Continued from Second Options - Part 4
For the KGPially challenged population, I’d explain what Illu is. For starters, it’s NOT a song from a Subhash Ghai movie where a flower blooms in a garden and the insect sings “I love you. I love you. I love you.”
Illu in IIT Kgp is far from it. Every year people residing in a Hall in Kgp get together to celebrate the festival of Diwali in a wonderful and unique manner. There is a beautiful show of lights stunningly drawn into carefully carved patterns depicting various scenes usually taken from a mythological story. But the catch is, we don’t take a Chinese light and wrap it around the Hall in a snake-like manner. We make the decorations from old school, i.e. with diyas only. Thousands of diyas are mounted over an array of bamboo sticks which are lighted up on the Diwali evening illuminating the Hall with patterns one can only see and feel proud of. However, that’s the last 15 minutes of the show. Before that there’s a pyramidal preparation which goes on for 50 days. Getting bamboos, painting them in patterns, making loops from steel wires, tying wires to the bamboo sticks, dropping fire-proof powder on the bamboos, setting up wind-sheets and a lot more goes into making 20’ by 60’ structures. People work in dangerous conditions and miss sleep and classes. Often, people work 15’ above the ground supported by only beds and tables taken from their rooms because they do not need to sleep in their rooms anyways with the work incomplete. Some years back, the festival of Illumination was turned into an inter-Hall event and Illu now became more than just a festival of celebration. It was now a struggle for victory and every Hall spent the last bit of their energy to win this. Personally, I was not in favour of such an event but the debate over the significance of Illu was as old as Rajnikanth’s grandfather. I once told Gambheer that Illu was just an inter-Hall event and should not get so much importance. He replied,
‘Just an inter-Hall? Just an inter-Hall. Vishal, it’s so much more than “just an inter-Hall.” I mean… that first loop. Oh! what a heaven that first loop is. The dildo, like a sesame freckle breast of an angel resting gently on the heap of pliers and cutters below, wires mingling in a seductive pas de deux. And then… a paintbrush! The most playful little paintbrush! Then a dip of dye, a flush of paint and a… a patty of design so exquisite, swirling on the bamboo, mixing in the can and separating again in a fugue of dark and light so… delightful. This is no mere array of diyas on a bamboo stick and wind sheet, Vishal. This is God, speaking to us though Hall.’
That was the last time I ever debated with anyone over the topic of Illu. But as God would have it, the next month was dedicated to the festival of Illu. Everyday Juice and Gambheer would come at 9 pm banging doors and jugading junta. After a week, they didn’t even have to do that. They’d just come up to the door and smile at me as the devil does whenever another soul enters the gates of Hell. Once I was on my way to empty my bowels when Aanchal came to call people to work. He refused to believe my “routine excuse” and almost dragged me to the Illu ground. Sometimes, I would take shelter in the not-so illuminating Halls as it seemed insane to me to have an Aerodynamics test the other day and the only study of aerodynamics I would be doing was throwing useless wire loops on the ground and seeing how far they’d fly. It was also quite acrophobic for me to climb that grid of beds, tables and chairs and tie diyas around the border of the structure. But my limit of tolerance was crossed when the table from my room went missing one day as Gambheer just couldn’t say no to “his own feeling of responsibility.” I still believe that my feelings for my table were more than his feelings for the responsibility and that he should’ve asked me before giving it in but when I told him that he gave me the usual pre-independence response, ‘everyone has given it in.’ And I couldn’t fight with him now as his strength had increased. He had fallen into a symbiotical relationship with Shin Chan and they both seemed to agree on everything, especially on disagreeing with me! I spent the next few weeks without my table and it was never before so depressing. All I wanted was sleep, independence, freedom and of course, my table. I patiently waited for the I-Day ad it was here. I rushed home the first opportunity I got and missed the once in a lifetime moment again (as told to me by Akshay Goenka last year). When I returned, my table still wasn’t back. I had to search for her and finally find a suitable time when Gambheer was not in the room to bring her back. I still don’t know why he didn’t want her back. The next day I was going to class but I saw all the cycles in the parking lot heaped up as if two cyclones had just had a fight there. Juice came beside me,
‘Yesterday Jaishith dumped every cycle which was out of the shed in a heap so that the ground is presentable to the judges.’
‘But my cycle was in the shed.’ I replied.
‘Yes, the cycles which were dumped were dumped ON the cycles already parked there.’
