A Quantum Step

Quark was the first respite students got from the monotony of the mess. For twenty years prior, studentkind had walked into the same mess hall for every meal, tucked into the same rice-dal-chappati routine, drank off the same cooler, and belched in identical flavors. Rasam was on tap twice a day; sambar maybe even three. You had your Model T. And, yes, it was black.

Quark changed all that, thanks to three intrepid pioneers: Sheikh, Suku and Tony. From our wing in Narmada, they conceived and planned the first ever concept for a student cafeteria on campus. Late at night they conspired, argued, and cursed until Sheikh talked the talk, Suku mocked it, and Tony walked it.

I have no idea why they called it Quark. It’s possible that Higgs Boson was taken.

The menu was decided. Quark would launch with cheese toast, pizza and milkshakes. Cold coffees would come later. A counter was set up in the open quadrangle between Saras and Godav.  Cinder blocks, scattered about like eruption ejecta, would serve as seats. There was a market. There was a product. There was an A+ founding team.

One place the founding team sadly fell short was in spotting talent. For the position of the first manager of Quark, they put in place the peerless Vanavamalai. If you knew him, and you’re not already wearing a smile on your face as you read this, please check with your doctor on your Botox job.

Vanavamalai was a piece of work. He had never been in the food business before. Or in any other business. Or in any other anything. Simple things excruciated him. A small chore was a root canal. His rampant errors fed his nervous tension which in turn fed even more errors, in endless recursion. I can flat out tell you that Mahatma Gandhi was better cut out for sumo wrestling.

A typical Quark evening started off around 7:30. A few stragglers who had missed dinner at the mess might get things going, and the pace would slowly pick up. By about ten, the place would be bustling with students who turned up to pass time, smoke a cigarette, bum one, avoid work, gossip, and pass more time. Vanavamalai was unwittingly thrust into the middle of it all.

Two sarklet millsake! (that is, chocolate milkshake, for non-Pondicherry French speakers)
Two guys from Saras arise and start to walk over, chappals flapping in the dust. A frantic amendment follows.
No! No! No! One banana, one sarklet.
Two Jamunites perk up and make a beeline. Two more who actually ordered cold coffees pick up their shoulder bags and head over – just in case. All six converge at the counter, just as Gangadhar sets down two banana milkshakes.

Gangadhar was Vanavamalai’s reluctant deputy and backoffice manager. He cleaned the dishes, worked the blender and made the toasts, while Vanavamalai tussled with customers at the line of scrimmage.

Chaos erupts as the parties begin to wrangle.
“Vanavamalai, I asked for two chocolate milkshakes.”
“No saar, you order colcofy.”
“What cold coffee! I ordered choco…”
“OK saar, ok saar. It will make. Please wait.”
 Turning to the other two:
“You ask colcofy? Here, you take colcofy.”
“But Vanavamalai, I asked for one banana and one chocolate. Also you are putting two banana!”
At this point, Vanavamalai looks down and notices the two banana milkshakes he must work with. His tactics change.
 “Sorry saar, but you take banana today. Tomorrow we adjust...”

… and it would go on and on in a unending comedy of errors. Tempers would flare, orders would get backed up, toasts would burn, and bread would run out before the small matter of the milkshakes got resolved. Vanavamalai made Uncle Podger look like W Edwards Deming.

Two seize toast, one pissa!
The high reedy voice sends the throng around the counter into a dither. Should I claim it? Should I not? Will I ever get my cheese toast? Suddenly a hand appears from over a shoulder and seizes one of the toasts. Other eager hands thrust forth to claim the remaining plates, like disaster victims clutching out at food aid. Vanavamalai watches helplessly. Gangadhar snickers at the back. The cheese toasts vanish and a flurry of reorders are screamed out in frustration...

Well after midnight, a brow-beaten Vanavamalai would emerge at our wing to bring in the day’s take and to account for the numbers. I could hear the whole thing from a few rooms away and even catch the sincerity in his nervous chatter. Each night, Sheikh would vacillate between berating the poor fellow, and counseling him. I would hear phrases like, “Vanavamalai, you are a good fellow. But you need to relax a bit.”  On occasion, Sheikh would come over and ask me to engage him in Tamil.

"Can you give this guy some advice?" he would implore me.

Yey-nna Malai! I would start, with exaggerated accent... which always managed to coax a wee smile out of him.

Learning Trades

For the first three or four semesters we had to take workshop classes to build purported hands-on experience. The real intent was to deny you an afternoon nap.

Many of the workshop foremen were in on this cruel conspiracy. Short Cock was one among them. A forensic specimen for the short-man syndrome, he settled his scores at the workshop. Anyone present would remember the session where he lifted his head to look past the students gathered around him, point at the back and snarl: You! Get off that stool! The crowd parted to reveal Alex, the tallest student, at six feet three inches. Short Cock shrank impossibly further into his shoes, as the laughter poured in.

