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Hostel Day

2011-03-17T00:41:00.012+05:30

If you wanted to see an IITian letting loose, you could do worse than turn up on Hostel Day. This was an annual event with ceremony, repast, entertainment, and late-night partying. Just stags, of course. Hinds lowered their hair on their own hostel day at Sarayu.

The evening kicks off with a needless speech by the hostel warden. I can't imagine what he had to say that was worth delaying the celebrations to follow. Various prizes would be handed out to winners of intra-hostel sporting events, contested over the year. These were intensely absurd contests where stopping a ball with a hockey stick rather than your blundering foot was a mark of prodigious skill. Notwithstanding, we all watched and applauded heartily for our jocks. Dinner would soon follow.

If you ate at the hostel mess every day, you would have come to the irrepressible conclusion that the hostel cooks were holding back a tad. All this bottled talent spilled over to the hostel day feast. Thick scaly chappatis made way for crisp puffy pooris. The tomato soup flaunted croutons. The kurma gloated in cauliflower and carrots. Potato chips made their annual appearance, like cicadas in spring.

The piece de resistance was the special fried rice. The grains stood apart, proud and shiny like soldiers at a parade. Raisins and cashews ceased to be mere quantum possibilities. There were two non-veg offerings today, mutton and chicken, gleaming in dark grease. A noodle dish lent oriental mystique. The custard classic, an eternal favorite, looked extra bright yellow and shiny. You would have to cut through a solid inch at the top to free the fruit languishing below. Even the big round steel plates shone a bit more. There was zing in the air and it alighted on all it touched.

The feast was put away with smacking lips and approving nods. Even skeletons like me dipped into second and third servings.

The hostel day movie followed dinner and was screened in the open quadrangle below. Deliberating over the pick was always a pre-hostel day tussle. An irrationally exuberant Soc Sec like Anil might plump for something art house – like Kurosawa or Fellini – ignoring at his own peril time-tested staples like Bond, or Indian Jones. He would thankfully be put in place and persuaded to see the light.

The liquor would get set up towards the end of the movie. There would be two stations, hosting separately, fruit punch and rum punch. For wimps and for studs. Inverted and stacked up were the regular steel glasses, doing double duty.

In hostel matters, you always had to deal with a few puritans who begrudged any celebration money going towards any kind of booze. They would rather have an extra pasty gulab jamun smear their prudish palates. A farcical hearing was more that what these folks deserved. As Gen Sec, I was obliged to put forth a strategy that would stretch the budget for liquor and keep it flowing. One of the mess workers was my man and we put it together like this.

He would start up the rum punch with a bottle or two of exquisite Old Monk rum, the best money could buy (I still drink this stuff). Around ten, he would have to replace this with Naga rum that took things down two or three notches. Most folks wouldn't tell the difference. Once we crossed midnight, he would have to start topping things up with arrack procured from Tarams and stored in my room. Now this stuff was so vile that you were forced to rebalance the whole brew equation. Two more packets of rasna would go into the mix in an attempt to blunt everything down with sugar. Some revelers might have taken pause at this tactical shift, but there was never a dearth of takers.

The punches would get all mixed up late into the night. By then the wimps would be hitting the rum punch and the studs would be hitting the floor. Those still standing would move into the terrace above the common room to greet the last Old Monk. Stragglers from other hostels would join in and the sweet smell of pot would waft through the warm night breeze. Queen, The Who... Marley would rend the night.

The hostel would be fast asleep at nine the next morning. Food spills, strewn plates and cigarette butts marked evidence of a good night gone by. The new day would blur in the fog of recovery.

The Man and his Machine

2010-03-08T20:43:00.021+05:30

I think the first washing machine in the subcontinent was set up at Narmada hostel. The parts looked like they had been salvaged from a WWII Jeep abandoned at the Ledo Road in Burma. Any possible doubt was put to rest when the machine was started. It clattered and vibrated with the gusto of a jackhammer at a metro project. There was just one cycle – Run! – which got the job done without the help of any wash, spin, rinse, bob, weave, duck… or dance routine. You put the clothes in, ran the machine until it started to lose water, then you took them out.

