Ooty

This is one of the few diary entries I wrote on the batch trip. This simple night walk in Ooty will always remain with me as one of the fondest memories of the batch trip.

Walking on the hill streets in the night is like, in many ways, reading a book. Everything comes to you in black and white, and it’s left up to you to fill in the colours.

It is a reader’s delight, though. As you wonder off into the night to scale the streets of upper Ooty, the Enid Blyton novels savored in the long gone years of childhood come alive in front of your eyes. The British architecture gels so well with the natural beauty of the hills that after a point it becomes difficult to tell one from the other.

The road snakes through the hills. On one side, the sloping hills end in a grey stone wall, and on the other, the valley is protected from the road by an ivy covered wire railing which looks as old as the British rule itself. On both sides of the road stand oak, deodar and chir trees. Stalwart, yet humble sentries, tilting a bit on the top to meet each other over the narrow street, as if forming a canopy to welcome you to their home.

Walking away into these upper streets is like delving deeper and deeper into your Enid Blyton. The lights from the valley keep peeping in every now and then from behind the ivy and deodar curtain, carry with them the British style sloping roof houses and white churches located down there. Narrow streets, little more than metaled footpaths actually, occasionally digress from the main road to end in gates marking the entrance to some age-old colonial property. Attempting to follow them, one ends up encountering address plates which say something like Kel Marsh, Haydock House, Colson Street, making one wonder if one really was in India, and not in some British rural idyll. Not infrequently, these properties, to mark their entrance bear two pillars surmounted by entrance lights, and nothing more. The ways of the world, it seems, will still take a while to catch up with this place.

It’s 3 o’clok in the night, and the next action packed day starts at 6. Inhaling the perfume the earth has prepared after the evening’s rain, you start walking back to the lodge. Crickets and warts are having a ball in the surrounding woods. Down in the valley town, a few dogs are barking. An occasional truck passes by on the highway a few kilometers further ahead.

You keep walking, and looking at the trees, the ivy, the hills and the barely visible sky, you try to figure out what color they would look under the sun, from the different shades of grey they give off under the half moon. Walking down the same street you walked up five minutes ago can be lonely, and to pass time, you think of adding some more music to this black and white movie unfolding before you. You play the music in your mind. And then you break into the tune.

But as soon as you listen to the sound of your own voice, for the first time in all these years you are disappointed. Because you realize that unfolding before you is one movie which has been provided enough music by nature itself, and can do without further human intervention. Having committed the cardinal sin of breaking the stillness of the night, but having taken your lesson nevertheless, you proceed towards your lodge.

Half an hour later, as you snuggle inside your sleeping bag, you realize that things are somehow not the same. The some part of this precolonial night time Ooty has followed you home, to probably stay with you forever.

 

The journey

Sitting inside,
peering out of the windows of,
dangling from the doors of,
or traveling atop
the luxury bus

its air, conditioned
from all dust, smoke and soot,

and in august, pure company
of a hundred beautiful people

we looked down upon
those
running helter skelter
unprotected, alone
on the road outside.

Only to become one of them
after a four year long
unforgettable journey.

 

Memorabilia

Empty chips packets, bought to stave off the mind numbing hunger which results from missed lunches. Fruit peels, the reminders of the promises of a healthy lifestyle made to self over the years. Piles and piles of newspapers, drooled over during exams, untouched otherwise. Except for special reasons.

CAT and placement books on the table – reminders of those bygone times when I used to think about studying. The entire wardrobe on the backrests of the chair of the bed. Colorful, random crumbs on one particular pair of jeans. Remind me of that crazy farewell drink.

Eggs, egg peals, chaney, Tiger Balm – remnants of the sports day.

A few black wristbands, random gifts I picked from Tirupati for my sisters, never presented it to them. A green pen, bought long ago, for no particular reason. An orange colored whistle, looted from Himank on our awesome last cult nite.

A pair of scissors, bought to trim nose hair. Small pin-up national flags, long preserved on the window sill. Broken pairs of glasses, from one of the dirt football matches. A small lock whose keys I lost somewhere.

A game of cube I could never solve. Coins left randomly here and there. In times when the need to really scrounge for money arose, their predecessors always showed themselves up out of the un-likeliest of corners.

Question papers, memorabilia of all those dreaded times one could never wait to get out from.

The dust on the guitar, the less than perfect laptop and the huge Shield won on the sports day.

And finally, the reminder pads and sticky notes, bought to remind myself of cleaning the room, and later cosigned to the piles of debris.

