Welcome to the all new issue of MadMag.

Times have changed and so have we. Seniors have become corporates and juniors have become seniors. And a whole new crowd(!) has entered the campus in search of a better future. And what am I doing here??? Presenting to you the Mad magazine, voicing your opinions and thoughts from an upside down point of view.

Vijay Thomas has cartooned(add this to the Oxford dictionary) the current scene at the college entrance. Isn't it cool?

And interestingly, the Mad Maggie Richa wants us to be very passionate in life... isnt something cooking!!!!

When will girls ever understand men?? Will girls learn something from this?? I wonder. Rahul Pillai has something to say about girls in"The whole new world".

RajniMania grips Symbi students. Find out how Rajni conquered 21 new fans in Photon Factory.

Richa takes over MadMag with another article on why she is the MadMaggie of the batch.... IS she mad!!

And Phi comes back with one of his best articles in "The American Conspiracy Theory"

A special welcome to the new batch with the promise of a Mad Mad year ahead.......

~ Praveen

SellPhones - Vijay Thomas

Let us be passionate

“So, what are your passions in life??”

That’s the most dreaded question I face.

Uhh…well, passions in life??

“Listening to music, reading books, and watching movies” the mundane answer loomed large before me.

But am I really interested in any of the things mentioned in this prosaic answer?? Music…well, radio mirchi is really okk…I mean, not everyone is totally into music is it? (For u music fans out there, believe me there are ppl like me...not so much into it...even Macha too…) Okk..then am I interested in movies?? Uhh...Not really, I watch only the Bollywood masala preferably Shah Rukh Khan Movies and hardly any of the English movies that used to come to our theatres all dubbed in Hindi, and I was never keen to watch. Collecting stamps, cars, sports, painting, quizzing, philosophy, trekking, mountaineering, traveling, drama, dance, singing, guitar…well I hardly have a finger into any of these pies.

So now what??

It’s said that ‘A person who does not have something he'll die for, life not worth living’…so does that mean I'm unfit to live????? Am a total failure????? An entirely boring person?? L . Well considering the fact that that leaves only books, and that too not the constructive managerial acclaimed books for their gyan, but the thrilling entertaining Jeffery Archers, and Frederic Forsyths are all I've mostly read so far, that again leaves me with no decent answer, one that I might use to impress interviewers with...

But I still do realize, one thing that I do love doing is trying to be interested in all the things I’ve mentioned. Maybe I’m not so much into these today, but perhaps I shall certainly develop a liking, which might turn into a passion into one of these very things. The bottom line I guess is to try all there is in this world to try. You never know what you might just love doing, and what you might have missed. So, from now on, u see, I’ve started listening to lots of music, watching lots of Rajnikanth movies for starts, well, guess I won’t get down to collecting stamps and painting yet, but I reckon that still leaves a whole lot of things to be tried out there…

~ Richa

Its a whole new world - Pillai

Legends in the form of men, centuries together have been, and still seem to dedicate thoughts to the most irresistible form of life to them---WOMEN. Be it the ultimate William Shakespeare, be it the hidden poet within every individual, the essence of a woman have never missed their minds.

Times have changed, eras have passed by. Atom bombs have replaced bows and arrows, kingdoms have been transformed into democracies, pyramids have been rediscovered and several such mysteries resolved. Men have changed their ways too—from a submissive form of life, to a terror spreading earthling, the classical gentleman, the macho man and finally today’s most sought after metro-sexual phenomenon.

But on the other side a reflection of what the women have made out of themselves all these days, would you believe that they have managed to survive without even the slightest of change across all these centuries…..?????

Suspect for their men still haunt them day in and night out. Even to this day making a mountain out of a mole-hill is like a natural gift befitted to them. Their best quote even to this day remains---“I hate your Mom”.

