The wise chronicler apologizes for his long absence. Due to certain circumstances which will remain undisclosed, the magnanimous and verbose scribe of this record was unable to pen down these pearls which will no doubt go down in the annals of history as words to be reckoned with.

The following excerpt from our protagonist’s unfulfilled college life contains the tale of his first acquaintances at this new place. Much to his chagrin they remained his steadfast partners in crime throughout his four years in hell college.

The first day had almost drawn to an end. Although R was not much of an introvert, the entirely new culture at this rural stable had shaken him to his very core. At a loss for words, R had somehow slinked his way through most of the introductory classes, where clearly incapable teachers had steadfastly strived to deliver what they thought were particularly inspiring discourses in the desired conduct of a student throughout his years in education. Much like the previous sentence, these discourses were utterly incoherent and had made R a little nauseas and possibly diarrhea stricken.

The last two classes of the day were in the computer lab. The tables housing the unwieldy beasts that passed for computers here were brand new and hence were giving of that extremely virulent odour of polish and paint, both of which did nothing to improve R’s mood. He made his way to the most secluded corner of the lab and eased himself down on a chair whose only claim to that title was that it allowed someone to place their posterior upon its hard and lumpy surface. Shifting uncomfortably R looked around the room. He glanced over several people and somehow his eyes came to rest upon a duo.

Much like him this duo looked dumbfounded and morose, like a child does when it finds out that Santa Claus doesn’t exist. One of them was tall and lanky, wearing a shirt which was carefully arranged to look careless. The boy had long hair which was draped over his head like the curtains over the stage of an especially untidy theatre. The boy had the look of a person desperately trying to fit in where he couldn’t. R grunted to himself. He understood the sentiment.

The other boy was considerably bulky with generous chunks of fat clinging to his face and from the looks of it, trembling beneath his clothes. The boy was wearing a dirty cap which covered a small turban. He was also exceptionally hairy. Now of course the Sikh religion forbids them to cut off their hair, but this boy looked like he had hair in places he himself didn’t know existed. His expression was that of an agitated ape, just one banana away from losing his sanity.

Something about this duo made R get up and make his way over to them. They glanced up at him, hope suddenly lighting up their weary faces. R introduced himself concisely and then waited around for them to respond in kind.
“Hey,” said the lanky one introducing himself. The worthy chronicler takes this opportunity to name the lanky one DK, Run written last name first because the other way around would make for a hilarious breakdown in any company proficient in Hindi. The chronicler also bestows upon the other boy the name of Meddling Mannu, the reasons for which will be made clear in future texts. (Of course the name doesn’t leave much to the imagination, and the humble scribe accepts that his readers aren’t probably lacking in the grey cell area.)

DK grinned at R. “Wonderful place isn’t it?”
R grimaced and sighed. “Yeah well, for better or for worse we are stuck here for the next four years.”
Meddling Mannu smiled at this and cracked some fell joke which was as cheap as it was weird. Of course being young men, the other two roared their heads off upon hearing it. Even though neither of the two on future pondering would find it funny.

The next two hours passed pretty easily as these three got to know each other. They discussed the dirty washrooms, the bumbling baboons others would call their teachers and the disheartening lack of pretty faces to hit on. They even took the same college bus to reach their homes, where even more conversation was to be had. Phone numbers were exchanged as were vows to meet the next morning to board the same bus back to the college. All things considered R walked away from this encounter vaguely satisfied at having made some worthwhile friends. Maybe life wouldn’t be as hard as he had envisioned it.

Life, of course, didn’t share the same viewpoint.

Herein lies the story of a disinterested explorer exploring the wild wastelands of an exceptionally mediocre Indian Technology Institutes. You know, the kind of institute which makes a horrific accident involving multiple fractures and out-of-body guts seem like a pleasant dream. Needless to say, the faint of heart should look away.

When we last left our reluctant protagonist he had succeeded obtaining a much desired admission into a brand new and untested college. Of course succeeded is a relative term. And the irony wasn’t lost on R as he surveyed the under construction building which was going to be his ‘temple of knowledge’ for the next four years. He entered through the iron wrought gates and a chill ran up his spine. He had the distinct feeling that Hades was laughing at him from his comfortable throne in Tartarus while the Euphemides swooped ever closer.¹

The college bore a deserted look. While this might have been because there weren’t many students to populate it, it might have been more likely that in his excitement, R’s father had dropped off R entirely too early. Which he had. And R had time to kill in a place he didn’t want to spend any time in at all.

