  P A R T - II The next few weeks brought tons of litsoc points to Mandak and we ended the year with a 120-or-so point win over Alak, the closest competing hostel. (poor Alak! ) We had 'fought' our way to yet another consecutive LitSoc win. The next litsec would say in his inaugural speech, "... We have been winning Litsoc for n+1 years ! We've gotta win it for the (n+2)th time!... blah blah" .
Oh Boy ! What a blast ! [All this is not to say mine was the only hostel that did shit. I'm sure every hostel did, does and will continue to do truckloads of shit every lit-year. The whole system is flawed. Scrap the damned litsoc I say.
Yeah ! Let people participate for personally glory. Not for the glory of their hostel. 'Aint no such thing as hostel spirit. That's what I say! ] In the middle of all this fighting, we had lost the bigger picture.
We didn't know why we were devoting so much time and effort into winning. Perhaps some of my friends realized it earlier than I did (You know who you are. Good for you ! ) and some never really realized it. It was like waking up from Neo's dream. When I did wake up, it wasn't an abrupt dawning of facts.
It was slow and painful. A large fraction of people in my hostel don't even know what litsoc means, leave alone having enthu to participate in it. Oh heck ! What the hell ! In my third year I learnt a great deal about the internal working of Litsoc. Deeper and deeper I went and it consumed me.
I've never admitted it to myself but now I think this whole litsoc thing had a huge influence on my academic output. (Heheh.. Who cares ? ) During this year I handled major hostel decisions in the lit-scene and also attended some litsec meetings... thanks to my good friend...oops COLLEAGUE, Mr. Bose. Yeah, he was the litsec then and he made i moved my ass a good deal so we could push our hostel to yet another victory. After all, who'd like to loose a Litsoc under his litsec-ship, especially a litsec-ship won through great pains after a four way election ? hahahah.
(I love the colleague thing btw!). So in April 2003, we did another Mandak Litsoc win. After a huge amount of haggling, flinging of accusations, the details of which i will pass, and court-of-law-style quarreling with rival hostels and the culsecs, all of which hated us by now, we 'engineered' another glorious win, this time beating rivals Jam by 2.5 points. I was to be the next litsec of Mandak. Man, it felt good. Oooohhhh yes it did.
I learnt a great many things in the following year. My finally year at IIT and at Mandak. The most important of these was the realization that everybody in Mandak wanted to win the Litsoc (even though some of these people didn't know what LitSoc really was) but very few people wanted to do anything to contribute towards that desire. I inwardly felt we didn't really deserve to win if we didn't have the will to. Ten or twelve people in a hostel of 250 just wasn't good enough. And so in April 2004, we broke the chain !
We lost Litsoc to a very deserving Alak. I wonder now if the loss meant anything at all to the bulk of people who live in Mandak. Hmmm. When I look back now, i see the mistakes we made, the mistakes i made. We were blinded, i was blinded. Litsoc really isn't about winning - and I don't say this because we lost under my litsecship (but then again I wouldn't have had the chance to reflect had we won again) - its about participating and having fun ;) (Ye hear that gape ?
Its about having fun! 'course you don't understand a word of that , do you ? Heheheh... ) ^Above left: Gapa. Our new litsec (enjoying a lighter moment) All the best to you baby! Others in the pic: PLD, Danny (love you bitch), matak (fighter, whore! Look what I did ..heheh) and Jhantoo.
To all the good times we've shared ! . . . . .
Waiting for your comments on this one. *Litsoc is the annual interhostel championship for literary and cultural events and competitions. It comprises LITerary and SOCial activities. 
