Say E for Exams!

"Remember Remember, the sixth of November for that is when my
semesters start.
And I find no reason why my exam season should ever be forgot."


This is just a famous statement from an epic movie called V for Vendetta, that I morphed a little to suit my troubled semester scenario. The big month has passed. We dreaded the month, we fought our way through it or rather crawled our way through it, but heck, now we are done, and boy, aren't we happy! I have said enough and more about my fancy educational system, but eventually when it all boils down to the big picture, we sure can't do much when we come to our exams, but put our hearts into it and give it our best. On the whole, I'd say I did a decent job. Frankly, for the kind of effort that I could muster, my class topper would have done better writing with his left hand, but hey, I am strictly not the kinds who choose my second revision over the final six balls of an action packed cricket game. I choose all fifty overs and then start hunting for my books.


It was a bright start, my first exam. See, there's this thing called effort and then there's thing called luck. When it comes to Anna University, you either give the former a full hundred percent, or spend your life at the church asking for a lot of the latter. Unfortunately for me, I give my best when it comes to the former, and then the latter is given in generous measure to everyone else in class. As usual, my percentage hovers around the same old vicinity. This time around, I can't really say how much of the former I gave or how much of the latter I got. Basically, I just hope both strike a chord. But then I realize that means I am again asking for the latter, because hope is just a decorative synonym for luck isn't it? Wait a minute, this is too confusing.


For those of you who have no clue what I study, I do Electrical and Electronics Engineering. If you've gotten through reading the entire name of my course in one breath, I suggest you give professional singing a shot. Everyone says that my course is comparatively the toughest. Because every other person who asks me for my course cracks the same 'You're gonna be an electrician?' joke. If so many of them have struggled to pass and landed up as electricians, it must be a tough course. Maybe it is, but I guess I'm doing quite fine and dandy. The only problem is, the dorks who frame the question paper somehow psychologically track what I know. And quiz me on the rest. I mean, the dorks are so thorough in their work that even if I study the book inside out, they ask what's out of portion and stump me again. At the end of it all, I'm done now and I'm a happy man. And hey, I think I might make a good electrician. I correctly fixed a bulb on the holder and all last week.

My phone - The I-phone!

There! I've said it aloud. Now don't mock at me for announcing that my greatest fantasy is not some Hollywood celebrity woman with pink lips. Its the I-phone. To make things worse, the I-phone just got released in India. Unfortunately for me, the price is a little high for my budget. I am exactly a 30,870 rupees short. Fine yes, I have only a hundred and thirty bucks in my wallet, and I owe a couple of friends frugal amounts too. I was helpless. See, when the I-phone 3-G came out in the international market, it cost a little less that dirt. In today's rate of dollar conversion, it came to somewhere around nine thousand. I was like 'Whoa, that phone's mine'. I took all the massive price drop, stock exchange, dollar depreciation and all into account and calculated the Indian market's price to be close to atleast ten grand. And then it all happened.


Vodafone and Airtel are cheats! They promised the world's equivalent of goodies, but they never said they would take half your inherited fortune in return. The prices speak for themselves. A whopping 31,000 bucks for the 8GB and just a five grand extra for doubling your memory space. You Oh-so-clever people, now who will even go for the 8GB one? They would always pay that extra surplus and get the 16GB one. Extra revenue for those fashionable Indian tycoons. They should have just informed us that the I-phone's entry would be only for those Forbes India Money Minters' hot daughters and punk sons. The normal humans like us can keep fantasizing. And how!


The standard nation wide survey conducted by M.P.P (Murali's Poll Plaza. Its an international critically acclaimed psychological survey scheme that scans people's faces and deduces answers. Its 97% accurate.) shows that 80% of all I-phone users do not have any clue about 70% of the I-phone's applications. This point, yes this very point shows why people have money and they don't know what to do with it. Lets take a quick example. This business magnate whose name I refuse to mention, was one of the first who queued up to buy the I-phone. (It was actually his driver who stood in the queue all night, but this guy just took his place in the morning to pose for the daily papers.) He picked up the phone, unwrapped it so quickly like one of those toy-train sets to eight year olds, and then switched it on. The glee on his face spoke for itself. Then the stand up comedy started.

1. Muthu, where is that pen thingy which you press on the screen with? (He was referring to the stylus, which the I-phone does not provide.)