But then, you didn’t have to do all that. For the man behind the machine was the hostel dhobi, Deaf Dhobes. A lean man with deepset piercing eyes, he wore a twisted grey beard that looked like it was being wrung out by the machine every Tuesday. He was missing several front teeth and the others rattled when he spoke. He talked a wheezy Tamil as though he personally suffered the plumbing disorders of the machine, and his words were long lost by the time they whistled past his teeth and filtered through his beard. You could have easily mistaken him for a godman, had he swapped his checkered green lungi for a plain saffron one. It might have been more convincing, had he not been chaste. He was also mostly deaf.

His relationship with his machine was somewhat like a mahout’s with his elephant. They worked together, laid up together, and abused each other. He was its flogger and caretaker.

The washing ritual worked like this. You set your dirty laundry out by your door, in the plastic bucket that you normally parked in your room, on the bottom shelf of the inbuilt masonry cupboard. When Deaf Dhobes knocked at your door, you pulled out the blue packet of Nirma (Washing powder Nirma... [down four notes]... Washing powder Nirma... [up five notes]... Nir-Mah!) from the top shelf and handed it over to him. Dhobes would expertly dispense three spoonfuls without a spill and lock it away in a corner of a soiled shirt-tail, sealing it within a flamboyant knot. I think he also took a bit of money as his service charge, before he moved on to clean up your neighbor’s mess.

The bucket would be back at your door by late evening. There was no apparent identification or sorting algorithm. Deaf Dhobes just remembered each student’s clothes, or their buckets. The clothes themselves were inside; tightly wrung out, and coiled limply upon each other like snakes at an Indiana Jones reunion. The drying was left to you.

When you finally got to wear the clothes, large parallel wrinkles would run obliquely across your torso, like an alien exovascular system. Ironing them out, of course, was out of character at IIT since it was much pain for no gain. That damp-sweet scent of the wash got so imprinted in your brain that had you bottled it up, back then, and opened it up now – twenty years hence – you would home in on it like a hog after a truffle.

There was more to Deaf Dhobes than met the eye. His room was next to the one that housed his machine and I remember once finding him in a yogic headstand, arms folded beneath him. He was locked in a trance, and took a while to get off his stance. When he finally took in my unscheduled wash, he gestured by touching two fingers to the lips shrouded behind his beard. I pulled out a beautiful gold-and-red packet of Gold Flake Kings and gave him one of the two or three precious cigarettes nestled inside. Over time I would give him a few more.

During the big cyclone of 1984, it rained buckets for days. Hostels were marooned. Classes were suspended. Football was out, poker and bridge were in.

Laundry was definitely out. Deaf Dhobes had time to kill and he did it well at the Taram’s arrack shop. You could have spotted him there any evening, happy as a mosquito in a nudist colony. Well, almost. The blood curry simmering by the door, even he left quite alone.

An Alternate Reality

2010-01-25T18:25:00.018+05:30

Kiki was Toolie’s bigger and badder brother: in size, insolence, impudence, and good old Punjabi brazenness. Toolie himself was hard to pip in any of these departments, so Kiki must just have gotten an extra copy of them badass genes.

Perhaps to cut all this down to size, someone in the family decided that Kiki must join the army. So Kiki applied for the Short Service Commission of the Indian Army that lets you serve for five years and then decide. Kiki got selected and was posted to Madras where he started boot camp. A few weeks later Toolie, Amar and I decide to visit him from IIT.

His outpost was many kilometers away and the visiting hours were Sundays, between 10 and 12. So one Sunday morning I get out to Ganga hostel to borrow Pranish’s Yezdi. As the only one with a valid license, I ride. Amar piles in behind me and Toolie takes the rear.

