LBSNAA – The colours of the Foundation Course

It’ s a beautiful place to reside in, the very ambiance of the academy with its hills and curves signifies  a sense of stability, that comes naturally to any place with a rocky terrain.

The interesting aspect of doing FC here is that the pace with which the course moves; There are 250+ people to meet and get to know about, trillions of gossips revolving around hundreds of tit-bit events that happen during the day, and to top it all, every week ends with some organised event that adds to the randomness and entropy (some call it excitement) of the course.

It is this brisk pace of the mind, deeply contextuated in the stillness of the spirit, that acts as the continuous underlying theme of the stay here. No matter how random my day goes – with seemingly irrelevant/ trivial classes, or incidents of incoherent (and often defying-ly irrational) behaviour of some batch mates, I can always find my inner peace just sitting out and staring at the majestic topography that this place offers.

Last few weeks that I have spent here have been an experiment in handling randomness – to do something, experience it and then return to the shell that is secured in the presence of few like-minded friends.

"Pratakal ka Atyachar"- Our Skit in the 1st cultural

A lot of my active participation in the FC has been questionable; The skit that I partly scripted and played a role in – was very well-received by the OTs and faculty alike, but only our team knows how many questions were put to us before we performed on stage. There were batchmates who had a blanket objection to their being imitated (Frankly, I thought it was their inflated egos who made them feel that they deserve imitation), while some took it in the right spirit. We were constantly wary of how the faculty will take their own imitations – being the first cultural night, we knew that we have to set the standards and we took the risk of doing things our way.

A Scene from the Bhojpuri Song in 2nd Culturals

A similar story is that of the Bhojpuri item song that we danced on in the second cultural – although the jury is still out on whether it was vulgar or not (or rather, whether the level of vulgarity was within acceptable limits or not :D). A lady faculty member complimented us on the “unapologetic manner” in which we did it while there were a number of differing viewpoints from some batchmates.

I guess the most difficult type of questions for me to answer would be those questioning the logic of my acts, and I won’t care about such questions unless my behavior gets really out-of-the line.

A major departure from the NPA attitude has been that of image consciousness – while in NPA my acts were directed so as to ensure that my low-profile image doesn’t get blurred, here I am just being myself irrespective of the consequences. This isn’t really the safest approach – I have already merited a personal meeting with the disciplinary in charge along with the image of being “culturally active” (some extended it to assume that i would be energetic about everything, irrespective of its stupidity). Given the latter image, my low participation in the childish fete organised yesterday, brought the ire of my batch mates who coordinated it.

One critically important learning from the stay in LBSNAA so far is that the lonely boring moments centred around somber futuristic existential questions can be humorously evaded by gossiping about the most nugatory things in academy life. This is the importance of friends whom you can talk to.