Foreword
Don’t ask me what prompted this. I will not tell you. What I will tell is this….. “Somewhere down very deep in every human lives an emotional bastard. Some live with it every day, some are too scared to expose the world to it and some just let it take its course……” . I said the same to mine…. “Thou art afoot!! Now write what thou wilt….!!”
The acronyms used are slangs and are self explanatory wipect to the context.
The content
It gets surprisingly chilly during the nights in Ahmedabad in the anticipation of winter. DA-IICT fell in the landscape and accepted the hard truth. The night which we are interested in took place during September (For obvious reasons my memory is marred and I can’t place the exact month. But who are you to judge… You weren’t there anyway..!!).
The air was still that night. The characters we are interested in; Prashant, Pratik, Suvrat and Rishabh were sitting on the stairs that led to the third floor. The stairs were tactfully placed at the junction between two hostel wings and provided easy access to the adjacent wings. However, the actual purpose of the ‘junction’, as it was referred to by the hostel dwellers, during the night was more than just transit. The one which we are interested in (at the junction of A and D wings) had transitioned into a common hangout for smokers and lovers smitten by long distances (and Reliance night pack of course). The balcony was aptly suited for long conversations for it allowed the wind blowing from the east during the night to carry away the smoke and soothe the altercations on the phone. The huge neon light strategically located near the parking lot kept flickering during the night. It only added to the charisma and somehow never got fixed during the four years of stay of our heroes at DAIICT.
I want to rant so much about the characters but shall be terse.
Suvrat was the guy every girl would hate. He stank. He stank of smoke, a month old jeans, a quarter old shirt and a lot of deo to cover up the smell. Suvrat was no ordinary guy. Apparently he had topped the UP board twice. His list of achievements included collecting an award from Md. Kaif (yeah the same one who granted Dada the luxury to strip his hairy chest right at the Lord’s and show to the world that we can grow hair too.) He remained a mystery to a lot of people in college for he was never in college. Somehow, girls kept falling for him and he kept first running after and then from them. These days he was dating some Gujju chick from Ahmedabad who we are told was well versed with the preparation of Khaman Dhokla and Phaafda. He was infamous amongst the professors; because not attending lectures was his right that the college founders had bestowed upon him and ‘Medical emergency re-examination’ policy was his best friend. It is told that he had passed seventeen courses (which is more than twice the number of technical electives Pratik opted for) at the policy’s aid. The dean of Academic affairs Sameer Suhaag (or Sam Su like they called him fondly) was befuddled at Suvrat’s ability to fall sick during all exams. These days he was dwelling in the room right opposite Prashant’s and they used to share the light moments over tea and smoke every now and then. One tiny detail: people who knew him fondly and upon whom he had by his grace rained the luxury of intimacy, never referred to him with his first name. They simply called him Gupta.
Pratik was the guy next door. I mean he was the guy next door to the door next to Gupta’s next door neighbor. Forget it. It is too complicated. Anyway, he was deeply in love with a girl whose real name shall be withheld (not on his request but on the author’s judiciousness) and shell here on be referred to as R by everyone. The girl is not of criticality to the episode but we shall spend some time on her because she was the one who Pratik talked to more than 7 and a half hours in the night and hence deprived of sleep, slept the day off on the beds which were conveniently flicked off seniors and were placed between the actual beds that the college had provided. She was in the same village that Pratik spent his childhood and like all mushy love stories, their story took shape during her childhood and our hero’s teenage. He was a skinny guy who wore spectacles. He had style apparently (I guess he was the most stylish stud in his village and that is the only reason R fell for him.) It is said that the guy could not stay awake for more than 4 hours in the day, but boy he could code (and eat). He single handedly built a website for his course on Software engineering and got placed in a fancy company in the final year. And it was not just any website. It could be accessed on other networks and know what? It worked!! The site never threw any errors and corrected any error in the input on its own. Somehow, the professor Ashwin Banerjee could never quite understand the complexities of the website and ended up granting an ‘AB’ for the effort. Fucking ‘Absolutely Blown off his heads’.
