KGP KA TEMPO HIGH HAIN-4

Calculators- One too many

Cheating is not a new word in the IIT, rather to find someone who never cheated was something rare. People cheated in the exams, in the practicals, in seminars, well almost everywhere. As proclaimed before I was a god boy (still no pun intended), so I kept away from these cheating practices. Rather than cheating, mugging up was a better option for me. I figured out that the time & effort spent in creating those micro cheats was much more than mugging up the topic. But that doesn’t mean that I was unaware of the methods. I even helped my friends in finding new ways to cheat. Just see the honesty my friends. This incident is regarding Baccha who got caught while cheating in the exams(probably the only one in our department till date) & the after effects.
Physics is a tough subjects & tougher is the formulas & equations which we had to memorize. Baccha tried to follow the ‘Honesty is best policy’ in the first Sem but the grades were disastrous. So the guy got deviated from the honesty path & the person who taught him how to cheat was yours truly. Since we had calculators allowed during exams is was pretty easy to write the unmemorizables in the calculator with a pencil. Safe & reusable way. Bur our Baccha was not a professional & got caught in the 3rd sem. It was a tough paper & baccha needed to score well. In this pressure situation & with over enthusiasm Baccha brought 3 calculators to the exam hall. 2 borrowed from friends. But it was a bad day. The bad lights made the Myopic Baccha move those calculators in peculiar fashions infront of his eyes so as to get a good view of the things written. Firstly the multiple calculators & then the calculator dance made the invigilator suspicious. He came & saw this new use of calculators. The invigilator was a PhD scholar & mostly in such cases they either ignore these things or take away the cheats(here the 3 calculators). But this guy was new to this job & took this job very seriously. He reported this to the professor who to the HoD. Now Baccha was doing project under the HoD & he had to take actions against baccha in order to avoid charges of nepotism. Baccha was in deep shit.
After this his exam was cancelled & the verdict drawn was that he has to take that exam the next year resulting in a year loss for him. The authority seemed very strict in this case. They seemed to be disgusted with Baccha. “In two years this guy could not learn how to cheat properly. he need one more year in the IIT to strengthen his fundamentals”, they thought. But this incident brought one different face of our batch, the unified face. First strike was on the subject teacher. He was a south Indian guy. As as every other south Indian he too was timid , soft spoken & easily afraid. So we narrated different incidents of suicides committed by the students & the possible repercussions faced by the concerned authority. He agreed to give Baccha a second chance. Next was the HoD. A strict north Indian (The Kharoos type). So the previous approach was not applied here but we started joint petitions ,agitations, request & soft threats. It worked after a few days & Baccha was allowed to give that exam in next Sem. Now lastly it was the research scholar who according to us was the main culprit. We started Ghandhigiri that is non cooperation with him. He was boycotted in the dinning place, at labs & even no one went to him for lab viva. So the last Sem was pretty miserable for this guy.
P.S. After that incident both the HoD & the subject teacher took extra care of Baccha. They ensured that Baccha passed that exam in the last Sem.

KGP ka Tempo high hain-3

A Proxy Chat
My formal introduction to the internet & the social networking sites && Chatting happened at KGP only. 24hour free internet!!! Whao what else could desolated souls like us wish for.
I got my first taste of Orkut then & got addicted to it in no time. It was not only the long lost friends which attracted us but the girls there (online friends) whom we never met in past or do not have a chance to meet in future were the cherry on the top.
From my college me & another guy were in our batch. The incredible PD, a smart (little over the line in some cases) , handsome (in his own view) cool dude & most importantly a selp proclaimed Big flirt. He was a big-time flirt since the college days. His antics & attitude infront of the girls made him a sort of God of Flirting in our group. Now since I was also from the same college I was also considered as a Flirt though not of that stature as PD. You see I was really a good boy before (no pun intended here) but became a flirt not by choice but by misconception. ‘Guys from the same college have similar characteristic.’
Since I already got the stamp of a mediocre flirt without any hardwork at all it was time for becoming a pro. My aim was simple. ‘Follow the expert’ is what I started to do & this started bearing fruits pretty quickly.
One incident which I can remember was my first gtalk chat. I did my first online chat not with my id but with PD’s id & the girl could not realize that. Well, she was a junior from our college whom me & PD added to Orkut. Her name, well what was it? let me think..
may be Munni might be Shiela or anything…We added so many girls that it was not possible to keep the track of their names.
Our rules were simple. (The rulebook of Flirting)
Number one: to introduce ourselves as the IITans & future Physicist. Girls get thrilled by such words.
Next we would make her realize that Physics Students of IIT are also human like them & eat 4 meals per day, sleep 8 hours & are not immune to nature calls. It was pretty surprising how these dumb girls believed that people in IIT are geeks who study’s 26 hours daily. When they realize that IITans are also human like them the battle is half won. Now as they relish their big discovery we make our moves.
Next is Sense of Humor. We usually had a few good lines which we used everywhere, it was just a matter of directing the conversation to that path where our senses of Humor can take over from.
Sometimes a little bit of silly arguments did the trick.(This tricks do work on dumb girls only, so guys please make sure the girl on the other side is dumb enough to eat the bait).
Since I was a fast learner I grabbed these trick of the trade very quickly. And soon me & PD were flirting with same girls sharing notes & sometimes even competing for prizes like Icecream or coffee treats.
This girl whom I referred before was nothing different. It seemed that she was thrilled to have two IItans in her friendlist who were constantly flirting with her & trying to impress her. Now one day I went to Lodu’s room where I found an empty computer with the Gtalk logged in with PD’s id. She pinged. I responded as PD. We started conversing. I found out that mine & PD’s way of chatting were similar (might be because we were from the same college). We used that later in situations when me giving proxy for PD as well as PD chatting on my behalf. After 2 hours that chat ended.
Later PD found out from his chat history that he had a 1000+ lines of conversation with that girl while he was taking his afternoon nap. I was not that much conversant with gmail that time so forgot to delete the chat history. It did not take much time for PD to figure out that it was me & from then I started chatting with that girl from my own id. So it started from that day, competition in the more lines of chatting with her & exaggerated discussions about our achievements at the end of the day till that day the girl vanished from Social networking.

