Chapter-1

Life shares with us a whole lot of experiences. Most times, we just live through them, never really experience them the way we should. We never really live life with a sense of each day being a last. Then, one day, it all ends. An experience is over. A door closes. It is true, that another door opens elsewhere. But this door is closed forever.

It is with this sense of a closure that Pramod and I walked back to insti. Four years done, a year to go. We had been a gang of six, Pramod, Madhav, Shakti, Shankar, Nidhi (Srinidhi actually) and I. The other four were done with their coursework at IITM, and had flown abroad to pursue further studies. Pramod and I had a year of coursework to complete. When we’d signed up for the five year dual degree course at IIT Madras, we did give it a lot of thought, since people were generally done with the campus in four years. But what we did not realize then, was that the toughest part of staying in a five year course was that you had to spend a year away from people you had spent four years with forging wonderful friendships.

We entered the institute campus at 1.55pm. I had recently acquired my cousin’s Bajaj Pulsar, and it was definitely a wonderful experience driving a motorbike, after three years on a scooty. But afternoon winds were always a pain in the ass. We entered the campus, got done with the security screening, and were riding inside when we saw Paras at the bus stand. Ram Parasnis, or Paras as we generally called him, was a dual degree in Elec-VLSI, the same sub-branch as Pramod. I was an Elec-Communications student. We knew him decently since we attended the same classes initially, but then we weren’t really buddies. The bus drivers were out for lunch, and would be back only at around 2.30pm. So, we offered Paras a lift on the bike, and manoeuvred routes to the department so as to not be caught by the security. Over that small ride, Paras told us about how he had spent the entire summer in campus with Lakshman, another guy from VLSI, and how the Chennai heat totally beat them. It helped that our department had a canteen, people could pick up something to drink from time to time.  We reached the department entrance and I was parking my bike when I met Panchapakesan, and Hameed parking Hameed’s Yamaha R15 in the stand. This was a legendary R15, we used to call it “Bijli”, in honour of it being sexy!  Panchapakesan was such an ancient TamBrahm name, and so we used to call him Punch in college. Punch and Hameed were both VLSI guys as well, and along with Lakshman, they formed a trio of insti renowned coders. We called them to join us for a cup of tea at the canteen before they could go to work.

As we entered the canteen, we met two more of our brethren. There was Gautam, whose insti name was Katrina (he was made to gyrate like her in one of the insti ragging sessions in our first year), and Navneet, aka Nigga. Gautam was my roommate in my first year, the epitome of sincerity and modesty, he was known to be one of those guys who used to crib about not doing well in an exam after scoring an 80%. Navneet was the only guy in this group of 8, other than me, who was from Elec-Comm. Navneet was the branch topper, but one who was confused about what he wanted to do after he got done with his dual degree. One thing he knew though, was to put cock, which in insti lingo meant being able to ramble about something, possessing limited information about the same. He also liked to be called Nigga, as he considered himself a specialist in the Nigga way of life!

The eight of us got our teas and a quota of butter biscuits, the biscuits our canteen was extremely famous for. We sat down on a round table and started chatting. After a long session, we decided to meet again at 4.30 pm for evening tea, and to make that a tradition, where we spent some time together chatting together, and killing the loneliness that the final year had brought into us. This also kick-started one of the best periods of my life.

Chapter - 2

The tea-shop meetings had become a tradition. The final year of a dual degree course is generally very light. Except for a couple of courses, and the final project which needed to be complete, one really didn’t have much to do. Also, we got paid to do the project, which meant money for practically nothing. It was a period when there was a lot of time to kill, and we killed lots of it in the tea-shop.