We had workshops in smithy, carpentry, fitting, lathes and milling, foundry and welding. The fitting shop brings back the worst memories, with its dreaded “channel” exercise. You were given a U-shaped iron channel, four inches long and about three inches high, whose raised sides had to be filed down with a hand-file – down to a flat plate. This might sound innocuous, but I urge you to wait till you do the numbers.

On a good day, each stoke of a sharpened file would shave off about one micron of metal. Now, many of the files had worn teeth. Moreover, in any given Madras afternoon, at least half your strokes would lack true commitment. So if you accounted for all this and resigned yourself to working at roughly the rate of your heartbeat, you could have yourself that flat plate in about seven years. The routine came straight out of the Gulag. It had no other purpose but to break you down.

The simplest way to beat the system was to use the edge of your file to work multiple deep grooves into the raised sides, before using the flat face again to fervently even them out. Of course, this innovation was forbidden – no surprise there! If discovered, you were handed a brand new channel and life started all over again in the dump. This happened to me and the sheer depravity of the ordeal uncurled my hair for three whole days.

The exercise at the welding shop was to put down a weld bead along a groove between two metal plates, to fuse them together. It looked fatuously simple when the instructor demonstrated it. First, he would thrust out a face protector, like a gladiator approaching a lion. Peering through its tiny filter, he would point a long electrode towards the beginning of the groove, stopping dead 3 millimeters from the metal, just in time to start up a beautiful electric arc. In one straight smooth pass over the intended seam, he would deposit one straight smooth weld, stepping back to leave the plates cleanly jointed and parallel. Voila!

Then it was your turn. When you first peer through the face protector, you see absolutely nothing. Nada! You then stagger towards the table, dangling the electrode from your fingers like a depleted bottle of rum. Hold the electrode too far away from the metal and you’ll never see an arc; hold it too close and it will sickeningly stick itself onto the metal plate, killing any arc that might have mercifully started.

If you could hold your hand, rock steady, between 2.9 and 3.1 millimeters from a flat plate while looking through an X-ray sheet, I’d say you got it licked. But failure got so predictable that if you heard anyone say Fuck!, you knew he had just gotten his rod stuck. At the end of this inevitable lose-lose situation, what you had in front of you were two metal plates stuck unpredictably together, like Siamese twins.

You learned a lot about your classmates and where they would wind up, by just watching them in the workshop. Some were naturally gifted. Skilled with their hands, they finished their models true and fast and had enough time to help out the losers. In time, they would become leaders of men. I helped too, in my own way. When the roll call was called out, I would squeak out a muffled YesSir to cover for a friend napping at the hostel. I should have quit right then and taken up ventriloquism.

Some of the guys were cheats. They would scour the back rooms, looking for previously completed models that could be reconditioned and passed off as their own. Most of them would make it to the trading floors of Wall Street.

A few were perfectionists who would work up a lather even in the writhing Madras heat. I remember watching one such at the welding shop. He just couldn’t come to terms with his genetic inability to lay down a weld. The damn rod just kept getting obstinately stuck onto the plate, like a magnetic doorknob that got too close. Throwing away his face protector, he confronted the arc with naked eyes and poisonous intent. I didn’t stay long enough to see what happened, but he did indeed become a world famous computer scientist and inventor.

My seven year old daughter will be welding bare-eyed this summer.

The Curious Case of the Two Syllabi

No matter what your engineering major, you had to get through some common subjects. Electrical engineering was one of them and it was dished out over two courses. This was a minefield for minimalists like me because you couldn’t solely rely on a strong basic science foundation established before IIT, to see you through. So all bets were off. 

Everything in here was brand spanking new: transistors, diodes, junctions, PNP, bandgaps, doping... This was way down the river from Ohm’s law and Kirchhoff’s laws, which is as far as I had ridden the boat. 

Whenever I find out that singularly clever reason why I decided to build on this natural disadvantage by not attending any of the classes, I will let you know. Not one! I’d even skipped all the intermediate tests. What was I thinking? 

Came the night before the final exam and I had to make the call: Do I even show up for the exam, or take it on the chin and write the whole thing off as a bad memory? Truant as I was, this was as extreme as things had gotten.

So I walk down a few rooms from mine and seek counsel from the sage STS. 

Now STS was remarkably unique in many ways, and I’ll start with some of the least of them. He was the only guy on campus who managed a full-grown beard and one, of maybe two, with a girlfriend. Seventy nine percent of all the calls that rang the hostel phone were intended for him; one hundred percent of them were from Sharanya. Both would gladly have improved upon these numbers, had the phone not been dangling off the hook for roughly forty three percent of the time. 

STS washed clothes with missionary zeal and more immaculately than the hostel dhobi. Sadly, they were always his own. When Madras was hit by water shortage, he paced his room for months in a blue funk. 

He was also extremely smart and methodical and had both the talent and patience to succinctly explain Lagrangian mechanics to a slightly dim orangutan. 

