Birds of a Feather...

It's a common practice in IIMB to party around on the drop of a hat. Now that the new batch has joined, the seniors are busy partying with these guys on pretext of some or the other common ground. For example, today, the 2nd year students in IIMB who graduated from IITD threw a dinner party to their counterparts in the 1st year - kind of a welcome gesture for the newbies. Slightly amusing too, as some of these 1st year guys were my seniors in IITD on account of heavy pre-MBA work experince.

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We already have had the freshers grand welcome party. A separate girls-only party was also organized. Then came the individual "block" parties (IIMB doesn't have big hostels, rather small blocks of 30-50 rooms each, interconnected through corridors). And now, alumni meet from various reputed grad colleges as IITs, BITS, DCE/NSIT etc...Of course, I am not complaining - parties are fun :)

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A not-so silver lining though, which I noticed today - they also have what they call the "tam" party, the "gult" party etc. Somehow, the idea of forming groups based on your native regions has never gone down well with me, more so because this trend seems to be prevalent only in the southern states - I can't, for the life of me, try and organize a Delhi/UP/Punjab meet (Though one of my friends was suggesting a Chandigarh treat, but that was purely because the 1st year has some good looking girls from over there). Two further observations cause discomfort to me:

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1. Somehow, the southies here tend to stick together. Not all of them, but still an all-Southie friends' group is a much more common sight than an all-Northie group. For example, my friends' group has two guys from Gujrat, three from Jharkhand/Bihar, two from UP, one each from Bengal, MP, Chandigrah, Mumbai and Orissa. Somehow, we always miss out on Tamil Nadu/Kerala/Karnataka/Andhra guys and they seem to miss out on us.

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2. I did not observe regionalism to this extent in my IIT hostel life - My hostel had southies in single-digit and they didn't use to hang out together. Ditto for the immediate senior as well as junior batches over there.

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One of my close southie friend (outside the group I talked about above) had an explanation for it - One, there is always this language barrier which prevents southies from freely intermingling with Northie guys; Two, southies in general are more humble/modest and might feel slightly out-of-place in the company of chalaak Northies; Three, the Northies (again, in general) might have some inherent racial color-based prejudice against southies in their unconscious.

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Well, probable reasons these might be for this groupism, justifications they are definitely not. I will try and analyze this further in some future posts, especially what implications it has on Life@IIMB.

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And oh, this also holds true for north-eastern states, but the number is so small that it is hardly noticeable.