2. How do I make a call? The green button is not there! (To which the driver said 'It needs activation saab')

3. Can I atleast play games? Where is Snake? (Three onlookers were giggling so loudly, they could hardly suppress themselves.)


Then the man left, much to the relief of the Airtel office staff. This is why I wonder how money saturates in the hands of people who never know what to do with it. They either buy fancy cars, bikes or gadgets which they can never imagine complete utilization out of, or stock it in banks and multiply the amounts so they can start wondering what to do with it afresh. I really hope Dad increases my pocket money. If I start saving by tomorrow, maybe by 8017, I would have bought the I-phone. Donations are welcome.

The Educational Block.

The title is supposed to be an intended pun. They built a brand new block for our department. Its huge, tall, spacious, breezy, attractive and unfortunately far far away. Its already quite a mess that we study in an institution that is placed a comfortable 38 kilometers outside the city limits. Now they want us to walk inside the campus too. We did not deserve this. They promised us air-conditioned labs, spacious classrooms, stunning architecture, great upholstery and a whole new approach to technical education. They just chose to hide the own blatant fact that could generate oodles of anger and frustration from an already disgusted batch of students. They built the block a mile away from the bus stop, a mile away from the canteen, and the biggest blow to this huge mishap - a glad two and a half miles from the main college gate. For all those foodaholic obesity endorsing KFC loving friends of mine, their attendance just took a bullet to the temple. They choose to bunk college rather than walk the extra mile which brings about disastrous after-effects like elongated classroom sleep and cruciating ankle and joint pains.


I do not blame my college. I can't do so anymore. If there were any more accusations that I could file, the book would be fatter than the bible. Sometimes if there is too much of something, you just wouldn't know what to do. In the case of my college, its area. Acres and acres of land are stagnating in and around, they just don't know what to do with it all. So they hatch a cunning ingenious plan - Start scores of new courses, build huge blocks in far away locations, and let the students walk to their misery. The block is just a fancy looking three-storeyed-so-far brick and concrete structure, with six acres of barren land for neighbors. Occasionally cows come right into the block, establish proof of their digestion and walk out with elan. Amidst all this, we students fight our way to grab some amount of education.


The block is not even completely constructed yet. There is still work going on, and occasional lectures are interrupted by deafening sounds and crunching noises that come as a boon to both the students and the lecturers. The lecturers, with no clue what they were teaching, could cover up saying they had said it right and that we had heard it wrong. The students cash in on the opportunity to slyly gossip amongst themselves and call the teachers names, with no worries about being questioned for the same. Sadly, there is a minor glitch to the whole plan. Just when you think you have come up with the coolest comment about the teacher, and you are yelling your heart out like you are atop a lighthouse, all the construction work will suddenly stop. Not just one or two of them; All of them! And your voice will echo all around the classroom with that sense of pride and establishment while the dumbfounded teacher will stare at your face like it were made of pure spotless gold. The rest, is all but a few breezy walks to the dean's desk and back.


Altogether the department has not gotten a makeover or gained a touch of class, as they promised us. It has just moved a few hundred meters away, is just as bad as ever and has only managed to generate a lot more dirt than it usually did. It was usually just in our brains, but now they are emphasizing it by showing live samples outside our block. It sure sounds like fun, to walk a mile a day. But for people with already caving in figures, and minimal enthusiasm to institutional education, this block is proving to be quite a block for and to academics. They misunderstood the phrase 'The Journey to Education'. God help them!

Not so 'New'ton!

There have been times when I have wished that I could not anticipate my next step. Perhaps wish that my next step would be in Venice or Rome, but please please not back home. There is nothing to look forward to, nothing fancy that is going to happen. Every next step has the standard footing. You always step on solid land supporting all your mass. In Chennai, with lots of cows it might be a little different, but cumulatively speaking you can't really hope for something exciting out of your next step. That is why I love the concept of weightlessness. Now don't go classifying me under the list of geeky scientists who waited for fruits to fall on their heads so they could stumble on astounding phenomena. In my defence, it was sheer luck. I keep telling my parents that he was born earlier, at a time when 'It' was not found, and so when the apple fell, he just christened 'It' one tech-savvy name called 'Gravity' and bang, his showcase fills with awards and he becomes a scholar. Its fate, that's what it is.