So now you can see for yourself why I hit him up for advice. I ask him frankly if it was even worth the exercise to try out the exam. He assures me that it was quite easy actually. A 40+ out of a 50 in the final would allow you to pass the whole course, even with nothing on the scoreboard yet. All we needed was to just get a few principles down and smartly focus on the problem-oriented topics where we’d likely be tested. 

I get so convinced so fast that I rope in Annie. Annie is a whole story by himself that I’ll have to save for separate narration, perhaps a few. Suffice to say that he had also missed all the classes, but suffering none of the turmoil I did, was listening to Dire Straits in Suku’s room. I convince Annie that we can jointly make it through this one. 

STS coaches us gingerly for a few hours, peeling back his explanations to address shocking gaps. He even leaves us with his notes when he's done. Astonishingly, his newest students start to brim with confidence. 

The next morning finds us sharp and ready at the Electrical Sciences department waiting for the exam to start. I look at the first page and see several questions that I can hunt down. This is good! The answerable list actually starts to grow as I run my eyes down. What a lovely turn of events! 

Just as I am about to tuck in my grin and get started, I notice some odd notes at the top of the exam paper. It goes something like this: 

Electrical Sciences II – Final Exam 

All A and B Batch students must answer questions 1-12 in Section I and all C and D Batch students must answer questions 13-24 in Section II.

What the heck was that about? 

According to this ordinance, as a D-batcher I’m supposed to answer 13-24. I turn the page to get there. I may as well have been looking at an exam in clinical nephrology. A left hook from Muhammad Ali would have felt like a motherly caress right now. 

Recovering, I put my hand up and hail the professor. 

“Sir, I am a D batch student. Can I just do the questions for the A batch students”? 

“No”. 

“Sir, I prepared well for the other syllabus – the one for the A and B batches. I don’t know any of the questions in this one. Please let me take the other one… I am actually well prepared for it.” 

He looks at me like a dog breeder who’s just stumbled upon a pink hairless breed. 

“What’s your name? How come I’ve never seen you in the class?” 

My train just got derailed. I get up, hand over a blank paper, and leave the classroom. It’s barely been ten minutes into the exam. My mind is in a tizzy. I try and reassure myself. You gave it your best shot under the circumstances. 

I stumble out and just stare at a notice board to calm things down a bit. Totally irrelevant stuff. Out of the corner of my eye, I see another person down the corridor. He’s reading another notice board, far down. It’s Annie! He’d been in another classroom. And he had played out the same movie, with an equally unforgiving instructor. 

We trudge back to the hostel. Now we'd have to face Sheikh. Our comrade-in-arms, he had derided our approach the previous night even as he turned in early. Now we'd gifted him a good laugh to go with his good sleep. 

I just hope that they have good egg curry for lunch.

The Lights Coordinator

Sajai was hip. He rode a motorcycle on campus. Just two others did. Each year, Sajai broke a different bone riding that bike. The bike didn't seem to mind. So one evening in our first year and his third, when he showed up at Mandakini hostel (in a cast) looking for some volunteers, I was amicably predisposed.

It was early January and Mardi Gras, our cultural festival, was around the corner. Any number of events masquerading as culture would be squeezed into this format. Among them was music—perhaps the most deserving of the moniker—itself, diced into Light, Classical, Carnatic, Western and other strains. Sajai, as Western Music Coordinator, was to organize the most popular event of the fest. Listeners liked the genre, but liked better what they were doing as they liked it. I was only in my first year and there were many ropes to be learned.

So after Sajai completed his impassionate pitch in the common room, I raised my hand and signed up for service. I was assigned to the 101st Airborne Division that would be dispatched to the Pacific theater. Almost. I was asked to be in charge of stage lighting and was given the title of Lights Coordinator that came with neither rank nor stripe. At that time I had no experience in this, or anything else for that matter. Sajai assured me that it would be a cakewalk and he looked like he generally knew what he talked about.

The equipment was awesome. Amps, power amps, equalizers, speakers, synthesizers… lots of hardware. Just as my excitement mounted, I had to ratchet it down when I discovered that all this was the playing field of the Sound Coordinator.

The Lights Coordinator had something decidedly more mundane. He worked a few boxes that operated the lights on the stage. There were three of them: green, red, and I think yellow. Each had a dial that you turned up to take up the intensity of that color. If you worked two of them in opposition, you could drench the stage in the color you turned up. The process was completely manual, which I liked, because you called all the shots.

You have a ear for music, just go with the flow—was all the advice I got. I think we might have had a dry-run or two but I can’t really recall them.

Mardi Gras soon got under way and it was the night of the western music competition. The location was the OAT, right under the stars. The place was packed with people, not one over twenty five. Things started up slowly as teams took their time tuning up their instruments and priming their youthful voices to get them properly hoarse. I had a control table with my boxes laid out in front of me and was working my way into a groove.

