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Body awareness my ass

Some sort of "Body awareness week" is going on, and some people at IUB have been sending spams about it 2-3 times every day since last week and now it's getting on my nerves. Since expressing any personal opinion on the IUB mailing list is usually frowned upon, I thought I'll vent here on my blog. So yeah, this is freaking me out. The emails say various things, "Love your body, stop hating it for once, stop counting calories and stop being ashamed of your own body" ... and now there is a competition to write a poem about your body, encouraging students to "be creative, because anything goes!"

What the hell? One or two emails are enough, I get the message. But twice every day?

And what more, now they are having some sort of Osho meditation thing going on. I hope they don't hold an orgy in the name of body awareness. In Hinduism, the body is said to be a prison for the soul and the ultimate goal in life is to free yourself, and here these people are, asking us to "love our bodies". Honestly, I am not much of a religious person by any means, but I sure do not care the least bit about my body or whatever, within the healthy limits of staying fit and groomed. I am certainly not obsessed neither do I support such obsession. Unfortunately, at IUB there is this specific trait (I can't get a better word) - that of selecting something totally stupid and making a deal out of it.

Some time back, they were creating an anti-racial-discriminatory organization. There is no discrimination at IUB whatsoever, and the idea was severely criticized by most students. Then they started forming an anti-sexual-harassment body. Well...

And the best of all, the student government succeeded in getting "Offices" in the student activity center building. Although they feel more "official" and authoritative now, the rest of the student body doesn't give a damn. How? Well, last month, the student government was sending out a few emails every week advertising their new offices. The interesting bit is that the email went like - "Want to talk about something with a member of the parliament, or just grab a coffee? Come to our new Student Government office in the SAC!"...

Then there is conformist tradition about academics. When a student pointed out a less-than-optimal way to solve a problem, he gets the response from the TA - "This is not a course on efficient programming. This is a course to learn the basics of computer science." On another occasion, when I pointed out that almost everywhere a stack is top-down instead of bottom-up, I got the response - "You are not everywhere, you are at IUB", and then they proceeded to modify one of the language constructs to include a special way so that we can actually solve the homework problem - the correction coming the night before it was due.

What more? About two months ago I sent an email to the facilities department asking them to get the only publicly accessible piano at IUB to be restored from the horrible condition it is, or at the very least, be re-tuned! Their response -
"Dear Prashant Vaibhav,
not our duty!!!!
Thank you for your request."

That was the exact response I received. Now I totally agree that it might not be their duty, but could they so much as take the pains to tell me WHOSE duty it was if not the Facilities Management? But why do that, why not let me stay caught up in beauraucracy? Which reminds me, I still don't have my laptop back, after the whole semester has ended.

Anyway. Now close this window and go and love your body. Ciao.