Logically speaking, if I had taken birth back then, and say, a pomegranate fell on my head, I would have done the little math I knew and named it, well, say 'pomegravity'. See, I could do it too! He just jumped the gun, the lucky fella. Optimistic person that I am, I still sat under trees wondering if I could get a brainwave. Dogs chased me. No math there. I discovered this phenomenon called 'fear'. Now that I am part of the herd, I realized I should atleast bother to offend those great discoveries that eluded me. So I have always been bent on defying gravity. I've got everything that there is to go to outer space. Just that one thing, money. That's what went missing. So I'm still at home now.


Weightlessness is such a beautiful thing to experience. Imagine being at a place where your next step could be no step at all. Well, its like stepping on nothing. That nothing is not the literal nothing, it is, say nothingness, though there is no such word. See, its complicated. We'd have to get to physics and then you'll see how bad I am at it. No I don't think its worth the gamble. Think about having no mass to support you as you drop your foot on the ground. As in not ground, but yes, dropping it. Moving down like free-flow salt, feeling like paper, with everything zooming by, and nothing to step on, it must be an incredible feeling. I have always wanted to just get into an express elevator and like they show in all those action-flicks, bust the cable and fall down free. Weightless. Those few seconds are worth the death I tell you.


The sad part is, I live in Chennai and the tallest building, a meagre fourteen floored apartment was such a celebrated affair that they advertised for it all over the city. Eventually it became a residential complex, and as usual clothes came up to dry on the balcony rails. With buildings this tall, by the time the cable rips, you'd be R.I.P. To make things worse, lifts in Chennai are like aeroplanes. Children love going up and down in the elevator, and pressing the button is like free candy. They just keep running down flights of stairs, pressing the button, and rushing down again. Finally when I stop at the ground floor, I'd be monitoring a mini-creche, and two buttons would have come off the panel. Such an enriching experience. Oh, and that button-pressing thing - I used to be the fastest at that in sixth grade.


Its not practically viable, and I already got an earful for asking my dad for a luxury sedan. I don't think asking him for a time-capsule would sound very convincing. My space flight's become a far fetched wish now. I'm going to try weightlessness though. With my physique, the demands are that I starve for a month. If I do suvive the ordeal, I swear to God I'd be weightless. I hate to blame fate though. Damn you Newton!

-Supermur.

The Gen(d)eration Gap.

Imagine being in an institution that believes all males are out to get every other female in the vicinity and the only way they could stop them is by being a not-so-co-ed anymore college. Yes, this is the dismal state of a score of engineering colleges in and around the city. My college does no such thing. The men and women are already at loggerheads. Blasphemous as the principle may sound, the measures they adopt to keep this strategy going will give you a taste of how extraordinarily clever the faculty here is like. Oh, so that's how they cut down on the count of all those love marriages in the city. Nip it in the bud. Kudos! Difference is, now men seem to have begun to look for women in other 'normal' colleges or sadly grown to become icons of singularity. Here's how they go about it. Women : The supposedly delicate fragile souls made of glass and rose petals, who just got teleported from Heaven's north end. Men : Hideous heartless women-loving, correction women-Only loving greyhounds who are ready to risk anything to woo a woman. I cannot deny the fact that there are men of that category, the ones with stunted brain growth, compensated by the size of their mustaches and who sit on low-lying walls and whistle at every woman who walks by and thinking one would actually reciprocate, walk up to them and express their undying love. Unfortunately their cheeks go red by then, and they become bait to a host of swear words and they eventually give up on their Machiavellian exercise.

Here's a quick list of the measures they adopt to pull down boy-girl interaction in the campus.

1. Reduce the number of breaks you get during the day. If one class is done, make sure you keep screwing the children before you see the next teacher waiting outside. Now Re-screw!

2. If a boy and a girl are found talking, call them for a disciplinary meeting. Warn them that if this happens again, their parents will be called. (Yes yes, I know you're rolling on the floor now, but we do have parent-teacher meetings in colleges here. This is to bridge the gap between the student and the teacher. Oh damn you, if that were your ambition, spare the darned women for us!)

3. Make sure that there are regular patrols to check for cross-gender interaction during class hours. If found, Attack!

4. Always have club meetings and cultural fests supervised by teachers. Put boys at the far back, so they can hoot. Put women in the front end. Faculty sit in the middle. No no, it cannot be the other way round. Because the boys will be able to turn around and see the women then. They should only be able to see their backs and that too beyond the drum sizes of their teachers if they try.

