Mob

It was only a month into our first semester of engineering, at the peak of the collective ‘Seniors must be obeyed at all costs’ spell cast on us. The spell would dissipate in a few weeks and it would surely be attempted on subsequent newbies in newer batches, it would never ever have as much power on us greenhorns as it had then. We believed.

In this environment, Dubious (all names including this changed for privacy purposes) and me found ourselves roaming the campus at 02:00 AM, roughly hewn heavy wooden sticks in hand. We were part of a battalion, a few dozen strong, entrusted with the protection of our engineering college from possible attack by the enemy.

The enemy in this case were Kurukshetra University (KU) students. This was all part of an endless cycle of insults and avenge-of-insults that KU and engineering college students were engaged in, possibly just because they needed something to do in this semi-agrarian town in Haryana.

With soldiers like Dubious, a short dreamy literature fanatic and me, a skin and bones contraption wearing telescopes for glasses, the future of this battalion if it chose to engage in any kind of physical battle was bleak. As it happened and as indeed happened on many a night, the KU chose to sleep off their insult while we patrolled the perimeters. Dubious and me weren’t above looking relieved at this turn of events.

The obvious lack of action in combination with the ache in our arms was leading us back towards our hostel and peace. We nearly made it when Jhamelaa from the leading dozen announced “This Popat has been showing off too much in class. Isn’t it time someone put him in his place?”

Just like that, the KU threat was gone but a visceral hatred for Popat replaced it. The mob had turned.  Now Popat, a batchmate I barely knew from a different branch, must be sought and taught.

What this Popat had done was something I had no idea of, yet it was truly astonishing how the focus had shifted on what was a cool October night. The mob had already swarmed towards Popat’s ground floor room before logic could step in.

Luckily for Popat and the extremely confused me, a baritone voiced negotiator friend of his managed to send us all back to where we should have in the first place, our rooms and our beds. The immediate unavailability of Popat, who had wisely decided to make a speedy exit towards safer climes before his lesson teachers showed up, also helped.

Whenever I read of mob mentality, I always go back to that night in Kurukshetra. I remember how Dubious, until then as much a passive participant as me, declared “Yes, Popat must be taught a lesson!” and merged into the crowd at Popat’s door. The very night air, it had seemed to me then, carried the perverse ability to turn thinking off and frenzy on.

[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.in/2017/10/mob.html]

A brighter shade of blue

Blue we were, a brighter shade of blue
Young, restless, lonely... but with a crew
Evenings endless to fill, not a thing to do
Rumours like cigarette smoke float, from God knows who.
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Laughter there was, there was fear
Anxiety there was, so was cheer
Swear words flowed easy, reddening earth & sky
High Hopes played on loop, deep... deep into the night.
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These walls these fields these stars they knew
For long had they from boys, men drew
Whatever else they may be, this much was true
These guys... were a brighter shade of blue.
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[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.in/2016/04/a-brighter-shade-of-blue.html]

Kirmich Road

NIT-Kurukshetra Main Building (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Bangor. Maine. USA. A radio ad. A surprising radio ad. I let my attention drift from the speeding traffic coursing down I-95 S towards Boston. Dangerous. I grip the steering wheel tighter and look to the road again. Memories.

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"Mahindra Tractors... now in New England!" the ad said. I grew up in an industrialized small town in south Gujarat. I have no childhood memories of farms and farm machinery. That name though... has special resonance.
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Kurukshetra. Haryana. India. Land of the Mahabharata and not much else after. Scratch that. Everything. It was everything and a little bit more. For 4 years. Tucked away in a corner of a sprawling university campus, bordered by wheat fields is an engineering college. Or as it seemed to us then, a universe... our universe.
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A narrow road. Used only occasionally by tempos and Mahindra tractors. The borderline between our world and theirs. Offering easy access to two critical facilities - khokhas for rescue from the tyranny of hostel mess food and thekas for the times when the food wasn't enough of an escape.
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Kirmich Road. Home to khokhaas Akloo, Harish, Meghnath and the only so called 'restaurant', the James Bond inspired Golden Eye. Not for the culinary aesthete, it must be said, given the buffaloes tied alongside their shed like structures and the buzzing flies around them but for a certain group of young adults, the best in the world. Host also to the entrepreneur from Kerala who set up his roadside idli-dosa stall, here in rural Haryana, as far away from home as he could possibly be, brave and undeterred in his mission of serving quality South Indian fare. 
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The road of terror and darkness in the first year. Beyond which lay the naked yellow bulbs under which seniors were free to do, in their own ominous words, 'whatever they want' after they had spirited away the freshers from the stifling confines of their hostel/jail in the middle of the night. The jokes and the humour were crude but the anda chow-mein on some nights was compensation enough.
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 The road of freedom thereafter. Birthday and job treats, recuperating cultural/technical fest committees, farewells, reunion parties - all had a way spilling onto Kirmich Road, a bone chilling walk on a winter night and respite from baking hostel rooms in the summer. Akloo's half-fry Maggi and a steaming glass of patti at midnight was a treat hunter's 'mission complete'. Meghnath's parathas too with their mysterious green chutney, which gave salvation to some and jaundice to others, warmed many a soul in a Haryana winter. 
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Unlikely friendships - making a mockery of the conventional ideas of common ground and background - were formed here, unrequited love - the most common ailment of any young boy's life - was analyzed and criticized here i.e. until it struck the criticizers themselves and understanding silences - over shared cigarettes - covered those golden periods when words seemed superfluous, here in this nondescript road by the wheat fields. 
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A cancelled lecture's magnificent happy hour saw the tides of students wash over Kirmich Road's shores. Late night debates, whose origins could never be traced beyond the vast lands of a country called Boredom fed by the river called Alcohol, reached their garbled crescendo here. This narrow rectangular strip of pitch and tar was a stage... a canvas for all those emotions inseparable from the adventure called student life.
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No wonder then, that half a world away, 8 years since I had even thought about it, Kirmich Road sprung back to life in an instant. Nostalgia tends to smoothen the edges of reality and even to periods of darkness provides a noir like cool. 
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In an idealized tableau, I can always see it, my feet propped up on an empty chair and a glass of patti in my hand, accompanied by a changeable cast of friends - a noisy tractor bouncing past leaving behind a trail of the faint but unmistakable tinny notes of a Punjabi song's ektara. 
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Just another ordinary... but never quite ordinary day on Kirmich Road.
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[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.in/2015/09/kirmich-road.html]

Living with differences

I can’t help feeling a little cynical as I pen this down. After all, the only people who would want to read an essay on “Living with differences” would be the ones who are already aware that there is no viable alternative to it. For those who are convinced that standardization-be it on the lines of religion, caste or class is the way out of the entire world’s ills wouldn’t bother making the effort. But in times when a moderate opinion on any issue is panned and reviled by both warring camps, this is an important exercise in self-motivation.