An hour into it, things were up several notches. The audience was on its feet clapping, cheering, hooting, swaying, screaming… the din was just deafening. Folks were lighting up all over the place, blowing thick blue acrid smoke. Even a rookie like me could tell that these weren't Gold Flakes pinched from Daddy. Drinks flowed and sank down gullets.

Someone came over to my desk and handed me a glass of beer. And another. And another. Things started to get easier. I could now match the colors, time them with the music, work things differently for the melody and harmony... create funky effects that only I could see. The whole theater was one throbbing cauldron of noise, smoke, light, heat – each in gorgeous excess.

Tan tan ta-dan, tan tan ta-dan, tan tan……
Smoooooooke on the water, fire in the sky-ay

Hits from Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, The Doors, The Who rent the air and rocked the audience off their feet. I was in seventh heaven, and it showed. Someone stopped by and asked to have a go at the controls. I would have none of it. The rheostats were smoking as my operations became manic. I must have looked like Charlie Chaplin on the assembly line in Modern Times. Not that anyone noticed.

But, all things must pass. The show wound down late night. Someone must have prised me away from them light controls. Campus families grit their teeth and finally managed to get to sleep over the din. Nair at Tarams doubled up his dhoti and got ready for rush hour.

Own or Lease?

Effective asset management is a cornerstone of financial prudence. But try and get a bit too cute and you'll get bitten. I didn’t have to wait until Enron or the more recent financial meltdown to learn this lesson.

It was our third year and I had just been elected as the hostel GenSec. Narmada had several mango trees that were laden with fruit for much of the year. Very few were ever plucked. A small number served as target practice for rubber-band catapult enthusiasts and a few more were harvested by the mess workers for the red pickle that went with the curd-rice on Saturday nights, right before the OAT movie. The bulk of the mangoes simply rotted.

I can’t quite remember exactly how this started, but I had connected with a vendor from Taramani and offered him the lease of the mango trees for one whole season. I think the deal was worth a few hundred rupees. Good enough for several bottles of rum and another common-room terrace party, I had likely reasoned.

So I put up a notice that must have read something like this:

Dear fellow students:

Please note that the mango trees in the hostel premises have been leased out to Mr. Sivamani of Taramani for the sum of three hundred rupees that will be added to the hostel funds. Students are requested not to pluck the mangoes anymore.

Yours sincerely,

Talk about a storm in teacup! This was the topic of conversation for the next two days – in the mess, in the common room, even in the bathrooms. Had I really sought to be the laughing stock of my mates, I would have struggled to top this one. Soon, other notices popped up:

Students are requested to stop breathing on hostel premises. The air has been leased out to Mr. Krishnachari of Velacheri.

Students are requested to stop playing games on hostel grounds. The space has been leased out to Mr. Nayar of Adyar to grow vegetables that will be sold and added to the hostel funds.

One was grossly creative:

Students are requested not to flush after using the toilets. All hostel shit has been leased out as manure to Mr…

The matter followed me wherever I went and whenever I was spotted. Even well-wishing seniors like Ben and Vasan couldn’t stay away from the kill and would bawl down from their third floor rooms when they saw me skulk by.

“Aye Curly! Can we look at the stars today or did you lease that out yesterday?"

I had put my foot in my mouth and threaded it right through my ear. The only thing I could unwind now was the contract. Which I did, and normal mango service was soon restored.

And thus it came to pass that the blighted residents of Narmada could partake of their forbidden fruit again.

Night Owls on Mount Road

Nineteen Eighty-Four. It straddled our second and third years and lots of events picked that year to occur. Prime Minister Gandhi ordered the raid on the Golden Temple and paid the ultimate price. The Soviet Union and its stooges boycotted the LA Olympics. Michael Jackson’s Beat It reverberated from hostel common rooms, most evenings. McEnroe slaughtered Connors at Wimbledon. Union Carbide became a reviled household name. One thing that didn't happen that year was Orwell's dystopian prophecy of a Big Brother world.

It was dinner time one April evening and the mess was abuzz with the din of conversation and the clatter of plates being cleared. I am stopped by Kutty as I finish up and prepare to head upstairs. Kutty was in his final year; 6 by 5 if I recall right, which meant he was marking his sixth year in the five-year program, that had since been replaced by a four-year one. An n-by-fiver was typically a veteran who had taken a sabbatical from all work, usually in pursuit of higher aspirations. And yes, you may read that line again. Well, it was the home stretch now and Kutty was pulling together his final-year project and looking for help.

The project is traffic engineering, he tells me. I could learn quite a bit and see how such things get done. All I needed to do was accompany him that night and help set up his measurement equipment on Mount Road, right outside the LIC building. The job involved setting up some stuff on the road in preparation for traffic measurements to be made the next day, during rush hour. He had a car waiting, so we wouldn’t have to bike or bus it. He’d bring cigarettes and, yes, a bottle of Old Monk. We would also celebrate over dinner at the Coronet the next day in Adyar. It’ll be fun, his sales pitch concludes.