The odd semester was filled with a lot of general stuff. Seeing and eating around in various places was one of them. One night, when my parents were away, we decided to spend the night at my place. We got to the terrace, and to the top of the water tank at the terrace, and started philosophising about life. We weren’t drunk, but we were high, literally and not. We started opening up to one another for the first time. I spoke about my various crushes from high school, about having asked a friend out in college in my first year and how it had ended badly. Punch spoke about how he had gotten drunk the first time, and the comical dance that had followed. Pramod’s skeletons were the most hilarious, talking about how stressful assignments had contributed to bringing out the sexually active human being in him. We kept talking till 3 am, at which point we started feeling really hungry. We walked into the kitchen, and decided to make some pasta. We didn’t have any red or white sauce, but what we did have was some garam masala. So, we decided to experiment, and played around with oil, macaroni and garam masala, till something edible came out. Well, it looked more like an upma, but it didn’t taste too bad.

We got to sleep at around 4 am, and woke up at 7am to visit the Kapaleeshwara temple. What followed that, was some fantastic breakfast at Karpagambal Mess. Anyone who has visited the temple in Mylapore, will know this small one-room mess right opposite the temple. The food though, is five-star. While eating here, worries about the next real big thing started coming up.

Hameed: Man, I was going through a few of last year’s placement files. Kinda screwed up dude, the kind of stuff they ask.

Punch: Ob you are going to thulp it all da, put your peace.

Paras: No man, I’ve been thinking about it as well. We need to start working on the placements, I don’t remember jackshit of what we did in four years of college.

Me: Shall we do some sort of group study? Will help, will also be fun!

Nigga: Group study won’t help da. See, the other six are VLSI junta, we are from Comm.

With that, Katrina got done with his Rava Pongal and we were ready to move. But the discussion hit us again at another treat, this time Katrina’s at Eatalica. This time, Pramod, the slowest eater in the group, decided to finish quickly, and jump into the discussion about placement preparations. If there was something that stimulated Pramod, it was academics. He decided that studying timers and stuff was the most important part of placement preparation, at which point Nigga and I lost them. It became clear here that VLSI junta would prepare in a specialized manner for the placements, and it wouldn’t really help to try get some sort of a group study idea working.

Chapter-3

The big day was here. Placements day 1 is the most important day in the calendar of an IIT student. One might plan to join a company, go abroad for further studies, do a post-graduate management degree, whatever, but the placements are the ultimate shield of security for any student. A job in your placements would mean you don’t eventually lose out on anything, you have something to do with your life.

My first interview was at 7am on day 1. A major bank had shortlisted me, and it only helped that I had strong mathematical base. My interview dragged on till 11am, during the course of which they got me to speak to the manager of their New York branch, and they made me an offer at 11am, at which point I had to tell them that I couldn’t accept the offer without having a look at the other companies that had shortlisted me. Following this, I went ahead to attend a couple of other interviews, none of which went half as well as this one, and so I came back to tell the company that I would be accepting the job. But then, it turned out that somewhere during the course of my interview I had told them that I would consider a master’s programme admit from some high ranked universities seriously, in which case I might not take the job. This had left a strong imprint on their minds, and they had decided to withdraw the offer they had made me. They decided to make the offer to the second placed candidate instead. I was looking forward to studying abroad anyway, and placements was just a way of getting secure. So, I was not really upset, and I decided to check out the name of the second placed person in the list. There, to my surprise,  it was the coder-guru Punch! Punch had a job, the job he badly needed, and that made me feel like a hero, I left the interview room laughing loud, after promises of Punch treating me later.

Pramod had also landed a job with a Japanese electronics giant, while Nigga had got a job with a banking firm as well, a rival to the firm which interviewed Punch and me. The count was 3/8. I was feeling kind of miserable, with no job on day 1. I met a couple of friends Vedhaa, and Chandni. Vedhaa was a junior by one year, someone who had been infinitely ridiculed for having a guy’s name, though people refused to see the “aa” at the end of her name. Chandni was a junior by a couple of years, who would graduate along with Vedhaa (Vedhaa was a dual degree student!) They spoke to me in detail about how tomorrow would be a better day, and how a job isn’t far away. I went to sleep disappointed, but determined about the next day.