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It’s been over a year since I passed out of Regional Engineering College (REC), Kurukshetra (Now that’s a real place in Haryana, in case you thought it is something on the lines of Rama’s Bridge). It’s been grandly re-christened National Institute of Technology (NIT), Kurukshetra, but we alumni persist with the REC short form rather than the new fangled NIT. RECs represent a unique kind of Institutions where people so markedly different are put together in some kind of weird social experiment. Students from every state have just got to be there, unlike the IITs where only the ‘cream’ shows up (more often than not resulting in states with great competitive environments dominating the numbers). But in RECs, it was a case of state boards, Delhi boards, vernacular medium, English medium, competitive exam based selections and board marks based selections, all tossed together in a mixed salad of sorts. And to the great surprise of everyone involved, manage to function quite well in their own hopelessly complicated sort of way.

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As one would expect, stereotyping was everyone’s favourite pastime. Guys from the North are bruising and crude, the people from the East are pseudo-intellectual snobs, the fellows from Western India- oh, ready to sell their souls if there was any money involved, students from the South never looking beyond syllabus books and their ‘own’ kind and finally the North-east- drunk druggies! And this was just stereotype level 1, the data and pre-conditioning for which our upbringing in our respective domicile states had already groomed us to believe. The next level would crop up when passionate as the youth must be, battle lines would be drawn over a minor argument or scuffle. Regions would blend into temporary coalitions and you would discover that:

# UP-ites were all scheming politicians

# Biharis were vicious fighters ready to plunge into battle at the drop of a hat

# Telugus were basically spineless and wouldn’t ever take a stand

# Tamils were out on a mission to subjugate all other South Indian cultures

# Bengalis were so full of themselves that it was impossible to stand them for more than a minute

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and a million more such previously unstated accusations that were always hiding in a dark corner of the mind waiting for an oppurtune moment to spring out.

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All prejudices and pet hates now out in the open, a tangible bitterness in the air and one would be forgiven for thinking that national integration was a lost cause even after 60 years of Independence. Tense and difficult, moments like these were indeed but in retrospect they bring a smile to my face.

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I smile because there is a fact that drifters like me knew. Being a Bengali schooled in Gujarat, and thereby gaining admission through the Gujarat quota, my domicile state was just one identity. We call them State GTs (Get Togethers) and Gujarat GT was something like a degree which was affixed to my name as and when the situation required. I had the good fortune/misfortune of being termed too Bengali or not Bengali enough by different groups at different times. I knew that despite all the cribbing and finger pointing some things would remain unchanged.

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When mess food in its vile form was served on our plates, all hands would stretch to that extra large jar of spicy South Indian pickle carried by a benevolent soul. When the Telugu guy next room would be really sick, it would be his Haryanvi classmates who would rush him to the hospital. That the common room would be packed to the rafters with every eye on the TV screen whenever “The Matrix” was on or when Australia was on the verge of losing a cricket match, whether the opponent be India or not. That the precious matchbox doing the rounds to light cigarettes had no regional loyalties and neither did a freshly filled bottle of cold water from the cooler, the furious look on its owner’s face notwithstanding. Xeroxed notes on the night before the exam would have a geographical distribution worthy of a thesis and that the look of shock after a particularly tough exam hardly varied from face to face. The dissimilarities between us were far too many to note down, but it was the most unlikely similarities that invited bemused contemplation.

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But of course, not everything was hunky-dory in life at an REC. Some of my fellow students by way of being in the wrong place at the wrong time walked away from 4 years of engineering with regional stereotypes further re-inforced. Some of them gave up the fight to defy the labels of their region, finding it much more convenient to behave the way certain people expected them to, helped in no small measure by constant heckling and jeering. The 50% local strength of the Haryanvi students in our REC frequently saw ‘Us and them’ situations crop up with Haryana-non Haryana tensions simmering. This feeling of insecurity against the majority populace seemed to be a common feature in most RECs if reports from friends in other RECs are anything to go by. Any kind of majority always exerts an unseen and mostly unintentional pressure on the others, and in an atmosphere of distrust, it only requires the proverbial spark to burst into flames.

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This is where I realized the sincere need for just inane conversation. By virtue of my network of friends, I always knew that the rumours and whispers about the ‘rival’ group had minimum basis in truth. Some of the people I talked with hardly had anything in common with me, but just by interacting with them I knew they couldn’t be half as bad as the alarm raisers claimed them to be. Sadly for others who were completely out of touch with them, anything anyone ever said about them was as good as true.

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Having grown up in Gujarat, I wondered even more how much a little mindless banter could have made a difference. During the 2002 riots in Gujarat, a Muslim classmate and I laughed over the fact that identical stories about a Muslim girl/Hindu girl being abducted were doing the rounds simultaneously in the respective communities. But when put in context of the horrifying violence that rumours like these generated, it hardly seems funny any longer. The fact that virtual LOCs between the two communities in most cities still persist, its sadly evident that peace achieved in such conditions is just a makeshift arrangement.

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At the end of the day we are all flawed, emotional beings who have a set of prejudices and dislikes which have evolved out of our immediate environment. Some of these prejudices cannot be shaken off in a lifetime but we can surely do better at preventing them from hardening. Every time one makes a sweeping statement about a community or a caste or a class, its important to rein that in. Situations may yet force them out but keeping those words in for a few seconds more robs them of their sting and in many cases makes one realize the purposelessness of it all.

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It is only human nature that we turn to a group that is closest to our way of living whenever we feel the need for security and identity. But reaching out is so much more important even though mutual agreement may be a distant dream. Just by knowing a person with a set of values which we find odd, comes a revelation that we are similar in some ways however few they may be. This similarity is a surprise and lessens to a great extent all our apprehensions about something completely unknown. And of course the all important fact that for any correction of supposed ‘flaws’ in the other, the kind word of a friend is so much more effective than the hate filled invective of a stranger.

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It’s a strange world that we live in. The rich/privileged seem to hate the poor for not being able to fend for themselves and the poor/disadvantaged hate the rich for purposefully keeping all opportunities to themselves. The religious hate the ‘modern’ for being too flippant about their God, while the ‘modern’ hate the religious for being book-bound bigots. And so on and forth, rage a variety of differences. I am not idealistic enough to see the world join together in a celebration of our differences in the near future, indeed coming together has its fair share of acrimony. But just knowing our differences and accepting them, before pushing for any kind of compromise is the first and inevitable step in the long, arduous path towards a world which is a saner, more livable version of its present sorry self.

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Written by me but originally published on 30th January 2008 at 

http://citizensforpeace.in/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=130&Itemid=55

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[ http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2012/04/living-with-differences.html]

Stamped

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In the ultimate tribute to the importance and influence that spending 4 years in a hostel 1500 kilometres away from home while at engineering school has had on me, someone who had known me for only about half an hour at that point and also was aware of the fact that I had graduated from REC Kurukshetra asked "So you grew up in Haryana, right?" 

