WHEN SLOPPY GOT LUCKY

The Sunday rolled out in a customary manner when I was rolling on my bed with my mind being pulled into reality by my stupid roomies having their early morning chat. Both of them had to go out for a meeting to which even I should have gone. I had already spent my Saturday in GRAND Masti, Pizza Hut and football; so was really not in mood to commit for something which I can afford to miss.

So I had my Sunday breakfast of Dosa with sugar and sat to study. Yes, blame it on my friends or approaching test on Tuesday; I sat to study.

I quite sincerely studied till afternoon, with Facebook running alongside giving company. Well it was afternoon and I thought to order food from outside but with recent outings and expenses, I curtailed my belly’s crying out.

I went to play football and was expecting a match practice today as it was the last practice before mid-semester. As expected after a good long basic work out session we started a match.

I don’t want to take names here but off late I going to football field had become a useless ritual. I still love football and enjoy playing but sometimes you reach a point where you almost give up the attempt to excel. I don’t know why but that feeling had started coming. Seeing juniors younger than me going ahead of me and the sight of me sitting on bench with juniors playing in near future often sends a chill down my spine. I can’t help it or maybe I can but I don’t want to. I played shit today; sloppy like hell. I played worse than most of my competitors on the field. Being beaten by a striker 3-4 times in a half hour game is nothing short of a day of embarrassment for a centre back like me. I was embarrassed, sad and felt like shit.

I came back to room and quickly went up to take a shower avoiding any conversation with my fellow team mates which would remind me of my performance. I didn’t eat snacks in mess as I was planning to go for the Engineer’s Day event and eat High Tea.

I changed and left for the event. I had someone to meet there so I went little early. I had expected the quiz to have started but fortunately or unfortunately it had not. The prize money Rs.1500 had pulled in enough crowd on a Sunday, that too a week before mid-semester. I sat behind in last row with 3^rd year Telugu gang. The quiz started and so did our comments. In a sporty mood I asked Manas to take part and seeing Rs.1500 prize money he also agreed to participate.   

Qualifying round started up and we had to answer ten questions. The questions were tough enough that I didn’t know most of it, but easy enough that Manas could answer 5-6.

I was in my check-capris and slippers. Sitting below the AC I was freezing.  The results were going to be announced for 4 selected teams to come up on stage. I was still freezing so I quietly found a hot corner spot and took my chair there. I took off my slippers and sat cross legged on the chair to watch the up-coming quiz comfortably. I was about to switch on my phone when I heard on the speakers, “the winners are, first team is Sai Manas and Abhinav Krishnan”.

I couldn’t stop grinning. I told Sai Manas that I don’t want to go but he said with his heavy accented Hyderabadi english “come on dude!”

I was feeling stupid but lucky; and moreover I was stunned at my luck. It felt like some sort of garbage of misfortune piling up on me. I was sure of being embarrassed on stage. I was going up on stage for a Technical quiz. The statement was an embarrassment in itself.

I was again feeling stupid on stage but later when all four teams were up on the stage. The competition felt even. It was lack of quality in crowd that brought us on stage not luck.

The quiz started and most of the questions bounced on all 4 team tables and went to audience.

The lady luck started smiling at us when Manas got an easy one and we opened our account. The quiz went on and lady luck literally sat with me on this one. It was question regarding a Roman emperor, his amulet and the famous word he used on it for protection from disease. Though history was my field of interest, this one bounced off. It was then that Revant, the quiz-master gave a clue; the word had 11 letters.

  After reading Da Vinci’s code I have started playing a lot with words and I played well with this question when out of the blue I presented the answer ABRACADABRA.

Lady luck kept giving us kisses when easiest of guesses like Bill Gates for anything on Microsoft and Android versions on picture of sweets fetched us points;   points which sailed us all the way to victory.

Yes! We won. From sitting and commenting on last row we ended up winning the cash prize. It was crazy stuff and I was quite literally bowled over by the behaviour of lady luck. Since when did lady luck have a thing for me?

The sad part of the day was after the jubilant victory I didn’t get high tea because I don’t break line and by the time I reached Bhaina following queue, the food was over.

Well what to do. Such is life dearies.

 

A Breeze from IIT Kharagpur

It’s a dream of every aspiring engineer to end up in IIT; India’s most prestigious technical college and one of the producers of the world’s brightest engineers. But when a student after cracking IIT-JEE with a not so ‘flashy’ rank aspires for a core branch and ends up in one of the “new” IITs, all he or she wishes is if they could have scored a little more in JEE and ended up with some course in the “real old” IITs.

The impact on me was profuse when I being a student of one of the “new” IITs visited IIT Kharagpur, the oldest and the biggest of the IITs. The half-a-century old college made me fall in love with it on the first sight.  It was a cold December night when we landed in world's longest railway station; Kharagpur. We had gone to participate in Inter IIT sports meet. They sent a huge cargo truck to carry our luggage and a bus to ferry us. The first impression was not really the best impression.

The better came when we saw their hostels. It was an expanse of corridors and rooms with washrooms only rarely visible destinations at the end of the long corridors. Surely in this matter our hostels had an edge.

The next amazing sight was their mess. It was well maintained, huge, organised and one of them even had a television set (well now that you can argue to be a luxury).
As we went further we saw buildings with departments written on them in grand fashion. I stood between Departments of Humanities and Architecture and thought that’s all my college has; two small buildings. With sights of each department buildings coming up, each began hitting my mind and heart as boulders rolling down from a mountain. By the time we reached the huge Nehru Museum, which was behind the academic section, my mind was in a dizzy and my legs were trembling. I was caught in total despair and disgust as to why I took the core branch in the new IIT, why I didn’t take any ‘not-so-famous’ course and get into some ‘real’ IIT.