R slumped down onto the landing at the reception. Sitting on the floor fit in extremely well with how his life was going. He considered his options. It didn’t take him long seeing as he only had one. All of a sudden a sound broke through the eerie silence.

A car drew up to him. Someone inside tried to open the door and failed. Someone tried again and finally figured it out. Someone got out of the car. R looked up dispassionately. Someone turned out to be this old, bald guy who, as R would later learn, had extremely foul smelling breath.

Now there are two kinds of old, bald guys with foul smelling breath. There are the kind and cute grandfatherly types who give you candy and tell you long and meandering tales of their childhood when everything was inevitably better than everything that exists today. The kind of guys you can take the candy from and then safely ignore. The other kind consists of those who believe that every younger person (which at their age is mostly everyone and their uncle) is a detrimental effect to society and should be purged as soon as possible. The old, bald guy with foul smelling breath who had just stepped out of the car was definitely ensconced in the latter category.

All this ran a rather fast marathon through R’s head as the old, bald guy came up to him.
“Stand up,” he said in a voice that can only described as a blender on its last legs trying its best to blend a potent mixture of nails and human intestines. Which as this chronicler belatedly realises is hardly a description at all.

R stood up apprehensively. The old guy looked at him up and down. He gave him a look normally reserved for those weird nameless, creepy insects which show up only after torrential rains.
“What are you wearing?” he asked managing to fit in more disdain in the query than one would think an old guy ought to have.

R looked down at himself. For a fleeting moment he thought that he had forgotten to put on anything to cover his lower body. From his perspective, limited as it was, everything looked fine. All despicable body parts were appropriately covered.
“Uh… clothes…” R ventured doubtfully.
The old guy snorted derisively layering R in a few droplets of foul smelling mucous. “Didn’t you attend the orientation ceremony? Didn’t you hear the rules?”

R tried to think back on the past few days. He did remember some sort of function at the college, but he had been characteristically indifferent to it. So while he did remember a bunch of important sounding people trying to piece together some sort of speech while completely massacring the poor rules of the Good King’s English, he didn’t really remember much of what they had said. Not even the little he had understood.

“What rules?” R asked a little defiantly starting to get annoyed at this strange old man.
“The dress code, you impertinent little rapscallion!”² the old man bellowed spewing out even more of the mucous. “You are only allowed to wear formal shirts and trousers in the college premises.”
R let a faint grin break across his face. “You can’t be serious. There is nothing wrong with the way I’m dressed.”
“Yes there is, you punk. Its wholly indecent. If you are dressed the same tomorrow, I’ll personally chuck you out of the college. Consider yourself warned.” With this reprimand, the old, bald guy with the foul smelling breath stormed away.

R was a little taken aback but not really concerned. Old men are entirely within reason to be cranky and he didn’t mind. After all what could a random old man possibly do to him? He turned to a newcomer on the scene. A student by the looks of the bag slung across his shirt clad shoulders. R decided to be friendly.
“Who does that guy think he is?” he asked rhetorically expecting a grin and a shrug.
“Him? He’s the director of academics,” the student replied while scratching his thigh through his trousers. He didn’t even blink when he said that.

R started. He could see the portentous approach of the shackles of doom and reprisal. He sighed. He wasn’t going to like this college very much. Resigned to his fate he made his way into the college and began the quest to find his class.

---

1. Characters from Greek Mythology. Don’t expect this chronicler to explain. Wiser men have already done so if you’d only care to find out.

2. Of course none of this was actually spoken in true English. It merely consisted of Hindi with a few grammatically incorrect English sentences strewn in for good measure. The chronicler simply doesn’t want to sully his text with incomprehensible rubbish and takes refuge behind that stalwart defender of creative imagination called literary license.

Three, now coming up to four years ago, the sun rose rather unassumingly on an unremarkable day. For the mindless denizens scuttling around on the blue planet, it was a beginning of sorts. But then every day is.

A young, good looking boy with short hair and a gorgeous jaw line arose with reluctance. It wasn’t a day he wanted to experience. Freshly rankless in all engineering entrance examinations he was mildly discomforted. The beans he had gorged on the night before didn’t help matters either. Still he had breakfast to look forward to, after attending to matters in the loo of course.

Suddenly he groaned. He had just remembered. The counseling. Yes he had to travel to reach an aggravatingly distant counseling centre which promised him a faint hope of living out his dream. No, not the one with the bikini suits and martinis. The other one. The one which had him sitting on his butt, churning out software which made Steve Jobs and Bill Gates look like a collective band of clueless baboons. But then little did he know. They are already rich and life is a bitch.