Such richness, so many souvenirs. It never ceases to amaze me how much memorabilia you can collect only if you don’t clean up your room!

And just to think that after tomorrow, it’ll all be gone…

 

Post farewell

The boys radiate with smiles
and the girls,
the girls are all beautiful.

It was a race,
a four year long
relay race.
We switched vehicles, and made pals
in those, who we
happened to ride beside with.

We wished all well,
but looked at them
only from time to time.
Had to have an eye on the road.
It’s tough to make love
while on the move.

The race is over now,
and we all sit on the finish line
lying on our backs,
rubbing our shoulders
stretching our legs
savoring the high
of finishing a hard-run lap.

And we see others around us
sweet summer sweat
oozing everywhere
wiping off the heat,
the dust, the grime of the races
from all the splendid faces
And we realize that that was how they had been
radiant, shining, handsome.

We’ll all run different races now
but as of now, they seem far away.
And as we bask in the sweet glory
of finishing one long, satisfying, fulfilling run

The boys, they radiate with smiles
and the girls,
the girls look just beautiful.

 

How our lives have changed!

Change is the only thing constant in the world. But with the breathtaking (or breakneck) pace of growth of technology in the past thirty years or so, the world and people’s lives have been changing faster now than probably at any time during history.

Changes bring about differences between eras, and the life of a student passing out from a place like IIIT/ IIT today is vastly different from one passing out, say, ten years ago. The flow of time will bring about more changes, and life of an average student will be different ten years from now. This post is a humble effort to see some of the differences between the lives of us/ our seniors/ our juniors.

On our part, we do not know a world without:

1. Internet: From your daily life, try to subtract academic Google search, non-academic Google search, Gtalk chats, blogs, and DC++. No, don’t continue reading. Stop. And imagine.

Difficult, isn’ it?

Were we born about ten years ago, we would have passed through college without using the internet. I’m not passing any value judgment whether it would have been for better or for worse, but it surely would have been a totally different ‘you’. In what ways, can you imagine?

2. Mobile phone: Okay, there would have been a few more STD phones in the hostel, and things would have been just fine as long as talking home is concerned. But I wonder how the girl/ boy friends of the previous generation fulfilled their urges, given that there was no GTalk, either.

For those who work for things like these, imagine managing Felicity without cellphone.

3. Corporate jobs: The late Narsimha Rao and Manmohan Singh opened up India’s economy in 91. Its effects on the lives of people like ourselves started being noticed in the lae 90s, when people started getting fat salaries, and things like ‘placement’ and ‘package’ suddenly found a place in almost every Indian dictionary.

Suddenly, the demand for a seat in IIT/ IIM skyrocketed, coaching centres mushroomed and our parents started tailored our lives so as to make us maximum suitable for a seat in IIT/ IIM.

Hard to imagine people like ourselves starting our careers at about half the salaries of our fathers and IITs being just a wee bit more than any other colleges, isn’t it?

In addition, our juniors won’t know a world without:

4. Digi/ mobile cam: By the time you leave from college, you all will have in excess of 1 GB of pics. Maybe even ten times that. And without having directly paid for a single shot.

A few years ago, there used to be 36 shots cameras, and people had to pay about 10 bucks apiece for every single shot. This is something we have seen, but the kids coming up in the next few years will find hard to imagine. Just like we find hard to imagine a world minus internet and mobile phones. .

5. Dish TV. It came about in the early 90s. Some of us remember how it was like to live with, and love the good ol’ Doordarshan. I, on my part, grew up without a TV in my home for the major part of my childhood. Try telling that to a 22-year old ten years from now.

6. IPL/ T20 cricket. Some of us may scoff at it, but for the kids growing up now, probably this is THE cricket.

Faster, more resourceful life with many more physical comforts. But is it necessarily more enriching?

Changes will come, and it’s impossible to predict how and when, as all it takes is one bright idea (out of potentially millions) to revolutionize the world. Here’s to those changes, and to the hope that collectively they be for the better of our world!

PS: If there are more points you might want to add, I throw open the comments section to you

 

“Feathers” – IIIT Poetry Read Meet

TO: Students@students.iiit.ac.in

CC: ramancharla@iiit.ac.in

Dear poetry lovers,

You’re once again accorded a warm invitation to “Feathers” – IIIT’s own poetry read meet.

Date: Saturday, 14th March
Time: 6:00 PM
Venue: 3**, Main Building
Language of recital: Any under the sun (including any you might have invented). So far I’ve received entries only for Hindi, English, Telugu, though.

