MNNIT Allahabad was never short of activity. In three days, a fresher from Kanpur hung himself in his room and the police and press were all over the campus to investigate incidents of ragging. Luckily there was none after that. We had hardly settled in when the notices for Swagat were put up. The welcome programme for freshers was meant to showcase fresh talent and Tagore was all abuzz about it. Especially now that the invectives had ceased, everybody seemed interested to show their true colour. However the fear of ragging still loomed at large like a ghost.
The inmates of Tagore looked up to Swagat for one more particular reason. That would be the day we would get freedom from the one month under custody, which in spite of all the troubles it had brought, had brought all of us very close to each other. Until then, we were dependent on Guptaji’s canteen that sold everything from samosas to key-locks, milk to butter, buckets to bedding, drawing sheets to folders and white dresses to black shoes. It was canteen, store cum life-line for the 500 students of Tagore and Guptaji took special advantage of this situation. Once a week, a bus would take handpicked students to University Road to purchase books. A stall sold fruits and fruit juice within the premises of Tagore hostel. A dhobi picked up clothes in the evening. Thus the administration had made sure that all our requirements had been taken care of and we had no excuse whatsoever to bypass the custody imposed upon us.
Like Binay, we lived four in a room; the other three being Abhijit Das, Rahul Verma and Ashutosh Gautam. Unlike Binay, we did not have much work to distribute amongst ourselves. We had food in the mess, gave clothes to the dhobi and divided the room into four parts; each one was entrusted to keep one part clean. This was supposed to mean that everybody would clean a part of the room. In practice, this meant that whenever a finger was raised why one part of the room was dirty, the obligation was passed to someone else by pushing the garbage on his side and one part of the room always remained dirty in turns. Cleanliness is the last thing to expect out of a boys’ hostel.
National Institute of Technology, Allahabad had students from all parts of India. There were students from down South Tamil Nadu and Kerala to Jammu and Kashmir. There were students from Gujarat to Arunachal Pradesh. Abhijit Das came from Assam. His father owned a press. He was short, surly and short-tempered. He listened to English music and hailed liberty; so much so that he disobeyed the code of conduct implemented by the seniors and boycotted everything they stood for. He often confronted them on the way and was bashed, but they failed to dissuade him. He was always ready to pick up a fight and loved to engage in arguments with me. Sometimes, the arguments would blow off and attract spectators from as far as B-wing. Ashutosh Gautam was what Abhijit wasn’t. He was quiet and reserved. He never expressed himself in more than three words. He was tall and well-built but never took advantage of his physique. He was afraid of none but never picked up confrontations. He was my best mate in the room. Rahul Verma was Abhijit and Ashutosh put into one. For weeks, he would remain all by himself; as if his existence did not matter. When he picked up an argument, it was impossible to defeat him. He was the perfect personification of talent MNNIT had bequeathed. He was ranked 6th in UP Board, a rare achievement in an overpopulated state, felicitated by the State Government, and mastered English in a year hence. He had no sense of pride or an inclination to boast. We made an odd family.
My room was immediately above Guptaji’s canteen. By and by, it was the best location in Tagore. We had a clear view of the mess, so we never had to toil to find out if the mess had opened already. There was a tree right in front that concealed the sunlight and there was a water-cooler close to the room. First floor was also relatively safe from the menace of mosquitoes and snakes. Things, as you may have figured out, are always relative in MNNIT.
As soon as the notices for Swagat were out, our room was abuzz with a lot of voices. Besides the regular ones, Sushil and Abhishek Sati had joined in. Abhijit sat brusquely on his bed with Rupam, his alter ego ever since his family moved into the same colony in Assam. They were contemplating their chances in singing single versus in pairs. They decided to audition for both. Sushil was interested in everything: the drama, the dances, singing, whistling. He looked like an extraordinary bundle of talent packed into one Rambo, ready to take on the world all alone. Ashutosh sat quietly listening in one corner and Rahul threw a word or two every now and then. I was undecided. This was an opportunity to initiate the change in me. I hadn’t been able to speak in public for long. I auditioned for the Independence Day debate. I failed. I auditioned for the drama as well. As I steered my name slowly through the selected participants, I found my name in the waiting list. A smile flickered on my lips slowly. I hadn’t lost my flair completely. There was hope and hope was better than the rope. What was I thinking anyways!
None of my other room-mates made the mark for Swagat. By the time the seniors left, tired with hours of auditions, Tagore was brimming with a lot of glee; and a lot of ruing continued. As I entered my room, Abhijit was the first one to start.
