28 February 2006

College Reflections-1

All the posts, including this one, titled 'College Reflections - n' are dedicated to my alma mater, Dharmsinh Desai Institute of Technology, for giving me some of the happiest days and best friends of my life.

I am a believer of destiny. Of course, I believe that you alone can create your destiny and it was my destiny to land up in DDIT. I entered the portals of this institute as a gawky seventeen year old boy and came out as someone more than just an engineer, as a more complete human being and perhaps with a lot more baggage than I could possibly carry.
I sometimes feel that what if I hadn’t gone to DDIT. Probably I could have got into a better insti, with a better brand name, with a better infrastructure and better placements but would I have been able to make the friends I made at DDIT, friends for life, memories unlimited. Possibly not.
I still remember that eve of 1st internal of instrumentation (instru) sometime in 5th sem i.e July/Aug 2001. Now instru was a subject which everybody loved to hate. Full of theory. No numericals. No concepts. Just pages and pages of theory to mug up and spurt it out in your answer sheet. As usual, I and my two terrific roomies Rahul a.k.a KC and Sagar a.k.a soggs were going to have a 'one-day'. That’s what we called the ‘attempt’ of acing a test by studying for just one day or rather one night before the test. To start off with none of us used to have the faintest idea about the syllabus, forget about the contents. The reason being endless bunking of lectures. So much for being an engineer. So, usually we had to get hold of some serious, sincere, nerdy chap of our class to know how much is there and what’s not there in the syllabus or rather what to study and what not to study. Coming back to the day before the instru internal, it was raining heavily and the state of affairs during such rains in Nadiad, a sleepy town between Baroda and Ahmedabad, was such that you would need to a wade thru knee deep waters to make your way during moderate to heavy rains. As was often the case, during such heavy rains, a couple of transformers used to get burn culminating in electricity cut. Now imagine having electricity cut just the day before your exam. It becomes more exciting especially when you have left the entire subject to study on last day. But we were hardcore kaam chors, so we simply closed our books and went out to have fun in the downpour. I still wonder at times about how bindaas I was at that point of time. No worries about the impending exam. I knew that probably I’ll flunk next day but it just didn’t matter. What mattered was having fun, pure raw fun with your friends. Everything else was irrelevant. We ran thru the streets full of filthy waters, fully drenched, shouting at the top of our voices as if we were displaying our rebellion against the agonies of never ending exams and the SYSTEM. We went to the room of other serious chaps of our class, they were all tensed up because of the power cut at such a crucial point of time but we simply asked them to join us. As seriousness was there in their DNA so we had to literally force them by pushing them right into the rain.Even today when we old friends get together, we remember that fateful evening and often wonder ‘Kahaan gaye woh din’. As an after thought I still don’t remember how I fared in the instru internal next day. I guess I just passed.:)

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