Some guidelines for the POETS –

FIRSTLY, you should bring your poetry in some form (i.e. hard copy, soft copy on a pen drive etc) with you. __DO_NOT__ rely on your memory – Read Meets can take their toll and your own poetry, among other things, might start escaping you after a while.

SECONDLY, if you want your audience to grasp your poetry better, you might as well bring print outs for them too, so that they may read AND listen. Around 20-30 photocopies of your poetry should do. If you’re loathe to take out so many copies, don’t worry and just mail the pieces you plan to read to me. I’ll bring the printouts for you. Honest.

THIRDLY, this will be a reading ALOUD session. You’ll have to __PERFORM__ your poetry. No restrictions here – you can simply read aloud your poem, or sing it, or sing it on the guitar, or dance on it, or whatever.
–> You may use any number and kind (with some discretion) of props for your performance.
Only constraint is, it has to be __YOUR__OWN_WORK__.
–> There’s one strong disincentive for a bad performance – The audience will be armed with newspapers and will be free to throw them at you.

FOURTHLY, you__WILL __HAVE__TO__DRINK__COFFEE__. No poetry without coffee. The first three guidelines are negotiable, but no compromise on this one. Period. And don’t worry, there’ll be enough for everybody.

`

Guidelines for the AUDIENCE:

FIRSTLY, note the time and place carefully.

SECONDLY, there’ll be newspapers (to be improvised as missiles on the poets) for you.

THIRDLY, throwing missiles on the organizers will be strictly prohibited.

FOURTHLY, there will be coffee for you, too, but __ONLY__IF __ there are enough of you present.

Thank you.
Aniket Sharma
Magazine Club.

PS: Can’t believe you went through all this! Anyways, see you there.

PPS: For those on the students list, you must have read this already (I hope you must have), and for those no longer on the list, well, you know all about it now. Let’s make Feathers a part of IIIT. Just like the Bloggers’ Day. Cheers!

 

Scribe

“Hello, Where are you, sir?”
“I’m in front of the school building, Shekar, where are you?”
“Even I’m in front of the building, sir…”
I raised a hand, and moving it so as to catch attention, I did a full 360 degrees, looking around for someone talking on the phone. I registered no one.
Still waving, I said, “Shekar, do you see me…?”
“Uh, umm…”
And almost as soon as I’d said it, I wished I could eat those words.
Of course Shekar didn’t see me.
That was because Shekar couldn’t see. If he could, there was no need for me to be there.
He was one of the students of the Special School for whom a group of us from Samvedana were acting as ’scribes’, for their intermediate AP Board examinations.

Lost for words, I raced my mind for another plausible question which he could answer to reveal his location to me.
“Uh, okay, what colour shirt are you wearing, Shekar?”
“Umm, black sir, it’s black.”
I was out of the school campus now. Looking around, I saw at some distance what appeared to me to be a group of visually impaired kids. One of them was talking animatedly on his cellphone. I went to him.
“Hey, are you Shekar?”
The voice recognition was instant. “Ohh, Aniket sir.”
“Yes, Shekar, how are you?”
I held out a hand, only to keep staring at it for about ten seconds. Finally, I extended the arm and patted him on the shoulder.

He was wearing a maroon-colored T Shirt.

The exam was Hindi, and by conventional standards, Shekar wasn’t very good at it. Neither had I expected him to be. After all, hailing from a village in Andhra, he isn’t supposed to know Hindi in the first place. But far above anything else, he doesn’t read, and he doesn’t write. Whatever he knew was what he had remembered from what a dedicated teacher had read to him.

He knew the Antonyms and Synonyms very well. But when it came to doing sentence correction, he simply fluttered his blank eyes with all the more fervor. And had all of them wrong. I had anticipated this situation, and had planned to write as much as I could for him. Also, I had resolved to let this be his knowledge that I was writing whatever he was telling me to. But now I was mired in dilemma. Didn’t Shekar deserve to know the exact place he had carved out for himself in this world full of kids more advantaged than himself? Should the chance of this one humble, but true pride be denied to him? Or should it be the case that given his condition, he should be allowed to use as much luck as came his way? Will it be luck at all to get more marks than what he actually deserved? Or did he deserve more than what he actually would have got under a neutral scribe, and thus a partial scribe was only a fair thing to have?

What will be better for him? Knowing exactly where he stood in the world, or the confidence boost that inevitably comes after a good score in the exams, howsoever may it have been acquired?