The next day was one of the longest days of my life. I had interviews all day long, starting at 7am, and it went on until 11pm. There was an online security company, which eventually hired Hameed and Lakshman, there was an electronics giant from the US, which hired Paras, while I got into a start-up which did data consulting. I didn’t really worry much about the profile, because it was a back-up at best, but it felt like a monkey off the back. We decided to go to the CCD on campus at 11.30pm, and drove back in the rain at 12.30 am. It was one of the longest nights of our lives, and one of the most exhilarating ones as well. The next morning, Kat also landed a job and we rejoiced. We decided to have dinner at the city’s richest hotel, the Grand Chola, for the heck of it. We partied that night, but the true fun was still to begin.

Chapter-4

It was a small trip, a detour from the main focus of our story, but the trip to Japan amidst all the fun in Chennai was something I couldn’t miss out on. It was less of a fun trip, and more of an awareness building one. It was intended to bring to light the difficulties faced on the national front by the Japanese locals due to the March 2011 tsunami. People were washed away, cities wiped out. If there was a hands-on description of pralaya, this was it. We were taken around, and shown the various disaster locations. We also got to interact with the locals, people who had lost their parents, their children, their loved ones in this extremely disastrous incident.

We were a group of 60 students from India, who had made the trip. It was more of an eye-opening experience for us. For those who had lived a life of comfort, not really seen disaster first hand, this was a shocking reality check. Sleepless nights were spent looking at the ceiling, and wondering if such nasty things really did happen. It took us some time to even grasp the gravity of the situation. But what really stood out was that we got to meet a lot of real life heroes. The memories we forged over the trip were unforgettable, so much so that once we got back to India, it was all we were talking about for a week or two.

The trip added a whole new perspective to me, my thoughts. It was absolutely necessary to become socially aware, of the various evils that surround us, and the ways we could combat them. A couple of months earlier, there had been a brutal rape in New Delhi, which had left the victim battered, and she died eventually. We couldn’t let such things happen, there had to be something done, as students could not be mere onlookers. I participated in a protest organized by the Tamil students at IIT Madras, condemning the acts of terrors against innocent Tamils in Sri Lanka.

Social talk became a regular piece in our tea shop meetings. We started discussing about the government, the country’s options in the upcoming elections, an eternal favourite topic was Narendra Modi’s candidacy. I think it was a period which shaped not only me, but also the rest of us, from a thinking perspective. While Paras and I were taste buddies, on this ground we were almost always at each others throats. Add to the fray Lakshman, the eternal pessimist, and he would tear apart any views of anybody else, brand them cup, and put his across. Well, it was fun anyway. Pramod was the pacifist. Kat involved himself in these arguments as long as they remained arguments, and moved out the moment a fight turned up. Punch was unpredictable, but one vivid memory was him and me, fighting Nigga and Paras, over Sonia Gandhi’s legitimacy to the Indian Prime Ministerial post. At the end of the day, it ended up adding to the fun we had in our final semester. This also paved way to the various other avenues of fun we sought.

Chapter-5

Post placements, all that remained was our final semester. We had planned to have a lot of fun, and fun we did have. Fun mainly meant eating outside. There was my Pulsar, “Bijli”, Pramod’s Honda Activa in the department, and we needed just one more bike to make trips to wherever we wished to. The entirety of the final semester remained a haze. Time passed at the rate of water flow. It was quick.

The winter had just ended, with a fantastic A.R.Rahman concert which Paras, Punch, Pramod and I had attended. That was in some sense the tipping point, because whatever followed that was pure, unadulterated fun. We discovered new places in the city, and made it a point to try them out. The places were diverse, but the emotion was same, last semester fun. Paras was a huge fan of the film Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, and if there was some influence of the film on him, it was on the fact that you don’t really get time back, so you have fun to the maximum. We tried out a whole lot of places, GRT, Ashvita, Sandy’s Choco Bar, Tangerine, Darios, Mansukh, Papa Johns, Little Italy, Eatalica, Ibaco, Freez Zone, Kailash Parbat, Bbq Nation, US Pizza, Sangeethas, Krishna Sweets, Ratna Cafe, a whole host of places. This was the period of treats. There were toasts raised everywhere, and the feeling of passing out was slowly sinking in.