The learning opportunity part must have swung it for me, for I didn’t press upon him to improve the offer. Kutty then casually asks if any of my friends might want to join and perhaps I should check and see if there was any interest. The guy was a consummate operator.

I took the deal back to my wing, but found no takers. So around nine or ten that night, we head out in his old Fiat to Mount Road. There was another volunteer in the back seat, a first-year student I think, who said little the whole night. We reach the LIC building, park on the side of the road, and wait for the traffic to abate. Around midnight we swing into action. The first thing we do is glue together strips of white paper, three inches wide, to make extra-long strips that could span the entire road. We paste dozens of these on the road, parallel to each other and exactly one foot apart, on prior markings. Mount Road was undivided those days. So if you waited for a break in the occasional late-hour traffic and darted across like a langur monkey with a tiger on its tail, you could lay it across in one straight shot. Needless to day, we didn't really worry about getting run over.

The glue came out of a frothy bucket that looked and smelled like food gone terribly bad. Which was perilously close to what it actually was. I would later learn that it had been concocted by a mess worker specially commissioned by Kutty for the project. But it looked like the compounder had started with upma, rather than overcooked rice because it was hard to spread. Applying it effectively could well have been turned into a separate B Tech project, on its own merit. Too little, and the strips would come right off the road; too much, and the glue would dissolve the paper outright.

We work for a few hours before we realize that the first-year student’s gone missing. We find him in the car, fast asleep. He’s clearly had a big bunch of beans, or their equivalent, for dinner and the car is now out of bounds. So we leave him in the car, take the rum out, and sip it by the side of the road.

A cop shows up from nowhere and draws close. Kutty slips him a few notes and a couple of cigarettes and sends him on his way with a friendly pat on the shoulder. He melts into the hazy night. The rum comes out of hiding and we sip again. It's past three and we are too weary to continue. We’ve done over a hundred yards of road by now, so we call it quits and drive back to campus.

The next day, during rush hour, Kutty brings with him a new set of volunteers. I told you he was an operator. Their task is to count vehicles passing over the zebra pattern we’d set up the previous night. Kutty hands out mechanical counters: one for cars, one for autos, and another for buses. I handle the stopwatch and bark out start and stop times. Kutty has set up a camera on a tripod and puts himself behind it to take random shots of passing cars. He’s a known photography freak, one who gladly would have pursued graduate studies in camera work in the US, if there indeed was such an item.

I have no idea what Kutty did with all the data we accumulated, how he processed them, what he wrote up, or what he concluded. But some things I do know: Since that fateful day, traffic congestion has increased ten-fold on Mount Road. Accidents are up 923 percent. Murders and homicides have quintupled. Jayalalitha got elected and reelected and reelected. No Nobel Prize was ever awarded in a related field.

Kutty meanwhile made it to Vanderbilt University to study things completely unrelated.

Complex Analysis

It must have been around the fifth semester and the course was an elective called Complex Numbers.

Now a guy like me needs a course that started with Complex as badly as a praying mantis needs a lesson in table manners. Simple Sums, Easy Arithmetic Tricks, Summies for Dummies—any of these would have put me on a fast track towards a ten-point-oh, but they never appeared on the menu. So I missed out.

Actually, I think I suffered from an undiagnosed ailment that philosophers call prospective distortion. This is where you assess matters with grossly misplaced optimism before disaster strikes you down. It often repeats. It afflicted me whenever I made course selections at the rosy beginning of each semester. This kind of optimism would have been perfect on Wall Street.

But let’s make it back to the story. The professor handling complex variables was Raghava Rao—a metronomic character whose pedagogical method was the art of rote that he had effectively demonstrated at the introductory math courses. He would rewrite dense and archaic Piskunov formulations and explain them monotonically to the blackboard. You were left to work with the rebound.

Raghava Rao did his roll call at the beginning of each class. The accidental convenience of this arrangement allowed you to sneak out anytime after the roll call—for a bathroom break, or any other excursion of your choice from which you weren't compelled to ever return. The roll call would continue ponderously for the first ten minutes. Swimshake, VizaiYes, AnoozeBee… would provoke consecutive YesSirs from Suheim Sheikh, me and Anuj Bellare, moments before Suheim and I would contemplate the break for freedom.

It was exam day in complex numbers. The question paper had been distributed and the silence was punctuated by the occasional rustle of paper. Sitting close to me was Amar, punching furiously at his calculator.

Calculator?

Now let me tell you that when dealing with complex numbers, a blow torch would come in handier than a calculator. Complex numbers is all theory stuff and you’ve got to get your head wired up to imagine imaginary parts, even as you lost the handle on the real ones. I may remember nothing about the course, but I can proudly tell you that Euler figured out that cos theta plus i sin theta equals e raised to i theta.

I later found out that even Euler had to stand on his head for three whole days, before he could coax this one out of his upturned brain.

Raghava Rao comes over to Amar to investigate the deployment of the said calculator and this is what he beholds.

