Brain Freeze
Friday, June 23, 2006
Red Tape & All That Jazz- Or How to Fool the College Authorities into Thinking You Are a Blameless Babe in the Woods
Four years in a college, and you'd think that the higher-ups would PAY to see us go. But NO! Our college authorities don't want to give us up without a struggle. So, they have devised the perfect torture plan to make sure that 1 out of 5 students do not leave the College of Engineering, Trivandrum.
This seemingly simple yet devious plan is called, innocuously enough, a No-Dues Certificate. At face value, the form asks very simple questions indeed.
1) Name, (easy enough unless you are the kind that writes EVERYTHING from your neighbour's paper).
2) Class and year in which admitted to CET. Now, unless you spent most of your adult life at CET, I am sure you remember the time you found yourself in the midst of the Acacia forest wondering "Mera number kab aayega?"
8) Reason for leaving: Uhm, they won't have me anymore?! I wish they would, but they need the space for the juniors....
Once the poor final year student (or to be alumnus) is done with the third degree, he/she is suddenly faced with a mass of cryptic designations like Head Librarian, Hostel Warden, Bus Secretary, Supdt. A4, Supdt. G2 etc. Like a lifeline you cling on to Head of Department and Dean as someone you might recognise if you meet them in the lobby....
You're told you need their signatures. Counting down, that's around nine signatures and a smile creases your face as you start calculating what can be done with the spare time. When, suddenly, the trap is sprung by the gleeful other in the conversation,
"By the way, you need to get signatures from every lab and place in the college where you set your foot in."
Frantically, some lovebirds begin to calculate if the long walks and the sojourns in the Acacia Park (also known as the Panjaara Kaadu) was costing them any.
And thus begins your long trek around the 145 acres of the College of Engineering, Trivandrum.
Any sane CETian begins with the Library, where it's easy to get the four signatures and bid adieu. Any ECEian worth their salt then demands a no dues from the Machines Lab, (heh! imagine breaking a DC motor or a AC transformer), and the Mechanical Workshop Lab, (no breakages unless asked to use a large hammer and a chisel). Getting signatures from the umpteen labs you never remembered having done in the four years in college, from the component store, from your staff advisor and the HOD complete the quota at the Dept.
Ideally, the CGPU, the CCF and the CETAA ought to come somewhere in the middle.
I couldn't bear to look as the sir at the Central Computer Facility punched a hole into my ID card, (which was falling apart with that final indignity anyway). Ideally, I did say. I forgot to get the no dues from the CET Alumni Association (CETAA), but got a signature from the HOD anyway.
That made for a funny conversation.
Friend: "I have to get a signature from the CETAA"
Me: "Now, I haven't been to any of those reunions yet. So, I didn't pay. I gave it off without paying THEM!"
Friend: "Hah. Now, you won't be an alumnus of CET."
Me: "Aren't we all supposed to meet, like, in 2056?"
After one day,
Me: "Sir, I got my no dues approved without signing three forms in triplicate about joining the CETAA as a member."
Sir: "Cluck like a chicken thrice and promise me you won't repeat this again!"
Then, of course, there is the case of non-college bus using, day scholars having to camp outside the Hostel Warden and the Bus Secretary's Office. Not to mention having to take a sign off the scatter brained lady that is the Dept. Librarian.
This process took three days. At the end of which, I cheerfully went to the UG Dean's Office and asked for my TC.
The lady looked mournfully up and asked me to wait for three months, at the end of which the Dean would inform me I'd have to take a signature again since he used Emerald Green Ink to sign instead of Jade Green.
I hate red tape. And, no, not the shoes.
PostScript
This is my last blogspot from this address. This is because of proxy issues this blog page faces at most institutes, including IIMB.
Those cats who are curious about my further adventures are free to read on at .....
Frankly, I am curious to know too ;)
http://bstung.wordpress.com
PostScript to a PS
On the honour of a Fachchi from IIMB, I'll try to keep the blog updated and as clear as the accounts kept by Anderson & Anderson for Enron.
See you guys, and trust me I enjoyed the Brain Freeze ride.
Tuesday, June 20, 2006
Tick tock...1:30 am, 21st June, 2006.