“Hey listen everybody, we must raise a toast to this friend of ours who has made a cut above us all. Here is Mitesh Karwa, dull dark actor and stammerer. He is placed in the waiting list for the drama. Can you imagine a Hindi drama with a stammer! The new-age Sha-sha-sha-sha-hrukh Khan is born. What role do you expect to get! Fan bearer, background tree, unnamed soldiers. You could fit such a variety of roles! Cheers!”
It had been a great day. I was happy to be doing something after more than two years. I was in the best mood for an argument. I could hardly gauge the situation and if I did not retort, it would only mean submission. I could not submit now.
“And this is to congratulate my friend Abhijit Das who cracked a voice at singing, broke a leg at dancing, did all kinds of moves, moved around his seniors carrying tea and water and still failed to make his mark. Congratulations AD.”
“I never carried tea and water for seniors!”
“Oh, that was just an addition from my side. You can take it as a complementary remark. Did I put up a good show there? See, you seem so infuriated. You seem to have fallen for the bait already. I can see somebody turning green. Do you feel jealous now?”
“So the damned actor has begun his show already! What can we expect next?”
“Well it’s for time to tell.”
“I wonder why time did not send you to the National School of Drama. That’s what seems to interest you so much.”
“Yes, drama intrigues me. Why does that raise brows off your face? Whether at NSD or at NIT, that’s hardly a question. It’s the quality that has been recognized. That I am better than the hundreds of you, who have been put to silence.”
“You are in the wait-list, damn you…”
“And still a cut above the rest of you who failed to make your presence felt.”
Abhijit raised a heavy book as if he was going to throw it upon my face. I shrugged a little to make some space. It required the heavy intervention of Rahul to stall an interesting argument that almost exploded into a fight. “Pointless. You failed to make a mark but there is nothing to get infuriated about. Does it even matter? All these celebrations aren’t meant to give you a cozy welcome. This is not your felicitation ceremony for making it to this college. It’s a mask these seniors have taken to hide the ploys they’ve planted to avenge what they could not do to us during ragging. There’re a lot of things to come. Go to MP Hall tomorrow and get sacrificed.”
He sounded unusually calm, like serendipity herself. He sounded like the man by the noose, forbearing my future to me. It was enough to get me thinking. Could I take the change? Not now, I thought. For twenty four hours, I was agitated. Then, I withdrew my name from the list. I could not make up my mind that I was doing the right thing, but I let it go. I knew that had AD been in my place, he would most certainly go. I could not. For my sake somebody else placed in the wait-list would perform on the stage. There would be more opportunities for me. That is how I consoled myself. I regret it now. I wish I hadn’t taken the step back that day. Swagat re-instilled some lost confidence, but I could not overcome the resistance to change; not immediately. On coming back, I told my room-mates that I could not make it to the stage; none of the wait-listed students could. That was the end of it. Every night thereafter, my room was filled with stories of how Sushil was ragged and what Anshul had to do and how a senior laughed after butchering one fresher after another. From every other quarter, I heard nothing but fun they had at MP Hall. Days passed and I modified my gait a little.
Swagat was a lot of fun, until it was nothing but confusion. There were a few good dances, a group song prepared by students amongst us and a Hindi play. The play was where things started going wrong. Seniors started pouring in and obstructed most of the view and then they danced and yelled; they drank and they made awful noises; they did everything so that no sound or view reached us. I had been waiting eagerly for the play but it was cut short as the audience became unmanageable. All the hard work put in by the Dramatics people for all these days was cast away in seconds. I felt very sorry for them. The seniors kept drinking and making all kinds of noises. They abused each one of us, behaving like nothing but swines. They were nothing better than the ruffians and hoodlums you find on the roads. Then they broke up upon a girl they had not seen before, and suddenly the last few seats of MP Hall were blazing with nothing less than a wrestling match, as their friends cheered on. It shook me. That was when I realized that engineering wasn’t fashionable and fair after all. It was a road-fight. There was no role for honest and candid people here. And engineering never meant displaying academic excellence. Engineers do not win arguments; they eliminate the one who created that argument. They do not solve problems by logic; they fight them with both hands. Things changed very suddenly and I was on my seat, enjoying the show over my chair as Anshul sang out aloud, “In the end, it doesn’t even matter.”