There was just one catch. The rear wheel hub assembly of the motorcycle was missing a lug nut, so in theory the wheel could come right off, anytime. Toolie assures us that this shouldn’t be a problem since he would personally check on it, as we ride along. The man kept his word. Every kilometer or so, he’d lean over to one side to examine and certify the state of the wheel. It was a different matter that each such inspection quadrupled the risk of keeling over; one that he so gallantly sought to contain in the first place.

We reach the campus, dismount and walk in. We spot a guy jogging by and supporting a large log of wood on his shoulders, arms drooped over either end. It must have weighed at least 30 pounds. One look at his tortured face tells us that this was no Black Cat training schedule or some other field-martial derring-do; he was just copping punishment – military style. After this sobering introduction, we move on to find the visitors area and see Kiki waiting for us.

“What took you all so long?” he exclaims, looking at us with the gratitude of an earthquake survivor pulled out of the rubble after two days.   Kiki had been in boot camp for a few weeks and it shows.

“I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing here", he starts. "The guys here are crazy. They are Jats from Rajasthan, man. I mean, these guys were stripping and eating a camel with their teeth and bare hands a few weeks ago, while I was eating a dosa and sipping a shake at Nirulas in CP! How am I supposed to keep up…”

He talks a lot. Like a bluesman, his tales convey his unremitting misery. We try changing topics to make him feel better.  Our unfettered life at IIT just rankles him.

“You guys have no idea how good you have it,” he proclaims. “Do you know what music they have over here? They have one English album in this entire place! And guess what it is, Toolie? It’s Paul Fuckin’ Anka. From the 1960s, man!” He actually puts on the record to demonstrate his anguish. We lean back and take a listen. The complaints continue to flow thick and fast.

My heart goes out to him, even as my mind wanders back in time...

I congratulate myself for standing up to my dad, years ago, in refusing to attend the follow-up physicals after clearing the National Defense Academy exam. Those old conversations play back in my head.

“You must go for the interview”, says dad. “This is NDA. You will be an officer at twenty two! Do you have any idea how long it normally takes to become an officer in the army?”

“But Daddy, they make you toil all day. And the interview is in Allahabad – in June.  It's forty three degrees in Alla…”

“Listen to me! You don’t know what you’re talking about. I worked in the Defense Ministry for 25 years. The NDA boys were always on top. Do you know that you can retire with a half-pension after 15 years? Where else can you do that?”

“But Daddy, did you know that they have an ambulance waiting at the NDA physicals? Shamsheer told me… it’s because they ask you to jump off an eight-foot wall and a few boys actually dislocate their kneecaps! They test your body Daddy, not your b…”

“You just shuddup! You think you are the most intelligent fellow around and the NDA boys are all bloody fools. Just because they don’t come from your stupid St Josephs! Let me call Periappa... tell him what a bloody idiot you are….”

Periappa (uncle) had served for decades at the Defense Services Staff College in Wellington. A week later, he would send me a beautifully hand-written letter confirming my status as a bloody idiot, while exhorting me to join the NDA. I still remember this Hollywood line – Vijay, you will join the Academy as a boy, but you will come out a man!

I still have the letter somewhere. Manhood, meanwhile, has thankfully managed to elude me.

...Kiki brings me back to the present. “Toolie, get me some music when you get here next time, OK?” he says. We’ve started to head towards the door to take our leave.

“When are you guys coming next? Can you come next Sunday?” he implores. “Curly, just remind Toolie to get me some damn music!” was the last thing I heard as we left.

That visit put a new perspective on my IIT experience. Deep gratitude for my station welled up within me. I stopped bitching about the mess sambar for two straight weeks.

The Movie Buff

2010-01-07T05:28:00.012+05:30

It’s impossible to gloss over the irrationality behind some of the ludicrous choices we made those days. I think cramming for the IIT Joint Entrance Exam had something to do with this, and here’s my conjecture.

