This is my article that I hope will get published in Contour, the yearly magazine of the Civil Engineering Department at IITM.

This is not an article about my moment defining experience in IIT. There are simply too many of those to count them off my fingers, and worse, pick a single one of them as the best and write about it. I will try and encapsulate some of those worthy experiences you might have had, but it happens so frequently that the “Ah!!” moment is no longer there.

After haggling over the price of hiring an auto from the main gate to, well, almost anywhere, you embark on a roller coaster ride and dive headlong into a world of chaos. Blaring horns, drivers – friends and foes, hollering at each other, smoke from the rusty, battered MTC buses, smoke from the guy on the bike, the stink as the garbage lorry goes ever so slowly past you, the hour long waits at the signals and the traffic jams, a sudden dust storm that blinds your senses, the beggars at every traffic signal, insolent stares, appreciative glances, et al make up your journey both ways. All this for 2 hours of entertainment, wherein you spend the first hour ranting about the journey to the place, and the next hour dreading the journey back. Once you wave the auto off at the main gate, as you collect your bearings and slowly walk in, you feel a sudden tranquility everywhere. It is so silent that you can hear a twig breaking under the paw of a doe. A band of monkeys sit on the tree tops, with the mother monkey picking out nits from the young ones as they watch wide eyed. A cool breeze brings with it the scent of the meadows and you find yourself doused with leaves and scented flowers falling from the trees. You feel refreshed and cleansed, as if you passed through the sheet of water in a waterfall. You hear a jungle bird cooing to itself, as a smile comes to your lips, no matter how bad your day went.

How one hates the 8 AM classes! There are people who hate classes, but let’s leave them out of this. Even though you slept only at 4 AM, as you had this extremely important hostel meeting where all the wing members came together to debate which was better: Om Shanti Om or Jodhaa Akbar, you have no respite. Since your attendance is already so low and your professor remembers you as the guy who scored lowest in the 1^st quiz, you have no option but to get up early and go to the class. As you wake up grudgingly, with a stiff neck and droopy eyes, you look out of the window, to see a herd of deer chewing away at the dewy grass, as an energetic young fawn frolics its way towards your window. Another fawn leaps out of nowhere, and then starts a playful dance ritual that mesmerizes you till a majestic stag comes along and stops the dance, if only for a brief moment. The smile lasts longer than your 8 AM class, but make sure you don’t smile in full view of the professor. We all know what happens next!!

As the monsoon comes by, the first thing that comes to everyone’s minds – Mandak. The hostel’s quadrangle looks like a swimming pool, and water enters the rooms on the ground floor. People rediscover their childhood, making paper boats and trying hard to keep them afloat, and lose it the instant they start using expletives when the boat sinks. A whole ensemble of frogs croak away to eternity, and people who have tried keeping frogs as pets (remember Neville Longbottom of Harry Potter??) have found them useful as alarms. A must watch place during the monsoon, don’t forget to rub mosquito repellant lotion as you go to watch the spectacle.

As usual, you are late for class. And as usual, your professor doesn’t listen to any excuses, ones ranging from “I woke up late” to “I suffer from amnesia”. As you start cycling, you hear the angry skies, and all of a sudden, everything goes dark and the skies open up. A bevy of water drops hit the road with a pitter-patter and you smell the scent of damp earth that awakens you to the fullest. You look at your watch and cycle even more furiously through the blinding sheet of rain, as the cool rain drops drench your soul and the cold winds take you away to a special plane of thought. Hair wet, clothes sticking to your body, you shuffle your way to the class with a full 2 minutes in hand, when you see the writing on the board: Class canceled. After that heavenly experience, you don’t even feel the urge to swear at the professor and the class representative. And of course, a plus point: you don’t need to bathe for a week!!

In each hostel, there will be at least one guy who never comes out of the room, never talks to his wing mates, never plays anything, never goes to the mess with the horde, never comes and shouts his head off at GBMs, never misses taking bath twice a day, never misses taking books from the book bank, never over issues a book, never takes too much of your time, never talks to girls, never misses a class, never stays up later than 11 PM and never wakes up later than 6 AM. There will be at least one day where you will see him drunk. And you will remember that day for a lifetime.

On your floor, amongst other things such as your books, computer, one or two lizards and various other miscellany, you see a not-so-thin film of dust. You so obviously took the words “people should follow in your footsteps!” quite seriously, that you intend on leaving footprints all over the floor and the walls. You look up to see a dark brown fan running at half the speed it should, because of the dust accumulated on it. You see families of spiders running up and down the wall and the whole ceiling infested with cobwebs that even Indiana Jones would find tough to penetrate. As you come out of the room, you see light streaming out with peculiar intensity from one of your wing mates’ room. You trudge along slowly, wondering what it could be, and as you turn into the door, the light from various sources blinds you as you take a moment to comprehend what happened. You see flashy shiny objects that look familiar, when you remember that you have the same things, but of a rather different color, mostly black. You see the floor clean, and things at their place. You don’t look him in his face for more than a week.

We have become so used to all of the above, that we are missing out on all the little and wonderful things in our life. These are moments that we will cherish for a long time to come, reminiscences that will be icebreakers at reunions, anecdotes that the generations to come will know about, and experiences that we will think about in times of solitude. Small things like these make us what we are.