Of Thermodynamics and zuks...

"You're late, " the man standing in front of me in room number 2224 said. I looked at him. Short, dark, and looked almost comical with his Charlie Chaplin-style mustache. The watch read 8:02 am. The class started at 8:00. It was my first day at college, and it had taken me full 10 minutes to just locate the darned room. "You could really do with a little more humanity, " I mentally told him, and I said, "I'm sorry sir, won't happen in the future." He seemed satisfied with this acceptance of his authority, and motioned me to take a seat.

This is how my struggle with thermodynamics started. When i had first heard that we had thermodynamics as one of our courses, I was really happy about it. I mean, I had been pretty good at it while at school. Even in my BITSAT paper I had solved the questions related to this topic in nano seconds. Of course, at that time, I had no means of knowing..

The first test was a breeze. "Wait till you move further into the course. Things will change, " my senior had told me. I didn't believe her then. "Must have been terribly stupid," I thought about her. How naive...

Anyways, back at the thermo tut, things started moving from good, to bad, to downright pathetic.

My thermo teacher, since I can't write his name here, lets call the old bloke ENTROPY.

So, Entropy's problem in life was that he was a complete sadist. And for some totally inexplicable reason, I was his target this semester. Plus, the 8 o'clock class thing was taking its toll. I mean its absolutely impossible to get ready for a class that begins at freaking 8 in the morning. Had the teacher been nicer to me, I would probably have gone that extra mile. But Entropy had made it the sole objective of his life to bother my life.

Partly bugged by my exponentially decreasing interest in the subject, and partly because of my laziness, somewhere down the semester, I stopped attending thermo lectures. And then hell broke loose.

I sat in the class looking at the quiz sheet in front of me. the questions could have been based on metaphysics for all I knew. I did not follow a word of what was asked. Anyways since we had to sit through the ten minutes, and partly for the heck of scribbling something, I began to write out random formulas on the answer sheet. Entropy walked past. Stopped at my desk. Stared hard at the paper. "Not attending lectures, eh?" And before I could answer, walked away, with a self-pleased, sarcastic smile oh his face.

On the rare occasions when I did get marks, he would say, "So, cheated this time, didn't you?"

Sadist, I tell you.

As if that was not enough, the people in my class added to my misery. For the uninitiated, we were supposed to have 8 tests out of which the best 6 were considered for evaluation. Now I hadn't exactly cracked it, but my marks were decent enough. But the guys in my class, man!! nerd would be an understatement. This guy, I never found out his name, I'll call him the fat-black-wannabe guy. So fat-black-wannabe had got full marks in 6 tests. He happened to get a 9/10 in one test. "Puhleaseee sir. Take a retest. I won't have full marks in all my tests."

Thats how he begged Entropy. DIE!!! You pest! DIE!!! (this is a toned down version of my mental reaction at the request just mentioned.) Needless to say, a retest was not taken, and fat-black-wannabe sat sulking in the class for the rest of the hour.

Another thing that appalled me about Entropy was the presence of a family. See, now I totally understand that professors are human beings and stuff, but the very thought of them sitting at a dining table at home, eating, talking to friends, being nice to their kids... gives me a churning, sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. Gross. The only seem like they're made to teach, to bother students, to take all the pleasure in the world from deducting marks. What do they talk about at home anyways? The first law of thermodynamics? Weird.

Enough said.

P.S.: I made a B in thermodynamics. How did I do it? Beats me, no idea. :D

In the beginning....

Trends they say are like the flu. Someone begins it, then someone else follows it, and before you know it, it has everyone in its grip. Everyone around is writing about mundane things going on in their life, documenting it, sharing it. So here I am, with my very own blog. This one will be the first of a series(hopefully, provided my readers are willing to bear with me.), where I will write about the insignificant and significant, the funny and the sad, the grotesque and the beautiful experiences I've had in the four years of my life spent at the BITS-Pilani campus.

So, where do I begin? Looking back at my first year here, I think its pointless going over every minute detail. So much for me has changed, and yet so much has remained the same. I think I'll just go over the highlights , without bugging you any further, after all thats where it all started. So here goes:

You know how you see people with awesome college lives in all those movies.Picture perfect campuses, all sorts of interesting characters around. And add to this the fact that the college is one of the best engineering colleges in the country. So the scene that i had in my mind was something like this: picture perfect lush green campus, with all sorts of nerdy, brilliant students, who discuss nothing but software code over endless cups of coffee in the canteen. A place where if you stay quiet, you can actually listen to people talking about engineering structures.A place where the lecture-halls and pillars have mathematical formulas written all over them. You get the picture.Well, nothing of that sort happened...

I entered the gates of this revered institute. I completed my registration formalities. "Meera Bhawan, " the guy at the desk told me. "Uh-huh. I said. And..err... where is it?". "Just go down to the Saraswati Temple and take the left from there, " he said. If I had had the opportunity, I should have liked to ask him where in the world 'Saraswati Temple' was, but the guy standing behind me was looking increasingly disgusted, and so I carried myself and my curiosity out of the way.

Down at Meera Bhwan things weren't impressive. Within few hours of my arrival I realized that one, I was sharing my room with a rat(no, my room-mate had not arrived at that point of time, I mean an actual rat.), and two, the only thing available to fight the Pilani heat was a measly fan which had such a high rpm, that i could actually see the fan blades as it rotated.

"It'll all be fine," I remember telling my mother, as she left me."It had better be fine.. I have four years to go," I told myself.

Living alone in a hostel without parents had more advantages than I could ever dream of. Three days into that life, and I was already beginning to enjoy myself. Talking with my room-mate late into the night, no restrictions...I liked it.

A few days later, when the seniors arrived, came the first lessons in Bitsian lingo. "Meet me at anc, " my state senior told me. "The what?!"

"Anc..You know it right?". "Err...no."

He burst out laughing. I can now understand why he acted the way he did, I mean anc is THE hangout point of the campus, but at that point I felt more irritated than stupid.

Over the weeks, I learnt a lot more about campus.. IPC, insti-canteen, gus, sky, c'not, LTC, FDs...and of course, THE word of the Bitsian lingo: lite.

I never realized how much BITS had changed me, until one day, when i met some parents at the gate, and when they asked me where a certain hostel was, i replied : "Sure, just take this road to UCO bank, take a right at IPC, and then a left at FD2."

Life had come full circle...

And ahh..yes..the rat, its stayed there till the end of the year, and to be honest, it was a convenience , everytime you wanted to prevent someone you desist from entering your room, you just said: "You're always welcome into my room. Infact, I fancy my pet rat might actually like you ." ;)