Roller Coaster College Ride...perhaps...worth living...!!!

!!!Squeezed Semester!!!

So…after such a zippy roller coaster merry go round… (Wish I knew more names of Essel World’s rides)…start to the graduate program…it was time for something that never struck to me…could happen anytime down the line…! This was even a greater fiasco then the Zidane’s head butt…for me…at least…!

After been through all the nerves of the season…I or rather we joined the regular classes for the next semester…and believe me…the experience for the first day was even horrible than the first day experience at the college…! To make you feel the same…just consider a kid studying in first standard made to sit with the junior college guys!

Woooohhhhhh!!!

What I witnessed on the black board was horrible…horrifying…terrible…terrifying…! It read:

MVI something something…
LXI something something…
And more of alphabets…
And more…
And more…

And the blackboard seemed even more black with the letters soaking in the color…because they were as good as the sentence “Hello!” is to an illiterate…!

No idea why the mad soul was scribbling alphabets there…was this a class where we were to learn some sort of English…or what!!!

Absolutely insane…on the part of the college administration…to make us sit there and go through the happenings as and when they happen…This wasn’t the lone case…neither for the subjects nor for the elite 1%...Each subject repeated the same trend…with all of us looking completely astonished…may be at our illiteracy or at the class’ intelligence…! Whatever it may be…but I knew that is what I had to do hands with in the upcoming time…!

So…taking all that in its entirety…we began on the ride once again…a tad confident…a lot of apprehensions…a bit of tension…and a lot to study…in a couple of months…because the semester was already a month old…when we came!

And…those two months were curtailed to a month and a half…because of the annual day functions and corresponding events which took place at the college premise every year though I must admit…I was never eager to attend any of them irrespective of the time I had…I loved my morning jog…afternoon knap…evening coffee…and the good night dreams…! I don’t know why…this was a dramatic change…from my aspect… a person who was the spearhead of all the functions held at his school and a person who is still remembered by his teachers every year even after he left his school for his participation energy…never had that zeal…or enthusiasm to attend any such event at his college…! No reason…I could cite for the same…may be the environment had to do a lot with it …! May be…!!!

Making friends is an integral part of my life…and so did I…made new friends…and a lot more…this time around…!

Foremost…the girl whom I always admired…not because she was gorgeous…of course that was the prima facie reason…but because of her simplicity…intelligence and innocence…she was Ruchita “The Sugar Coated Beauty with blessed Brain”! She turned out to be one of my best friends…

Next came Ankur…yup Ankur Agrawal “The Courageous Man”…though we were not so well gelled at that time…but yes…he was a better friend in the making…because…the coming future was a better and a more interesting one for us…I shall dictate that as and when I can…! But I still believe…He is a courageous guy…….man…you have are a brave heart…and you know why I say so!

A few more whom I added to the ever growing list of my friends were…Mohit, Ritu, Deepesh, Priya, Suyog…!

The tie with Taran, Anu and Rahul just got even stronger as time flew by in the past one year…we had some really good moments shared together…some of them hilarious…some of them humorous…!

The subjects…though none of them were interesting…you must be thinking…what does this guy find interesting…! Well…believe me…engineering subjects are damn boring…! And so we had a bunch of them every semester…this time accolades for adding insult to injury were given to Microprocessor, Digital Computer Organization, Discrete Structures, System Programming…and the good old Mathematics…!If you think that was it…and no more torturing need to be insisted…..common…move on folks…we had some brilliant lecturers…my gosh…!!! Some of them were…mimics…! I know…this is bad on my part to say so about my teachers…but that is what some of them deserved…! Petrifying classes…perhaps the appropriate term I can give them…some were even worse than the Cruciatus Curse!!!

Then there was this DCO faculty…hmm…I can hardly remember attending any of his class except one…in the complete semester…No…No…I didn’t miss any…In fact he did not bother to take one…and so was the case in his labs…or rather…practical classes…! If that could have sufficed…it would have been wonders…but…there was something really bewildered on the notice board when it came to short attendance list!!! I was a prominent feature there…because…he took a single lab…and I missed that…! WOW!!!

The subject I would love to mention is System Programming…Bloody Hell! What was that crap…? I am still not able to be out of the trauma it caused in my head…and if I thought I can cough up some of the topics and pass my examinations…go to hell…the book and the author were a mere artifact of highly rusty writing…! That was the worst book I ever read in my life…Only cramming…and believe me…when I say cramming…Hardcore Cramming…made me achieve the up ticks in the number surpassing the sacrosanct number for an engineer - - - 35!

