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?