So continues the series of posts on undergrad life; writing out of a sense of duty towards my friends from that time, this might possibly be the last one on the subject.
Sitting in the last bench meant that we also developed a tact for using mobile phones in class, with an arbitrarily high success probability; where success probability is defined as the fraction of times our mobiles did not get confiscated by the lecturer. In Ruban’s case, the denominator of the fraction (the total number of times his phone was being nefariously employed in class) was overwhelmingly large that he was unable to keep up a correspondingly low numerator value; resulting in several trips to the faculty office to beg for his mobile.
For me, this year, the third, somehow became something of the last proper year in college. The true fourth year in my case, or atleast most of it (and if people were to be believed – the best part of the 4 years) was spent doing physics in IITM. Looking back, missing the actual final year was probably quite apt, and very much in-line with what the 4 years really turned out to be – a wanton waste of time, and a general negative impact in several directions.
Although these are years more recent, it has somehow become impossible to recollect very many fun incidents, maybe not because they were totally absent, but because in 3 years, the college had seen us grow out of childhood and into the ambitious kernel of a not-so-innocent adult. Most of my friends were busy trying to land dream pay packages when the job interviews came around later that year, another section was dreaming about ousting this previous lot by going into a B-school and getting instated as their slave master in 2 year’s time.
But in 4 years, the college had also miraculously succeeded in convincing some to take up engineering more seriously, or atleast, go in search of true engineering. This was the small bunch of “sorcerers” for whom the sweet sound of a motor whirring was music and the ‘Laplace domain’, a home away from home. But this group was also something of a secret society, holding clandestine night meetings in nondescript hostel rooms to discuss strategies to crack GATE, and ruminate on the statistics of GRE scores. Soon, acronyms like ETH, EPFL, IDEA, RWTH, TUe and ISAE jumped to life, and courses like power electronics, electrical drives and power systems were being studied with great fervour and unnatural levels of enthusiasm.
On the other hand, the B-school junta were going medieval with their ‘T.I.M.E’ classes and questions about how many cats could eat how many rats in how much time. Some found combinatorics and data analysis hard, while others came face to face with the cruelties of the english language – and then there were people like my roomie Deepak Nambiar who was unfazed by either of them. Caught in between the intellectually fulfilling dream of an MS in engineering, and the money making mantra of IIM’s, Anand spent most of the ensuing two years debating out the pros and cons of the two, in the end deciding that a job in the gulf (aka “gelf” in mallu-speak) was the way to go.
Then there was the cool-gang, Vivek and Abilash predominantly, Nishant trying hard to be cool. Not that any of them were really “cool”, but that they somehow managed to remain aloof from all the job-interview hullabaloo. Vivek by constantly keeping himself engaged with his mobile phone, the other end of the electromagnetic tether slowly tightening around the neck of some poor girl in the girl’s hostel; while Vivek did not believe in discrimination among the very many plausible targets, Abilash had finally decided that enough was enough, and was for the first time in 3 years, seen with a content smile on his face (which I hope warms his soul for years to come 
).
The drab day-to-day semester was highlighted by the departmental induction – the one occasion when me, Nithin, Ruban and Senthil chose to run amok in Coimbatore trying our hardest to decide between various choices of donuts and stuffing in as many chicken biriyanis as possible before getting back into the vegetarian hell the campus was. It is all the more remarkable that after making a grave of so many poor chickens, and a generous number of lambs, in our tummies, all of them werent shaken into life, as Ruban and Senthil decided to drive their bikes in the peak city traffic like total maniacs, or if I were to believe their words, like Valentino Rossi and Max Biaggi somewhere in Catalunya.
As the year crunched ahead, anxiety escalated day by day – foremost because of the impending make-or-break job interviews, but also because of the prospect of a huge project decision. The BTech project is perhaps one of the great technical farces of indian engineering education, atleast in most of the colleges. In 3 years, most students are not taught anything solid, exams come and go, students coast from year to year, learning how to invert Fourier transforms but never knowing how or why it has any bearing on reality. And then in the end, they are expected to come up with some masterpiece of engineering synthesis, to showcase all that they have painfully studied in the preceding years. Some couldn’t be bothered – they just got it done by MTech students; as for those who bothered and cared, well, they were supervised by faculty who couldn’t care less. But then there was the rare team, with a student capable enough and a faculty ambitious enough; in this category fell the pre-eminent 10-pointer of our batch ‘VGP’, his equally competent classmate Hari, supervised by one of the few professors still carrying out active research. Even then, there was a general lack of technical sophistication and a courage to think radical; in fact, one of the most pitiable exhibitions of a gross lack of sophistication was some project (or atleast the initial plan) to design a traffic light system – in an engineering college! Primary school students in my former school did that as a summer break hobby.
Anyway, the interview month approached pretty quick, and for the first time, the boy’s hostel saw students washing clothes and pressing shirts! And finally polishing that leather shoes procured in first year, an experience akin to some archaeological dig – spotting that canteen stain from last year, and the odd chewing gum stuck under the sole from first year. Although I do not really recall which companies came first, I do remember it being one of the so-called “core” companies. On the day, as I lazily woke up at 8am pondering sheepishly from bed whether to pay a visit to the department, the excited racket outside made me wander outside to a sight of some students hurriedly going through their electrical machines notes, while some others believed that they could win the heart of the interviewer by combing their hair sleek with copious amounts of gel. After the last minute gasping about that one formula nobody seemed to remember, the entourage hurried off to the exam hall, like a line of pumped-up penguins marching on adrenaline shots.
The trials, the drawn faces of my friends, their joy at seeing their names on ‘clear-lists’, and their mounting torment as they did not make it in some company – these things proved to be a unique window into people’s character, and more importantly, their stakes in life. Some quit easily and settled for a compromise, others persevered on and got what they wanted, some even had last-minute revelations about what they wanted to do with life as they came out of some interview. The sheer multiplicity of human response to personal catastrophe is one of the things that makes humanity unique – it is not just the proverbial ‘fight or flight’. In four years of college, things changed – some lost everything they had come in with, some gained an entire life being there; some had the best years of their lives in there, while others regretted being there at all; from within this extreme-spanning spectrum, what stood out in common was the willingness to drudge through difficulty with an attitude that upheld the motto “this too will pass”, while learning to smile at life’s mischievous pranks – and these are perhaps the biggest lessons I learnt in my 4 years…