Rishabh!! Now, how do I start? The man is a phenomenon in himself. He uses words methodically and can be quite a convincer. His fame preceeds his presence and can be more dominant than Chris Gayle’s bludgeoning during IPL. To most people’s surprise Rishabh was a short guy. You never quite expect a guy like him to be of this stature but boy when he starts to talk !! … Everyone listens. The trees, the leaves on the trees, the creatures inhabiting the leaves on the tree and the kids in the womb of the expecting creature inhabiting the leaves on the tree. He speaks sense. He weighs words meticulously and ends up winning any conversation that he is a part of. It is said that once he was talking to a British delegate in his current company and the client asked a difficult question which involved a lot of technicalities. Without getting into the knitty gritties of the actual conversation I will tell you what our hero responded with: “Saar!! The caricature of an extended analysis is tangential to the project. However, leveraging resources from across business verticals from a foreign organization shall give us more visibility into the rational why the “Quantum of Solace” dunked at the theaters but was a superhit in the villages.” The client and the team stood flummoxed. It was as if the solution was right there. Someone had to just word it up. It is also beckoning to the scenario that our hero once sold Taj Mahal to an NRI under ‘Insurance and private holding act for rare artifacts’ for 30 Million $ and then got it back without reimbursing by quoting the ‘Lost artifact recollection act’. The NRI wept for one week.
We all know Prashant from his stint in ‘Their Story’. (It is not an attempt to publicize the story.)
*****
The trip
The wind played tricks in the night. Suvrat, Rishabh and Prashant sat on the stairs gazing at the moonlight. The talks were generally customary. Rishabh was worried about why the DBMS professor did not reply to his Good morning e-mail. Prashant kept looking at his cell from time to time as if expecting a call from the President. Suvrat sat holding the cigarette in his left hand. He puffed hard and rocked his head silently. He let out the smoke with a silent exhale and passed the cigarette to Rishabh. Rishabh folded his sleeves and retorted in quiet dismay:
“Abe nahi be…!! I just had dinner”
“So?” Both Prashant and Suvrat raised their concern of their friend denying them the luxury of burning his lungs together with them.
“Yaar..!! It is harmful just after dinner! A recent study has proven this. They tested it on monkeys in Mongolia and it is said that those monkeys have the strongest immune system”
“Ahh!! Harmful after dinner…. !! My ass!! I guess it is like honey for an empty stomach” No one quite understood the context but all shared a quick laugh on the comparison Prashant had created. Pratik walked in a minute later. He seemed surprisingly fresh at 2 in the night.
“Let’s go somewhere” Pratik demanded and settled onto the stairs. It is important to notice that the moment he was in the vicinity, everyone had moved in opposite directions to make space for him. He settled in the empty space conjecturing , “ Maa ki… !! Kitna sutta peete ho be??? BC, ek din mujhe bhi passive smoking ki aadal lagwaoge..”
The curse seemed to hurt no one. Gupta somehow, found it very funny and started laughing in uncontrollable snorts. He frequently stopped to gasp fpr air and when he did so, he ensured to exclaim the handpicked from his colorful vocabulary, “HAHA!! Fuck BC!! ”
“Chalo Thol chalte hain” Pratik remarked as some random dude came on to the stairs and not knowing the identity of our heroes, hid his cigarette inside. Gupta on the other hand noticing that the mentioned random dude was from his city, assured him… “Abe!! Piyo be….tension na lo…”
“Saale BC, koi meri baat ka jawab to de do… What say? Thol tonight? Bike ride?” Pratik cursed again in unstoppable surges. “Naa be..!! It is too cold tonight” Prashant played the spoilsport he always played. Gupta as always did not give a damn. On the contrary he lifted the left cheek of his ass… cursing slightly..”Oh!! BC.. kahaan gayi?”, took out a key without a key ring from his pocket and said…”D wing ki parking me hai…le jaao.. I am not inclined.. I have to prepare for IAS,CFA, CAT,GRE, IPS etc….” (It is true. The guy prepared for more entrance tests than the courses he wrote during his engineering). For the enlightenment of the readers, the item which he was referring to was the deadly, red Pulsar , Registration num: GJ 01 FL- 1723
It is time now people to bring to your notice the hero who with his art of convincing will in the next 25 words, coax Gupta and Prashant to acquiesce to Pratik’s demand.
