The Campus

The IIM Calcutta campus or Jokaland, as we call it, is almost like an island amid lakes.

The IIM Calcutta campus, courtesy Google Earth.

As it's evident from the Google Earth image, there are three major man-made lakes surrounding the academic block, the campus KV and library. Our hostels are along the lakes on the outside. The setting gets more clear in the Wikimapia image, as it has proper labelling too.

Compare it to the IIT Bombay campus and you'll find many similarities. Both the campus have the serene presence of beautiful water bodies and dense greenery. Right now the similarities get thicker, since the Calcutta weather nowadays is quite like Mumbai monsoons; it stays cloudy with frequent short showers. Due to the lakes, it stays humid at the campus and if it's not windy, it can get really stifling. The IIMC campus is much smaller than IITB campus, and obviously since IITB is meant for much bigger number of junta. It used to house 4 BTech batches, each of roughly 500 plus huge number of MTechs and few PhDs too. Here at IIMC there are just two batches at a given point of time. My batch's strength is around 310 and that's the largest number they've ever had.

One thing paining me is the distance from the downtown Kolkata. Last night I enquired about ordering pizza and I got to know that the minimum order they take is something as obscene as 6k!! That's because the nearest outlet is at Camac Street or like that :-). But, the food in the mess & (almost) 24 hrs canteen in the hostel is much better than IITB. But eating out is still an issue. Nearest Metro station is some 100 bucks away from IIMC and there aren't many options to reach there. I guess things would get brighter once my bike reaches Kolkata.

Today I took some pictures at the campus. I've uploaded them at the Flickr page. Most of them need little bit of postprocessing, which I plan to do soon.

Kolkata Chapter Begins :-)

This would be the longest stretch when I didn't blog, since I started blogging, but it's like that, and that's the way it is. First I was stranded, disconnected at Jaipur for a while, which now seems like pretty comfortable setting.. sigh. Then, once I touched base at Kolkata, things got hectic, and I didn't have a computer for a while. Now that things have more or less settled and I've bought my self a rather sleek Compaq Presario v3000, it's about time I resume blogging.

First things first, Kolkata and the neighbourhood, looks totally amazing from air, after first few days of showers. From my SpiceJet flight, I was gawking, spellbound, at the marvellous view below.. lush greenery, numerous big & small canals and all! Then we hit the ground (pun intended). Let's just say, for someone new to the city, it's not very tough to not like the city, going by the first impressions. The IIM Calcutta campus is good 90 minutes from the airport! The area neighbouring IIMC, it's called Joka, is rather unimpressive to say the least. However, the campus is breathtaking with its 7 lakes and lush greenery. My hostel room, I found is more comfortable than the room I had in IIT Bombay. It's bigger, better planned and it has a balcony which opens to the patch of jungle behind my hostel. I haven't clicked snaps of the campus, but I intend to do that pretty soon. The downtown Kolkata, essentially Park Street area, is light-years away from the campus and it takes huge effort to make it to there. Till now I've been there only once, and even then it was disappointing as we couldn't catch any movie! The movie buff in me is still very pleased to be here; the LAN is virtually full of movies! My new 250 GB external HDD might getting full to the brim, is looking like a possibility.

The academic load looks manageable. I have five courses, all of them interesting. Especially the Organisational Behaviour course, which has interesting mix of Psychological studies in it, pretty impressive! Then there is Indian Economic and Political History, which is also pretty interesting to study. Midterms are still (just?) 2 weeks away and things are chill (as we say here).

I guess, I'll start with such banal posts; it should take time to get back the flow for blogging :-)