5. Men and women walk in separate files. Sit separately. Eat separately. Bathrooms are placed at either ends or on different floors. Most importantly, staff rooms should be placed at crucial locations between bathrooms. There is no sparing anyone here. This is war.

If this is not enough there are various other small-scale methods done to make sure men and women feel that its wiser they plot methods to rob the World Bank than try conversing in institutional premises. After all, we are not being observed, we are being Tracked! Fighting this killing spree, there were groups of men and women who got together in the weekends in places far far away from college and planned ways to converse in college. They found the bus-stand a probable spot because the staff concentration there was low. (My college did that only now.) Unfortunately for them, drivers were spies. Meet the parents! Again! They thought they could speak during their sports hours. Men and women were assigned different grounds. What could the children do? They did the one thing they could do best. Panicked. They tried to rise to the occasion and get back at the semi-barbaric staff members. One Guevara got suspended. The rest of them were never found again.

The Great Wall of Chennai
This is a famous story in the south. If you haven't heard of it yet, you're missing something. A college down here went to the very extreme by putting up a wall between the corridor and classified the left side for men and right side for women. This is so because they believed the men might step on the dupattas of the women and make fun of them. For the love of God, if the men were this jobless, they would have passed. Thus it so became that men and women go to the same class, traversing different paths and under the supervision of different teachers and so discipline and decorum prevailed and all was well again and all the teachers lived happily ever after. The students on the other hand, grew longer hair and formed rebel groups to fight back. Maybe they are still fighting to this day. My heart goes out to them.

-Supermur.

Its one Whole Mess.

Have you ever wondered if the person who cooks for you might have previously worked for a large scale stationery manufacturing unit? Has it ever hit you hard in the gut that your eating, if spotted by others might relatively resemble a cow's? Have you ever been amazed how they could so meticulously make Natraj Rubber in the form of a perfect circle, adorn it with intricate striations and put it on a plate and give it with 'kuruma'? If yes, then you might be in the vicinity of the ever-glorious S.S.N boy's hostel mess. Welcome to my world! I'm not a hosteler. I perennially strive not to be one. But situations force me into residing there frequently, They make 'parotas' for dinner, or so they claim. I walk in, pick up their stainless steel plate, which has S.S.N triumphantly embossed on it, sparkles so brightly like those Vim commercials, you could look at your image on it and slick back your hair with pride, and a friend goes 'It's parotas today. Good luck!'. The 'Good Luck' part more or less spoke for itself. I should have realized I was going to have a dinner I'd never forget as long as my veins pumped blood into my arteries.

They serve Natraj Rubber. Correction! Natraj Rubber with salt! It didn't taste that bad. It just didn't taste. I cant deny the fact that I'm not that well built. But with ten slender fingers if you're not able to pull off a piece from a wholly circular parota, you're either under malnutrition or this must be the literal sense of explaining 'food for thought'! It doesn't come off, and the circumference is too large to pop the whole thing into your mouth. Even if you employed your muscular friends to pull off a piece, the chances of you chewing it down your oesophagus is one per thirteen million. Good luck with it. The kuruma is just fuel to the fire. Half-cooked vegetables straight from the shredder, boiled and dropped into masala water. That is the recipe yes, but copybook fashion doesn't work here. The kuruma warrants criticism. If there was some syndrome to nullify your sense of taste, perhaps then you might give this three stars. Sanity might just pop the finger. I stay in the hostel only because of basketball practice. If not for my passion for the sport, so endorsed by my previous post, I would be at one of those mobile consumer courts now.

They have a menu. They serve different dishes every day. Maybe they thought showing variety to garbage might entice the consumers. Their full course meals are a delicacy I must say. Their buttermilk, its sheer class. Here's how it works. Open the tap and show a spoonful of curd every 6.7 seconds, and Voila! Buttermilk in a cup. Oh, and if you have time, please find out if there is any company in southern Tamilnadu that makes 'Sriram bread'. Or 'Real' mix-fruit jam. Though their coffee is some consolation, expecting humans to survive eight hours of Engineering jargon on a cup of coffee is a little too taxing. The mess staff are opportunist too. I don't blame them. They are forced to eat their own food. Amul butter - The one branded item that is there on their shelves, and they stock it. See, we know Amul. It's the taste of India. Yet they stock that and give us 'Real' jam instead.

