This is dedicated to chidambaram who was a junior in ps and now in kharagpur as well...

I asked a kgpian, before i became one myself, how this place was..

He started this way,

"well, its quite a nice place.. clean air.. great woods.. its like in the middle of a forest"
(may be this guy knew i had a thing for nature.... god knows that).

"the profs are damn cooperative and there is no junior senior ambiguity.."
he continued.. I was quite impressed by now..

"and the food is godly over here"
wooow.... this place has got to rock...

"there's 24x7 3mbps Internet connectivity out here"
i was bowled over...

i wanted to be there and i got there.. in about a month i got my admission letter and i went over to kgp to become a part of its system..

day 1.
Dean's speech in an auditorium with a capacity of 200, welcoming a gathering of 800 students and accompanying parents..
He started off with "As we are having a 'slight' lack of space please adjust by sitting on the floor", when we had trouble finding space to ground our feet.. For 2.5 hrs he made us endure his worthless rabble about the greatness of iit as if it was gonna give us any solace..

Registration. 800 btech guys 50 odd phd guys(as if their number matters but still..) 3 counters to deposit fees.. wait from 8.30 to 4.30 in the evening.. if time was money, i wouldn't have had to pay my fees that day.

day 2.
classes. A guy came 2 min late and was not allowed into the class... prof spent 15 minutes lecturing to him, ignoring the rest of the class.. even during the rest of the class, he was acting plain silly and i tell you we were getting pissed right the first day... finally the class got over and we were left hoping other classes would be better than that..
nope.. no luck.. one prof kept slapping those who dint answer his questions.. another was a plain bloke and couldn't handle himself, let aside dealing with the class.. another never considered us to be existent in his class (it is said his class attendance one day was 1 but he still kept saying students).. another was ga* enough to arrange a ramp walk for all in the class during class hours and video tape it (god knows what happened, he was arrested later the year for sexual assault on a colleague. well.. serves him right).....

classes were nothing less than hell.. tic tac toe and hangman were our only chance of survival if we dint want to lose an attendance..

sometime after mid sems a couple of seniors came along and literally 'recruited' a batch of juniors to be sacrificed (did i say sacrificed? i meant ragged but both are too close any way) and i was one of them. you know you learn a lot when you are ragged.. how it feels to be preyed upon.. how the rabbit feels at the tigers paw.. how the mouse feels when the cat plays with it... it was a 'learning experience'... for those who dint get what I'm saying.. I'm trying to be ironic..

and the mess menu.. rice like paste, brown colored water, yellow colored water, leather patches and tasteless curd... by the time i came home after mid sems all my taste buds had shut down and i couldn't tell between an ice cream and a hot cuppa masala tea..

i hated that guy who told me kgp was awesome.. never talked to him..

i thought no one in his proper senses would call this place hell... he would say it was worse..

then came the summer hols... i went to my hometown.. a town near coimbatore where only one in five has a phone connection.. comps and internet were out of the world for them...
it was fine at first.. a free bird. no classes, no crap given in the name of food, no screwed up profs trying to piss us off...
but then there was this longing for company, a desire to sit on some damn table with pals and chat about some random crap.. to be in online gaming parlours and game for hours...

i figured what makes iit or for that matter any institution is our friends and not the system itself... it was a slow and steady transition.... from iit hating to iit longing....

and then this chidambaram guy calls up... "how is iit?" he asks me...
"nice place.. cool climate... sexy environment.. food is kinda ok.." i say.. and the vicious cycle is set rolling once more.. now i can only hope he doesn't try to take out his revenge on me..