KGP ka Tempo high hain….2

Rum-Ion (ramayan) Saga

I was not a part of this saga. But came to know about it from different sources & using my creative imagination penning down the story. Story of our Ion aka Lodu. As his name shows Lodu was/is/will be always full of load (mostly unnecessary) & with a face like he suffering from the worst case of acute constipation. A Presi Graduate, SFI comrade, a computer geek, & a few pounds of extra fat.
One sunday after returning from home I found out that something had happened. Kamal told “hey do you know what Lodu had done yesterday?” . “No” I replied.
“How come I would know what happened out here when I was 150 kms away @ home? ” I thought & asked him “hey what happened? .”
“Ask him what he did yesterday? There he is coming now. Go and ask.” Kamal said.
I did exactly what Kamal told to do but got a serious look & later a smile which looked more a grin from Lodu. “It’s not the right time to ask this sort of question” I thought & so went to my most reliable informer in the hostel , Baccha.
Baccha was doing quantum mechanics assignment when I entered his room. “What’s the matter with Lodu? Why he is looking so depressed(a few extra degrees more than usual)? What happened?”
Then Baccha told me this.(later verified from other sources too).
Yesterday there was ‘Daroo Party’ as usual in the hostel & this time it was decided that Vodka has become too much repetitive & now its time for change. Change to Rum(a man’s drink). So the old monk was called for to join the party.
As for most of them it was the first exposure they decided to play safe. Well, almost everyone except Lodu. Don’t know what went in his mind as he decided to take his pegs count to a new height on that day. May be he wanted to prove how much a man he is or may be the “free” drink intensified his thirst. The after effect was literally catastrophic.
After 3 pegs Lodu started to announce his love for Prateek in front of the whole hostel(it was the first act of such kind, so everyone watched that eagerly). Prateek who was not that much drunk could not reciprocate the same love for Lodu. Rather than holding Lodu into his arms & giving him a kiss which everyone suggested , he decided to go to the safest place at that time, his hostel room. But Lodu was determined , nothing can stop him on that day. So after 2-3 more pegs he decided now its time, time to rescue his love from W1-205 (the dungeon) & rode back to E2-312 (his castle). Next was the search for his noble steed. But luck was not on his side on that day. He searched & searched in the cycle stand but his noble steed(2nd hand or may be a few hands more bought for Rs 500) did not turn up.
So Lodu decided to cover that distance on foot & in order to minimize the wait of his beloved he started to run.
But as we have seen in hindi movies , true love has many roadblocks , here too lodu faced one such roadblock. It came in form of a brick lying in the hostel lawn. He tumbled over it & fell down on the lawn. But no one came to his rescue (they were afraid as helping Lodu might trigger some sort of dormant love for them in Lodu’s heart). Prateek too did not show up. So Lodu decided to take a few minutes nap out there (love can be so tiring sometimes). After a short nap of 30 minutes lodu again woke up. But neither he could not find any living creature near his range nor the way to Prateek’s room, so he decided to express his emotions to a hostel pillar (I later wend to see the poor pillar). He clung to the pillar & uttered these two lines a few thousand times at least before deciding to spend the rest of the night out there beside it . “Prateek, please don’t leave me.” “I cannot live without you“.
The poor hostel pillar which could not run away since it was doing his duty of supporting the roof, stayed there & listened patiently to Lodu till he was exhausted.
That day everyone came to know another side of Lodu, the soft, the romantic, the brave prince & finally the heart broken one.
Rum surely had a deep impact on Ion creating the saga of a lifetime. I call it the Rum-Ion (pronounced as ramayan) Saga.