The next time I talked to Binay, I told him everything about Swagat and he banged his head on the wall. This time, HE insisted that I should NOT change. But as the Chemistry teacher said in class, a reaction once started cannot be undone. A process set up would not stop until completed. Like a diamond in the ocean, life in motion; one could only move on. And no matter how many times I promised Binay that day that Mitesh would always remain the same, he would never remain the same again.
The inmates of Tagore looked up to Swagat for one more particular reason. That would be the day we would get freedom from the one month under custody, which in spite of all the troubles it had brought, had brought all of us very close to each other. Until then, we were dependent on Guptaji’s canteen that sold everything from samosas to key-locks, milk to butter, buckets to bedding, drawing sheets to folders and white dresses to black shoes. It was canteen, store cum life-line for the 500 students of Tagore and Guptaji took special advantage of this situation. Once a week, a bus would take handpicked students to University Road to purchase books. A stall sold fruits and fruit juice within the premises of Tagore hostel. A dhobi picked up clothes in the evening. Thus the administration had made sure that all our requirements had been taken care of and we had no excuse whatsoever to bypass the custody imposed upon us.
Like Binay, we lived four in a room; the other three being Abhijit Das, Rahul Verma and Ashutosh Gautam. Unlike Binay, we did not have much work to distribute amongst ourselves. We had food in the mess, gave clothes to the dhobi and divided the room into four parts; each one was entrusted to keep one part clean. This was supposed to mean that everybody would clean a part of the room. In practice, this meant that whenever a finger was raised why one part of the room was dirty, the obligation was passed to someone else by pushing the garbage on his side and one part of the room always remained dirty in turns. Cleanliness is the last thing to expect out of a boys’ hostel.
National Institute of Technology, Allahabad had students from all parts of India. There were students from down South Tamil Nadu and Kerala to Jammu and Kashmir. There were students from Gujarat to Arunachal Pradesh. Abhijit Das came from Assam. His father owned a press. He was short, surly and short-tempered. He listened to English music and hailed liberty; so much so that he disobeyed the code of conduct implemented by the seniors and boycotted everything they stood for. He often confronted them on the way and was bashed, but they failed to dissuade him. He was always ready to pick up a fight and loved to engage in arguments with me. Sometimes, the arguments would blow off and attract spectators from as far as B-wing. Ashutosh Gautam was what Abhijit wasn’t. He was quiet and reserved. He never expressed himself in more than three words. He was tall and well-built but never took advantage of his physique. He was afraid of none but never picked up confrontations. He was my best mate in the room. Rahul Verma was Abhijit and Ashutosh put into one. For weeks, he would remain all by himself; as if his existence did not matter. When he picked up an argument, it was impossible to defeat him. He was the perfect personification of talent MNNIT had bequeathed. He was ranked 6th in UP Board, a rare achievement in an overpopulated state, felicitated by the State Government, and mastered English in a year hence. He had no sense of pride or an inclination to boast. We made an odd family.
My room was immediately above Guptaji’s canteen. By and by, it was the best location in Tagore. We had a clear view of the mess, so we never had to toil to find out if the mess had opened already. There was a tree right in front that concealed the sunlight and there was a water-cooler close to the room. First floor was also relatively safe from the menace of mosquitoes and snakes. Things, as you may have figured out, are always relative in MNNIT.
As soon as the notices for Swagat were out, our room was abuzz with a lot of voices. Besides the regular ones, Sushil and Abhishek Sati had joined in. Abhijit sat brusquely on his bed with Rupam, his alter ego ever since his family moved into the same colony in Assam. They were contemplating their chances in singing single versus in pairs. They decided to audition for both. Sushil was interested in everything: the drama, the dances, singing, whistling. He looked like an extraordinary bundle of talent packed into one Rambo, ready to take on the world all alone. Ashutosh sat quietly listening in one corner and Rahul threw a word or two every now and then. I was undecided. This was an opportunity to initiate the change in me. I hadn’t been able to speak in public for long. I auditioned for the Independence Day debate. I failed. I auditioned for the drama as well. As I steered my name slowly through the selected participants, I found my name in the waiting list. A smile flickered on my lips slowly. I hadn’t lost my flair completely. There was hope and hope was better than the rope. What was I thinking anyways!
None of my other room-mates made the mark for Swagat. By the time the seniors left, tired with hours of auditions, Tagore was brimming with a lot of glee; and a lot of ruing continued. As I entered my room, Abhijit was the first one to start.