They don't let us into their kitchens. They guard their trade secrets with their lives. The mess meetings don't make a difference either. When you are a little happy that the new caterers seem to be making palatable food, some God-forsaken loser picks a fight with some worker and out of sheer emergency, they bring back the old guys. Its the same old 'A coffee a day keeps your senses at bay' life again. Imagine living a life where you slog it out on the court for four hours at a stretch to come back and eat something that resembles your pant for dinner. Its worse when your mother's a brilliant cook and you a foodaholic. It is by no means fun, having your eyes closed and using the other side of your spoon to push the food down your throat, so it doesn't touch your tongue. Crocin should be after food or before food, not the food itself. This is a blow to all human obesity. If you are trying to cut back on the finance, yet you want to knock off that little extra fat around your pot-belly, Fitness One isn't always the call. There are economical options around. Give this a shot. Visible changes in seventeen days guaranteed, or we sponsor your medical expenditure. Hostel Mess - The taste numbs you. Literally.

-Supermur.

I had a Ball!..

Old men with pathetic knowledge about the sport come up with such beautiful phenomena sometimes. This septuagenarian relative of mine with his hair so nearly white, it would stand apart in the dark, once told my dad "This basketball is such a stupid game. I mean, why would you want two teams to go put it in two different baskets when one will do for one ball. They should either reduce the number of baskets or provide another ball. Why, football's worse. When they struggle so hard to bring the ball all the way with their feet, they put the darned goal outside the boundary line!" My poor dad had a tough time explaining the obvious, but coming to think of it. sport sure is demanding. Having dedicated half my life to sport, I seem to realize that, if I had saved all that time and energy I could have completed all my tasks with ease and had spare time go roam the world hunting for golden geese!

S.S.N College of Engineering does not boast of a brilliant basketball team. It doesn't have to. Others know that's the truth. See, we run by modesty! We are a strict no-no to endorsements. But we would appreciate it if you sang ballads in our praise. Maybe come up with witty nicknames like S.S.N.B.A ( You know, its the .. well .. the combo of S.S.N and N.B.A and the like. What's all that gray matter stagnating for? Knock up that top floor and come up with innovative stuff, people!) I mean, all this being voluntarily done by you. We don't ask you to. Practice being at at a fifteen to six in the morning, when the dogs still are asleep with their tails tucked in, waiting to snap at any object that moves, their ears pricking, their noses scanning for fresh ready-to-be-dug-into meat, players jog, jump, roll and sprint with dogged determination. And with sleeveless jerseys that let the cold air seep in and eat out your warmth, bring goosebumps all over your skin and make your fingers go numb, and with shorts so small, had they been any shorter you might not have much of garments on you, basketball players have a grueling, devastating time on the court. To come garnish our woes, it will rain at half past six.

Maybe its all by chance or Mr.Varun and The Madras Meteorological Department had some tie-up I do not know. But at half past six sharp, the showers come down and they sure come down with all the might they can muster. The cold pricks and the water runs down our backs chilling us and we go all 'Brrrr' yet we run. We run not because our college wants us to, not because we were born Olympic Athletes, not remotely because we could outrun the rain, but we run because its in us to run, it takes something to be a sportsman and we have scooped it up, and we shall hold it aloft , be it rain or shine. It does sound more or less like Rocky, I know. Why, with a little of Bill Conti and a backdrop of the Lincoln Memorial, this would be Rocky too. Difference is, we'd be around twelve to thirteen semi-naked 'Rocky's with S.S.N on our chests, signs of sleep in our minds and rabid dogs for security.

Coming to think of it, S.S.N came runners at Hindustan and got third at Crescent and at Rameswaram. Basketball sure does have its share of fun. So what if it means eating masala plastic for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and taking bath under gushing water from crevices in Corporation taps in the wide open, and sleeping in rooms with fans with a blade missing, and lights that work like lightning. Like lightning in the sense, they never stabilize. They just keep flashing like lightning and you eventually land up switching them off and playing 'Who's hitting who' in the dark. That's a fun game actually. You can go hit whomsoever you want and run around aimlessly. Nobody would ever know who has hit who. That is unless they don't catch hold of your hand or your watch or something. If that happens, you can just pray to the holy almighty that the sun never rises again for the rest of human existence. But in the larger perspective we get to play basketball for our college, get to go to class once every four weeks, and roam the world with not a care for all valuable education, and dedicate all that we have to sport, sport and sport alone. All Hail Rocky!

-Supermur.