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18 years of preceding experiences and conditioning, of being born in Calcutta, being schooled in Gujarat, it seems are now all moulded beneath that permanent Kurukshetra B. Tech Mechanical outer shell. \m/ Regional Engineering College, Kurukshetra \m/... \m/ Mechanical Engineering \m/ 

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[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2011/11/stamped.html]

Foggy parathas

[Tonight is a cold night in Calcutta, cold by Calcutta standards that is, but just the right kind of cold if you ask me. The motorcycle ride back home through deserted late night roads is faster by 20 kmph as your shoulders stiffen up to brave the chill in the air. Your twitchy on-the-verge-of-sneezing nose & numb fingertips feel like they belong to somebody else. Your eyelids are cold, like they have just been dug out of snow. Just the right kind of cold that a man can take... and robustly enjoy! Makes me think back to the four winters spent in the heart of Haryana, last experienced only 4 years ago but already seems like 4 decades ago.]

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07:30 AM

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I have always been a creature of the light, never a creature of the night even through the routine murdering lifestyle of an engineering college hostel. When the sun is up, I have to be up too no matter how late I sleep or no matter how much of a biology v/s fermented liquids challenge last night's party was. So all too frequently on a winter's morning on a weekend, I would find myself blinking like a deer caught in the headlights and grumbling my way out of the sensational comforts of a thick blanket. It didn't matter that I would be taken down by another wave of extreme sleepiness at around 11:00 AM, but for the moment, I was hopelessly awake.

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A hostel bears an uncanny resemblance to a graveyard in those hours of the morning, so deathly quiet is the surroundings. Every party worth its salt has already ended in tearful emotional moments of the "You are a real friend!" nature and the chorus of puking heads out of the verandahs of decadence has long gone silent. It's a surreal world, especially in contrast to the mayhem and the noise and the loud music that inhabited the same space just a few hours ago. Then there's the all pervading morning fog rolling in from the sunflower fields in front of Hostel Number 5, almost looking responsible for putting all the party revellers to a much needed but vehemently-fought-against slumber.

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I lumber down the stairs after pulling on my worn-down-to-the-last thread blue jacket as the cold stings my ears. The few odd inmates (Yes, we have had some notices which referred to us as "Inmates of Hostel No. 5"!) who were also in wait for breakfast to begin also come shuffling down, a mini army of zombies staggering through the fog in search of the one thing they craved, the only thing that could justify being awake at that  - hot paranthas! Methi, aloo, gobi whatever may be the stuffing - all welcomed onto the cold steel of the railway catering style steel plates, topped off with a cube of butter and then another cube of butter to serve as the 'subzi' component of the meal. 

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The warmth of the first morsels of food awaken the other senses and I can hear the sound of the carrom board striker whacking into the sides. Somebody has already got down to business in the common room neighbouring the hostel mess and I am sure by the time I leave the table, none of the newspapers pinned to the boards would be free for a read. Nonetheless, I wander into the common room out of sheer habit and check out what's on TV. Wonders of wonders, it's not ETC with its endless stream of Bollywood movie trailers but a West Indies v/s Australia Test match live. Lara is hitting the hide off the Aussies and it seems that the word has got around already. A few familiar faces, cricket-fans as they are, rush in and take up the first row. I too find my nook, in the second row with an empty chair in front to prop my legs up on to half doze, half dream my way through the wizardry on display on TV. Another blissful day of anarchy thus progresses in REC Kurukshetra, in the land of foggy parathas.

Anthem

It was my very first guitar class in February this year and my teacher walked in, dazzled us with a couple of minutes of freestyling on the fretboard and got going with the compulsory "To start off, tell me why you want to learn the guitar" session. My answer was a rather unimaginative and plain Jane "I love the sound of the guitar!" (Straight out of the 'Cliched Answer 101') but the guy who sat next to me and who now is much more higher on the guitar learning curve (It figures...) came up with "I want to perfectly play the slow lead section of Led Zep's 'Stairway to Heaven' at least once in my life!" My teacher was suitably impressed with his focus and so was I, and I got thinking.

What would be the one song that I'd learn to play if there were only that one song that I could learn? After much soul searching, leaving the divine creations of the likes of U2, Dire Straits and other classic rock favourites behind, I settled for what on the face seems to be an extremely crude song - "BC Sutta" by the Pakistani band Zeest. There were a lot of college band-ish songs which followed that classic, using coarser swear words, more intellectual lyrics, finer musical arrangements etc and gained immense popularity on the hostel MP3 lists but to me they were horrible, just playing on the sensationalism gained by an overdose of swear words yet somehow lacking in depth and class if I may say so.

The strums of "BC Sutta" have that essential rawness that is in complete sync with its bare-to-bones perfect lyrics, perfect because the lyricist knew exactly where the intensity of the song picked up and where exactly the swear words needed to be used & where not. The heart and soul of the song are right where a rock song's should be, in a very rough and tough place. A few girls from my college recorded a version of the very same song, a version which got frequent play on some boy's hostel PCs who were moronic enough to be taken aback by the fact that girls can swear too. What next? Surprise at the fact that girls breathe too? Some of us guys need to grow up or at least wake up to find that is the 21st century... really!

But that said, girls singing that song sounded so pathetic that it became even more evident why this was really a guy's song. A fair counterpoint to girls singing "BC Sutta" would be to imagine (Oh dear Devil, forgive me for this blasphemy) Metallica singing Shania Twain's "That don't be impress me much". Ha! Now you get the idea! True, that women can do everything that men can but just like some men who find dressing like a drag queen irresistible and are deservedly laughed at, so too should we laugh at women who try something ridiculous and unnecessary like this. Women's lib hopefully has bigger battles to fight than to beat men at their evolution enhanced crudeness, which is something they eventually may be able to but to what end?

The need and craving for a cigarette at the moment when it is most inaccessible, the relief when the first drag hits home, the sense of brotherhood that prevails as smoke fills the hostel room while the lone ciggie does the rounds and the essential ruggedness of being a member of the male species - all put together in 4 minutes 18 seconds in this gem of a song. Ideal scenario - a single room maybe 10 years down the line at Boy's Hostel No. 5 (Chatrawaas No. 5) of REC(NIT??) Kurukshetra, the mattress folded over so as to avoid the Royal Stag spilling onto it, all buddies resting on whatever little real estate they can find in between strewn clothes, fluttering newspapers and similar clutter, guitar in my hands, cigarettes in our lips, smoke clouding the roof of the room and everyone going "Doston mein baithaa, main sutta pi rahaa..." Ah yes! Heaven!

God

[In memory of a friend tragically snatched away from this world and in honour of the greatest cricketer on the face of planet earth]

It was early in 2003 towards the end of the second semester when a passionate debate about cricket was suddenly ignited in our room no. 118 of Hostel 3. Guys from neighbouring rooms and afar had joined in the fray. The debate was like many other hostel debates that had happened in the past and would happen again in the future, intense and eventually unresolved. No side was ready to give any quarter and swords remained drawn. The topic was Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar and his greatness, and for once in my life I was not in his camp. Not in his camp because there was only one person battling for him and he was the greatest Sachin fan I have ever known. It's not an easy thing for me to say, super maniacal Sachin fan that I am, that Abhishek Tomer was such a Sachin fanatic that I seemed mild in comparison. In that debate, Tomer was insistent on only one point "Sachin bhagwaan hai (Sachin is God)!" I said that Sachin was and is my favourite player of all time, but it was too much to call him God because A. he was yet to win a World Cup (This was before he almost singlehandedly took India to the 2003 World Cup final), B. he sometimes stuttered in big matches (Again this was way before the magic he displayed in the 2 one day finals against Australia in Australia in 2008) and C. India had a much much better record of winning the match when say Sehwag or Ganguly scored a ton rather than Sachin (Put this down to bad luck more than anything else). He heard all of this patiently and told the rest of us "Say what you will, but one day you'll realize that Sachin bhagwaan hai!". He couldn't really convince us and we couldn't really convince him.

