The Median 2: Halfway to college life

1st semester. Those were the days when I used to go mess 4 times a day; that I still do. Just timings have changed. What that used to be breakfast those days, are now rescheduled to 1 A.M. NC. One day, I came back after dinner and heard some heated arguments at hostel entrance. After paying a little notice, I realised that noise is not futile but some intellectual hi-fi topic because only two people were speakers and rest 10 had surrounded them in hope of little increase in their knowledge or just to get socialised. These small discussions play a very important role in first few weeks of college as they create opportunities for likeminded people to interact among themselves. As for example, if discussion is on India vs. Australia in cricket or Man U vs. Chelsea, people can easily find their supporters. Isn’t this? However let’s come back to that discussion. Out of natural curiosity, I stood there for a while to get the theme of their interesting discussion.

First guy: You can’t question epics.

Second guy: Of course not, Science and philosophy are close to each other. You can’t go to master one while leaving other. As Great Feynman put this “Philosophers say a great deal about what is absolutely necessary for science, and it is always, so far as one can see, rather naive, and probably wrong.”

First guy: True, but every philosophy doesn’t have reason or logic, you can’t go on finding everything about a sentence which on first hand… (Brief pause…looks over the whole crowd present there and waiting for their head nod and to make them realise how important his words were.)…don’t even mean anything.

First guy: If you talk of philosophy, you can’t find anything better than Gita.

Second guy: I read that. (And he got busy enjoying the wow expression on the face of bewildered audience).

Suddenly a guy from the crowd shouted,” yaar, bari bari baatein ho rahi hai. Hamari samajh me kuch nahi aayega.”

Now, let me introduce you to first guy:  Praveen Srinivasan. Any guesses for second one??. Of course, Milind Shyani. Who else can remember quotes of Feynman that took me 10 minutes to google! And that guy which suddenly popped in between was Aditya Dadu. 

Krishna Janmastmi celebrations were just around the corner and one guy was collecting donations for that. He came to my room. His face started ringing bells in my memory. I couldn’t recollect though. He introduced himself as,” Mayank Singh from Bokaro Steel City.”

I asked,” FIITJEE??”. Yes was the reply and I realised we had done coaching at same FIITJEE bokaro centre.

Elections for hostel representatives. Two guys came to ask for vote. Pranay Aggarwal and Abishek Anand. Later I heard something about Abishek Anand that made me jealous of him. He had cracked JEE and PMT both without any coaching. An example of true genius. Even now, he don’t know anything about paper bound tomorrow morning and don’t feel surprised when he gets av+ where you get av after attending all classes and studying consecutive nights. Later I was introduced to Pawan Kumar during pandit’s campaigning

Those were the days when people used to ask JEE ranks and that was sort of indicator of intellectual level. And as you know how much first impression matters, people used to fake their ranks and ultimately there was the day when a dreadful excel sheet was released on DC with all JEE ranks. In that rain, everyone was naked; some half, some full. I have several interesting incidents associated with that but I choose not to write. After all, I love my readers. (Somebody is smiling ;)

It was T1 time. I was used to system where I didn’t give much importance to class tests rather I find it easy to prepare hard for one final exam. Seriously, I had no idea then that grades will be decided on marks of T1+T2+Compre. Chemistry paper; I wrote nothing. I counted how many people are there in my branch in that terrible1 hour. I reached hostel, some people were discussing the paper near stairs. I asked them which chapters we were supposed to study. They cried,”yaar, humari bhi lag gayi..single digit aayega”. I thought,”Ok, single digit av sounds awesome.” T1 became fun for me. I failed in Class 4 in Science and Maths; and it was 10 years since then. I was enjoying. I don’t why teachers at BITS are so fast in paper evaluation. Anyhow, I got 8; but interestingly av was 29. And those single digit people got AV+. Those single digit persons were Yash Patodia, Subhanshu Pareekh.

I had interesting teacher in Chem 1. Buzz was that Chem 1 had got 10% marks for attendance. I was already av-21 and I had no other option other than to listen his crap which was lost in his confused pronunciation. I played games on Bluetooth with Abishek Maheswari. I found there a guy which always sat with Subhanshu, and had always single expression. That guy is Anirudh Gupta. I found pretty interesting boy in that class. That guy had magnetic personality which always attracted me. I managed some of my T1 sins in T2 but still I had 3 Ds in pre compre. Thermodynamics was pathetic. Someone told me about a guy who could help me. I went to his room and asked for help. He quickly agreed. He was the same guy of Chem class: Ishan Kawley. For the last one year, we go every day to nescafe for the same drink, hot coffee. :)