The Beginning of the End: Premiere Step

I woke up again to the monotonous, mind-numbing beats from Hum Tumhare Hain Sanam. What an army of bouncing jhingurs, assorted creepy-crawlies (probably halfway to Dr. Moreau's), Tropic of Cancer summer heat, drying water tanks, and last but not the least, attendance/pop quizzes could not achieve, was accomplished with gay abandon by those god-forsaken songs. They managed to wake most of my block at Sector-7, Gandhinagar up (of course some determined heroes fought on), to an afternoon of mild regret, no food and playing cards.

Yes this was what most "mornings" in Sector 7 were like. But somehow this one seemed different. It felt eerily like the one Wyndham describes in The Day of the Triffids. My roommate wasn't in his bed, which was never a good sign. All the other single-room flats in my block were locked, which was definitely a bad sign. And the song had stopped on cue as if it had just been played to trouble my peaceful slumber. Then realization dawned (like it dawns when you screw up your whole life and only realize it on your deathbed). The last night, my blockmates had been studying, running around with question/answers, all tense and sweaty foreheads, struggling in their debut with textbooks, and I?...Unable to cope so much sudden pressure, I reverted to my inherent defense mechanism, which comes in handy in such stressful, high pressure situations: I went off to sleep. And now, apparently, this mechanism had produced some unwanted consequences. Slowly, the terror of having missed my first ever BEC exam began dawning on me. How could not anybody wake me? How could they be so mean and uncaring? When this anger, frustration and sheer terror achieved a sort of unholy crescendo reaching nightmarish proportions, only then did I care to snap out of it (There's a limit to the level of nightmares that one can take just before an exam, however irrelevant). Dawn was breaking. I had about a couple of hours to study how voltages don't follow human laws, and in fact basically just happen to hang around useless conductors. Too much pressure. I'm in my first year of college for chrissakes! Someone will come to wake me in time.

Welcome to Block 82, Sector-7, Virgin Territory. Tucked away in one not very noticeable corner of Govt Housing, we revelled in our anonymity. We shared our borders with our gregarious neighbours, the good people of block-83 and with the road which led to lots of places, but rarely ours. In fact it was so low-profile that the folk from Save-Water-Or-Else Tankers Inc. frequently skipped this block, much to our toilet's discomfiture (we? we were a little hygienically challenged. Out of sight, out of mind, pinch your nose, or shit you'll find).

Ah, the fragile innocence of youth! The time when Cupid's workings stir young blood as heatedly as might Hell's raging conflagrations. The time when the brain accepts its inferiority graciously, to make way for torrents of passion, which flood your very being. The time when your whole world seems to hinge on that one glance that hitches (generally the second one), and that one impossible smile of acknowledgement. The time when...yeah well, it almost lasted a week. I don't know how I got it, or how exactly I was cured, but the ailness was short-lived. And of course, my new acquintances (and future friends), made merry, mostly out of my misery. (Life after that one week has mostly been payback, muahahaha). But all and all, it was fun while it lasted. For a spicy, sexed up, account of what actually transpired,...well ask anybody! Who the heck am I to come in the way of your entertainment? Although yours truly was cured of this contagious infection, the germ had spread, in some cases, with gratuitous ego-fatalities (Yes, yes there are many stories to tell, but pal, you gotta be invited!)

