A View from the Other Side : Part 0.5

A View from the Other Side
A trilogy based on the events at the X - INAO camp.
(For some reason in 3.5 parts)
Sometimes also called "The Many Morals of Astro Camp".

Part 0.5: Before the Beginning
April 30 to May 2

Day -2
For me this year's camp began on April 30th. Not because I had to travel from some far off place to Mumbai to attend the camp but because it was around 4am on 30 April that I made the first concious effort to locate some of my Camp stuff (sky charts etc).
Which brings me to
Moral 1 : Any search expedition started after 4am is doomed to fail.
After this failed attempt I tried to console my self with a game of Warcraft, bringing us to
Moral 2 : If you try to play DOTA at 5:30 am you will most probably lose.
So after sleeping at around 6:00 am I got up at around 2:00 pm , had my bath(hereby referred to as bath 0). By the end of lunch it was already 3:30, did some work and left for IIT around 5:30pm.
Reaching IIT at around 7:30 pm I realised
Moral 3 : Time spent sleeping in a cab is time well spent.

At IIT I met Mehul (mildy frustrated I might add). It seems that while I was enjoying my mid-evening nap, he was running from pillar to post to put up the IJSO kids in their rooms and ensuring that the matresses arrived. I dumped my luggage in our room (No. 48 hereby referred to as the store-house). Entering the H-8 lounge where the Astro-Juniors were put up I came across
Moral 4 : H-8 lounge - All ventilation + Summer = Noisy Oven.
After getting all the juniors cooked to medium well-done we proceeded to H-13 Mess (No not canteen) for dinner. Dinner was good (anybody who thinks otherwise has not eaten in NSC).
After dinner we decided to have our first observation session (my first session after almost a year) bringing me to
Moral 5: I remember the sky only two months in a year (May+June).


Day -1:
At around midnight the observation got over the kids went back to the oven. And we followed to answer some doubts. There we had our first encounter with the ramaiya kind. Leading us to
Moral 6 : It is bad idea to discuss academics with anybody who enrolls into a class to get into a class.
However Day 1 did start on a good note as well. We discovered "post dinner". Post dinner is the midnight analog of breakfast. You see, my eating schedule is shifted ahead by a good 5 hours. Hence breakfast correponds to lunch, so on and so forth and finally dinner corresponds to post dinner. H13 canteen does the job surprisingly well i might add.

After barely 4 hours of sleep, I was woken up by a familliar "Chiraag Bhaiyya". Which brings me to
Moral 7 : It is futile to try to act as though you are sleeping with Senapati around. It does more harm than good.
Day 1 consisted mainly of rousing speech by Vahia Sir, a lecture by us on the basic use of calculators. Some lectures by Sagir Sheik on basic maths and ofcourse the infamous polar plotting session by us.
Moral 8 : r = 1.5*(cos (theta))^2 - 0.5 looks nice but is ridiculously difficult to imagine for 8th graders.
Day 1 is often also called the day of the exodus. It was the day when the we led the junior from the oven to the mess which they called theor home for the next 19 days. Akshay I remember had arrived by then.
By the end if the dorm session for the day it was time for some rest.

Day 0:
After having our second post dinner we went to sleep. By the time we awoke it seems one of the kids had already ran away. It took quite some tracing to figure out that he had actually left the camp.
Moral 9 : Kids should come with RFID tags.
Day 2 again was pretty dull. The basic physics was pretty basic. Well may be not for the juniors. However Day 2 is famous for a rather unconnected incident. Day 2 was the day I went to my old hostel (H3) consequently it became the day of Bath 1.
Moral 10 : It is very difficult to stay clean in any camp, especially if you are a facilitator.