I was watching India bat on live television in 2008 when I heard of Tomer's tragic passing away. A friend had called me and told me the terrible news. That night was not Sachin's night either as within minutes of my coming to know, Sachin walked back to the pavilion, dismissed early. I thought with a lump in my throat and a reeling mind, "There is no point in playing this match, Sachin. Your greatest fan is no more."

When I think today and go back to that day seven years ago in Kurukshetra, I evaluate God's (the real one if there is one up in the heavens) track record. Does God always do what is asked of Him? Do we really believe that He will help us out of every ditch that life throws us into? Do we worship Him because of His iron-bound reliability or because of what He is possibly capable of? Would we really be happy if He gave us all that we wanted without a struggle or without the occasional sobering punch of defeat? If God is so far from perfect, how on earth can we train our guns on Sachin!

For more than 20 years, this man has carried the hopes and dreams of a nation on his shoulders. He is too self-effacing, too much of a real gentleman to make any claims to be God. That is the most awe-inspiring aspect of Sachin's mental make-up. He wouldn't ever get thrown out of a night club for misbehaving with a girl (unlike a certain Australian competitor) and neither would he ever put the unity of his team at stake for his personal ego (like the West Indian great of this era who I personally believe is the only batsman in the world who can dare to look Sachin in the eye). Truth be spoken, Sachin could do that and get away with it such is the level of hero-worship the great man commands, but he would not... simply because he is Sachin. All he ever wanted to do is to walk out to the middle of the ground as the crowd shouts his name and hit the ball with the middle of the bat. He wants to get up every day, train, run, shout, bowl and give his 100% on the cricket field every single time. He wants to let loose a flood of joy and optimism through the lives of his millions of followers by that wonderful straight drive, the crackling cover drive or the bullet like pull shot. When Sachin bats, he bats for everybody and everybody bats for him. I don't care for all the records that he holds or how many trophies he has won for India, all mere statistics and cold numbers to me. It's how I feel when I watch him play however long or short his innings might be. For that wonderful honour of watching this artist at work, I am indebted to him forever.

When on February 24th, in the packed office canteen, we saw Sachin steal that final single to get to 200 and jumped up in delirious joy, there was only one thought running on my mind over and over again like the ticker tape they keep running headlines on at the bottom of news channel screens. Wherever you are, buddy Tomer, may your soul rest in peace and may you smile & savour this victory. When I see that an international sports legend is 36 years old and still as bubbly, enthusiastic and capable of bringing such happiness into people's lives, I must finally accept defeat in this 7 year old debate and say what must be said. "Sachin bhagwaan hai!". Enough said!

Holi Hai!!!

Yes, the picture above is from an 'ordinary' Holi, as ordinary as things can get in my alma mater, REC Kurukshetra (Yeah, yeah now known as NIT Kurukshetra for all you nit-pickers). It's 10:15 in the morning and I am at my laptop reminiscing about how coated in mud I would have been by now had this been any one of the 4 awesome Holi celebrations that I had participated in during the course of my engineering. The swamp things that are seen in the picture are actually a random selection of friends and acquaintances on the boy's hostel grounds, midway through the Holi madness, soon after which I am sure the cameraman must have been dunked in the mud too.

I can already see a few faces go "Eww", "Yuck" as they read this but mud based Holi was the most natural and healthy Holi possible. No artificial chemical dye based powders and colours involved, besides the fact we were students always in a state of bankruptcy so this was the only budget friendly way of doing things. Hook up a pipe from the ground-floor bathroom of B-block, scuff up the earth a little bit before allowing the water to flow into the ground which normally was for hostel cricket only. As the mud began to form, the first few lunatic volunteers would themselves take a plunge into it but this was not the fun part of the celebrations. The real enthusiasm was reserved for those who were in any way unwilling to participate in this annual cleansing ritual. Hostel room doors would be broken down if some information of a popular hideaway inside was confirmed, and then kicking and screaming, with a splash would go in our latest capture. So would any unsuspecting soul who may have wandered into the common room on the day of Holi and was vehemently claiming that he thought watching a cricket match was more fun than rolling in the mud like pigs.

Everyone knew that wearing anything but an sacrificable T-shirt and old pants was madness on the day of Holi inside a RECK hostel. In the rough and tumble style of Kurukshetra Holi, sooner rather than later there'd be a loud "Rippppppppppppp". Oops! That was the beginning of the end of our poor mud soaked clothes. The eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth way of life would swing into operation and soon there would be no T-shirt left intact on any shoulder. Soon the mud Olympics would be on with freestyle sliding and team gymnastics on the slippery, slithery skating rink that our erstwhile hostel cricket ground had become. Dog tired as the first spring sun shone down brightly on our wheezing lot, we would lie prostate on the same mud and water and catch our breath. By lunchtime, 300 odd guys would hit the hostel bathrooms to get back to their non mud-caked avatars and the spectacular amounts of mud that would line the bathroom floors made all of us pity the cleaners who surely would have cursed us into hell many times over.

Holi was a special day in Kurukshetra, I should say an especially special day in Kurukshetra because all days in Kurukshetra were special. I remember Holi in first year, when despite having flunked in a subject like some others of my batch (The first semester results had been declared the day before and my assassin's name was Physics-1) Holi pulled us out of our gloom. We were moping about with a dejected look on our face when we saw a couple of guys sneak towards the bathroom a bucket of muddy water in hand where one of our more disciplined friends was just finishing his daily normal non 'Holi'day bath towelling himself dry. Then a splash; howls of loud laughter; a string of angry, even louder, non-repeatable swear words and all of us with a sudden smile creeping across our face shouting "Holi hai, bhai... Holi hai!!"

Uncool ninjas

There is a lot of effort required to make mysterious assasins, trained in the most lethal of martial arts look boring but anime the wildly popular Japanese style of animation manages to do just that. I wouldn't have had so much of a beef with anime and we would have stayed away from each other in mutual agreement had it not invaded my personal space for nearly an entire year. I had borrowed my friend Subbu's PC for almost the whole length of my final year of engineering and had had to patiently put up with the incredible stupidity and blind devotion of Naruto lovers.

