B.C.S to U.S

The summers were almost coming to an end. And it was time for the inevitable. The first year results were going to be out. We were all a bit tense as we had a lot of fun the previous year and that meant the obvious during results. For me, It had been a great year. I had moved out of my house and living on my own which was a great high. I was not a great fan of intoxication, but 18 is the age when you try a lot of stuff.

A friend of mine, vinod had come down from Mumbai for the same reason as Dhaval. You could not help it, It was 1997, IT was booming and everybody wanted a piece of the pie. Vinod was a friend of mine from junior college days, and we had been through a lot of shit together. It worked fine for me , him being there and all. Both of us had a tough time in junior college. Coming in with good results in S.S.C, leaving with terrible performances in H.S.C. All of our other friends had stuck to their tasks, put their heads down for two years and gone on to do another four years of drudgery in an engineering course. We had tried to be cool, Bunked classes, fallen in love and smoke and by the end were both lost in translation. Looking back, it seems fun now, but it was really tough at that time.
It was a tough system. You had to slog for a whole year in Tenth grade, Slog harder for another Two years to get admission in an engineering college to slog for another four years. One slip along the way, and you were lost into oblivion. Me and vinod had done rather well on the first step, but had lost interest along the way. And I takes only that much to be rejected from every possible engineering college in the state. 75% would not be bad in most parts of the world,
But in our situation it would be better if we would have not given the exams at all. But there we were, clueless about what to do next. The both of us spent another year trying our hand at Bsc and considering our options. In that time, we had figured out that we had expensive taste and would need the big bucks really fast. I.T seemed the only feasible solution at that time. At the end of the year, I enrolled in BCS but vinod just missed the bus. He was back again after a year, and I was hoping he would get in.

I got up early on the morning of the result in anticipation. Vinod was up before me. We got ready and went to college.I didn’t have the heart to go in and collect my result straight away. We lit our cigarettes and went and sat outside CRUMBS.Crumbs was a small bakery on F.C.Road bang opposite the girls hostel. Why it was a popular hangout is evident. Actually, Hardly anybody would go inside crumbs and grab a bite. But lazing on the steps outside, getting some local gossip was a favourite pastime. It was unusually empty at that time of the day. It was the summer and everybody was at home, but on
result day it just felt creepy.

And they started pouring in. The song by queen “Another one bites the dust” kept playing in my head. Some of my college friends passed, some failed. When I could not take it any longer, I stepped in and slowly walked up to the line. When I was second in line I tried to peek , but could see nothing. And then came my turn. As the clerk looked up my name, I could feel my feet melt.He handed out the piece of paper to me. I took on look at it and ran towards the gate screaming. I had ducked 3 subjects,but more importantly not missed the year. Anybody looking would have guessed that I had topped the exam. For all you know,I had the same feeling. I came out of college to crumbs and gave vinod the thumbs up sign. He was as relieved as me, I could see that. Sid and the gang came to crumbs in some time. None of the guys had done well, but everybody had moved to the next Year. This called for a celebration, which at that time meant butter pav bhaji at shiv sagar.

With the results out of the way, I had a lot of other things to focus on which I will come to later. Vinod and Dhaval got along well With each other, which was strange considering the fact that they didn’t get along with any body else. But a few days later, vinod left Without getting admission, and Dhaval got in at new modern college. I met vinod a few times after that when I went home to Bombay, But have completely lost touch now. If you ever read this iyer, you gotta get in touch.

Sid's place seemed like a nice place to hang out at in the afternoons. He was living in a kinda big place for a student. It was an independent house, with an open terrace in shivaji housing colony in shivajinagar. Coming from mumbai, that much of space is like a mansion. It had a small verandah in front, which suited the smokers very well. Sid was not into smoking, and his house had his rules. So i was perched outside blowing smoke rings, while mithil was inside all alone. That was the way he preferred it at the time, or maybe we preferred it, cannot be sure. Sid had gone out to pick up a friend of his who had arrived in pune a couple of days ago. He was a friend of siddharth from his junior college days, who was coming in pune to take admission in B.C.S. That was a bit amusing for me , cos where I was looking for a way out, this dude was looking for a way in.
Sid arrived shortly, with his new accomplice. The guy must have been all of 40 kgs and about 5'8. And to complete the look he was wearing glasses. He looked around everything and everybody as he was about to charge at it with full force. He was going to put up with sid for a while.Not another nerd, I thought. Well, I already had quite a few around, more of them would only mean lesser of the fairer sex around.
Introductions were made and I found his name to be dhaval. He didn't talk much , which worked just as well.
We all had lunch later, the kind a student could afford in the city those days. We all returned home as it was too hot and sight seeing for the new guy could be done later. As soon as we came in, dhaval pulled a copy of "The Godfather" and perched himself in a chair. I tried to look into what he was reading, but as soon i got close, i got the same bulls on parade look. I thought for about a second whether to return the compliment, but the heavy lunch took over and i walked back.
Mithil had found himself a corner and his harmonica (mouth organ as I preffered to call it). He started to blow into it, and it made weird noises (add sholay tune desc later). Dhaval looked up from his book again, but mithil seemed oblivious. After some more satanic noises, sid, who had been cleaning up all this while, as was the case whenever we came back into the house, curtly asked him to stop playing or leave the room. Sid had a way with mithil. Usually, anyone else would have just barked a profanity at mithil. But sid made it sound like it was two choices he had, and he could have any one which must have made him feel like a king. He briefly took the harmonica away from his mouth and walked away to the other room. Sid turned on his computer, another reason I used to hang out at his place. The comp had Brian Lara's cricket 95
installed on it which was pretty much fun to play at that time.(add no running, boundaries only rule later). To use the machine for some college work seemed futile. Sid started the comp and asked if i wanted to join in. I agreed to the choice, given I had nothing else to do. I told him I would be with him after a smoke, which was just about the time it would take the 486 machine to load windows 95 at that time.
As i walked out the house for the smoke, I wondered about the three guys in the house. They were friends for 3 years, and were meeting each other after a long time. Yet there seemed to be no love lost between them. The were in the same house, and yet could have been in three different worlds altogether. Anways, I could not care less, I was just a good accquiantnace at the time and had too much on my mind to bother with. If I had known then what i knew now, I would have dropped the cigarrete and ran and never looked back. But I finished my smoke and went back in to play Brian Lara's Cricket 95.