Poor men, they still are the best lovers of Peace. Had it not been for them, women….mind you would have joined the list along with the dinosaurs and the walruses. They made buses with special reservations for women to rest their whatever. Lay your hands on her and you are hunted down like a dog. Chase a woman and you get beaten for being a womanizer…..but even under the most tiring circumstances won’t you find a MENISER…..will you????

At the end of a day, even when women take responsibility for the success of a man with the saying that, “BEHIND EVERY SUCCESFUL MAN THERE IS A WOMAN”. Sadly, none of us realize that WOMEN CHASE ONLY SUCCESFUL MEN!!!!

~ Rahul Pillai

The Write Way

As a kid, we always have all those crazy ambitions. I wanted to become a doctor, well a nurse actually coz I thought their uniforms were smart!, a librarian, coz then I could sit and read all those million books, a magician coz all those tricks impressed me infinitely and finally a writer.


The first few ambitions whirled away as time did, but as I read and read and read I wished, I could write atleast one thriller in my life! However that writing streak just refuses to strike me.
I thought perhaps by reading all the tomes in the world I might just manage to get inspired and write realms of meaningful gibberish. However even after sifting through several Harry Potters, Roald Dahls, Jeffery Archers, Agatha Christies J my mind stubbornly refused to comply in writing that best selling thriller.

I shifted to reading Newspapers and magazines hoping to become one of those awesome columnists who make their living out of writing those crazy or thought provoking articles. Well, did I succeed there??...naaah..negative again. Now what..my literary ambitions almost died. I had to hunt for a new avenue for inspiration...BLOGOSPHERE loomed large before me as I delved into the world of blogs. There are people who metarmorphosize the most mundane into acts of supreme excitement and then there are those who go totally mushy mushy in their blogs till u wanna puke, and then there are ones, who tell u all about themselves, their make ups and break ups, and then there are the professional bloggers who write for companies, write for brands etc. There is a huge wealth of information in those blogs that I get to know about..


Anyways, I reckon, writing is an innate talent, some have it, some don’t, no matter how hard they try to write that elusive story... No matter which side one falls, I reckon, it’s worth a try. Who knows, wen the write chords ll be struck finally…


But is there any place where madness is appreciated and encouraged, where being mad is fun, great fun, where people believe that truly great madness cannot be achieved without significant intelligence.

Now, I am the MadMaggie, Richa.

Photon Factory

Non-Tamil Rajni Fan Club
Rajni Magic grips these girls
Rajni style
Symbi gang in E-square after Sivaji

"My best evening after a long time" - Sheetal Menezes

"Awesome movie man" - Harshvardhan

"Who can ever not like this movie. Mindblowing movie" - Vijay Thomas

"How did they ever think of doing such a thing. Great movie man" - Kuldeep

"Paisa vasool to the last cent" - Neha

P.S: Words like awesome, mindblowing, amazing are just English language's excuse for not having a perfect word to describe the movie

News from the fourth dimension

I’ve finally come to the conclusion that a person like me should not be allowed to watch movies. I expect something that I spend my hard earned money on to have at least a small bit of substance.

But all I do is count off the factual improbabilities that are shown in that brief period of time and upset the person next to me to such an extent that they vow never to watch a movie in the theatre (with me???) again!!!

What’s with all these Hollywood movies that depict the future???

Let’s look at a simple set of facts. The world’s population at this juncture is around six and a half billion smelly individuals. Out of these around two and a quarter reside in just two countries: India and China (here too China leads the way with a population of 1.2 billion and India has a population of a measly billion). Two crowded, you say, eh?

Anyways, that makes more than a third of the world’s population (I’d guess closer to a half than a third) Asian in origin. And the growth rate of this segment of the world is much higher than their Caucasian counterparts (some may debate that the ‘developed’ world has a lot more avenues for distraction, hence a lesser procreation rate).

So we can safely assume that another 50 years down the line (which is about three generations) more than half the earth’s population would be distinctly Asian in their origin. And then there are the Hispanics, the Afros, etc.

