Exchange - Part I

Today I went to Crosswords and happened to notice the ‘Lonely Planet – Europe on a shoestring’ and well, it’s high time…

So here I begin my saga - a tale of well over 40 cities…

It all started with a certain ritual – which involved one’s first semester grades, a SOP and that curious thing we call - a black box. What came out of the black box was one document which had an ‘Exchange Rank’ - this would determine which university one would go to and more importantly – with whom…

Now, nothing in my life ever happens without some honest-to-goodness roadblocks – so the university we chose, or rather the one that chose us – decided to cancel the program and we were left rudderless. Fortunately, we acquired the number of one certain Mallu gentleman (more on him later) – the head of the MBA Exchange program in one of our partner institutes, who happened to be visiting India at that time. The rest, as they say, was history.

So, we were going to this school called - ESC Bretagne Brest!!

Wait a minute, BREST? Is that how you pronounced it? Where was this godforsaken place? Western tip of France? Near Normandy? D-Day bombings? Whatever – everyone shut their traps – we were finally getting exchanged…

A motley bunch of people we were – five of us – from different walks of life – getting together for three months – four guys and me – one of them being an erstwhile friend; things had been rocky with him off-late – with such an amazing line-up, interesting things were bound to happen…

Well, I will try to have as less of that as possible, more of my personal life in my autobiography, releasing, let’s see…at least forty years from now.