No one remembers when it all began. But I will start from a reference point and use flashbacks wherever required.
It was an usual afternoon at siddharth’s place. Sid as he wanted himself called, but we seldom did, was a relatively
New friend for me. It was mid May in 1997. The first year exams were over and the results were yet to be declared.
Afternoons are not very pleasant in the hot weather in pune. Given a choice, I would have easily opted to stay back
Home in Mumbai. But I had to get here, as results were going to be out soon.. If I was going to flunk , I sure needed to run away from home.Being in pune would have given me a headstart.

I was introduced to siddharth by a common friend, mithil. Mithil was studying with me in fergusson college.
He was the kind of guy, you could recognize from a distance and then maintain the distance. I mean, there was
Nothing wrong with the dude, but nothing seemed to be right either. He had done the moonwalk during our course induction,And immediately non-fans of Michael Jackson stepped away. Considering It was late in the 90’s, the music had long faded and jackson’s bed habits were already public. But mithil seemed unfazed, and till today remains a true fan. In the beginning of the year, the guys in class had a running wager. At the end of the day, we would pay the guy who sat next to mithil..

And one day mithil found out I was from Mumbai. He came and asked me with a big smile on his face, a smile I would see only three times in the next four years “Where are you from in Mumbai?”. Before I could reply, The guy had already sat down next to me. He was from Virar, I was from andheri. They are both suburbs of Bombay, but they could be two different cities altogether considering the contrasts.I prefer to call the city Bombay, cos it was Bombay at that time. And so started a conversation, which would set the ball rolling. If I would have just said I was not from Mumbai, Maybe Life would have changed a lot and I would have been not writing this. Soon enough, I found out that even though the guy makes a horribble first impression, he could be entertaining in a strange sort of way. Mithil is still an acquired taste, one which I have still to acquire. Anyways, by the end of the year we kinda could tolerate each other and that much was enough.

I met siddharth outside college, where you generally meet people when you are studying. He was mithil’s roommate and had come to pick him up. Well, here was another dude you could not miss in a crowd. There was nothing fancy about him, but you could know the guy was making an effort. At what, I am not entirely sure of. But he would come across to most people as someone who is always trying. I still remember him being perched on his Yamaha 135 c.c ( I know he would not like it being called just his bike) in a pair of denims and a bright orange shirt.
The only thing missing to complete the image of Shahrukh khan in DDLJ, which had released a couple of years ago, was the mandolin, which I later found out was at home. I didn’t see him for a long time after that, details of which I will come to later. Anyways, by the end of the summer we were getting along well enough to spend a couple of hours together.

Most stories about a group of friends in college start with the first day in college. They move on to the ragging, unknown people sticking up for each other and friendships being formed and so on and so forth. Well, we didn't even know each other at the begining of the first year. Or till almost the end. The four of us, that is. There were a lot more, but these four were at the core. Everybody else could be identified as being introduced by one or more of these four. We were and are quite a collection of sorts.
I shall try and narrate this from my viewpoint. This could immediately turn up as an issue of debate amongst us. The four could all want the story to be told from their viewpoint. Which would all be totally different versions of the same event. I will try and take their inputs on some of the controversial topics, so that they dont feel left out. And that the truth is never known. Most of us would like it like that i am sure.
The guys were all from different suburbs of mumbai. I insist on mentioning suburbs, because south mumbai or town as it is fondly called is a different city altogether. Growing up in virar is not as same as growing up in cuffe parade. Or even Bandra for that matter. All of us had seen college as it was in the suburbs and had moved on higher grounds to a different city to study. The place was none other than the hometown of education as it is fondly called(still??), PUNE. The course that they pursued was and is called B.C.S(Bachelor Of Computer science). The syllabus will be found on the Pune university site for readers who are interested in it. I cannot post it here for the simple reason that I do not know if I would be able to survive the inexplicable horror of remembering the subjects again. Not that the course was the toughest the Indian Education System could throw on you. There were far more worse or so I would hear at that time. But my mental and physical abilities have their own limitations. Plus a general curiosity about every thing around, coupled with tons of laziness thrown in did'nt leave much time for books.
But, those were the times of careless youth, without a worry in the mind. No bosses, no deadlines and no money. Well, i say no money, because you dont worry about something you dont have. It is the least important thing in college. Sure it can buy you lots of stuff, but it cant get you in the cool gang. You are either there or you are not. period. All of us went through a lot of turbulent times. Every now and then someone would hit a purple patch which would be the exact period for another to go into deep depression. We loved each other, hated each other, but most importantly stuck with each other till the end. And after that just parted ways because enough was enough.
I will try and keep it as long and precise as possible. Hoping for a lot of inputs along the way.

This is a honest effort to document the journey of a bunch of guys from B.C.S to M.C.S to U.S. As i start writing this blog, some have already completed the journey, some are in transit, a few waiting for their chance and the rest already giving up.
I hope this does not turn out to be the last post on the blog, considering my short attention span and even shorter concentration time. Hope my friends will fill me on the gaps, which would be wide as the mumbai-pune expressway considering my problem with long term( and short term) memory.
More Later ....