A poet made a friend…and a friend made a poet!

I reckon I first started writing meaningful poetry back in the first year of engineering. I think it had something to do with drab and boring lectures and sitting at the back of the class. To be blunt and honest, the first time that I ever slept in a lecture (literally and metaphorically) was in engineering. I had never been so bored by a monotonous lecture ever before in all my years of education! I cannot imagine where the professors learn to teach like they do, two cups of coffee couldn’t keep me awake sometimes! (Though I suspect staying up all night might just have had a small role to play but I bet that was rather insignificant!) Sitting on the last benches, I remember having snacks and sometimes even an entire 7 course lunch, playing hangman, cross and noughts, join the dots, Sudoku, reading books like the Da Vinci code, learning to write backwards, reading up and understanding things like six-stroke engines, planning out how to go about making a hover-craft, creating a poll-of-the-day (which might I add, was sometimes the highlight of the day, much obliged to JD for all those wild thoughts!) messaging friends, flirting with women over texts (umm…ok so there wasn’t much of that but lemme say it here, it’ll make me a little happier!) and of course, writing poems…scores of poems.

But to be honest, I never thought my poems were any good (heck I would still say so! I think it’s only the fact that some others seem to think otherwise that keeps me going!) I think I wrote a poem a day on an average about anything, everything and nothing! Random thoughts as ever! I do think I lack self-confidence when it comes to what I am writing. To me, all that I write never seems to be good enough and everytime I read something I have written, I always want to revisit it and redo it all over again. It was something that one of my friends had once noticed, she said it was frightening how I could be confident about anything, sometimes even things that I was terrible at and manage to pull it off like the greatest heist of the century and yet when it came to the one thing that I excelled at (I am not praising myself here…it wasn’t me that said it in the first place! Although I am a bit of a ham sometimes!) I was surprisingly doubtful of my own abilities! I still think her opinions were a little too flattering but heck, why should I complain about getting praised right? I think I’ll let her views stand!

Well anyways, the poems I wrote through most of the first semester always found their way to the dust-bin as soon as they materialized on paper. I always thought they were terrible. Well, I was studying in the library with (someone who was more of an acquaintance than a friend back then) when I had one of my moments and I phased out into my own little world to start penning down my thoughts in a rhyme. It was about friendship and something on those lines. As usual, I wrote it down and then threw it away. She saw the poem whilst I was writing it and when I had thrown it away in the dust-bin, she picked up the torn pieces from that pile. She went through the trouble of actually figuring out the jig-saw puzzle, gluing all the pieces onto another paper and gifting them to me the next day! She convinced me to write and we struck a deal wherein she lay claim to all my poems and I was never to destroy any of my works, bound by a contract! (Yeah I know! Women!) I think that was the first step in a friendship that has stood the test of time (touchwood!) I guess I will always remember that as the day a friend made a poet and a poet made a friend!

MAGGI

As engineers who have graduated they way engineers should, most of us hostelites did most (if not all) of the studying in a mad-rush at the fag end of the semester at a time more famously known as the PLs. For most, it means studying 5 subjects from scratch and attaining a level of understanding which would stand us good years down the line in our careers when we least expect to use all that knowledge! (Most of us are surprised by the fact that we are able to recall those complex concepts and those lengthy formulae to bail us out of a jam!) After all, reading engineering history that has taken hundreds of years to develop and arguably the greatest minds humanity has borne witness to, encompassed in a matter of 400 odd pages per subject, in a matter of a couple of days and still being able to make sense of it all is no mean task! Yet, thousands of young minds traverse the journey successfully every year and are awarded the title of “ENGINEER.” I am pretty sure doctors slog it out throughout their academic stint and are worthy of the honour bestowed when they are permitted to add the suffix “Dr.” in front of their names but I reckon us engineers haven’t quite taken a less perilous journey as we navigate through the 8 semesters and should be given a suffix too, like “Er.” maybe. Then I would call myself Er. Bikram Snehi. That would be funny though. Imagine the situation when someone is calling my name, “Er. Bikram, would you please care to be seated?” Sounds like a stutter, “er…may I help you?” So everytime someone stutters, all engineers would be looking over our shoulders to see if we are being addressed to! (Although with the number of engineers my beloved nation is producing, the title would be redundant anyways.)