I have always loved comics and animation and still do but somehow the Japanese style of doing things always manages to get my goat. The weirdly coloured hair, the boringly repetitive facial expressions and the unnecessary iterations of the camera panning away to reveal two opponents squaring off in yet another yawn inducing ninja battle were asking for too much if they were asking for my attention. Japanese voices sometimes too coarse and others too squeaky talking gibberish like the "chidori" (Thousand bird power), the triple seal curse or yelling "Sasuke Kan" had started to appear in my dreams. My room was always packed with Naruto fans who seemed to love even his retarded "ramen" weakness & giggled like teenage girls and the series ran in 24 hour cycles within the closed confines of my room. The show was astoundingly popular and I was frequently given incredulous looks by anime devotees for not having liked even the tiniest portion of it. Being in the same room as this shabby work of art was a pain but it was still my room so I had to manfully withstand this assault on my good taste. My stand was crystal clear: ninjas cool, anime totally uncool.

434

12th March, 2006: A Sunday which will live in glory for all time to come for anyone who loves to see Australia beaten in a cricket match. The common room of our hostel had seen many a raucous celebration but none like that day even though India wasn't even one of the combatants.

It was the fifth and final one-dayer, the series decider for the Aussies touring South Africa. The day being a Sunday, the only thing that could be on the TV when a cricket match was on was a cricket match so a few sleepy heads half filled the common room and stared in disbelief as Ricky Ponting took the Proteas to task, the Aussies posting an unprecedented, mammoth, gargantuan, stupendous 434 runs as a target. The bitter memories of the 2004 World Cup final slaughter of India at the hands of the same batsman were awakened and the air was thick with the most vehement curses. How could they do this everytime, the darned Kangaroos, how could they bring their game up to such a level when it came to the big day? Hurt and anger and disappointment hung thick as people resorted to tearing newspapers and slamming the striker on the carrom board to divert their thoughts away from what looked assured to be another Aussie victory.

Who could've thought that a man called Herschelle Gibbs had decided otherwise? He smashed, pulled and cut his way in a dream innings as he came within touching distance of the impossible. Then he fell, and the mournful silence of the common room told the story of whose side we were rooting for. A parade of South African batsmen followed in quick succession, and the Aussies were back from the brink with their confident smirks. But Mark Boucher pulled the Proteas home in the most of nail biting of finishes with one ball to go and one wicket to spare. South Africa: 438/9 in 49.5 overs in what was positively the greatest run chase of all time. What a game!

The common room erupted and we were literally dancing in the aisles. High fives, chest bumps, pumping fists, mindless roars of joy et al were on display as the bitterest cricketing rivals of India were subjected to this incredible defeat. On that night, South Africa was playing for India, wreaking brutal vengeance on the invincible Aussies. The happiness that night defied belief as every cricket lover in our hostel fell asleep with a satisfied smile. It was Monday next day but we couldn't care less. Australia had been beaten and how! This was a story to tell our grandchildren. Even without being at the Wanderers, Jo'burg that night, being in far off Kurukshetra, it was well and truly a "I was there" moment.

A little bit of ourselves

The academic calendar was hardly of any interest to us. It was just a schedule interspersed with internals, vivas and assignment submissions before the menace of semester exams re-surfaced. However what we did look forward to if there was anything that could be put under that head would be the college fests. They were of little consequence to anyone not involved in them, and might not have even been impressive to the unbiased observer but for those who organized them, they'd be the centre of the universe for at least a month in time.

For me, it'd be the Mechanchie society's Magnum Opus, and the two biggies of the year for the entire college in the form of the tech-fest Literati and the cultural Confluence. Life was tough as far as getting sponsorships for the fests was concerned. Kurukshetra wasn't quite a name which would spring out of the pages when a senior executive of a company thought of killer brand placement. Consequently, getting the sponsors to shell out more than a pittance and then live up to their expectation to buy the moon for a dime was a near impossibility. But we tried.

"Prof Night", a standard feature of all IIT and big city college fests where a professional musical artist/group performed, remained a spectre through the fog during our 4 years in engineering school thanks to administrative red-tape. The attendance from neighbouring colleges and big cities remained sparse despite our best efforts to portray our inter-college fests as the best there was going to be. Sometimes it seemed that the only ones who believed the event to be a success were we the organizers ourselves. Everyone else was either turning their noses up at the "fun" to come or worser still, running away to avoid the boredom.

We were oblivious to all these shortcomings, us who were in the thick of these things. We'd continue to slave away over the posters that would build up to the events, engage in passionate debates over what actions would draw the 'crowds', spent late nights and long phone calls over supplies & fresh ideas that could pump more life and encourage more participation than last year or the year before last. The unbelievable efforts that we put into what would at the end of it all be just another tacky college fest defied belief. The grandiose nature of these events may only have been a illusion but it was a very useful one for us nonetheless. 

We had invested a little bit of ourselves & the zest of our youthful spirits on each of those tossed away pamphlets that were now being blown around the grounds, into the giant backdrop of the stage, on the furniture that we lugged onto the truck, the giant speakers that would screech in electromagnetic indignation and the million other activities that stitched together this attempt at college fest greatness. If spirit counted for anything at all in these cases, then we were at par with any of the hallowed institutions of the world stigmatized though might we be by being located in a little pocket of rural Haryana.

Drunken conviction

Engineering college saw me earn a certified gold star in drinking capacity. By the end of the fourth year, I was notorious for being a heavy drinker and feats far beyond my human capabilities were being attributed to me. They said that I never went 'out', which was a mostly true assertion because my sozzled state was notably different from anyone else's. While for others, shirts would come off, words would become incoherent and they'd have to literally mopped off the floor, I'd withdraw into my shell, just sit in a corner of the mayhem and watch others fall to pieces. My 'out' state was thus often misconstrued as the much desired stability by most of my drunk-beyond-repair partymates and you can't blame me for not being forthright. The 'tank' reputation was an honour given to only a handful and I wasn't going to be the one who'd surrender it unchallenged. 

There were times however when I'd behave too much like the conventional drunk but somehow it always escaped attracting attention. The worst of these incidents was on the night of Raveesh's job treat. I had fallen asleep early that night but my pal Raveesh nearly took my door down and dragged me to his party a couple of rooms away. The customary protestations and claims of "not being in the mood" were done away with rapidly post the first few beers. It was an especially big night for the hostel party circuit with every floor on every block sustaining at least one party. The hours zoomed by like seconds and the alcohol claimed each and every one slowly but surely. I was definitely not in tip-top condition but owing to my past reputation was assigned the painful duty of delivering the host back to the safety of his room. Raveesh was a heavy guy (Imagine Rafael Nadal without the tennis skills) and my spindly structure would've been in serious trouble even on an ordinary day. Tonight the torture was quadrupled, as I coaxed and cursed my slippery stone of a friend to his room. That he lived on the top floor of one block and I lived on the top floor of another block didn't help matters.

Dumping him into his room and securing his room, I took a deep breath in the corridor just outside his room. And all the alcohol of the night swooped into my head in a final decisive strike. The GPS inside my head went haywire and I decided with iron conviction that I was back on the top floor of my block. I stomped with certainty to 'my' room right in front of the stairs and was shocked to find it locked from the inside! I hammered like crazy on the locked door and shouted out in defiance that I wasn't going to let any random drunk from the party steal my bed. They'd have to get back to their own room and sleep, I claimed. 