“Bhai log..!! Yeh second year hai… aur hum log kabhi kahin nahi jaate…!! Kal ke lecture ki tension mat lo. I will wake you up” (or not let you sleep the entire night tonight).
“But we need one more bike.” Prashant exclaimed as if he drew an insight from rubbish.
And then started the discussion which took place every time more than 3 had to go out in the night on a bike.
Prashant: “Nakul se maange?”
Rishabh: “Nahi be.. unse kal hi maangi thi..”
Prashant: “Satty?”
Gupta: “Wo apni laundi ko ghumaane gaya hai…” (That is all. His participation in this conversation was over)
Pratik: “Aur koi? Smarty? ”
Prashant & Rishabh: “HMM” (In thoughtfulness)
Gupta: “Main ek aur jala raha hun”
All 3: “Ch….”
Pashant: “ Abe chhodo be… bike nahi milegi…“
Rishabh: “Abe JBL, maa mat ch….. !! Ruk dekh ke aane de Smarty ke room pe…” In the meanwhile, Gupta had finished the cigarette and joining the conversation added a name that they all had missed:
“NIGAM!!”
All 3: “Hmm!! Chance hai…”
And this is how they got the second bike and left at around 3 on two biked for a place which they thought was an epitome of scenic beauty and chirping birds…. Well..!!!! Not quite so in reality..!!!
Don’t ask me what prompted this. I will not tell you. What I will tell is this….. “Somewhere down very deep in every human lives an emotional bastard. Some live with it every day, some are too scared to expose the world to it and some just let it take its course……” . I said the same to mine…. “Thou art afoot!! Now write what thou wilt….!!”
The acronyms used are slangs and are self explanatory wipect to the context.
The content
It gets surprisingly chilly during the nights in Ahmedabad in the anticipation of winter. DA-IICT fell in the landscape and accepted the hard truth. The night which we are interested in took place during September (For obvious reasons my memory is marred and I can’t place the exact month. But who are you to judge… You weren’t there anyway..!!).
The air was still that night. The characters we are interested in; Prashant, Pratik, Suvrat and Rishabh were sitting on the stairs that led to the third floor. The stairs were tactfully placed at the junction between two hostel wings and provided easy access to the adjacent wings. However, the actual purpose of the ‘junction’, as it was referred to by the hostel dwellers, during the night was more than just transit. The one which we are interested in (at the junction of A and D wings) had transitioned into a common hangout for smokers and lovers smitten by long distances (and Reliance night pack of course). The balcony was aptly suited for long conversations for it allowed the wind blowing from the east during the night to carry away the smoke and soothe the altercations on the phone. The huge neon light strategically located near the parking lot kept flickering during the night. It only added to the charisma and somehow never got fixed during the four years of stay of our heroes at DAIICT.
I want to rant so much about the characters but shall be terse.
