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.