Bleary eyed and confused, the real resident of the room Devender opened the door. There was a PC inside the room and I thought to myself that I surely didn't have a PC in my room. Then another cranky bit of me decided that not only had Devender stolen my room in the space of the 5 minutes that had elapsed but that he had also set-up his PC inside in that brief interval. I must admit that Devender was much much more patient in the circumstances than I would have been. To be woken at 3:45 AM and be asked to vacate your own room alongwith his PC by a smashed-beyond-words drunk cannot be the best of experiences. Thank God that he was my classmate and I had developed a more cordial relationship with him when I was in a sober state. In vain, did he try to explain that my room was in a different block altogether. For I was rock-solid in my belief that I'd claim what was rightfully mine. I do not have the faintest memories of how I got back to my room but considering that I had no aches or pains to tend to the following morning, the parting must have been amicable. Next day of course was another party (I forget for what reason) where I was hailed as the great survivor of the previous night's party as always. Now Devender was the early-to-bed, early-to-rise kind of person so thankfully he wasn't ever going to tell on me leaving my reputation as the rock sacrosanct.

Paschim permutations

There was no real incentive to get back home for us in RECK except maybe at the end of the first semester. Hostel life with its fully engaging tomfoolery and stifling periods of inactivity had put us into the twilight zone where time had come to a stop. Semesters came and went, but were impossible to tell apart as far our routines went. It was the same carrom, common room, 'khokhaa', party, 'panga', bunked classes schedule that repeated itself through the years and every sem was a minor variant of the past. Going home was something which took us out of this world of irresponsibility and timelessness for a brief vacation.

Gujarat was about 18 hours away by train and despite knowing when our semester would end at least 3 months in advance, none of us guys based in Gujarat would ever take the pains or even had the foresight to book a seat. Given the extreme demand of seats on the Indian Railways, naturally we'd end up with a rather hopeless situation of 1 berth between 8 people or sometimes none at all. We'd prefer to take the Paschim Express from Ambala as it made its way to Bombay running through the parts of South Gujarat where most of us lived.

Bombay was home to the mythical 'maal'(babe) from Bombay and so it was a logical conclusion that at least a dozen of them ought to be on the Paschim Express. Every trip back home or to college would begin in a scouting trip up and down the length of the train for a sighting of this elusive species. Most of the times, the search party would return empty-handed but then the rarity of success led to the thrill of the hunt. In case of the occasional gust of good fortune, the carriage where the sighting had been reported by the forest guide would find itself frequented by a variety of young male college students who'd be passing along the length of the carriage multiple times and without apparent purpose. Being the socially inept engineers that we were (Most of us mechanical engineers too), the closest that anyone would get to a conversation with the Bollywood beauties would be a baritone "Sure" to the squeaky "Excuse me" from her as we stood blocking the passage in her carriage. We almost never had any seats anyways so we were nomads permanently in search of the promised land. Once on the rarest of rare occasions we had a single seat in the midst of some hot architecture girls headed out to Chandigarh from Bombay. We tried to play up the non-existent REC/NIT brandname card with them, an effort which needless to say fell flat on its face. Blank looks and confused smiles met our even more pathetic attempts at further explanations. We could've walked away with a little of our honour intact but that was not to be. Like the usual 'despos', we were quite shameless about our abject failure and felt blessed for at least having had the opportunity.

Night-time would make us feel really unwelcome. The bunks would go up and the day-time smiles would flip around into suspicion filled grimaces. We'd have to keep shuffling about from seat to seat every half an hour which hardly had area enough to park half an **s once the real owner of the berth had done his best to fill up his space. Most of the times, especially in summer time, we'd stand near the door, revelling in the cool night breeze and talk about adventures past or future as the train cantered through little towns and villages long dead and oblivious to its thunderous approach.

My roommate in 333

Third year had just begun with the luxury of single rooms and me & Malladi had gladly taken a common verandah equipped pair of rooms. We figured that this was the best way to avoid drawing attention to the obscure topics that we so enthusiastically discussed much to the chagrin of our other pals. But fate had different plans in mind and a persistently dripping roof forced me to abandon that comfy little room that I had in the corner of the hostel's C-Block, the equivalent of Tibet in our hostel's not-so-peaceful environs.

The MMCA found me a room on the top floor of B-Block, a block that was blessed with the zest that the C-Block sorely lacked and cursed with the mayhem that was inevitable when the year's most unstable elements got together in the same set of 3 floors. So off I went, bedding and all, to my new abode of room 333. I was calculating the number of unannounced parties that I'd miss out on by not being Malladi's verandah partner any longer, and ruing my decision.

When I shifted to my new room, I wasn't in the pink of health with the fickle weather causing some kind of congestion in my chest and thereby inviting my old friend asthma. My pals often wonder how I manage to stay calm in certain situations where everyone else is tearing up their hair. Truth is, it's only because I know very well how it feels when even something so natural and subconscious as taking a breath becomes an activity you need to out all your focus on. An asthma attack is the worst you can possibly feel and in comparison, every other woe in the world is just child's play.

The room was vacated just a week ago by Rishabh Kalra who probably couldn't bear the thought of being 2 staircases apart from his bosom buddies and thereby landed in the kitty of rain affected people like me. The windows were all covered by black paper, whether the handiwork of Kalra or someone before him I don't know. But it was dark and gloomy when I first entered the room, not the most welcoming room in the hostel. I am a creature of the light but I was too ill then to think about taking the dark paper off. I dropped into bed and slept right through the afternoon and the evening. 

Both the doors were latched and the light from the windows papered out so I couldn't really tell the time when I woke up. It must've been after midnight, and I decided to get myself a drink of water. But I found that I couldn't move. I have the habit of sleeping on my stomach and hard as I tried I could not budge. What was even more terrifying was the reason that I couldn't move! It was like someone or something was pressing down hard on my shoulders and was just outside the range of my eyes as I strained my neck in vain to turn around and discover the source of this force. My mouth went dry and couldn't produce anything more than a very feeble hoarse sound. I struggled for a few minutes more but all in vain. The next thing I knew it was morning again and it was a normal college day ahead. I figured it was just a bad dream and let it go by.

But on my second night in the room, the same thing happened again! The same crushing force pinned me to the bed at an odd hour of the night as I fought with all my strength to obtain the same unsuccessful result. I broke into a cold sweat and yet again it was morning when I woke up. I couldn't for the life of me figure out how I managed to go to sleep again every time. Maybe only a person like me was capable of going back to sleep even after such an incident occurred.

The hostel is so obviously not the place to discuss such paranoid stories. A couple of years ago, we had one of our year-mates undergo psychiatric treatment for such experiences and I wasn't quite ready to join his gang yet. I put these experiences down to my asthma and tried to forget about it. But a host of chilling thoughts crossed my mind. In which room did the guy who fell/jumped to his death from the hostel roof 12 years ago live? Was there some story that was not known to me?