Suvrat was the guy every girl would hate. He stank. He stank of smoke, a month old jeans, a quarter old shirt and a lot of deo to cover up the smell. Suvrat was no ordinary guy. Apparently he had topped the UP board twice. His list of achievements included collecting an award from Md. Kaif (yeah the same one who granted Dada the luxury to strip his hairy chest right at the Lord’s and show to the world that we can grow hair too.) He remained a mystery to a lot of people in college for he was never in college. Somehow, girls kept falling for him and he kept first running after and then from them. These days he was dating some Gujju chick from Ahmedabad who we are told was well versed with the preparation of Khaman Dhokla and Phaafda. He was infamous amongst the professors; because not attending lectures was his right that the college founders had bestowed upon him and ‘Medical emergency re-examination’ policy was his best friend. It is told that he had passed seventeen courses (which is more than twice the number of technical electives Pratik opted for) at the policy’s aid. The dean of Academic affairs Sameer Suhaag (or Sam Su like they called him fondly) was befuddled at Suvrat’s ability to fall sick during all exams. These days he was dwelling in the room right opposite Prashant’s and they used to share the light moments over tea and smoke every now and then. One tiny detail: people who knew him fondly and upon whom he had by his grace rained the luxury of intimacy, never referred to him with his first name. They simply called him Gupta.
Pratik was the guy next door. I mean he was the guy next door to the door next to Gupta’s next door neighbor. Forget it. It is too complicated. Anyway, he was deeply in love with a girl whose real name shall be withheld (not on his request but on the author’s judiciousness) and shell here on be referred to as R by everyone. The girl is not of criticality to the episode but we shall spend some time on her because she was the one who Pratik talked to more than 7 and a half hours in the night and hence deprived of sleep, slept the day off on the beds which were conveniently flicked off seniors and were placed between the actual beds that the college had provided. She was in the same village that Pratik spent his childhood and like all mushy love stories, their story took shape during her childhood and our hero’s teenage. He was a skinny guy who wore spectacles. He had style apparently (I guess he was the most stylish stud in his village and that is the only reason R fell for him.) It is said that the guy could not stay awake for more than 4 hours in the day, but boy he could code (and eat). He single handedly built a website for his course on Software engineering and got placed in a fancy company in the final year. And it was not just any website. It could be accessed on other networks and know what? It worked!! The site never threw any errors and corrected any error in the input on its own. Somehow, the professor Ashwin Banerjee could never quite understand the complexities of the website and ended up granting an ‘AB’ for the effort. Fucking ‘Absolutely Blown off his heads’.
Rishabh!! Now, how do I start? The man is a phenomenon in himself. He uses words methodically and can be quite a convincer. His fame preceeds his presence and can be more dominant than Chris Gayle’s bludgeoning during IPL. To most people’s surprise Rishabh was a short guy. You never quite expect a guy like him to be of this stature but boy when he starts to talk !! … Everyone listens. The trees, the leaves on the trees, the creatures inhabiting the leaves on the tree and the kids in the womb of the expecting creature inhabiting the leaves on the tree. He speaks sense. He weighs words meticulously and ends up winning any conversation that he is a part of. It is said that once he was talking to a British delegate in his current company and the client asked a difficult question which involved a lot of technicalities. Without getting into the knitty gritties of the actual conversation I will tell you what our hero responded with: “Saar!! The caricature of an extended analysis is tangential to the project. However, leveraging resources from across business verticals from a foreign organization shall give us more visibility into the rational why the “Quantum of Solace” dunked at the theaters but was a superhit in the villages.” The client and the team stood flummoxed. It was as if the solution was right there. Someone had to just word it up. It is also beckoning to the scenario that our hero once sold Taj Mahal to an NRI under ‘Insurance and private holding act for rare artifacts’ for 30 Million $ and then got it back without reimbursing by quoting the ‘Lost artifact recollection act’. The NRI wept for one week.
We all know Prashant from his stint in ‘Their Story’. (It is not an attempt to publicize the story.)
*****
The trip
The wind played tricks in the night. Suvrat, Rishabh and Prashant sat on the stairs gazing at the moonlight. The talks were generally customary. Rishabh was worried about why the DBMS professor did not reply to his Good morning e-mail. Prashant kept looking at his cell from time to time as if expecting a call from the President. Suvrat sat holding the cigarette in his left hand. He puffed hard and rocked his head silently. He let out the smoke with a silent exhale and passed the cigarette to Rishabh. Rishabh folded his sleeves and retorted in quiet dismay:
“Abe nahi be…!! I just had dinner”
“So?” Both Prashant and Suvrat raised their concern of their friend denying them the luxury of burning his lungs together with them.
