31 January, 2012

3rd Fingers - Chapter 1/8


Disclaimer: The contents of this series are not meant to be factually correct, not meant to arouse suspicion, are not against humanity, Hall, region, religion, society, Ramdev or any senior, I am not in the payroll of Professors or any other socially irresponsible group. Though this blog can cause pandemics of the mental kind – it has been certified to be bird flu resistant.

I knew I was dead. I just didn’t expect everyone to follow me even to Hell. But I should’ve known. After all, it was supposed to be redemnation without relief. I had been dumped into a crowded cauldron to boil while Anjali pushed me further deep with her spoon. Joose had promised that I’d get my own kettle soon but a senior sinner was not emptying the kettle Joose had saved for me. The stew I was being boiled in smelled due to lack of funds to buy good words. The green slime below had white bubbles erupting from time to time. I remembered it was the same slime which had offered my CS/EC/EE fellow mates massage sessions in Heaven by the cutest angels. If only I’d known the worth then. Loud drum noise was making my ears ache. The feast was getting ready. If I didn’t escape now I’d be barbequed in wet mess dal. This was desperation time. I summoned all my fat (I don’t have much muscle) and pushed my way out of the pot.

It was the 3rd time this week when I’d woken up to a nightmare rather than my alarm clock. Dreams have a funny way of intertwining everything in your life in a single scene and telling you how screwed up your existence is. I got out of bed and after relieving myself from the sins of last night I opened my mailbox. 19 unread messages. 4 spam. I had to review 3 poems and 4 articles posted in Talaash last night. Did I tell you about Talaash? Talaash is idle group of my college whom I was given the task to manage this year. I think they figured out I was the king of lazy people. However, such big posts do not come with a rod in the… never mind. My rod turned out to be my 6 feet tall friend Ishenam Chamatkari who actually wanted to do something for this group. He said he didn’t want to be the Governor under whom the team died. I argued that the team was never alive. Last year we hardly did any work and the team was handed over to me when all there was left in it was unsettled debts from different publishers around the campus. Ishenam and I soon figured out that the sluggish nature of our team was not due to lack of talent or tempo. Our publishing was on a standstill because the Institute failed to provide us with a timely supply of green paper. It was not much difficult you see. Ancestors of the society could’ve easily completed the task but they thought sleeping in their 7’ by 11’ boxes which the administration gave us in the name of rooms was more comfortable than running around across the campus waiting for the Indian bureaucracy to reimburse the jackpot amount of 1850/-. However, after careful planning by me (contributing slightly) and a political matchup of Ishenam with the Institute representatives (contributing largely) we got the system running again and now I had to review every dumb spelling mistake the brightest pool of students of the nation presented to me. One good way of improving their mathematics was to make the entrance examination objective. At that time our respected ministers hadn’t considered the effect of the objective paper on the English of the students. Result, the new batch of students ate and spoke math but dreamt of being the next Chetan Bhagat.

But the emails didn’t end there. There were 9 companies visiting the campus this weekend. But the companies were considerate enough to give me time to prepare. Out of the 9 companies, 8 did not want to consider any student who could not code, solder, design and sleep at the same time. This unique combination of multi-tasking was only taught to the geeks of my college who majored in computer science, electronics and electrical engineering. The 9th company was a bank who had either mistaken the campus of my college for an international B-school or actually expected to find the brightest financial analysts of the nation in an engineering college. Being money minded multinational, they didn’t care about what their employee had majored and considered all the students who chose to apply to it. After receiving over 800 CVs they realised that conducting so many interviews of such bright minds would blow their fuses for good and they skimmed off the top 100 CVs after arranging them in the order of grades. Again, my application came back without being shortlisted and I turned back to my computer for religious solace. When life kicks you in the rear, you have to turn to God. I searched for the best religious songs on the internal LAN drowned into 2 hours of heavenly bliss. Sadly, my devotion to Almighty was rudely interrupted by a call at 9:15 PM which reminded me I had to be in the Talaash meeting 15 minutes ago. I said God made me lose track of time sometimes. Ishenam blared out from the phone and called me to the meeting “in 3 minutes.” I shut the lid of my laptop, grabbed the cycle keys and rushed out of my Hall. My weekend, had begun.