Hive2010Vacation Edition

Happy Holidays!!

With the festive season having started, all the retailers in the country are aiming for maximum sales! You see brands offering to bring in the festive season home with gold, silver etc. And btw, there are some that offer good health, particularly for this season, with pure drinking water, hottest fashion, more TV channels and so on. They are ready with the red carpets laid down to give you the best possible shopping ‘experience’.

o_O? WHAT experience!? Buying an object which you’ve been waiting to be on sale? How is that experience? Interestingly enough, the strategy is to sell the same item throughout the year with different reasons to purchase it. So that you feel happy, proud, smart – whatever; basically satisfied with your purchase as you directly relate the purchase to the occasion. No matter if you’re buying the same damn thing in February for your loved one or in May-June for someone’s wedding, in august for your sister, in October for Navrati and Durga Puja or in November for diwali! What matters is the satisfaction that comes out of the shopping experience you’ve had while you purchased the object.

Here at hive, we too wish to offer an experience in every monthly issue! And hence, we have the dynamic identity which might change the reading ‘experience’. We wish to offer you the best with each issue coming out of the bee archive. We look forward to maximum participation from your side in each aspect of HIVE, be it graphics, typo, literature, or just anything. We respect the feedback we have been receiving and it’s that which gives us the confidence and keeps our spirits high to reach a level where readers demand the hive internationally. (students in exchange programmes abroad) ;)

So guys, wish you all have a joyous vacation and celebrate the festivities to your maximum energies!

Cheers!Editors

Illustrate the Quote:

“I’m not normally a praying man, but if you’re up there, please save me, Superman!” Homer Simpson

hive.mit@gmail.com

Alok NR, Bharat Singhal, Jitendra Arora, Nikhita Prabhudesai, Prajakta Kulkarni

Saurabh Garge

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All Along The Watchtowerby Ravi Popat

“My goal is to be one with music. I dedicate my whole life to this art.”

I’m shockingly bored. The reason can be a dull day at college. I return to the hostel. And I decide to skip lunch. I head directly to my room. Once I’m in, I get this sudden urge to sleep off. But I don’t want to. I switch my laptop on and wait for it to boot. I can’t seem to decide what exactly it is that I’m going to do once I’m in. Movie? Serial? Music? I hear the popular Windows theme then. I look up at the screen and see Jimi Hendrix staring at me with questioning eyes. He asks, “What is it that you desire the most?” and I stare back at him with a blank expression. I have nothing on me. But then, at that very moment, it strikes me. I get my answer. Hendrix smiles back. He knows I’m almost there. There, bang in the center of the desktop is his version of Dylan’s three-chorded masterpiece, All Along The Watchtower. I drag it to KMP and hit the play button.

I’ve always wondered what Hendrix must have felt like while playing this song, in studio or live. I get a feeling which I have no words for but can only describe by a slight mention of the movie Dazed And Confused. I almost do a cheer-jump when the leads start. Goosebumps raid my body and chills run down my spine. That is what I feel. Tenfold and we’re talking how he must have felt.

“My personal philosophy is my music. Nothing but music – life – that’s all.”

The story goes something like this. Jimi Hendrix and Dave Mason of Traffic were at a party and that’s where and when he heard the original for the first time. He was overwhelmed and decided to cover it and later that night got down to doing it along with Mitch Michell on drums, Dave Mason on a 12-string acoustic and Noel Redding on bass. Halfway through the session, Redding got pissed and left. So Dave Mason took over the bass although the bass for the last part for the song is played by Hendrix himself which is a classic example of his ambidexterity as Redding’s was a right-handed bass. The result was, and as is accepted, one of the greatest songs ever made. The facts state that it reached 5th on the UK charts and 20th on Billboard. Also, 5th on Guitar World’s 100 Greatest Guitar Solos and 48th on Rolling Stones’ 500 Greatest Songs Ever.

The psychedelic leads, the ghostly sounds in the solo after the second verse, the smooth turn-arounds, and that much loved voice singing about the joker and the thief as they march towards the castle with the watchtower are only a few of the things that make this the mesmerizing song that it is. (contd. on next page)

(Monkey businessby Alok NR, continued)Tools made man more productive. Agriculture started. The wheel came along. Ships were made and we started going places. His ingenuity and quest for better technologies (thanks to the brain) kept making his life even better. Houses came up. Essential survival taken care of – man devoted more time to other stuff. Societies cropped up, civilizations rose (and fell), empires were being built and trade began. Here I stop for the rest as they say is history.