KGP ka Tempo high hain….1

Joke of the day
First of all why this sort of name to it? Just to show how lively & fun this campus was. Being in the IIT , with some of the top brains of this country, lots of exams, assignments & CGPA’s ,SGPA’s ,study & more studies. Our life was not confined to just this only. It was night outs, party at chedis @ 3 in the morning, whole night carrom tournament with the looser paying the coffee bill(needed for staying awake), ‘Bondhur dokan’(a place to quench our thirst of rum,vodka & etc etc),” Boudir hotel”(cheapest food), LAN & DC (you name it & its available ,thanks to torrent) & the list will go on and on and on……
Ragging (Defn-a form of abuse on newcomers to educational institutions) is something which can have chills down the spine of every fresher .Since I did not have much past experience on this (in college 10-15 seniors came to rag a mere 100 freshers or more. So I thought they were more nervous than us & thus nothing considerable happened) , I was nervous, tensed & was literally cursing my parents for sending me there.
Like all engineering colleges the IIT’s were no different.
Here mostly the 2nd year BTech students were ragged coz in the 1st year all the freshers are kept in separate hostel (far away from the clutches of their seniors), but what about MSc people???
Later I came to know that MSc students(old people) did not have any eligible seniors to rag them. Our 2nd year MSc & PhD scholars (older people) were so much ragged by their project & research guide’s respectively that at the end of the day they did not have energy or enthusiasm to rag someone else.
But this was compensated by our ever enthusiastic teachers. Hey hey, pause, one second. Don’t imagine that they will be coming to our hostels & ask us to do a striptease or become superman (running in front of girls hostel with undergarments worn over the cloths). They had something which was much lethal than all of these. The Father of all ragging, the “Grand Viva”. It was a horrible experience which every student had to undergo before getting the release letter(the degree). A 30 minutes of torture sometimes getting extended to an hour where a student will be facing a pack of teachers ready with their arms & ammunition (the questions which we never imagined could be asked or which never came to our minds during the past 2 years of study). Don’t think they did all these alone but had accomplice known as “externals”. Here once the students enters the room (a seminar hall with the AC temperature lower than usual to intensify the chilling atmosphere) he will be asked what is his favorite topic. This is the first trap. If one says any topic then he will get the toughest questions one can imagine & failing to answer those will induce comments like ‘hey you can’t even answer the questions on your favorite topic, how can you answer the rest?‘
The scene was something like a poor sheep(the student) in front of a pack of wolves(teachers & external) ready to pounce on it or a lamb infront of the butchers knife.
But this don’t come to us as a shock since we get immuned /vaccinated to this torture by frequent doses of similar torture known as project viva, practical viva, seminars throughout the course.
Our first exposure to this came in the form of something termed as “introduction”. It took place just after we joined the institute. We were all taken to the Vikramshila seminar room. The audience comprising of professors , head dep , research scholars & MSc scholars and us(bakra of the day). One by one each of us would have to go to the stage ,introduce ourselves & clear all the doubts & questions coming from the audience after hearing our intro. At that day we came to know many facts such as Partha can sing rabindrasangeet in female voice(later we learnt that it was his original voice), kakima’s favorite food is “mayer hat er simui er payesh”, prateek wants to fly high other than doing his usual work (flirting), the extent to which Bodha can make a fool of himself ect ect ect….
It was my turn after sometime. Having watched most of them perform I decided that I will not make a fool of myself out there. Went on the stage , started answering confidently till that question came, “What is your hobby?” .Sounds harmless isin’t it? But…. well lets see what happens.
“reading & listening to music” I replied (the best answer I can think at that time)
“Ok then sing something” next question.
‘hey dude I told listing to music not singing‘ I thought but replied that “I am basically a bathroom singer & this ambiance is not suitable for me to sing”
“You physics guys should have strong imagination. Imagine this as a bathroom & sing” SB replied.
So I started visualizing & after a few mins sang a kishore number. But the reaction was not what I expected. I know that I am not Kishore Kumar but had this confidence that I can sing in tune. So seeing the audience starting to laugh was something what I least expected. They had listen patiently to some horrible songs sung by my friends before & clapped too at the end. ‘why should I be discriminated, this is unfair?’ I thought.
While coming back to my seat Momi(the show host) commented “nice joke“. ‘JOKE !!!! , is she mad? ‘ I thought.
Later came to know that while I was visualizing for my song impatient SB already shooted his next question which was “Ok ,then tell a joke.”
Everybody except me had heard that.
Now that’s what I call a “joke of the day”.