Amar takes a number, raises it to the power of zero, and avidly checks the result: One. He tries it again with another number: One. And another: One. Since three appeared to make for adequate proof, he delves back into his paper, notes something down and resumes the test.

The unflappable Raghava Rao is, for once, aghast. He comes up to the front of the class and interrupts the test with this stinging announcement.

“There must be something wrong with me”, he says. “It can only be my fault. I just saw one of your classmates checking the zeroth power of several numbers on his calculator. This is the final exam in complex variables and if this is what you have grasped, I must have done something wrong.”

All this from a man who has never addressed the class during the academic year.

Later that evening at the hostel, I ask Amar what had possessed him. “Obviously I knew the result, da”, he says with nonchalance, “I was just checking it. What’s Raghava Rao’s problem, anyway?”

I think philosophers call this one retrospective penitence.

Doing Time

It was really the first time I had seen the inside of a jail and it started off like this.

It was about 7:30 one muggy evening, wretched as any in Madras, when someone—I can’t remember who—called on me at the hostel. A couple of guys had gotten into trouble with the Adyar police and maybe I wanted to know. So why was I selected for the unique honor of this singular update, you might ask? Well, I was the hostel GenSec (General Secretary) and was supposed to keep tabs on stuff like this whenever I took my eyes off any mess staff pinching rice and provisions.

Less than an hour later, I arrived at the Adyar police station on a borrowed motorcycle, and was led away to a cell before I had opened my mouth and asked anyone anything. Indeed, I spotted two blokes from Narmada and Godav—both my friends—looking much like the weary prisoners they were, squatting and sulking in a corner. Their shirts were worn and ripped and had several bruises between them. One of them was in bare feet, missing the trademark blue Hawaii chappals that could have been had at the hostel SAC for twelve rupees, on account.

The Narmadite looked up, relief breaking over his face as he caught sight of me. “Curly, you got to get us out of here”, he blurted. “These guys are going to fuckin' kill us”. I followed his eyes across the dim room and caught sight of these guys for the first time: Five or six roughs, bunched together like a rack of bananas, staring daggers at my friends. My brain creaked as it struggled to hook together the pieces in this bizarre puzzle.

The events of the evening had started off at the Runs Hotel, by the IIT gate. Two final-year students (we were in our 3rd year at that time) had come in for dinner and were likely working through a stack of ceylon-egg parotas, when things took a turn from the ordinary. A discussion—on whether they could drink inside the premises—turned into an argument. But liquor wasn’t on the cards at this Muslim joint and many IITians knew that! Watering hole, this was not. I suspect this valuable point might have been lost on my tipsy friends.

In any case, the appearance of a bottle had caused one of the waiters to fly into a rage. Scooping up the offensive item, he dashed it against the table—an eye-witness would later report as he sat on a concrete blocks at Tarams gate, sipping a single SP—instantly flipping a lively argument into a nasty brawl. Things must have gotten really out of hand for when I got there later that night, Runs was a mess of broken lights and shattered tables, strewn around like flotsam after a depth charge. The fighters were still at it when the cops showed up in rolled up sleeves and lathis, cursing and clenching their teeth.

But let me get back to where I left you stranded…

“Curly! We need to get the fuck out of here. Call the Dean!” he implored, as I stood outside the deplorable cell.

I didn’t know what to make of the whole thing. My GenSec training manual had omitted this chapter. But something told me not to involve any official if I could help it. These guys were a month away from graduation and calling in the brass now could only make a bad situation worse. They could well be suspended from IIT, I reasoned, and what would they tell the American universities they were to join just months away, in the fall. A night in the cooler might be the right medicine to sober things down a bit. Besides, it looked like the combatants had struck up an uneasy truce and called off hostilities for the night.

So making false promises sincerely, I slid away.

I showed up the next morning at the police station and found the cell empty. The show had moved to Saidapet Court, I was told.

Chaos ruled at the courthouse as I arrived there. I saw my friends and the Runs’ staff awaiting their turn with the judge. It soon came up. A man brushed against my left shoulder and asked if I needed his services as a lawyer. I sized him up, as soon as I realized he was promoting himself. He wore a frayed black blazer that was worn almost white at the collar and was draped over a formerly white shirt.

Did we really need a lawyer? I had no idea. “How much”? I asked feebly. “Six rupees”, was the flat response. I could handle that, so I pulled out the money and hired my general counsel on the spot.

“Jusht plead guilty”, was his sage counsel. I relayed this to my sorry friends.

The hearing started. The Runs’ guys were behind a podium. Across the room from them, my friends were listening to the charges read out in Tamil that neither could understand. I was all ears.

One of the Runs’ guys motioned the judge. Saar, he started in Tamil, and proceeded to explain how he was just a customer who had been dining innocently the night prior, before he got caught up in the crossfire. The police had dragged him along, his entreaties notwithstanding. His arms, more than his mouth, bore the brunt of getting his story across. Pausing, the judge asked his companions if this was indeed true. They nodded in agreement.