And for the first 4-5 nights in a row, this apparition continued to recur to me with the same intensity. I tried to sleep on my back but somewhere in the night I'd turn onto my stomach and then the unknown entity would reappear making its presence felt. I was really scared by now and didn't really know who to confide to. So I decided to try something on my own. I gave up trying to turn around and find out who or what it was. The next night I felt the same force, I eased my shoulders and didn't do anything at all. The source of the force also eased up and then it was gone much quicker than before. For the first time since I had moved into the room I was able to turn myself around and saw what I expected to see. Nothing! The next couple of nights I did the same thing and the visits grew shorter. Within another 3-4 days, the presence was only fleeting and thereafter it was gone. Whatever it was, it had a feeling that I was there to overpower it and once it became aware that that was no such intention on my part, it left me in peace.

Room no.333 in Hostel No.5 was my personal fiefdom. I had personalized it to the greatest extent possible over the course of the 2 years that I stayed there. We had everything in there : great 'addas', serious discussions, emergency study meetings and all the ingredients that go into making a hostel room a 'hostel room'. And the real reason why it felt like my very own universe was that I had to share it with a rather creepy roommate for 2 weeks before it left me for good for reasons best known to itself.

Salvation through chicken

It would be one of those dreary winter evenings of Kurukshetra. I would be ambling my way through the brick passages to the mess as slowly as possible. That's because I knew that the dreadful combo of oily sticky 'bature' and paltry 'chole' awaited me. Then I would catch a glimpse of Suman a.k.a Baba-ji emerge out of the darkness into the patch of light cast by the volleyball floodlights clutching a plate topped with masala from the mess. That'd bring an extraordinary spark of life in me. That'd mean "Chicken night".

You see, Baba, my pal and Mechanical batchmate from Nepal was our resident chicken expert. Indeed he was probably the only one in our college gang that could tell a knife from a frying pan. We were indebted to him for the infinite number of times that he had saved us from death by inconceivably bad mess food.

I'd follow him, a rat to his Pied Piper, right to his room and find the rest of the gang already salivating at the prospects of what was to come. I wouldn't even be pissed off at their not informing me, because there was an unwritten rule : "Where there is chicken, there is Roy" and so they'd know that there was no way I was going to miss any event that involved chicken. In all fairness, I was the only guy who'd actually lend a helping hand to Baba, unlike the others who used all the time in which the chicken was cooking to take pot-shots at Baba for his "inner woman" and stuff on those lines. There was a solid reason why he was called Baba. It was because like the weather of the Himalayan kingdom from where he had descended unto Kurukshetra, he was always ice cool and impervious to the multiple prongs that my gang tried to poke him with.

As the chicken slowly absorbed the taste of the masala and gained its fiery character stoking the furnaces of our hunger, we'd beg Baba to go easy on the spices. We even managed to swiftly deposit half of his estimated chicken masala outside in the bushes once or twice for the sake of our young lives. But Baba had to have his own way of getting back, so he'd always end up making something that would literally smoke our brains out. We took what we got and we loved it huffing and puffing though we might be.

The top competitors for the title of "Prize hog" would be me, the skinny rag from India and Rajeev, the chicken incinerating monster from the Pacific nation of Fiji, thoughtfully nicknamed "Fiji"! All possible damage done, the gang would sneak out onto to the two chairs and beds kept outside in the common verandah. There we'd sit passing a measly Navy Cut or two around and gaze at the stars in silence. Not that any of us was in a poetic mood at all, it was just that we were stuffed to the gills with chicken and rice and our thought processes were already stewed in Baba's masalas. Now that all of us are thrown out to the farthest corners of the world, we do fall back on the memories of these nights as the epitome of what college was to us. Back then we were just a bunch of guys stuck in the moment, stuck in it together, not exercising their minds at all and therefore intensely at peace with the world.

Good, clean fun

Anyone reading my posts on my hostel times could be forgiven for thinking that all we did in college was to slosh ourselves out and stumble our way through. Drinking was an unavoidable pastime mainly due to Aristotle's age old declaration that "Man is a social animal". Consequently when a friend felt that a peg or two would help his cause of celebration or despair, it was absolutely rude to not join in. But all things put in perspective, it was only a minute portion of the fun in hostel life. Most of it was only childish fun initiated by blokes who were tasting their first, juicy morsels of freedom.

Carrom in the common room was a social hub as on-the-spot teams waited their turn on the single carrom board while taking jibes at the skills of the playing parties. There was no point in being gracious about your rival's shortcomings because there was no way on earth that your favour was going to be returned when bad times came calling for you. No sir, under the yellow lights over the board which mountains of powder could not smoothen, it was every man for himself alternating between being part of the jeering mob or being the victim of it. I speak from personal experience of having committed the most sensational fouls at the most critical times in RECK carrom history and the memories of all the reactions around me are hardly nostalgia inducing. The audience always wanted their bit of fun, by hook or by crook. But the malice was never intentional, it was a way of life at the RECK carrom boards.

Rumours especially of the previous semesters results being out were another way of stirring up a quiet night. Sometimes an actual surreptitiously printed Word document from the Hostel I-Net centre complete with marks and roll numbers would find its way on the walls of E-Block, while sweaty browed toppers and borderline cases (Read the rest of the world) would bring the house down on their verification pilgrimages to the site of crime. Powercuts just after or during dinner hours at the mess were when the boys hostels would really swing into life with the hum of a thousand unseen voices jabbering away in the night. The jokes would then seem funnier and the laughter had to be louder.

Infinite hours would be spent on the torn netted chairs at the 'khokhas' during and after class hours mulling over a cup of tea and the rare feast of kings, Maggi-half fry (basically a Maggi with a poached egg on top) with the stimulating company of a smelly buffalo and the flies buzzing over its dung. The cool darkness of the room would conceal a dozen odd eternally single guys lusting after the pretty heroine on the PC screen (Ahem! In keeping with the topic of this post, I speak right now of good, clean popular movies. Hey, they have pretty heroines too, and don't tell me that we didn't see enough of these movies too!) Swear words would be shouted across verandahs in the most jovial of spirits and news of a big action movie playing on the common room TV would bring crowds of all varieties and spirits tumbling into the chairs fanned by very effective coolers.

It was a weird world that we lived in for 4 years and there are countless other tales that would illustrate our paradoxical existence. It was complicated and rough, yet not at all unpleasant. We hated that life then as much as we loved it. I for one could never decide which emotion to stick to!

Cigarettes and alcohol

The frequent squeaking of the netted door hinges post sundown meant only one thing. That someone or many of them were cycling in and out of the common verandah between two single rooms of the hostel. That again could mean only thing. Another party in progress! The reason could be insignificant but the end result was always opulent. A group dancing as if their life depended on it, a set of attendees at various acute angles to the floor living out the effects of too much alcohol in too little time. PCs blaring out the music of choice, again an irrelevant choice once the participants were drunk enough. A lot of jousting would ensue at the beginning of every party over which song was cool enough or which was not. Towards the end any music that could drown the sounds of an over zealous drinker puking out onto the grounds would serve the purpose.