But when I see movies like Minority Report, Aeon Flux, Gattaca, et al, all I see is a crowd of these WASP types occupying the future world. Where the fuck are the Asians??? And especially if the world of the future is going to be dominated by technology, shouldn’t the nerds be in providential dominance?

Movies such as these have led me to believe that there is a global conspiracy (I’m exaggerating, it can’t be global: cause more than one third of the globe belongs to us) to blow us off the face of the earth. What do these guys posing to be directors in the (great?) film industry purported by Hollywood know that we don’t?

~Phi

American Conspiracy Theory

What are they planning to use? Hmm... here is a list of (conspiracy?) theories sent across by some of my well wishers (or are they different aspects of my personality, my other existences transcending the barriers of time and telling me why there is no more hope for me or people like me?):

· Illuminati & the New World Order
The Illuminati was a secret society in Bavaria in the late 18th century. They had a political agenda that included republicanism and abolition of monarchies, which they tried to institute by means of subterfuge, secrecy, and conspiracy, including the infiltration of other organizations.

Many believe that the society still exists. So do I. I also believe that they are tired of being blamed for all the crimes that they have not done and of not getting any credit for all that they have done (like inducing the chicken to cross the road and thereby getting killed and giving an avenue to all those ‘Why did the chicken cross the road?’ jokes) and have finally decided to come forth in a great spectacular show of strength in all their splendour that accentuates their greatness. It is rightly believed that once they do so, all people whose attitudes are not stuck in the colonial mindset of the 18th century will either commit mass suicide rather than live through that (enlightened?) period again. Boom!!! There go all the Asians...

· The Yazuka Takeover
The Yazuka is the Japanese mafia, known to run the world. The Yakuza are the world's richest and most powerful gangsters. They control many of the big-name Japanese corporations that now have huge leverage in the major western economies. Nothing can be done to loosen the grip of the Yakuza on the world economy.

Until one of the bigger mafias, the so called industrial congromolate monoliths decide to buyout the Japanese mafia in an Employee Leveraged Buyout scheme financed by the World Bank and the IMF.

We will then see systematic annihilation of all future competition. No more Asians.

· Alien Encounter
Sometime in the future, the real owners of the hardware at Area 51 will return to claim what’s rightfully theirs. As a penalty, they will devoid the Earth of all inhabitants that do not believe that their country is at the centre of the universe and are not a part of the We are the World phenomenon aka the baseball world series. Man, we sure are screwed.

· The You-Know-Who Syndrome
Brought up on a steady diet of Western pop culture and with their economies booming, it is believed that Asians will earn enough moolah to undergo plastic surgeries to become WASPs (like the famous black pop singer who had a dream to be white and beautiful when he grew up, and today is white, beautiful and has two holes where a nose should be). So in reality, what we see in the movies depicting the future, are not really Caucasians, but Asians that have realised their ambitions to be Bad.

· The Cultural revolution
Sometime in the future, the developed nations will launch a programme akin to Mao’s Cultural Revolution that will state: The White Man is a genius, everything the White Man says is truly great; one of the White man's words will override the meaning of ten thousands of yours.

And yes, this proclamation of the Great Cultural revolution will lead to the death of most of the non white individuals on the face of the earth.

They’ll understand the joke and die laughing. Not a bad way to go. Not a bad way at all.

Anyways, if you have any other theories that can be an addition to the ones above, please let me know. I’m trying to ascertain the believability of each one of them and getting a thesis published on the very topic.

Phi says: The comments made in this particular post are the fruit of a deranged mind having idle time on its hands. The injunctions and references made are hardly coincidental, but any defamation suits resulting from the stated comments cannot be pinned on the author because of a pending insanity plea in the court. If you like the article, please make a contribution in the form of a chain mail to all the employees in your office to make a hearty donation to the ‘Adopt an Asian’ fund that seeks to convert some of the Asians to a WASP mentality to ensure their survival in the world of the future.