Clearly a case of having been in the wrong place at the wrong time, the poor fellow was let go. He clambered down, brushed down his shirt, and left with a small smile and no further complaint.

The case resumed. The judge found a new gear when he discovered that the accused were from IIT. “You must be ashamed of yourselves,” he said, switching to English. “You are from IIT and you simply start drinking and just fighting”, he said. “I am going to talk to your Director”, he thundered. The crème-de-la-crème withered under his gaze.

I felt a nudge at my left. It was our general counsel. Kudi-aa saar? (was it alcohol?) he asked nervously, raising his thumb to his lips to drive home the query lest it be lost in translation. He was certainly getting down the facts of the case now.

Finally the verdict was announced. Each Runs’ employee had to pay up a fine of 150 rupees and the IITians had to come up with 250 each. Now back in 1985, this could have been a privy purse for an IITian. The guys came up to me and asked what we were going to do about the money. I don’t have it, I said, but I could get it. So off I went, back to campus, to raise the funds.

It took me a couple of hours to pull it all together and get back to the court where my friends had long given up on me as their savior. The clerk had been threatening them with various dire consequences, like months in jail, should the money not turn up. We paid up the fine and got their release.

It was almost three in the afternoon. The three of us rode back to campus astride the borrowed motorbike, starving and bone-tired. The prisoners hadn't had anything since their interrupted last supper. Not a word was exchanged until we reached the gate, when I enquired if we wanted to dine at Runs.

I can’t remember now if anyone laughed or if I got my head cuffed.

Terms of Embezzlement

Murali was an interesting fellow. He had a talent for making up anything from thin air. He could talk about anything - or nothing - for more than ten minutes; nonstop. This latter skill he put to use quite well. For years he was the unassailable champion at Just-A-Minute or JAM, a multi-participant social game session, where players must converse smoothly on any subject thrown up by the moderator. If you falter or slur or come out with drivel, you’re out. Murali was always the last man standing. He had an air of confidence about him which might have been just a patina, but you could never tell that from his gift of the gab.

He and I were among the very few guys, perhaps the only, from our class who intended to take up graduate studies in Management in the US. So we stayed back over the summers and took implausible IIT courses like AFMC (Accounting for Managerial Control) and FAMD (Financial Analysis for Management Decisions) that no one had heard about, but where we chalked up easy A grades to make up our abysmal averages. At least that’s the way it was with me.

A summer afternoon, up at my wing at Narmada hostel, bore out the episode that follows.

It was about 1:30. Most students were away for the summer and a few of their rooms had been taken up by visiting students from other colleges. It was after lunch and the Madras heat was insanely intense, shimmering off the white balconies and making your eyeballs dance. Murali and I lounged on the old rickety cane chairs in the balcony, hot and just plain bored. Down, in the corridor outside the ground-floor rooms opposite, were some guys chatting away in Hindi.

With a gleam in his eye, Murali hatches up a plan. He spots a guy, leaning on his bicycle outside his room, a worn yellow bag slung over his shoulder. With his outstretched forefinger Murali counts down the room, starting from the one in the middle… 17, 18, 19, 20, 21.

Now every hostel had a single phone, right by the mess. Incoming calls to any of the more than 150 residents, always came into this one number. Someone would pick up and the shout for the room number would ring out. I hated the system because I never got calls and the shouts for the ones that came in always interrupted my afternoon slumber. One of my selection criteria for a room had been to put as much distance as possible from this wretched phone. Our hostel also owed the privilege of an additional private phone in our wing to Sukumar; as the Social Secretary (Soc Sec) he must have had important affairs to transact.

Murali picks up Suku’s phone, dials the one downstairs, and asks for number 21. A mess worker sounds the call and we watch the guy we’d spotted earlier listen up, park his cycle, and walk across.

“What’s your name?” Murali asks. The guy mutters something.

“This is the Dean of Students”, Murali insists, standing up and inhaling to deepen his voice.

“Good afternoon, Sir”, the voice comes back.

I’m wondering where this is headed.

“There’s been a cash embezzlement at the Ad Block, to the tune of ten thousand rupees. In cash. Security saw a man leaving with a yellow bag on a cycle. You were last seen leaving the ad block about ten minutes ago holding a yellow cloth bag”.

All this without pause, for breath or ideas. Now he holds out the phone to let me catch the gasp at the other end, before he proceeds with rapid questions.

“Where are you from? What is your roll number? Who's your advisor? What did you have for lunch?” He just lets it rip.

“Sir, I’m Materials Science M Tech from REC Durgapur, sir. I have no idea sir. I just came back. You can ask my friends sir. I am doing my summer project with professor… I have never been to Ad Block, sir. I am just coming from library. Don’t have a roll number. I am external student. You can ask them sir.”

Murali lets all this in through one ear and out the other, before retorting:

“Do not leave the hostel premises... I repeat... do not leave the hostel premises. Stay where you are. We will be sending the Campus Security jeep to pick you up for questioning. What’s your roll number?”