Nameless, purposeless parties ending in total mayhem were a way of life at RECK (Or in most other hostels of other colleges, if I am to believe others too). The funny thing is that no one and I mean absolutely no one ever carries an iota of guilt for the murder of time as they were. Youth they say was meant to achieve greater heights, but as far as I know most of them were too busy getting themselves up from the grass on the hostel lawns. Communal cigarette smoke rose up in mushroom clouds against the bug encrusted yellow lamps that exposed the doings on all verandahs. The tinkling caused by shattered glass as bottles launched into free space from the third floor was more like a distant melody for the alcohol amplified imagination of the revellers. The slurred conversations were always so other worldly that it would only be a fool who would try to distill a common meaning out of them. Every once a while, enraged voices would shred the "Peace, love, empathy" flavour of the evening indicating that two utopian worlds has run into each other's paths, either by virtue of a misdirected bottle or purposefully guided swear word under the cover of drunkenness. However nothing on earth no matter how shocking or off-putting could halt our forays into decadence. As we plundered through the 4 most important years of our lives, with every party, the drags on the cigarettes would only get longer and the pegs would only get stronger.

B.A, Mechanical Engineering

This post has been a long time coming and I think I really owe myself this explanation. It may come across as a lame excuse for the four years of B.Tech spent in tomfoolery and reckless enjoyment, but its really necessary. I need to evaluate for myself why someone who is still hopelessly addicted to every NGC or Discovery Channel show that involves science and technology, and literally worships all engineering feats was so disillusioned with engineering itself that he feels like running away at the mere mention of it. The person in question is yours truly and here's my story.

Engineering college I discovered was pretty much like school. Solve the 'important' questions and plunge through the papers of the past 3 years and you could pretty much ensure that you were a B. Tech (Honours) graduate if not a topper. It really don't matter if you can't tell the difference between a motor car and a thorn bush because at the end of the day, a degree is just another piece of paper, right? Not that I myself am given to an intensely scientific frame of mind which abhors all practical considerations but this level of apathy was really choking. 90% of the people around me could very much be doing a B. Com (Honours) if that offered them their dream job which in their case was not a job they had dreamed of since childhood but the highest paying job around. And as I would discover soon, this was to be the least of my issues. Well, to tell you the truth I really don't think aiming for a 'dream' job is such a crime. The jobs are there only because you've got the talent to fulfill them.

But what really got my goat was the desperation, the blind ambition and almost criminal tendency to get marks any which way they came! Here were India's best brains who should have been almost vain about their supposed 'superior' mental abilities, but here they were squabbling and scheming over petty things like how to peek into the neighbour's paper, how to smuggle that chit in and to position themselves so that they got the best overall 'view'. Guys burning the midnight oil yet not above grabbing an eyeful of everyone else's paper. It's perfectly okay to feel that strong temptation without yielding to it but the urge to take cheating to a professional level as was evident all around me made me really sick. You know things are really REALLY bad, when Electronics students on the evening before the exam are more focussed on sending a group of girls to the teacher's residence to gain IMPORTANT hints than the last minute panic studying which in my opinion is the only way of dealing with the crisis. I could see for myself perfectly good people around me transform into rats intent on winning this obnoxious rat race for careers, MBAs and IASes. I figured I wasn't born a rat and had absolutely no intention of becoming one now. Success was the only thing worth aspiring for but not at the cost of my integrity.


To my mild amusement I found out that if I tried to implement my set of ethics on everyone else, I would have no friends left. So I settled for what was then the only way out for the rather forlorn me. To live my life on my own idiosyncratic terms, enjoy it (Now that's a resolution that I feel I overemphasized on) and not to tear my hair out over what everyone else was doing. Binary marks in internals were acceptable as long as I made it up by scoring enough in the finals not to flunk the subject. Topics that weren't even part of the syllabus were invariably more fascinating to me but I guess that is a pain that most people have to live with. Getting some marks on the board could hardly inspire me any longer. I understood perfectly that I could get the marks without having an iota of interest in the subject and in fact being uninterested might be the real key to success in the exams.

I will continue to look at engineering as I had always seen it, as a magnificent collation of tiny bits of common sense over the centuries and be awe struck by the achievements of those who really loved their work. I really don't get into all the debate over art, science and their differences. As far as I am concerned, all science is art when pursued with appropriate passion and all art is science when created with sincere dedication. I missed being a Honours graduate in engineering by a whisker (4 more marks in each of the 8 semesters to be exact) but I am obscenely proud of the fact that each and every mark is completely my own! I am certainly not amongst the better engineers in the world, but for the way I admire engineering I wouldn't hesitate to hand myself a B.A, Mechanical Engineering degree. I had to let go of engineering because in the most faux-arty kind of way, I just love it too much!

Unity in diversity

They say we all think alike and REC Kurukshetra afforded innumerable opportunities to study this phenomenon. But none so striking as the one I am about to relate to you. India may be a nation of X languages, Y ethnicities and so on but we do share a lot of common ground, and in our college's case it was the common room, home to the king of all time killers, the never silent TV. Cricket on TV, brought together the country (if our batch is taken as just one small sample) like no other and running a close second would be testoterone fuelled action movies. Crib and complain about how brainless these movies are for all you are worth, but if there was something that brought a hush in the boys' hostel common room packed to the rafters it had to be Arnie's robotic acting or Neo a.ka. Keanu Reeves bullet defying moves.

The scene is set at around 10 in the evening (by hostel standards) in the common room. On air was the mother, father and grandfather of all action movies Terminator 2: Judgement Day (Referred to as T2 in hushed whispers by 'real' action movie devotees). It is also among the most pivotal scenes of the movie when the liquid evil Terminator enters jail to kill Sarah Connor (Sorry for the details but really necessary) and after killing/impersonating his way through, he is near to completing his mission. At this point of time in the real world, enter Saurabh Shukla legendary in the hostel for his ability to forget things. I am the only guy standing and watching the movie from behind the last row of chairs as they are all already occupied. Saurabh's eyes are fixed on the screen which now shows the evil guy liquefy and pass through the jail bars only to have his gun get stuck in the bar. And THEN in the most curious of voices he asks me, "Yaar Roy!! Yeh kaunsee movie hai? (Roy, Which movie is this?)"

The reaction to this was startling in its co-ordination and brutal in its delivery. Each and every face that was present in the packed common room that night turned; and turned in spectacular symmetry towards the person who had committed this blasphemy. The collective gaze nearly knocked me off my feet even though it wasn't even aimed at me. Some faces showed pity, some shock, some a bemused disapproval of his ignorance and some of total disgust at this brief transgression. The faces included those of the mess workers, boys from the South, West, North, North-east but what was really got me was the uniformly quick reaction. And just as soon as it had begun, the collective look dissipated into nothing as everyone returned to watching the movie leaving Shukla to his cruel fate which seemed so certain to get him given the scale of his crime. I saw all of India think as one that night, be it over a movie starring the governor of California! Maybe we really aren't so different after all...