College. The word which most fresh out of school teenagers associate with unprecedented freedom, sexual encounters and a lack of hygiene. Being a fresh out of school teenager himself, our protagonist was no different. Except for the exceptionally good looks. But more on that later.

Half an hour later, he emerged from the bath with dripping hair and an empty stomach. He passed his father on the way to the kitchen.
“Hey son,” the ever optimistic father said hoping to elicit a rare reply from the aforementioned son. “All set to decide your college life today?”
The son grunted disparagingly disappointing the father who had hoped for a lively discussion on last night’s cricket match. Still a grunt was better than the shrug he got on most days.

The boy, let’s call him R, called out to his diminutive yet surprisingly strong mother to feed him. She acquiesced giving him a plate of something which escapes this humble chronicler’s memory. R ate slowly while going over his short and eventless life. He sighed. His doting father mistook this as an opening for conversation.
“You know, you might get into a good college today. Anything might happen. Perhaps some seats are left in the good ones.”
R knew that this was false hope but he didn’t want an argument just now. “Yes father,” he said rolling his eyes when his father wasn’t looking.
“I mean I know this guy in my office whose son caught a lucky break yesterday. You might do the same.”
“Yes father.”
“Come on then. We haven’t got all day. Get dressed. We leave in an hour.”

***

Later that day, the family car drove across a dirt road into a dirty but popular college. So popular that it was the university counseling center for the entire region. R was asleep. It had been a long and boring drive. His father’s yelling woke him up.
“Get up you oaf,” thundered his father. Having to skip a relaxing lunch drove him into a foul mood. “We’re here.”

The family got out of the car and walked to the long line in front of the building. All engineering hopefuls accompanied by parents, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts and other various members of a typically huge Indian family. It was hot, and the air was stale carrying a extremely bad odour, an important component of which was sweat. R and his family joined the line. The line as lines go was fairly important. It led inside the building where the students would be directed to a computer lab where they could sit down at a computer after depositing the counseling fees and list out their preferred colleges and streams in order of preference. The order was important often leading to hilarious anecdotes about how someone looking for Computer Science in a grade A college ended up in Mechanical Engineering in an entirely different college whose only claim to fame was that it was listed higher in the alphabetical list of colleges. Hilarious to everyone except the poor guy who had just wasted his non refundable counseling fees.

The line crept forward slowly giving R’s mother the opportunity to fish out various homemade delicacies from her hand bag and feed her family. By the time R reached the front of the line he was properly filled up on paranthas and chappati rolls. He approached the desk. On the other side of the desk sat three bored university officials who had been doing this for the past three days and would be here for another four. One of them passed R a form, asking him to fill it out and deposit it upstairs with the demand draft for the counseling fees. R filled the form awkwardly while a woman behind him poked him with her hand bag while asking another official inane questions which he didn’t want to answer. The form itself was a useless page of bureaucracy. R did have an enrollment number which if entered into the university’s database it would like any self respecting database answer any question on the form in sufficient detail. But then the three officials would have been redundant. And God forbid they lose their jobs.

After groaning inwardly at his luck, R ascended the narrow and dark stairwell and made his way to the computer lab. There he deposited his demand draft and the form and was assigned a computer. The old and pitifully slow computer already had a browser page open. A volunteer behind him gave him instructions on what to do. Of course all R needed to do was select colleges and streams from two drop down lists and make a list of his preferences in order of priority. One would think that an engineering hopeful had sufficient computer skills to do this simple task, but that didn’t stop the volunteer from teaching R everything from grasping the mouse to clicking the submit button. Against all odds R did manage to make up a short list of colleges he would prefer.

The list was short because R was incompetent and as a result had attained a pathetically low rank. Thus he had been called for counseling on the fourth day, while higher ranked people had already filled the seats in the better colleges. In fact had three new colleges not opened up that very day, R would have been out of luck. Still R did choose the college with the best sounding name. For his troubles he was given a printout of the list and dismissed summarily. R groaned again. He had to return the next day to find out whether he had managed to scrape together a seat in the college.

To avoid making a long story even longer, R managed to get into the Computer Science branch in this new and unproven college. Only time would show whether he had chosen wisely. Or as was more likely had he made the biggest mistake of his life. But for now this wise chronicler has run out of time.