When you start stuffing your 16-year old, 1300 cc brain with trifles like Lagrange's mean value theorem, L’Hospital’s rule, and Friedel-Crafts alkylation, something’s gotta give. Part of your medial temporal lobe, hitherto responsible for common sense and judgment, gets repurposed. In a seminal study of this IITian impairment, the hippocampus responsible (among other things) for making you deftly avoid a pile of steaming cowdung on the street was shown to instead get busy, at that exact moment, extracting the rank of a skew-symmetric matrix, despite frantic signals from a despairing olfactory bulb. Sadly, this turns out to be a zero-sum game that you can painfully verify when you feel the warm stickiness on your feet.

Going out to watch a late-night movie was one such irrational choice. Getting there was a painful voyage in itself. To top that, the movie usually stank, and the trip back at 2 or 3 in the morning was a fool’s errand.

The decision to go was usually made after dinner, in the false security of a brim stomach. You would first have to bike all the way to the gate before boarding a city bus down to Mount Road. You could start by riding your own bike. Or you could try and borrow one from Chacko or Daraius. Your bike was likely the standard issue Hero or Atlas cycle that your Dad bought for you in your first year for 280 rupees, plus 40 for the carrier and mud-guard. On the sixth day, the chain would awaken and start to grate inside its guard with every turn, for the rest of its boisterous life. Chacko and Daraius, meanwhile, had speedsters with a large gear ratios that made Bonn Avenue swish past like the autobahn. Your best option was clear, if you could swing it. But once you got to the gate, you would still have to wait for the bus and I think it was 19S that did the trick to Devi Theater, where most of the late shows played.

Hollywood productions made it to India a year or two after their release in the US - by third class seamail service. We accepted that benefaction gladly and slugged it out to watch deeply memorable flicks like Poltergeist and Conan the Barbarian. The ordeal of making it to the movie almost always had me sleeping right through it; but all was not lost, for someone would recap the plot on the long ride back to the hostel.

Returning from the movie was the biggest adventure of it all. You could wait for one of the really late-night buses that got you back to the IIT gate, or you could hitch a ride on a lorry. The lorries usually carried cement or brick and got you until Saidapet, where they turned right and headed towards the new construction sites around Meenambakam airport. After you slipped the driver a couple of bucks, you were left with the small matter of a three kilometer walk to the IIT gate, and then a ride on your rusty bike for the remaining few.

All for Poltergeist? Just blame your two-timing hippocampus!

One of those return trips was more than memorable. The movie had been short and we didn’t want to wait for one of the scheduled buses that wouldn’t arrive until much later. So we flagged down a lorry and hopped into the cabin, alongside the driver. Something was strangely amiss that night on that lorry.

Had we been looking, the clue would have been the faceless driver whose head was completely wrapped up in a turban, leaving small slits for his eyes. He throws in the gear and the lorry lurches forward, as we hold on. In less than a minute I am battling my own bile, rising up and flooding my throat in protest. An overpowering stench smothers the cabin in an evil miasma. I turn around, expecting to see pigs frolicking in their own manure. But it was worse. We were in a garbage truck, hauling away the vilest stuff from the filthiest metropolis in India.

I sank low in my seat and looked across at my movie companion, Annie. He was at floor level. His eyeballs were frozen and he wasn’t breathing. But this was not the time for lifesaving maneuvers, so I let it pass. I tried to concentrate my mind on something, on nothing - on everything, but the goddamn lorry. If you wanted to demonstrate the conquest of mind over matter, this was the time and place.

We literally hit the ground running at Saidapet and ground to a halt to take in deep breaths of the sweet night air. The walk back to the gate renewed our lease on life.

But what the Lord taketh away, the Lord giveth. He wore down my olfactory bulb to a point on that fateful day. Years later, that would come to my aid as a father. For I could change the soiled diapers on my infant daughter with a smile on my mouth, rather than a wrinkle on my nose.