His voice remains deep and official. All I can hear at the other end is breath whistling off the mouthpiece.

Now Murali twists the plot.

“Say, why don’t you go and meet the Gen Sec of your hostel and wait in his room until Campus Security arrives. Go there immediately.” He hangs up the phone and looks at me with a wide shit-eating grin. “He’s yours now, machaa”, he says.

I had not bargained for this. A few minutes later the guy shows up. He walks across towards me (and Murali), his nervous energy preceding him by about ten feet. I’m nervous myself for he looks much older, close up. I introduce myself as the Gen Sec and repeat the circumstances of the fraud, focusing on its central allegation. In a moment of sheer brilliance, I up the amount - to one lakh rupees. The guy’s eyes open up and he almost bites through his lower lip. Murali turns away to hide a smile. I start to feel a bit sorry. I also don’t have the chutzpah to hold the act up much longer. I tell him to go back to his room and wait for security, but to not leave.

The afternoon passes with no further event. That evening, when Murali and I come down to play some hockey, we see our man outside his room. He turns away in an instant, but his eyes tell us that he knows he’s been had.

Drinkers of Arrack

Many of you have heard about arrack; a few of you probably have actually tasted the vile stuff. For the others, let me venture a description of the experience. Imagine a badly rotten egg finely beaten up and seasoned with the juice of raw bitter-gourd in vinegar. Now multiply that by five hundred and twenty three and you will begin to get close to the taste and aroma of arrack. I cannot see any sane reason why anyone might want to try this stuff no matter what magic it renders, yet that did not stop many of us from doing just that.

Chalk it down to the audacity of hope (or youth).

Some of us took it in straight to minimize intake volume. Others mixed it up with soda, trying to make it flow smooth and laminar through the gullet. Yet others would quaff it down turbulently and immediately lick through a whole salt mine just to keep their insides from turning outside in revolt. Tarams was where you found the stuff, at the milli-kadai.

My first visit was with a friend, fellow IITian and milli supremo, Dr AJ. (The title is my honorary endowment to his sheer mastery over such matters. Months later he would show me the path to palm-tree toddy.) Now even he had trouble with arrack, which he drank with a constant wide grimace, punctuated by breezy exhalations.

The operative word to describe arrack consumption was “downing”. You didn’t drink arrack and you certainly didn’t sip the sucker; you downed it. Arrack was an amazing social leveler. All indulgers – you, the rickshaw wallah, the mess worker, the sundal vendor – all smelled the same after the show, and acted in precisely the same manner. Which I think truly explains the love-affair the commies have had with their vodka.

The milli-kadai was an experience to remember, but not cherish. You saw the same faces inside, a few of them from inside the campus, but most from the village. It was a dingy damp room with betel-juice spit marks at all corners. At the far end was an enclosed counter with a wire grill. Within, stood a frail man in a perennial white stubble who dished out the stuff in small little cups. You knew that he had low confidence in the (st)ability of his customers, for he always laid the filled cups on the counter, never handing them out.

Another guy dealt with the soda for the few who would waste money on such embellishment. You could buy a whole bottle of soda for forty paise, or get it in five- and ten-paise driblets. We got a whole bottle each time which always encouraged non-buyers to drift close to us and hit us up for freebies. At the door was another man constantly stirring a vat of steaming red brain curry that looked like marinara sauce bubbling impatiently as it waited for its pasta. I couldn’t even get near that stuff.

One evening I will always remember. AJ and I had done the tour at Tarams and decided to enjoy the evening by watching a movie at Vels. It was late evening and after a long walk we located the local theatre. It was a thatched affair with classroom-style wooden benches laid out in rows. A whirring projector, perched on a wooden stool, threw down a long beam on a screen at the front. Enna padam, yah? (What movie?) I asked as I sat down. Shivaji saar, the response came in. It was a black-and-white Shivaji Ganesan production.

Since he spoke no Tamil, AJ appeared to have come in just for the ambiance. His peace, however, was constantly interrupted by the guy next to him who would droop his head on AJ’s shoulders whenever he dozed off, waking up each time to his vigorous jerks and oral reprimands. Soon all would be forgotten and he would lovingly be at it again.

The guy next to me was really into the flick. I recall one scene where the hero had been bound like Prometeus and was getting pummeled like Rocky, by a gang of thugs. The sound effects went dicsh, disch, disch... My neighbor’s agitation rose with each blow. Unable to bear it any longer, he finally jolted me with: Avar thapechuduvara, saar? (Will he escape, sir?)

The milli culture grew fast. It started as the cheap drink of a few desperate hardliners who possessed neither money, inclination, nor posture to travel far for their poison. Soon it won acceptance among others. I seem to recall a Saras party that was based on the stuff. Things got rolling with a bottle or two of Old Monk and quickly yielded to milli as the night progressed and tastebuds regressed.