We made a short film, about how we envisioned our futures to be. It was an idea very close to our hearts, and I got Nigga to do the lead role on that. Nigga, in his inimitable style of putting cock, stole the show, totally. I also roped Chandni in for a small role, and got Hameed to edit the film, a beautiful job he did. We won the second best film for the annual short film making competition in the institute, something that added to the head, and also to the coffers, aided in a couple of more trips eating outside. The year was getting better and better, and as this was all happening, the excitement was not going to get any lesser. 

Chapter-6

The final semester, as everyone knows, has some very important parts to it. One of it being that of the hostel nights. The hostel life of an undergraduate student is one of the most memorable experiences of his/her life, no points for guessing that, and these hostel nights were some sort of a farewell party to this custom.

Within this custom of hostel nights, there were certain hostel nights more preferred than the rest. An all-time favourite was the Sharav hostel night, of the girls hostel Sharavati. People turned up in huge numbers to get there every year, and the hostels which decided to have their hostel nights on the same night as this suffered a big deal.

The usual hostel night routine was to have a small function, where the chief guest addresses the gathering, and the hostel general secretary gives his account of the hostel’s progress in the last one year. This is followed by awarding outstanding performers in the hostel, dinner, a few performances by the hostel inmates, and a DJ session, where the whole area suddenly changes into a discotheque. I had invited Vedhaa to my hostel night, and she had turned up. I also invited Chandni, and a few others, but it turned out that none of them turned up. As for the gang, people came in for dinner, and rushed out before the DJ session began.

The DJ session happened, following which I bade Vedhaa farewell, and went to meet Pramod in his lab. This was when I revealed to him that I liked Vedhaa, and had to tell her that. But he was apprehensive about the whole thing, the nice guy that he is, he advised me to stay put for a little longer. Before I knew it, this story had spread through the group.

Around the same period, Hameed happened to ask another girl Kamala out. Hameed, the veteran that he was with girls, happened to get omelette successfully. Getting omelette was the group’s jargon for getting hold of a female companion. Hameed’s biggest relief in this whole issue was that his bike would no longer be used by random first years to make out on.

This was also around the period that the institute’s final examinations were going on. Our reviews would happen really soon, and that would be it.

Chapter - 7

It was the last week in college. It was time for the final review. The fun was drawing to a close, and really quickly that too. The past week was when the department farewell night had taken place. This year’s Electrical department night had been a grand success, with more than 400 people turning up, more than twice the usual average. The professors had enjoyed it, it involved a lot of them getting tripped. One thing we realized was, professors enjoyed tripping students, but if there’s something they enjoyed more, it was fellow professors getting tripped. That evening had been an emotional one for me. I had headed the department’s student association for two straight years, and this time was for handing over the reins to an able junior.

We had been playing cricket every evening for nearly a month now, and that was another thing I was surely going to miss. We made it a point to play, because god knows when we would get to play this carefree again.

Next up, I had to face my thesis review, and defence. It was made up to be a very scary occasion with various professors sitting in the audience, and trying to catch us unawares about some mistake in our project. It could be in the very hypothesis on which our project was based, or could be on some small idea which took it forward, whatever. But the project had to be defended successfully for a degree.

I nervously entered the room for my defence. There was a team of 7 professors, and my friends sitting there, cheering aloud as usual. The presentation started slowly, and I tried to come to put to words what I had done over the last one year. I had thought that this would be the easiest part of my project, but I had been mistaken, it was by no means, a joke. As the equations turned up on screen, trying to get my audience make sense of those equations started becoming painful. At some point of time, I realized that the equations were going above the head of the audience, and so I had to cleanly skip major parts of my presentation, so as to rush to the results section, and at least try to make them understand what I’d obtained out of this whole thing. But that was disaster number two. I quickly thanked my guide, and looked around for questions. There weren’t any. I walked out of the room. I had screwed the presentation, but hell yeah, I was a dual degree from IIT Madras now.