A story that almost everyone is party to is about our first and final (from this side) tryst with the peculiar phenomenon of ragging. Now before I'd walked the hallowed grounds of this college, I'd heard a lot about suicides, expulsions, and career coup de grace(s) resulting from this particular process, which had ruined sometimes more than just careers. But when I came here, it seemed the only way you could be driven to suicidal inclinations was through the sheer desolation of the place! Vast expanses of green disturbed only occasionally by workers tearing down more than constructing. Our erstwhile seniors did try to make their presence felt through inane efforts (Jhinga la la hoor hoor anyone?) like taking innocuous intros and making poeple run around proposing to their crushes with whom they never had the guts to talk in person (man, I was so against ragging then). What they seemed most interested in of course, were the ladies in our batch (this interest saved me from an intro. Btw, I hope you remember what happened when a senior mistook a particular female in our batch for a waitress). So there we were, treading merrily upon what the senior's thought of as their own territory, and not paying due respect to the landlords/dukes/feudal tribe-leaders/you-get-the-drift. Drastic action was in order. So a handful of people made famous as the Patwari gang took it upon themselves to restore the dignity of their caste. About seven people (including yours truly), were loitering down the road to Gh-0, when we were ordered aside for a dose of personality development. Now these people looked a lot more different than the ones encountered on campus. In fact, they seemed a different species altogether. Different enough, that I felt a tinge of fear tickling my spine for the first time after coming here. We were made to kneel (which nearly decimated our haunches), and one by one, we were ordered to pay obeisance to our lord and masters (speaking in context of course), and speak eloquently (helped by a note) on why a particular aperture adorning our backside was theirs for the taking, whenever and wherever they wanted it. Needless to say, (and hence I'll say it) it was garnished with a lavish dosage of language any sailor would admire. Hence some people took to it like an ICTian takes to Copy/Paste, while other more conservative types had trouble uttering two syllables in a row. Now I had taken to copy/pasting before I got here, and hence it was no surprise when I began grinning at the apparent discomfort of the orthodox (or the Hindi illiterate). A particular gentleman adept at stealing petrol, but better at getting caught, decided to interrupt what were supposed to have been fearful moments for me, by shouting at me to rest my haunches on the ground (phew!), and threatening to reserve special treatment for me when everyone else was over and done with. Hmm, that didn't sound encouraging. But all's well when my rear end's well. Now people's attitude toward this treatment varied wildly from outright fear to downright obedience (not out of fear) to polite non-co-operation (to which I'm coming to in a sentence). We had people singing, giving tutorials on masturbation and waste disposal post-masturbation and people enacting dogs and their peculiar toilet habits, the latter wholly an idea of the person concerned. Then we had another category of persons. The senior who threatened me with dire consequences took one of these troublesome types to the head honcho, who in additional to looking frightening, was blessed with a thunderous voice. "Kutta ban!! BHENC**D" went this person. "Nahin sir. Aur kuchh kar lunga". (Some people just never know when to and when not to negotiate). The senior continued in the same vein, including the reluctant rebels' mother, father and probably his whole ancestry in his effort to make a dog out of a man. uh uh, not to be. I began taking personal interest in this already intriguing tete-a-tete, when the senior began talking about how he would come to the person's room and sodomize him and his whole block later on. Why in God's name did this person have to be my roommate! There was little chance that this would dent his determination when the mention of his whole family hadn't. I resigned myself to my fate, which consisted of speaking out aloud, the name of a brand of condoms, and running around in circle riding a scooter made of air. In the end, two seniors decided that quite a few of the "tormented" weren't digesting all this too well and gave a short orientation session on how they were the most benevolent seniors who ever walked the face of this earth (of course he was uttering rubbish! We are!), and what all they could do and didn't. Well, they hadn't counted on what all we could do and did. We all know what happened next, when the Director was treated to the same piece of creative writing that we'd already reviewed. I chose to keep a week of mourning for those poor seniors by beginning to dress according to the dress code which now stood annulled.

Never having acted in my school, I was surprised when I was offered a monster of a role, in a play written by a notable Hindi playwright. The Drama Club (officially it had some weird forgettable name), formed more as an excuse to interact with junior girls than do any drama, had helped me to get this role. My god, I'd never had to mug so much for a History exam! Even after my lines were edited and cut, I still kept forgetting half of 'em. Doing so much work for a non-academic end, I was peeved when in the poster for the play, I was listed a whopping eleventh in a list of eleven dramatis personae. Swallowing what little I had of an ego, I kept rehearsing. On D-Day, while cycling to college in the evening with the costumes in the perfect darkness of the 700m stretch from Gh-0, I happened to collide head-on with my neighbour, who incidentally happened to have the only other cycle of the same model in the whole college (weird irrelevant co-incidences always capture my imagination). My head hurt, but I managed to limp my way (my toe was completely bloodied) to the stage and heroically forget one-fourth of my lines. The high point of the play (despite me having more than half of the lines), didn't have me figuring anywhere, as it involved a senior (the de facto director), a very pretty batchmate, and a pretty senior (doing exactly what I don't remember. But you wouldn't miss it if you'd known, would you?). The crowd of course, didn't notice anything of what I said, so the more lines I forgot, the shorter the misery for was for them. Besides, the next play starred none other than everybody's wet dream, our Economics TA (I just couldn't get to see enough of her! Don't get me wrong. I was like any other male, but my interests in her were strictly academic due to the excessive competition. I just couldn't see enough of her, because I bunked most of her tutorials and slept through the rest).

Now this has become a decent sized post, but golly gee, there's still so much more to tell! I still want to pen down a lot of little anecdotes about the play rehearsals; about how I made my first few friends; of how my identity was virtually usurped by my illustrious namesake; of how we tormented the people living on the ground-floor during the night (the other side of the story is already documented before); of how after filling up a full sheet and a half in the BEC final exam, I managed a whopping one out of fifty (and still got a C); of how I played Midtown/Heretic II in the SPG labs, and only got caught later on when I wasn't even playing; the list is endless. I still have absolutely no idea how I managed not to flunk a single course that semester (despite the fact that I've had worse sems in terms of SPI). To write about any of those things (and more), I guess, would be another story...another post. Fret not, for the Semester of Ultra-Decadence beckons!

To be continued...