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.