In essence it all was a transition from the apparent wild nature of things to a more ‘orderly’ state of affairs, for our brain wanted to make sense of everything. And order gave everything some sense. Nature alone didn’t seem fair enough anymore. Money, science, religion, the notion of justice - all sprung from this basic human need for order which in turn was a product of man’s brain’s enhanced ability to assign meanings to things. Think about it! It’s a lot more complicated than this but in a way, simplifying it all, we are attending college today ‘cause our forefathers stopped hanging out on the trees. :(

Daym, we shoulda stayed up in those trees where we belonged. But then hey, blame it on evolution.

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Shreeya’s tooth falls outNikhita Prabhudesai

Monkey business(or - How man came down from the tree and went to college)by Alok N.R

Look how far we’ve come. From cave dwelling to instant fast food and internet. So many complicated systems are in place to maintain our society like the postal system, the judiciary, the government, telecommunication networks to name a few. What if we had less advanced brains and were just another species of wild animals? Chimps get along fine without postal systems, don’t they? In the wild, nature is the law. We departed from a natural coexistence chiefly due to those extra ounces of brain matter. Here is the evolution version of how it all happened.Humans and apes share a common ancestry; so flash back to the times when our forefathers used to hang out on trees. The more arboreal (tree dwelling) predecessors to modern man increasingly took to the tropical grassier lands (savannah), due to the shrinking equatorial belt and to cope with food shortages and climate change, in search of food and game.

But out on the grasslands they were disadvantaged. Their stooping posture and hopping around made them easy prey for predators like tigers and wolves. Every time they went for a hunt they had as much chance of ending up on a hyena’s dinner table as they had of finding a wild buck. So man did what any other species fighting for survival would do in such an adverse environment. He adapted.Firstly he started to adopt a more erect posture .Probably to leave less skin exposed to the tropical sun and also to give him an advantage of viewpoint while hunting in the grasslands. His bipedal (walking on legs instead of all fours) style enabled him to free his fore limbs for tool making. His feet flattened enabling him to run faster. The opposing thumb in his palms started shifting sideward to better suit the use of rocks and stones. Now let’s see where this last thing took us.

Coming from the trees, we never really had great teeth or claws for hunting. (Just compare your dentures with a saber-tooth tiger’s - you’ll know what I mean). But we had to hunt them none the less for meat and fur. So what did we do? We got industrious and started making tools. The new finger arrangement especially helped us with this. Through the stone and metal ages we perfected this craft. Now this enabled our brains to get creative and develop efficient weaponry and tools. Yup that’s where, in a way, it all started. We started using our brains. BIG TIME. Once we harnessed fire, metals were at our disposal. Now, they had claws and we had bows and arrows. Clearly, we started to win. (contd. on next pg)

(Along the watchtowerby Ravi Popat continued)I sit back, enjoying the ecstatic feeling the song renders, wishing it would never end. It does, sadly. But the ‘repeat’ button comes to my rescue and those four minutes of musical utopia repeat themselves putting me back in the trance I was earlier in.

“When I die, I want people to play my music, go wild, freak out and do anything they want to do.”

The song opens with the three chords being played for eight beats until the drums step in and Hendrix takes over, the opening solo being perfect with unflawed articulation. As the song progresses, Hendrix continues bending strings and sliding his fingers over them with utmost expertise. Then comes the “moaning” sound. Hendrix supposedly played this part using the cigarette lighter he had as a slide with the guitar facing up on his lap and then switching back to the normal, a straight Strat followed by all that Wah. Completion gets a dramatic touch as the last solo has Hendrix going as high up as the 21st fret on the higher D# and the fading music at the end leaves the listener asking for more, even after the long four minutes. A perfect end. Just like Mr. Crowley of Black Sabbath. The sheer ingenuity and his quintessential style that was, has earned him the title of Dead God. Rightly so.

After having listened to the song as many times as my ears would allow and with as much enthusiasm as a two-year-old’s, for a newly bought Barbie-doll, I still can’t get enough. Blame this on my immature self or on the song’s stupendous awesomeness. The song still haunts and so does Hendrix. The more I’m listening to his music, the closer I’m finding myself to tears every time I hear a number by him. His will remain one of the greatest losses this place has suffered or seen. It’s not hard to imagine how radically different everything would be if he would have lived. I wake up every day to this song and ask God for a wish. If I’m granted one, one can easily guess what I would ask for.

R.I.P.

May you be entertaining the Gods up there. May you be burning guitars up there. May you be doing wild things up there.

“We gotta record that. I gotta do that.”

10 3Coffee is not a beverage, its a universePrajakta Kulkarni

The KBC Experienceby Jahnvi Shah

We had gone to observe some of the best professionals of Indian showbiz in action. Also, the set, the music and lighting and the man – Amitabh Bachchan – in the flesh, on the sets of the biggest quiz show in India, Kaun Banega Crorepati, a.k.a. KBC. With a little luck and Subhash Kotwal sir’s connections, we got a chance to be a part of the audience in the 1st episode of the 4th season of KBC, to be aired on October 11th, Amitabh’s birthday.