The exam got over, we gave them chocolates and packed their bags, and Sushant, my co-scribe for another kid and I asked them who was coming to take them home. There was some confusion at first, but a few phone calls here and there (the kids kept some important phone numbers to memory) confirmed that they were going on their own.

Sushant and I were worried, and asked them whether we could walk them to the nearest bus stop at least. But they insisted on going by themselves. Concerned, we kept watching as they walked down the road for some distance, and then stopped. Sushant and I, convinced that they were in trouble, went to them to offer help, but we needn’t have worried; as soon as we came within earshot, we realized that they had stopped only to do some BC and to discuss about the paper.

We, the eyed ones entered a nearby shop to have a pepsi. The three and a half hour exam had been tiring for us, too. As we came out of the shop, we saw the kids at the far end of the road, barely visible now.

While on the way to IIIT, Sushant revealed to me that Sujaykar, the kid he had been writing for, had solved almost the entire Sanskrit paper, and could easily expect 95+ marks. Sushant had assured him that his paper had been written in a very legible hand, and that he could expect excellent marks from the paper. At this, Sujaykar had told him that he wasn’t worried about passing or failing. That the results were all up to God.

Indeed it must be this faith which keeps their hopes and sincerity up in these times when people with everything provided for are giving up. As the picture of the kids, walking down the far end of the road and farther away from us came to my mind, I wondered how far would I have gone.

Thanks, Samvedana, for providing me with this wonderful experience. Let’s go some distance along the steps we have taken.

 

I ε {class of 2009}

(Wearing our first batch TShirt in these final moments of our BTech got me thinking thus…)

What kind of a people are we?

If there is one defining characteristic of our batch, what is it?

We’re all reasonably good at studies. And we all like BCing and leg-pulling and basically chilling out and having clean, harmless fun. We’ve had some ups and downs, sweet moments and sour in the past three and a half years. When I try to look at my experiences and what I know of my batchmates’ from a bird’s eye view, one central theme becomes very visible to me, which I think defines our batch to a good extent. And that, I think, is our quality of endurance.

Flamboyant brilliance was never a part of our DNA. Unlike 2k2, we didn’t have six-foot giants mauling everyone on the sports fields. Or ultra-confident devil-may-cares capable of showing the middle finger to anyone. 2k3 undoubtedly had the best ever in almost every sport played in IIIT, and the best ever musicians ever to enter IIIT. 2k2 and 2k3, it is also said, had the toughest gamers ever. 2k4 were decent at most things, leadership included and got by far the highest number of awards I know of any batch. 2k3 and 4 also produced stud results in CAT and GRE. They got excellent placements in great companies. Our juniors are yet to show their full mettle, but even they have a fair sprinkling of individual geniuses in different fields.

So where does that leave us, the 2k5? When people from our and our neighbor batches remember us for our college life ten years from now, how many ’studs’ will they be able to recall?

There are definitely a few, but I’d argue that more than people who astonish the world with their brilliance, 2k5 is about people who started from behind and worked their way up, slowly and painstakingly without anyone knowing about it till it happened.

2k5 is about being a girl from a village and then coming to IIIT and getting a 1500+ score in GRE. It’s about not touching a computer till coming to IIIT, and then (not) sleeping in the labs for three years to become a world renowned coder, or a linux geek. It’s about giving an amused smile (and not showing the finger) to the world when it tells you to do something, and then putting your head down and writing an international level paper on your own. Or deciding to pursue a PhD in psychology after everyone has recognised you as a potential brilliant computer scientist. Or starting with it and soon making professional level designs and cartoons right here in IIIT.

It’s not about being a genius athlete from the start, but about starting with sports in the final year and playing for your batch and house and winning medals on the Sports Day. It’s about being from a village, listening to your first English song and touching the guitar after coming to IIIT, being ridiculed publicly by all and sundry for your accent, and then creating a rock band and performing a rock number on the Felicity stage.

Above all, it is about working day and night for the placements so that your batchmates get the best deal, despite yourself not having been placed. And still above, it’s about not letting a personal tragedy ruin you, but about channelizing those feelings to help those in need, and turning it into a mass movement.

There aren’t more than a few people in our batch whom others would gape at in astonishment. Less of the Sachins or Sehwags, that is. But in their place, a number of Kumbles and Dravids and Srinaths, who capture less attention, but end up achieving no less, and in some sense even more than their more noticed counterparts at the end of the day.

We have stood united (cliche? no, for this once, not just) and together we achieved a few things which might seem modest, but had actually been rejected as impossible in the beginning. 2k5 is about creating basketball and football teams from scratch by actually training the entire teams from scratch and then achieving balanced results against more experienced players. It’s about coming from behind and beating a team full of proper cricketers to lift the cricket trophy. In no small measure, it’s about starting writing and slowly developing into a batch of bloggers.

