The Grind

Semester end crunch time, and the Grind is on. Everyone here is grooving to the hip-hop music of projects, term papers, grade-saving quizzes, lab reports, frantic study towards hopeless exams, and add to all this, the sweltering heat of the metropolis is giving it a very sweaty, sexy look. I am in the middle of this melee, contributing my own bit of color to the show. Have various reports and project coding lined up for the next 3 days and exams starting in 6 days, with Approximation Algorithms looking to be the opening salvo in whats going to be my worst exams ever.

Time is moving quickly, but not in a flash to get it all over with quickly, painlessly. No, its not that easy. Crunch time is all about the slow churning of those days, where each hour of work can be felt, but more are needed as its never enough to catch up with all the procrastination of the last month. In IIT, they have a special name for this feeling - "NaBaD' - a pronouncable acronym for NBD, which stands for Nervous Breakdown. So, people are either in nabaD, or some have become nabaDus, folders get renamed from /syslab to /syslab_nbd etc.

So, with all the nadaDus flocking the pool this summer, the Grind is rocking.