A week in advance, we were told that only the CD students of UG Sem III and students of MIT-BJ (Broadcasting and Journalism) were going. Later, it was decided that all the RED students of UG Sem III and VII should also go. However, it did not work out so favorably for the ID students and they curse us till today for it.

On September 23rd, we left the campus at around 7.30am. It took us a long, 6 hours journey through Bombay’s traffic and heat in 2 over-crowded buses to reach the studio at Goregaon Film City. Once there, we were anything but presentable for the camera. We earned quite a few dirty looks from our fellow audience members who were dressed to kill. However, we first went in for some pet puja. But, although the food was for our pets it was a far cry from puja material. I even overheard one of our students whisper to another,” Now I love the mess food.” After freshening up a little and getting ourselves looking decent we were finally called in for the shoot to start. Going in we realised how much things look better on TV. The set was small enough to fit in our college main foyer! But the equipment – the cameras and lights – being used made up for all that the set was lacking. Because we were in simple t-shirts, we got the better seats as compared to the aunties-in-bling (tough luck auntyjees). We were given some instructions of how to behave once the cameras are on while waiting for host to arrive. But nothing prepared us for the moment he walked in. The moment he walked in the whole audience erupted!

We had our 15 seconds of fame, got to see how things happen in the industry and a fun, learning experience. Thank you MIT-ID for making this happen.(contd. on pg 9)

(The KBC experience by Jahnvi Shah, continued)Once Amitabh arrived everything went in to full swing. Everything happened very fast. The makeup man came in combed his wig into place with a tooth brush and patched up his wrinkles. The cameras came into place and were rolling. Amitabh read his lines once and started his act. There were no retakes during the actual quizzing. The only retakes happened later in the show when Amitabh forgot to introduce a break or forgot to promote Sanjay Dutt’s new movie (yes, Sanjay Dutt was also there). The whole time the cast and crew tried to make the contestants feel at home so that they would not get nervous.

The shoot took around 6 hours after which we all got photographs with Amitabh Bachchan. We then left Bombay in the same buses, exhausted but excited about coming on TV.

Then the wait started for October 11th. Statuses were changed on facebook informing the whole world to watch us without fail on TV. On the actual day, the TV in Gurukul decided to crash. We requested our warden to let us watch KBC on her TV. Our usually stern warden, let us in and for the first time in 3 semesters actually let us make noise in her room after 10.30pm.

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MacDonaldFarid Bawa

JuggernautAlok NR

News Updates

Joyfest was observed by some students in MIT, and a group of students participated in helping

underprivileged children (3-6 years) in a classroom in Loni. The program was organized by

Poulami Mehta. Over the weekends students of all disciplines performed plays, taught puppet

making, origami and clay-modelling to the children. Animation students painted the walls of

their class the next weekend.

A cleaning session was organized in the college on Sunday morning. A few students showed up

and cleaned the entire backyard as much as possible. A lot of material waste and canteen/tuk

shop waste filled up more than 7 big bags. The students are sincerely requested to be a little

more responsible on their part and use the college dustbins instead of the building’s backyard.

A great documentary was screened on Friday 15th October named Ram Ke Naam, filmed by

one of the best Indian documentary film makers - Anand Patwardhan. Our very own Prashant

Desai sir spoke a few words on the film and it’s making, as he even worked on a few unselected

shots and knew the director personally. Unfortunately only a few students showed up for this

award-winning film.

Electricity and server killing the only tiny bits of patience every day.

Navratri was celebrated with days filled of music, dance and excitement.

iDid, our very own college store is relaunching with new opportunities for everyone to sell their

work.

Priti Vyas of Vyas Gianetti Creative along with her batch-mates from NID’74 including

Dheemant Panchal and Prashant Desai, had a very delightful chat at a Free Chai session.

Excitement in seeping in as names for Secret Santa are being taken. The annual Christmas Fest

may start earlier.

“Coffee is not a beverage, its a universe”

Sakhi Bansal

8 5

Roh

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araf

Swar Raisinghani

Swar Rais

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ani

Coffee is wrath, coffee is truth,coffee is greed, coffee is love, coffee is sloth, coffee is courage, coffee is pride, coffee is wisdom, coffee is lust, coffee is creativity, coffee is envy, coffee is

tolerance, coffee is gluttony, coffee is freedom...coffee is universe.

My co�ee is a black hole.... It drags me into it!

Co�ee

Rohan Saraf : Blogs

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