The birds start chirping as the first rays of the sun filter in. The animals awake from their slumber as the sounds of early morning chime ever so lightly. Lilting.Silvery.Sweet.Fresh.

"Damn it, THE PRINTER'S JAMMED? WHERE IS ITCOM?!" Less than 3 hours to 9.00 am when one of the gazillion submissions for the day is due, as the resounding sound of the sleep-deprived participant reverberates across the corridors. The birds take off, throwing dirty glares at the source of the entire racket.

The birds look at IIM Indore as a quirk of nature. At any given time there are weird humans roaming about. The hostels brim with life and activity almost round the clock. People poring over cases, making slides for presentations, drafting the perfect CV, getting outfits ready, throwing global gyaan(one of the many terms that you will pick up when you are here), calling corporates for sponsorships, writing articles. Is this a life that I would want to live, you may ask.

You bet it is! Every participant on campus would vouch for that.

We do all the things we mentioned above but we missed one crucial tenet - we have a bloody good time doing them!

We'll not lie here - the pressure is high but we believe it is good for us. There will be times when you feel cracking CAT was the biggest mistake of your life. But then, the highs substantially outweigh the lows. In between the rigors of academics and grades, people here do things that a typical student does. We enjoy our sports. We party hard and celebrate festivals in style (cheers to the cultural variances present among the participants). We go out to the city - Indore brimming with life, umpteen eateries, movies, and watering holes. We go for long rides on the highways around our picturesque campus. We enjoy and even play our own music, de-stress with Art of Living courses. We do the odd play. We sing (some of us unceremoniously, but we still do!!), we crowd the dance floor at nightlong parties, we celebrate most of the festivals that this blessed multi-cultural, multi lingual land provides us and we celebrate them together. For, IIM Indore is a planet in itself, like our own motherland.

Let's cut back to our frustrated soul standing in front of a printer that perfectly followed Murphy's Law to the hilt. The 9 AM we'd mentioned earlier has now almost arrived. A quick halt at the mess (this is going to be your lifeline for the best two years of your life) which is open for 20 of the 24 hour day for a quick breakfast and then a quicker sprint to class. The sprint is on account of the culture of punctuality. One of the things that you will learn over here, sometimes painfully, is that there is a premium on time. The institute prides itself on its punctuality and it permeates through everything we do. In fact Ahvan, our management festival, is reputed to be a clockwork event.

Ahvan, the biggest event on IIM Indore's calendar, is our annual management extravaganza. Preparation for this event is almost a year long. Participants from all across the country's top schools slug it out as they try to outdo the other in brain and brawn. They join us for the competition and the revelry (that's another all-pervasive culture here, we love to compete with the best of best!) and they go back in great spirits.

Again, we digress from the day's story. At the end of classes, each 75 minutes long interspersed with a 15 minute break for tea, you traipse back to the melting pot and the adjacent mess to eat. The spectre of a quiz looms over the class close to 1 pm and your lunch's duration starting from 1.30 pm is inversely proportional to the number of quizzes and directly proportional to the amount of prior preparation that you have put in. You are expected to work before class every day and the ground rule is a two hour preparation for a one hour class.

We do have a number of the more pleasurable variety of quizzes organized by the Quiz Club on a regular basis. The afternoon will pass in a flash either with the quiz or French Language or Salsa Dance Classes or one of the many Guest Lectures that participants at IIM Indore have the privilege of attending. The best minds in the country address the student body on a regular basis. Come evening and it is time to sweat it out.

We have an assortment of sports and a state-of-the art gymnasium for the sports aficionados. The matches are inter-block, inter class, inter section, inter floor;basically inter anything! Did we mention that we love to compete? Well the sports fields are varied - the standard playground, basketball court, chess, football (or soccer), the computer (all ye gaming buffs are in for a treat), the corridor (nothing quite like tennis-ball soccer!), badminton, TT, carom... all this builds into a crescendo at the annual sports festival Hurdang where the competition and slogans are at their loudest.

One of the most distinctive features of this campus is that the students run most of the things on campus. The Student's Activities Council (SAC) is the channel through which the student body gets things done. Elected by the participants each year the SAC is the source of administration, merrymaking and entertainment - Cultural Committee aka CulCom organizes all the celebrations, dinners, bonfires, parties, antaksharis, Dumb Charades etc. The SAC is the source of sustenance. We never will forget the Hostel & Mess Committee for providing us with food which carries us through the two years. Did I forget to mention that we have our very own shop which can take care of all your necessities without you having to shell out money some 20 kms away? (That’s where the city is!) A portfolio of committees and clubs make it certain that you are always kept engaged with fun and also work for catering the needs of the student community.

We will keep it simple. The participants do a lot of things here by themselves, channelized through the SAC and a number of Interest Clubs, each ably guided and supported by the faculty. The SAC is constituted by different committees, one for each of the following arenas is elected - academic decisions, hostel upkeep and food, media, cultural and social activities, alumni, sports, IT infrastructure, alumni, placements.

The point we make is that everything in the institute is being defined by the participants and it is a fulfilling process to be a part of this for two years. We mentioned placements in the last line? Well to us, that is one of the most important functions of a B-school. We will sum up their role with a terse one-liner - they are doing a fabulous job.

Well, we seem to have touched on a lot of things that characterize IIM Indore in a short space and with absolutely no structure at all. Well that's because there is so much to talk about and, even as we wrote, so many things kept popping up in our minds, and we put them down. It is for you to come here and organize what you can, but remember the key is to have a gala time while you do!! Because, as you can live only once, gain the ultimate experience by living your life at IIM Indore!