L(unch) and T(ea) days - Part 3 - Journey back home

Venky pulls a chair and sits with us. I feel that he kind of knew about who did the work in our group. So he directly looks at Amit and asks, ‘Did you get the paper on Desublimation from the IIT library?’

‘Not yet sir. We did not have access to the IIT Library. I think we need a letter from you to show it to the librarian.’ Another piece of pure genius.

Fact: We don’t even know where the library is located inside the IIT Campus. We have been to the campus twice before.

Once, for submitting the forms of JEE, when we were really inspired about the whole thing and thought that getting into something like AIR 350 would be a cake walk. But then, I don’t like small numbers. So I added a zero to that and ended up being AIR 3500.

I think I still have all the unused Brilliant Tutorials material in my house. It was used for two purposes. My mom sometimes used to roll puris and keep them inside the books before frying them, so that they are not stuck against each other while taking them off for frying. And my brother used to carry one of the books to his school to play book cricket with his friends. No wonder, neither me nor my sporty brother ended up anywhere near the IITs.

Second time was for doing our Communication Skills Assignment. Can you believe it if I say we did our Communication Skills assignment in the Tribology lab at IIT Bombay? Yes, you have to.


Venky then starts explaining about the Desublimation process for the 348th time. And again, only Amit understands it and the rest of us are nodding like Joey. I doze off for a second and suddenly Abhi pinches me and I wake up to see Venky has left.
Amit has already written 15 pages of notes from the discussion. He and Santo are discussing about some concept of Heat and Mass Transfer which they could apply to the project, while me and Abhi go to drink water, discussing about the political scene in Maharashtra.

So, project discussion is over and now we need to get out of our ‘adda’.
As we walk out of the North Block, Abhi suggests that we should go over to his place, do some VB coding for the project, watch some TV and eat Bhel and Pani puri.

Project work for Amit, TV for Santo who wanted to see the match and Food for me. Nice marketing Abhi!

So, we go to the bus stop and wait for the famous ‘Filterpada’ bus. What a funny name for a place! Filterpada. We always used to tease Abhi about this place. Does the name mean everybody’s taps have water filters attached or something? I really don’t know. All I know is, Abhi used to run after the bus every time we used to leave L&T. Every single time. He has never reached the bus stop before the bus. He always used to see the bus go past us and then run unsuccessfully to catch it. Hmmm, probably that was purposely done by him to get some exercise every week.

And funnily, today there is no sign of the bus as we walk towards the bus stop. Santo is discussing about an E-Commerce assignment we had to submit on Friday, about how he cut the answers short and submitted a 3 page assignment. Important point was that there was not even a single answer which made sense since he had copied alternate lines from Amit’s assignment.

Forget about the poor E-Commerce professor, I think William Shakespeare would have died once again in his grave if he had read one of the answers from that assignment.

I am shattered when I hear this from Santo. How could he do this to me? I assumed his assignment was a ‘true copy’ and cut his assignment into half in the same manner and submitted a 3 page assignment with much bigger handwriting. I should have read atleast one complete sentence before copying. But then if you write an assignment in the midst of playing ‘Bollywood Hollywood’ in class, then these mishaps are bound to happen. I am sorry Will.

Yes, the bus has arrived. We get into the bus and get into the seats on the left side of the bus, because there is sun on the other side. But then, you cannot win against the sun, can you? The bus took a number of turns and now the sun was right in my eyes as I was ogling at a Gujju babe standing at a bus stop.

We are back to our best, talking about the Mumbai traffic, E-Commerce assignments, Gujju babes, Kurla’s famous Panipuri waala, bus conductors' unwillingness to give change, as the bus slowly crawled towards Kurla, where Abhi lived. I think we could have walked faster than the bus. But then, we are paunchy people, out of which one person's only exercise in a week is to run 100m towards a bus stop.

(to be continued)