Our hearts truly filled up with envy and over whelmed with amazement when we took a night stroll, through the lanes of IIT KGP. With lush greenery, abundance of open spaces, numerous cheap and delicious food joints, subsidised ‘Café Coffee Day’; the place astonished me at every step.

The sports facilities were immense. Their ‘Technology’ Gymkhana building had more badminton courts than our whole college. They had grounds for practice in couplets all over the campus with separate small practice places in each ‘hall’ (which is what they called their hostels).

 They had a market area called ‘Tech Market’ which was another place to be seen. It had everything required for household and everything a student would require, and prices there were hell low.

          Another notable observation was that every shop there had a complete section exclusively for ‘sutta’. It was like a customary item for them, mandatory for them to survive.

         At night time every girls’ hostels’ nearby ‘lonely corners’ used to be occupied with love birds. Beneath overgrown trees and in dark corners where street lights can’t reach, they use to crouch down to have fun. I heard that every well-built college had such areas. I couldn’t think of one in ours (maybe I will discover one when I have to!).

         Now the final thing I saw which pushed my mind into turmoil was the academic section. The ‘Insti’ building was magnificent with a foundation stone on which was written-“laid by Sir Jawahar Lal Nehru in March 1952”.

But what to do such are life dearies………  

(to be continued……)   

Bhubaneswar Diaries

After my JEE counselling and seat allotment, internet told me it’s IIT Bhubaneswar where my destiny lies. With high hopes, I set out for the city of Bhubaneswar.  A city relatively unknown to me. A city with no acquaintances or relatives. A city unknown, language unknown, culture unknown. To be frank, I landed up here as a complete alien. The only thing that I had with me was my admission letter and broken Hindi. The story begins here. Transformation. Rather, Evolution.

I would like to give a small rewind to my childhood. I would like to break it into three parts... Born to a hardcore leftist family, I grew up hearing ballads of communist heroics. Baptized in leftism, the whole atmosphere was such that we were all part of the revolution to change the entire system and to create a socialist paradise. That’s the political part. The next part is food. Back home, a week's diet had a wide range of delicacies. From prawns, fish, beef, chicken, vegetables....well that’s a long list. Vegetables and fish have a really long sub lists within them. And the best part, at least for me, was the coconut oil that gave aroma and flavour to all the food I had in my life. The last and final part. The freedom I was in search of. To think freely, act freely, live freely. 

Now about the twist in my life. It’s a 360 degree twist. I came here expecting a twist but the twist was worse than what even Christopher Nolan could imagine. For the dinner, a plate ended up before me leaving me the choice of what to eat. Everything smelled different and even tasted different. Then the twist begins. To the comments that food smelled and tasted differently, I got a stunning reply" I have heard that you cook with hair oil". Then came to fact that coconut oil is not a universal oil. I started lamenting about having no beef for months, which was not even available in a thousand kilometre radius.  Non-vegetable became ‘only chicken’. 

In the political part, I met people who had no clue about Che (Guevara). Back home, he was god. For people who still have never heard of Che, he is a famous Latin American revolutionary, respected and admired across the world. Che was hailed as messiah of the downtrodden. Now they are asking who is Che? All the ideology that I lived for turned out to be completely alien stuff for the majority. Some people even laughed at me. Even now they do that. 

After all these twists, I started living the life enjoying the twists within. But in plain English, we all have twists within our destiny.  It’s a great experience to wonder about the twists in life; especially when you write about it in the later part of your life.

Down the Same Road

I introduce myself as a third year student of the Dept. of Electrical Engineering, enrolled in the four year B-Tech program in the School of Electrical Sciences in Indian Institute of Technology, Bhubaneswar. My audience is mesmerised, I am after all a student from the elitist league of technical institutes, the best they say, I say, the country offers. I am proud, my family is, and my friends are. They have always been, because I maintained the “elitist” record all through my formal education. Competition is a word I learnt before I gathered confidence, and learnt the word success before I figured out what I wanted to do with my life. Had to outdo the rest, had to covet the Outstanding Student Award every session, and had to be the best; I understand now, it was what you would call the local best. I marked my own fence peering at how others did theirs. I thought I was gritty enough to sustain the competition, I understand I just had been lucky the competition sustained me.

Life within the hall of fame is a disappointing study; cracking the Joint Entrance Examination was a hallowed ambition, yet here is the first time most of us debate our education system. Here is when we peep into the “pen-sieve” and often find, we have not asked ourselves the right questions. On one of my regular visits to a nearby school, I come across a sulking girl, who on other sunny days is as exuberant as kids should be. She tells she is ashamed to go home because her scores have been poor in a paper; her marks have always been her confidence. I then come across a chattering bunch of todds, and begin a conversation on what they want to be when they grew taller, stronger and sharper. It’s a mix of answers, one who fancies being a geek and work as a scientist, one who wants to paint, one an engineer. These were answers me and my friends gave too, back in the days of tiny benches and building blocks. I am sceptical, how many can cling onto their interests where it is a daily struggle to fight for more marks. Then the bell rings, everyone is reluctant to leave their game and go back into classes. They all sigh, I sigh too. All this when children are the most receptive to learn new things and the best ones to ponder. Show them foam or bubbles from a boiling tube, you can feel their awe. I say this because we felt it too.

But why do we suddenly have something to say in the new found debate of our education system, why now? The early years of our technical education is spent by most waddling clueless, because our coaching institutes did not encourage us to ask ourselves, “What after?”, and we did not ask. I bet a lot of us have lost our inquisitiveness, or for that matter the very interest in technical education. May be because we don’t have a thing to die for now. And, unfortunate that only a trophy will incite us, if at all.