Different Feather

It is time to account for the 'non-typical' in the blurb of this blog.
I do not mean that everyone else in IITM is the conjugate of what I enlist here, but that in all these counts I belong to the minority...

{Update on 30.04.2007: The blurb of the blog at the time of this post's publication was 'An insight into a non-typical IIT-ian's times'}

I do not play Counter Strike or Quake or any other LAN game.

I do not listen to heavy metal music. My eardrums are not exactly in great terms with Linkin Park, Pink Floyd, Eminem, or anyone else who's slipping my mind for the moment.

I've been to Minar only once, that too only for a tired cup of tea, though the place is right opposite to my hostel.

I give my best at the mess. I out-eat my counterparts and very seldom waste the contents of my plate.

All my shirts and t-shirts have sleeves.

I tidy my room. Sense of neatness is a genetic disease I inherited from both my parents, who are dirtphobics of an annoying degree. And whenever they visit my suite, they vie with each other and sweep and scrub the floor to dazzling point.

I call my fellow students by the name their parents gave them. And whenever somebody beckons me with my insti-sobriquet 'Psycho' or at times 'Despo', I snap back, 'Call me Nirmal.' And if, on a later occasion, he still cries 'Psycho' to gain my attention, I pretend not to hear him.

My ever-changing desktop wallpaper is never a human, and most certainly not a woman in a bikini/ monokini/ no-kini.

I greet familiar professors good mornings (or afternoons or evenings).

I call my Tamil seniors 'Akka' or 'Anna', even behind their backs. Yet another bad habit home has infused into me.

I have purchased nothing that bears the IITM logo or brand. No hostel or department or insti or Shaastra or Saarang t-shirts, no IITM caps or tracks, nothing. Not even the notebooks in Gurunath. For the first two semesters I managed with virgin notebooks (I had preserved them unwritten in school), and for the current (third) semester I use notebooks I had stolen from Quality Control sector in the shopping complex (popularly known as Central Workshop).

I am not from Andhra Pradesh.

I am not in orkut.

I do not speak the IIT tongue.

If you can find anything else non-typical of me compared to the mean IIT-ian -- pun intended -- I invite you to opine on the comments page.