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COLLEGE NYABAGAM

It's precisely 130 days since the camaradrie of college life got over.....with the last exam of VB on may 5th...I somehow feel like being transported to the days of college life.

This is how my typical day at college wud be......I used to get up at 6 and quickly take a shower and get ready....pack my bag for the day ( not with books , but with the required playlist ....of cassetes ).switch on my walkman at 6 40 and walk up to the bus stand and after seeing a horde of engineering college buses plying wud... sight my bus...where the bus would come to a screeching halt after driving a dozen vehicles crazy .....on the road.My driver had a insatiable appetite for scaring the guts out of other people driving on the road.It was his version of need for speed ............

the next 1 hour would be spent listening to music along with prasanna who too wud have his playlist ....in his bag. On certain days when neither of us had our walkman's ,we had to put up with up the GANA PATTU the driver used to blaringly play...much to our discomfort in a set of really dumb screeching speakers which he thought was the next upgrade of a woofer sound system.On certain days when the driver was in a good mood , we would get to listen to suchitra ramadurai's sexy voice on radio mirchi 98.3 FM ...or sometimes doze away with the music ringing in our ears......which would be rudely awakened by the rush of students who board the bus at AVADI bus stand. That is the time when our bus would rest for about 10 minutes after filling petrol when our eyes start to ogle around in avadi , trying to find a ripe apple among the rotten lot.....Unfortunately the ripe apples :-) are pretty much less in the colleges in and around avadi.......

Then some time later all the noise would come to an abrupt end ....as the bus chugs along the college road ......stopping for all VT students to get down.......

It would take me quite a while to realize that college has indeed come and I have to remove the ear plugs of my ear and console myself to the fact that I have arrived at the doorstep of Hell.
It used to be long walk from the big gate to the main gate where the nepali guard used to scan us with his sharp eyes as if we were intruders entering a forbidden e-secure zone,checking our ID cards. Well sometime back my friend prasanna in 2nd year used to be regularly caught at the gates simply because the green color pant he wore and the colour prescibed by the college were marginally different.....and the other excuse was of course the shoe's we used to get caught for.Initially it was a mental torture seeing the guards off, but what suprised me most was that apart from the guards there were a horde of 6-7 idiots meant to check on our ID cards and transport cards......and those arseholes were called the "MEN IN GREEN" ....

Then it was automatically the toilet that we headed for, after which would come the best part, a 45 minute stint at the canteen.This is the place where the mama's met the machan's and so on , gossip would reach a crescendo at 8 30 am and would continue on till 9 am , the time when the classes were supposed to start.Our meal would finish at 9 :05 and we would amble our way...to the classrooms just in time , when the names on the attendance register were called .

I would somehow struggle shrug off a friendly cousin of mine called SLEEP until he came and cuddled ,cajoled me over....to visit his world daily ....when the classes were on. This ritual would continue every few minutes and.....just to be in the teachers good books , I would get up and ask her a question ...based on whatever crap lay in my classmate Achut's notebook...which was relevant(or irrelevant to the class) and lo....the teacher would feel that I paid attention to her.

Lunch was the most important period where i was fully awake......this was the period where all our gang would meet up at the canteen to lend our ears to the latest gossip and news about symposiums ,quizzes and of course discussions.Then there were the "guys " who would eat in the most peculiar manner. One guy would buy a lunch token and an incredibly huge amount of rice on his plate and 5-6 guys would put their hand in the plate wherever they got space to rob the guy of his lunch.........and munch on with other guy's lunch untill the clock struck 1 and a few minutes beyond.

The classes in the final year were a mere formality as the lecturer would spend more time with the girls in the adjacent row than on the dias.......and I had no complaints as i sneaked in time to work out a few quant problems ........and then again the cycle wud repeat in the evening with the same old bus journey .....plagued with the chennai heat.

Time just rolled by and 4 years went by just like that........


even now time is going by........just like that,whole day listening to music ...sleeping , chatting with the same guys on phone......the only thing is that the venue is different. quite glad to know that a sizeable amount of the class's intelligensia are employed.

prasad, Srivathsan(a.k.a STEVE): CTS
Achut, Joshy, kartik kannan(me): INFY
Anand, sheik, selva, jaffer, ananthavenkat, dinesh, tamilarasan, Jency, laxminarayanan: HCL
prasanakumar: IGATE/ISOFT
Nandagopal: YCS
venki: AOL
sudhir. b. k: TCS ...........and if i have left out anyone .......pls do lemme know