“Yaar..!! It is harmful just after dinner! A recent study has proven this. They tested it on monkeys in Mongolia and it is said that those monkeys have the strongest immune system”
“Ahh!! Harmful after dinner…. !! My ass!! I guess it is like honey for an empty stomach” No one quite understood the context but all shared a quick laugh on the comparison Prashant had created. Pratik walked in a minute later. He seemed surprisingly fresh at 2 in the night.
“Let’s go somewhere” Pratik demanded and settled onto the stairs. It is important to notice that the moment he was in the vicinity, everyone had moved in opposite directions to make space for him. He settled in the empty space conjecturing , “ Maa ki… !! Kitna sutta peete ho be??? BC, ek din mujhe bhi passive smoking ki aadal lagwaoge..”
The curse seemed to hurt no one. Gupta somehow, found it very funny and started laughing in uncontrollable snorts. He frequently stopped to gasp fpr air and when he did so, he ensured to exclaim the handpicked from his colorful vocabulary, “HAHA!! Fuck BC!! ”
“Chalo Thol chalte hain” Pratik remarked as some random dude came on to the stairs and not knowing the identity of our heroes, hid his cigarette inside. Gupta on the other hand noticing that the mentioned random dude was from his city, assured him… “Abe!! Piyo be….tension na lo…”
“Saale BC, koi meri baat ka jawab to de do… What say? Thol tonight? Bike ride?” Pratik cursed again in unstoppable surges. “Naa be..!! It is too cold tonight” Prashant played the spoilsport he always played. Gupta as always did not give a damn. On the contrary he lifted the left cheek of his ass… cursing slightly..”Oh!! BC.. kahaan gayi?”, took out a key without a key ring from his pocket and said…”D wing ki parking me hai…le jaao.. I am not inclined.. I have to prepare for IAS,CFA, CAT,GRE, IPS etc….” (It is true. The guy prepared for more entrance tests than the courses he wrote during his engineering). For the enlightenment of the readers, the item which he was referring to was the deadly, red Pulsar , Registration num: GJ 01 FL- 1723
It is time now people to bring to your notice the hero who with his art of convincing will in the next 25 words, coax Gupta and Prashant to acquiesce to Pratik’s demand.
“Bhai log..!! Yeh second year hai… aur hum log kabhi kahin nahi jaate…!! Kal ke lecture ki tension mat lo. I will wake you up” (or not let you sleep the entire night tonight).
“But we need one more bike.” Prashant exclaimed as if he drew an insight from rubbish.
And then started the discussion which took place every time more than 3 had to go out in the night on a bike.
Prashant: “Nakul se maange?”
Rishabh: “Nahi be.. unse kal hi maangi thi..”
Prashant: “Satty?”
Gupta: “Wo apni laundi ko ghumaane gaya hai…” (That is all. His participation in this conversation was over)
Pratik: “Aur koi? Smarty? ”
Prashant & Rishabh: “HMM” (In thoughtfulness)
Gupta: “Main ek aur jala raha hun”
All 3: “Ch….”
Pashant: “ Abe chhodo be… bike nahi milegi…“
Rishabh: “Abe JBL, maa mat ch….. !! Ruk dekh ke aane de Smarty ke room pe…” In the meanwhile, Gupta had finished the cigarette and joining the conversation added a name that they all had missed:
“NIGAM!!”
All 3: “Hmm!! Chance hai…”
And this is how they got the second bike and left at around 3 on two biked for a place which they thought was an epitome of scenic beauty and chirping birds…. Well..!!!! Not quite so in reality..!!!