Well…what can one do…rather than doing it all himself.

Bruised by the courseware…I seldom felt free…It took a hard toll on all of us…If we tried to spare a few hours free…huh…extra classes…were at our disposal to feast on…now what more can one expect!

That semester was a muted semester…was all over in attempting to come at par with the basics of all subjects…learning half a book of each on our own…all muddled up…..copying files as it is…that was the worst part of it…and then rushing to make a stupid editor in C…when we had the best of them on our computers…! Hmm…that’s engineering at its best…!

Soon…even before I can think of…studying seriously for examinations…preparation leaves were at my doorsteps…and believe me…this time it wasn’t all about study…! It was about how much more time out of 24 hours can we give to those books…it was all about…how much 20 pin microprocessor diagrams can you trace in your memory…it was all about ramming up the algorithms…algorithms…which were as good as a Sanskrit poems…for an English literature student…! I still remember myself…getting up in the morning…drawing the diagrams in rough…the formats…of specific instructions…the algorithms which I buffed up the night before…just to give a consolation to my dreadful soul…that…yes…you know something…that you can scribble out there in paper…irrespective of whether asked or not…!

Examinations came at a pace faster than a speed post after the preparation leave which was all tangled up with books…Xerox copies…oh yes…this particular college showed me how one can pass his engineering totally based on Xerox copies!

Afternoon sun scorched down…in April…and as I reached the student studded entrance of the computers department…butterflies or rather I should say…frogs jumped in my stomach…that was the only time in the past…when I was nervous…and nervous…and more nervous…the left over of some confidence that I may have managed to gather was just washed away by some doubts which I could eavesdrop…from the crowd around me…! Huh…I wished the clock didn’t strike 1300 hours…and I may have more time to cram notebooks…! This was the lone incident when a person who never studied at the last moment felt completely shook…! I didn’t knew what awaits in the examination room…what will the tiny letters on the question paper read…what will I do…how much I can remember…nothing…absolutely nothing…I was damn busy in reciting some tit bits like shlokas enchanted by a pundit…as I moved up the stairs…to my examination room…!

Sitting there and scratching lines as margins on the answer sheet…I could just give a glance to Rashmi…as she was the nearest hope I had out there…if I blundered! It was microprocessor…on day 1…!

I recited every possible prayer I knew…every possible god’s name…I knew…and I needed every bit of it…because…I really lacked conviction in myself that I can manage to move out of this allay…on a study as brief as a month and a half…though I must admit with out taking any credit from guys who manage to score well studying only in preparation leave of a length as long as 7 to 10 days…! There are many of them…..in an engineering batch…but I can’t do that…!

As the invigilator dropped the paper on my desk…I could not gather courage to sneak at it…but then…read the instructions…unlike my dear friend Rashmi…who does not bother to spent time on it…which said…Question 1 compulsory…so I managed to read that particular question and solved it…as I moved on paper seemed more of one that I can manage…and so did I. I was really very happy when the bell rang and it was one down…!

Next few were a bit easy because of the confidence booster that I got by surviving the initial blow…!

Examination came to end…along with the torture cell experience of viva…! Scores were out soon…and was a pretty nasty one…702…what read against my name…in comparison to some up there…! But I personally think…that was something very good…on what I did…and what we were at the beginning…!

There was also this heart failure fatal error made by our institute…A score that read against the good old green eyed dude…who excels in mathematics…unlike me…who’s a duffer in that field…

Applied Mathematics –III
Arpit Badjatya 08

And believe me…my phone did not stop ringing…as if it was me who checked his paper and gave him that ultimate glorious hard earned 8 marks…! Common…I am not his caretaker…or his sole proprietor…ask him…what did he do…who was in his thoughts when he did the paper…but that was a blunder as big as it could be…because when scrutinized…the marks turned out to be none less than…two fat ladies…88!!! I pity the boy…as no one told him his result……sorry champ…that is what friends are all about…!!!

The end of another bombshell semester! Finally we were on track for fronts like…no more shrinking semesters…no more branching processes…no more ragging…no more engineering drawings….!

The only bit to bother this time around was…campus recruitment process…our eligibilities…time when we’ll face them…rather will we anytime? … End of something…very unique…as was my ride…in the college…because not many study a squeezed semester…I think many a times…was that an achievement…was that something I should write in my resume…was that something I should boast of…but then…it was…what it had to be…!

No complaints…when life…wants to play its own path…what can you do…! Just play it safe!!! Cheers!