The Batch 20 Chinese Orientation

"Hey, are you attending the Chinese Student Orientation this time? You skipped all the previous ones."

Shaki

"Nope. Not my kind of scene, man."

Me

"Well, this one you must attend - by default."

Shaki

"Why? It’s not like they can make me."

Me

"Dude, they are holding the event in front of your house."

Shaki

For those uninformed, Shaki's the smart-ass that sits beside me in all the lecture classes. It's not that he particularly likes me or anything.
It's just that we must all sit in our designated positions according to our roll numbers. Don't Indian colleges just suck?

I’m not a partying kind of person (my mom hoarded all her social genes for herself). I’m more of a one-to-one conversationalist – a true believer of the idiom; ‘Two’s company; three’s a crowd’. I do quiet dinners in dim-lighted restaurants, meaningful phone conversations, and long drives around town in my beaten Vitara. Increase the party number by just one or two, you’ll get to see me do my trademark “Freeze-Up-Shut-Up”. You’ll see me nodding and agreeing with a big, plastic smile – but that’s all I’ll be doing.

I like connecting with people just fine. It’s just that I’d rather do it one person at a time.

My doorbell rang at 5.00 pm today, interrupting the payment of my cumulated sleep-debt. It was Abby, and she wanted to borrow my laptop – apparently, she and her cohort of choreographed cronies wanted to play music from it and practice the dance routine they planned for the Chinese Orientation tonight¹. I ended up dragging my arse out of my bed and helped; by standing in front of them with my laptop in my arms². S’pity Jason didn’t get a picture of that. It’s not everyday you’ll see me in my sleeping togs, my hair still disheveled and me, standing in front of about 20 dancing guys and girls with a laptop in my hand³. Priceless.

The festivities started at about 7.00 or 8.00 pm (Why? Should it matter?). To those not privy to the formal workings of the foreign student social protocols in Manipal, the Chinese Orientation is held every six month by the Chinese kids of Batch (X) for the Chinese kids of Batch (X+2). This time, it’s our (Batch 18) turn to host one for the fresh meat of Batch 20. The soul and purpose of this really inconvenient event is to enable the Chinese crocodiles and Oriental colour-wolves to do a spot of hunting Chinese seniors to get to know the freshies of the same ethnic, creed and race better.

And no, I shall decline to comment on racism. It is sufficient for you to know that I do not endorse such a practice. I even boycotted the previous Chinese Orientations to demonstrate my steadfast disapproval⁴ of it.

Have enough of my crappy commentary yet? If you have, here’s good news – I’m going to start showing you pictures instead;

From my front door.

Looks like Shaki wasn’t kidding after all. They brought the party to my neighbourhood.

The freshies.

The emcees for the night.

For your information, Abby (right) is still available and is up for grabs. Kit Sze (left), on the other hand, isn’t – and if you try to grab her, Casey will personally make sure that your grabbing hand will be in no shape to grab anything else for a very long time.

We feed the hungry because we are kind.

The secret to getting to know anyone is food. Business lunches, candlelit dinners, and even in this instance; soup kitchen style mass-feeding – all of them works by that same principle.

The Musical Trio.

After the kiddies are fed and watered, item one kick-started the night – Singing on the Lawn.

Then, there was a spot of fun and games involving the Batch 20 freshmen. They were divided into 4 or 5 groups (Why? Should this matter too?), and the game they played was this; they stood in a line and freshie number 1 was given a role to act out to freshie number 2 (while the other freshies were looking in the opposite direction). Freshie number 2 then tried to emulate what freshie number 1 did to freshie number 3. The game then progressed along this formula; freshie (Y) will act out what he or she saw freshie (Y-1) did to freshie (Y+1). The last freshie, (Y_finite) will have to tell the game-master what character/scenario was freshie (Y_finite-1) aping. To simplify things, we'll tag the variable freshie as (f), and the number of freshies in a group as (n). The fun part (which I shall denote with the function, F) of this game came from the scene/action they are suppose to act out (which I shall denote with the function, G) which will decay in accuracy as it is acted out by subsequent freshies. If we’re to represent the accuracy of their acting skills with, A, and the accuracy of the answer of freshie (Y_finite) - which is f_n - as A_finite, then;

F= A_finiteG[A(f₁)+A(f₂)+…A(f_n-2)+A(f_n-1)]

Okay, in plain English, the freshies played a hybrid game of Pass-the-Message and Charade. Sorry I do not have any pictures of the game because I was too bored to care. F < M - B (with M being Live Malaysian Parliamentary Broadcast, and B being Badruddin).

The Improvisational Acoustic Band

They did it with plastic pails and empty water dispenser bottles. I’m impressed that they managed to get more than “tonk-tonk-tonk” out of them. The crowd absolutely loved it.

The Dance Team.

This is the troupe of toe-tappers I played musical box too earlier in the evening. The truly amazing thing was that they only started practicing the night before. Now folks, this is a true mark of dedication - putting together a show overnight for some strangers we pretended to care about⁵. Jolly good work, fellas.

Hua Min

Here’s one of the dancers. She likes squatting.

Jason

And here’s the backbone of this event, the guy that made it all happen – our batch’s Chinese Representative⁶. He likes eating. A lot.

Two sporting guys from Batch 20.

One of the last event we had was getting a couple of volunteers from Batch 20 themselves to come up on stage lawn to sing. This was obviously the highlight of the night – the freshie girls are practically flinging their undergarments at the duo. One Batch 20 girl whose name was Ann Li, Annie, Anne Lee or Ang Lee (Why? Is this important to you?) told me that these two guys are the heart-throbs of her batch.

Bah, I detest these so-called heart-throbs. They are everything I’m not.

I think there were a couple of other things that happened after this but I can’t report to you about that because by that time, I was already back in my room editing the photographs for this post. There you have it, a brief insight into the inner workings of k0k bl0k.


Your friendly neighborhood newcaster,
k0k s3n w4i

¹ I’m being perfectly honest with you; that’s how I remembered that the Orientation was scheduled for tonight.
² Technically, I can just pass my laptop and its password to Abby and continue cutting Z's but frankly, I didn’t have the energy to try to get her to memorise my senseless, twelve-digit, alternating-letters-and-numbers password. I was also too lazy to look for pen and paper.
³ Have you seen a Chinese funeral procession where someone would walk in front of the coffin carrying a big photograph of the deceased? Well, that’s how I was holding my laptop.
⁴ Okay, I admit it – I’m just too bloody lazy to go.
⁵ With a few exceptions, of course. Like that cute chick in the miniskirt. And that hottie in pigtails. We definitely cared about them, oh yeah.
⁶ Our student council is structured like BN, with a Malay (UMNO), Chinese (MCA), and Indian (MIC) representative from each batch. All we’re lacking is the NEP.