“Hey listen everybody, we must raise a toast to this friend of ours who has made a cut above us all. Here is Mitesh Karwa, dull dark actor and stammerer. He is placed in the waiting list for the drama. Can you imagine a Hindi drama with a stammer! The new-age Sha-sha-sha-sha-hrukh Khan is born. What role do you expect to get! Fan bearer, background tree, unnamed soldiers. You could fit such a variety of roles! Cheers!”
It had been a great day. I was happy to be doing something after more than two years. I was in the best mood for an argument. I could hardly gauge the situation and if I did not retort, it would only mean submission. I could not submit now.
“And this is to congratulate my friend Abhijit Das who cracked a voice at singing, broke a leg at dancing, did all kinds of moves, moved around his seniors carrying tea and water and still failed to make his mark. Congratulations AD.”
“I never carried tea and water for seniors!”
“Oh, that was just an addition from my side. You can take it as a complementary remark. Did I put up a good show there? See, you seem so infuriated. You seem to have fallen for the bait already. I can see somebody turning green. Do you feel jealous now?”
“So the damned actor has begun his show already! What can we expect next?”
“Well it’s for time to tell.”
“I wonder why time did not send you to the National School of Drama. That’s what seems to interest you so much.”
“Yes, drama intrigues me. Why does that raise brows off your face? Whether at NSD or at NIT, that’s hardly a question. It’s the quality that has been recognized. That I am better than the hundreds of you, who have been put to silence.”
“You are in the wait-list, damn you…”
“And still a cut above the rest of you who failed to make your presence felt.”
Abhijit raised a heavy book as if he was going to throw it upon my face. I shrugged a little to make some space. It required the heavy intervention of Rahul to stall an interesting argument that almost exploded into a fight. “Pointless. You failed to make a mark but there is nothing to get infuriated about. Does it even matter? All these celebrations aren’t meant to give you a cozy welcome. This is not your felicitation ceremony for making it to this college. It’s a mask these seniors have taken to hide the ploys they’ve planted to avenge what they could not do to us during ragging. There’re a lot of things to come. Go to MP Hall tomorrow and get sacrificed.”
He sounded unusually calm, like serendipity herself. He sounded like the man by the noose, forbearing my future to me. It was enough to get me thinking. Could I take the change? Not now, I thought. For twenty four hours, I was agitated. Then, I withdrew my name from the list. I could not make up my mind that I was doing the right thing, but I let it go. I knew that had AD been in my place, he would most certainly go. I could not. For my sake somebody else placed in the wait-list would perform on the stage. There would be more opportunities for me. That is how I consoled myself. I regret it now. I wish I hadn’t taken the step back that day. Swagat re-instilled some lost confidence, but I could not overcome the resistance to change; not immediately. On coming back, I told my room-mates that I could not make it to the stage; none of the wait-listed students could. That was the end of it. Every night thereafter, my room was filled with stories of how Sushil was ragged and what Anshul had to do and how a senior laughed after butchering one fresher after another. From every other quarter, I heard nothing but fun they had at MP Hall. Days passed and I modified my gait a little.
Swagat was a lot of fun, until it was nothing but confusion. There were a few good dances, a group song prepared by students amongst us and a Hindi play. The play was where things started going wrong. Seniors started pouring in and obstructed most of the view and then they danced and yelled; they drank and they made awful noises; they did everything so that no sound or view reached us. I had been waiting eagerly for the play but it was cut short as the audience became unmanageable. All the hard work put in by the Dramatics people for all these days was cast away in seconds. I felt very sorry for them. The seniors kept drinking and making all kinds of noises. They abused each one of us, behaving like nothing but swines. They were nothing better than the ruffians and hoodlums you find on the roads. Then they broke up upon a girl they had not seen before, and suddenly the last few seats of MP Hall were blazing with nothing less than a wrestling match, as their friends cheered on. It shook me. That was when I realized that engineering wasn’t fashionable and fair after all. It was a road-fight. There was no role for honest and candid people here. And engineering never meant displaying academic excellence. Engineers do not win arguments; they eliminate the one who created that argument. They do not solve problems by logic; they fight them with both hands. Things changed very suddenly and I was on my seat, enjoying the show over my chair as Anshul sang out aloud, “In the end, it doesn’t even matter.”
The next time I talked to Binay, I told him everything about Swagat and he banged his head on the wall. This time, HE insisted that I should NOT change. But as the Chemistry teacher said in class, a reaction once started cannot be undone. A process set up would not stop until completed. Like a diamond in the ocean, life in motion; one could only move on. And no matter how many times I promised Binay that day that Mitesh would always remain the same, he would never remain the same again.