It’s about inheriting a huge load of expectations and still managing to take Felicity to the next level.

It’s about providing to the college an unpleasantness free Felicity and an unpleasantness-free inter house sports for once. It’s about standing together in desperate times, through fucked-up, frustrating placements, and still not allowing for cheating, or unpleasantness to happen.

`

At the end of the day, we didn’t get good placements or good results in CAT. If anyone says that collectively we have had a good start to life, he’s kidding you. We haven’t.

But then, we never did get good starts at anything, did we? And we always made good, didn’t we?

Sometimes I wonder why the tide had to turn the other way just when our turn came. But maybe it’s meant as an opportunity to bring the best out of us.

So let’s endure on, 2k5. Let’s not worry about what people say, and let’s just keep at it, like we always have. All will be well.

 

You know that quitting smoking wasn’t a bad idea after all, when

1. You finish the 1500m race with a silver medal and a timing of 5:16 without any practice. The year before, with two months’ rigorous practice, it had barely come down to 5:30 when you were still smoking.

2. You finish 10k, then 20k and then you start doing it regularly within a month. The earlier maximum had been 9k.

3. Your lips don’t look so dark anymore.

4. You smell someone smoking, and feel nauseated. How could I have taken that stuff in all those years?

5. You go home and don’t have to go paranoid about stuff emerging from your pockets.

6. You don’t have to worry about erasing the smell from your mouth. Be it before going to class or home.

7. You travel in a train, and don’t have to bear the stinking washrooms to have that smoke.

8. You suddenly have a lot more money to spend than you had before.

9. You spit out some cough, and for the first time in years, there’s no trace of black in it. And finally,

10.You handle not just exams, but bigger stuff like CAT, placements without cigarettes, and then get the awesome sweet feeling that you did it without them.That you gave your best, and there was no nicotine punching you through this time, and thus the results were all yours, and nobody, or nothing, else’s.

It’s six months now. And God willing, never again.

 

निशानची

पिछली कुछ पोस्ट्स से एक बड़ा अजीब सा ट्रेंड आ गया है इस ब्लॉग पर. बड़े और घमंडी नेता जिस तरह सभा को भाषण पिला कर बिना किसी से कुछ कहे सुने हवाई जहाज़ में उड़ जाते हैं, कुछ कुछ वैसे ही मैं भी यहाँ कविता बस मार दे रहा हूँ. आप लोगों से सीधा संवाद हो ही नहीं पा रहा है. साथ ही गद्य लिखे हुए अरसा हो गया है. इसे रचनात्मकता को पुनर्जीवित करने के लिए लिया गया एक ‘क्रिएटिव ब्रेक’ कहने की लंगडी कोशिश मैं कितनी ही कर लूँ, सचाई यही है की इन दिनों इस संवादशून्यता के पीछे मेरा आलस ही जिम्मेदार है, और कुछ नहीं.

चलिए इसी गिले शिकवे के बहाने कुछ सीधी बात ही हो गई. ये कविता पिछले दिनों लिखी थी. बताइए कैसी लगी. और एक अगली पोस्ट जल्दी ही लिखूंगा.

कुछ और नहीं, तो आप लोगों से किया गया ये वादा मुझे आलस छोड़ने की याद ही दिलाता रहेगा!

निशानची

निशानची
बन्दूक उठाता है
निशाना लगाता है
हर उस चीज़ पर
जिस पर निशाना लगाने की
कीमत मिल रही हो.

न उसकी आँख फड़कती है
न उंगली कांपती है.
जीवित – मृत , जड़-  चेतन
गर्भवती- जर्जर, दोषी – निर्दोष
देखता है हर लक्ष्य को बन्दूक की नाल के परे
और दबा देता है घोड़ा.

फिर संभालता है अपने पैसे,
जाकर कहीं तर करता है गला,
देखता है नाच- गाना
और सो जाता है,
सुबह उठकर फ़िर से निशाना लगाने के लिए.

अच्छा पैसा,
काम में महारथ,
आराम की ज़िन्दगी.

सब कहते हैं कि वह खुश है
पर पी कर कई बार वह मुझसे कह चुका है
कि यार, ऐसा क्यूँ नहीं होता
कि किसी के घावों पर मरहम लगा कर
उसे सीने से लगा लेने
के भी अच्छे पैसे मिल जाते.