Discounting the scanty few who either gave up because they had been diagnosed with a perennial case of writer's block, or had their houses ransacked thereby losing their trusted 128MB RAM assembled desktop in the process, or decided that blogging was too much to type regularly and decided to settle for tweeting instead, or plainly lost steam because their respective girlfriends/boyfriends/corporate jobs gave them only just enough time to do the basic everyday needs of brush, bathe, deodorize, eat and sleep, I think I can proudly proclaim myself the most infrequent blogger on this portal. Therefore, I decided to break out of the loop and blog. So, there.
This following is a brutally honest, long pending post that is dedicated to a group of four friends who went to college together; namely The Smart, The Fat, The Geek and The Brat. This might unravel and blatantly state some raw truths that either the referred four or victims of the activities of the referred four might not appreciate, but as one among the four, I don't give a rat's ass and I don't give a rat's ass about the ones who do give a rat's ass. So, Anchors away!
The four of them had met on the very first day in college and as fate had destined it or race/color(as we later classified ourselves) had categorized us, The Geek and The Fat sat together, thereby leaving The Smart and The Brat to help themselves. The bench was for two people and three could just perhaps have adjusted, but with The Geek and The Fat in a bench you could only possibly squeeze in Atom Ant in the middle. (There is so little space that, though small, an ordinary ant will still be squished and therefore it could only be Atom Ant.)
The Geek was mad about technology. He loved phones so much that it was rumored that he spoke more to his phone than on it. I wouldn't entirely call that a liability as his N-gage helped while away the time playing Tony Hawk's on it while the septuagenarian EC professor rambled away about circuits and his divorce. The Geek wore his pants on his chest, which The Fat loved to make fun of but which he hardly could because The Geek was predominantly in the other class for reasons aplenty. The only way you could identify the geek was with his always-planted killer smile and his ample usage of the term 'lol'.
The Brat was a happy-go-lucky fella as his name rightfully states and he had as much interest in attending college as Maneka Gandhi would have had in endorsing for KFC. The SFM professor threw him out on the second day of college and the EG professor had told him that his Engineering Drawing diagrams had so many board pin marks that he began to wonder if he was drawing in Braille! The only subject he loved was English. Sadly, the English Professor, a slightly 'synonym-of-happy' person had as much love for him. The Brat was known to hit on so much as a mannequin that dressed well and looked good. Yet he was found more in other colleges than his, thanks to the multiple cultural fests held in the city.
The Fat loved Subway. He loved Subway so much that he made everyone else in class love Subway. You see, The Fat isn't the kind of fat people you would see on one of those Subway brochures. He is just fatter than the other three, and plus Fat rhymed with Brat which made me helpless but to address him so. The Fat had the cleanliness of a skunk. His hostel room stank so much, that Onyx could have adopted it to use it as a model dumping ground. But it was a great place for us to bunk classes and watch the Fat's collection of devotional films or sit and do all the pending records. Well, the proud fact is The Fat was the only person to have an official relationship with another girl in class, which the other three invariably helped him with by buying or carrying veg puff or cold coffee or both.
The Smart was well, Smart. When the tests loomed, all four slogged just as much and while the three scored nearly around the same region, The Smart always somehow scored more. He had a mysterious past for none of us knew about his past relationships though we knew he did speak to someone over the phone. Yet, he helped the other three and took notes meticulously, so we never really could blame him. The Brat had one note for four years and other two probably had ten for the entire stretch. The Smart had one for each subject. The Smart was known to know it all. Krishna christened him rightfully so. The Smart made up new swear words, but the most favorite was 'Binny ke'.
Yet the four of them invariably hung out together, either to write fake letters and go play snooker or break out through fancy backside paths to go eat the Sub-of-the-day for lunch. Sometimes The Geek decided to stay with the other section and ditch the other three, but hey, he was The Geek okay!
To us, what was not cool was 'gay'. Our favorite phrase was 'Dude! That's gay'. All of us secretly loved the song 'Bubbly' by Colbie Caillat yet made fun of one another when someone was listening to it. Though The Fat thought he was in some way a 'West-coast Nigga from the hood', and The Geek nearly belonged to the other class and The Smart was ever so responsible and The Brat was always attending culturals or judging them, there was something that knitted them together. They were poles apart on so many different levels, yet chose to be one group everywhere. The entire college could identify them, for they stood out in every which way.
The credits though would be,
The Smart - Aadityaa Padmanaabhan. (You could master math by just counting the 'A's in his name)
The Fat - Deepesh Nair. (His bluetooth name was Fat, Black and Balding.)
The Geek - Dheepak Krishnamurthy. (He writes phone reviews now. I think he got married to one.)
Obviously, I am The Brat. I work at an IT firm now. Honestly if my life could suck more, it would have been a Eureka Forbes product.
But I think I survived my college life only because of these three, for their company was all that made me live through college. They helped, shared and stuck around as friends no matter how big a loser I acted as and I don't think anybody could have filled their place. If I could though, I should say thanks. But hey, that would be 'gay'!