Well, anyways…getting back to the point here. PLs were a time when we spent all day and all night watching movies and catching up with other such pleasures that we might have missed out on, on account of having had worked hard finishing the assignments, projects and the sort. (Oh, damn! I was supposed to have said that the time was spent studying… ah well, too much trouble to go back and edit so I guess I’ll let it stand!) Now you know the truth so I wouldn’t lie to you. For a majority of us, that was the norm. Not for all though. There were those among us who made good use of the time and did actually spend the time studying.

Ap would famously lock herself up in her room and not let anyone disturb her for the period. I guess she had a reserve of energy somewhere which meant that she hardly if ever ventured outside for anything. Dinner, lunch and breakfast were times when you saw everyone at the canteen except dear Ap. It was always a pleasure to catch her whenever I could, she was a sight for sore eyes. For all I’ve been through, I’m glad I had her around to counsel. Exam time was frenzied for her though. She spent all her time with the books. I can’t even imagine the sight of her drowned in books because she is meticulously neat! Ani was another zealot. When he sat down to study, he didn’t move at all. In fact, the PLs were a time when he invariably got insomniac and would wash clothes at 3 in the morning/night (I really dunno what to classify that time as!) just to make sure he wasn’t wasting time doing anything inconsequential. He had once challenged our chemistry teacher saying he would get the highest marks in college in her subject. Free-spirited as he has always been, he spent a lot of time in her class pulling her leg and generally fooling about. I remember one particular incident. Our teach wasn’t particularly good at diagrams, especially when it came to making them up on the blackboard. To her credit though she got the basic idea across most of the time. (Not that Ani was any good at diagrams either but we’ll let that pass for now.) As I was saying, she drew the diagram for a distillation tower and well, with the artistic liberty that she exercised, drew it tilted towards one side. Ani in all innocence (remains a contentious issue to this day!) replicated the diagram, albeit with a little more tilt to it. When she saw the diagram, (needless to say but I’ll say it anyway) she was flabbergasted! To her credit though, she laughed about it with us years down when we met her at one of the alumni meets. Well the point being, after all that and more, he had challenged her and did obtain the highest marks in college in chemistry! Kudos to the man to have been able to do that! And then there was Ra. The man followed quite a routine. Got up by 730, was studying by 830, studied on till 1 when he took a lunch break and then occasionally caught an afternoon nap but mostly spent the rest of the day studying till about 9 whence it was dinner time. Phenomenal! (Would you believe I actually gave that man an earful and counseled him into studying? Well, I can’t believe it myself!) Just for the record, his grades in engineering are stuff dreams are made of!

Where was I again?( Do I ramble so much? Unbelievable! And people tell me I don’t talk enough!) Right the PLs. I spent most of the PLs socializing and bonding with friends, catching movies at odd hours, riding away to obscure places unheard of and unexplored by the rest of humanity at Pune. But most of all, the PLs were memorable for all those wonderful moments I spent with Sa, Ro, Ab, Vi, Ani, Pr and the other chaps at the boys hostel. The most memorable of those times are the nights. As you might expect, the last couple of weeks were spent burning the midnight oil albeit for a completely different reason. At about 2 in the morning/night (whatever) at least one of us had to have Maggi cause we got hungry. So at those wee hours, stealthily in some room, someone would inevitably take up the task of making Maggi! Unfortunately (for the cook, not for the rest of us) the whiff would be in the air and we only had to follow our noses to the source. Hungry young men with forks in their hands went on a rampage trying to gulp down as much of the noodles as they could. Tongues scalding and lips smacking, the bowl would be empty before long. I know people who stayed up till those wee hours only so that they could lay their hands on those noodles! I for one was a part of that band. Heck, if it weren’t for Maggi, I wouldn’t have cleared my exams! Damn, anyone wanna cook me some Maggi? Come on… please?