A Quantum Step

2009-11-30T17:07:00.011+05:30

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 was right behind. 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 ejecta, would serve as chairs. 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!
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 skirmish.

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 tired Vanavamalai would show up at the 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 and offer some advice.

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

Learning Trades

2009-11-12T23:18:00.022+05:30

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

2009-06-04T23:32:00.004+05:30

No matter what your 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.

For some singularly clever reason, I had decided to build on this natural disadvantage by not attending any of the classes. 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 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 with a full-grown beard and one of maybe two, with a real girlfriend. Seventy nine percent of all the calls that rang the hostel phone were intended for him; one hundred percent of them were from the girlfriend. 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 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.

You can see for yourself now 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. That you just needed to 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 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

2009-04-19T17:31:00.001+05:30

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 variants. 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. Nair at Tarams doubled up his dhoti and got ready for rush hour.

Own or Lease?

2009-04-04T01:05:00.001+05:30

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

2009-03-24T23:28:00.028+05:30

Nineteen Eighty-Four. It straddled our second and third years and lots of events pick that year to happen. Prime Minister Gandhi orders the raid on the Golden Temple and pays the ultimate price. The Soviet Union and its stooges boycott the LA Olympics. Michael Jackson’s Beat It reverberates from hostel common rooms, most evenings. McEnroe slaughters Connors at Wimbledon. Union Carbide becomes 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 been replaced by a four-year one. An n-by-fiver was a veteran who had taken a sabbatical from all work, usually in pursuit of higher aspirations. Well, it was the home stretch now and Kutty was pulling together his final-year project, and looking for help.

The project is in 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 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.

The glue came out of a frothy bucket that looked and smelled like food gone terribly bad. 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. The glue, I would later learn, 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.

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. 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. The Nano got launched.

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

Complex Analysis

2009-03-23T23:35:00.025+05:30

It must have been around the fifth semester and the course was an elective called Complex Numbers. Now a guy like me needed a course that started with Complex, as much as a praying mantis needed 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. Actually, I think I suffered from an undiagnosed ailment that philosophers call prospective distortion; where you assess matters with grossly misplaced optimism before disaster strikes you down, again. It afflicted me whenever I made course selections at the rosy beginning of each semester. It would have been perfect on Wall Street.

But let’s make it back to the story. The professor handling complex variables was, I think, Raghav 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.

RR did his roll call at the beginning of each class. The accidental convenience of this arrangement allowed you to sneak out anytime for a bathroom break, or other excursion, from which you might never recover in time to return. The roll call would continue ponderously for the first ten minutes. Swimshake, VizaiYes, AnoozeBee… would provoke consecutive YesSirs from Suheim, me and Anuj, 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.

Raghav Rao comes over to Amar to investigate the calculator and this is what he beholds. Amar takes a number, raises it to the power of zero, and checks the result: one. He tries it again with another number: one. And another: same result. He delves back into his paper, notes something down, and resumes the test.

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

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

I think philosophers call this one retrospective penitence.

Doing Time

2009-02-02T17:47:00.028+05:30

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 and was supposed to keep tabs on stuff like this whenever I took my eye off any mess staff pinching 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 the two blokes from Narmada and Godav, both my friends, looking badder than bad as they squatted and sulked in a corner. Their shirts were worn and ripped, they had several bruises between them, and I seem to remember one 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 f--- 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 and staring daggers at my friends. My brain creaked as it struggled to put together the pieces.

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 cylinder 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, clenching their teeth while brandishing their lathis.

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 Gen Sec 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, which soon came up. A man brushed against my left shoulder and asked if I needed the services of a lawyer. I sized him up, as soon as I realized he was promoting himself. He had on 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 him 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 new counselor. Kudi-aa saar? (was it alcohol?) he asked, raising his thumb to his lips to drive home the query. 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 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. 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.

Terms of Embezzlement

2009-01-25T18:06:00.007+05:30

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

2009-01-07T18:17:00.004+05:30

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.