In around 10 hours, I'll be giving the last engineering exam of my life. (If all goes to plan)
In 15 hours, I'll have gotten my no-dues and hopefully, my TC from the College of Engineering, Trivandrum, my home away from home for the past four years. (More on that soon enough.)
In around 84 hours, I'll be bidding adieu to my life in Trivandrum, a place I have been inhabiting for the past 17 years.
In 5 days, I'll be roaming the streets of Bangalore with my family, visiting relatives and smiling my way into the record books.
In less than 6 days, I'll be at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore.
If this is a dream, don't wake me up!
Friday, June 16, 2006
ClosureI am leaving CET in a week. This is something I wanted to post around 8 months ago...
This is a post that has been pending for sometime. Many a time I started typing the words that I hoped would in some measure put my feelings into words. But, everytime, I failed. This is an attempt, futile maybe, to bring closure.
Death is something that happens in everyone's life. Whether it is the end or beginning of something is debatable.
But, murder.... Murder is different. Murder is despicable... Murder is also something that shouldn't happen to someone you know.
On 13th October, 2005, my classmate went missing. It was around the holidays and nobody really knew about it. The next day, we had our seminars, and all of the seventh semester, Applied Electronics were busy in eking out just those extra five marks from their talks.
Maybe we were too engrossed in our own lives to notice the absence of someone we took for granted in our class, maybe we were guilty of paying too less attention. Maybe, we were just too human....
The next week, it casually dropped into conversation.
"Did you know Shyamal is missing?"
That's when I remembered he hadn't been coming for the labs. We were trying to figure out where he could have gone and when he'd gone missing. Conflicting stories came up. Some thought it was Friday and some were sure they'd seen him on Thursday. The girls were anxious, and the boys tried to reassure us.
"He'll be back, he always is."
The story found itself on Page 3 of Hindu everyday. The police had no idea. The police suspected extortion. The police were in Madras. The police were questioning students. Always the headline read, "Missing Engineering College student".
Everyday, unwillingly, I pulled myself to read the newspaper, praying hard and wishing that one day the headline would read "Missing Engineering College Student found."
This is when students come together.
We started discussing about what could be wrong. Where he could have gone. What could have happened. Hundreds of questions and hundreds of plausible answers and just an unspoken question in our minds, under the surface, "Are you as afraid as I am for him?"
Everyone was afraid and unable to voice what we actually felt.
Days passed in this fashion.
Everyday, I picked the newspaper. The media was sensationalising everything, and I hated myself for relying on what the papers were saying. I ought to have known him better. I ought to have taken the time...
So many maybes... so many what ifs....
When, suddenly, that was it.
I took the paper one day and turned automatically to the third page. There was a terse report of an unidentified body found near the By-Pass. I turned panicky. On reading, it said it was that of a 30 year old man. My mind quietened down and my prayers became more vehement.
That afternoon, I got a phone call.
"There's bad news. Shyamal's body has been found. He's been murdered."
I sat down. There was a knot in my stomach. I forced myself to read the report again, reading between the lines.
I remembered the shirt he was wearing that day, according to the report.
Unbidden thoughts flooded into my head.
All of us in workshop garb, doing carpentry, and sir asking if everyone understood Malayalam. Whereupon, everyone pointed to Shyamal, saying he was from the Andamans. The sir had to spend three weeks explaining everything in two languages.
Shyamal sitting down on the verandah, outside our Power Electronics lab, playing with his mobile phone.
All the boys bugging him to know what the hindi word for 'cockroach' was. The MHites asking him to fan them as they "so"ed (slept).
His quirky humour and his funny way of talking.
The way he (and all my other lab partners) filched my lab record and rough record to do their experiments.
Three years of opportunities when we could know him and couldn't. Three years ago, his parents had sent him to our college to get a B.Tech degree. Never again would they see him. Never again would there be a chance for us to know him properly.
My prayers turned. I hoped he hadn't suffered much in his passing and I prayed for the peace of his family.
I felt for those of my friends (and his) who had to go and identify one of our own.
I found I couldn't bear to be alone. I got online and I stayed online for 3 days, talking nonsense.
Many times, I took up blogger's home page to write an eulogy. But what could I say, other than:-
"He was my classmate, a gentle soul who never harmed a fly. This ought not have happened to him. We didn't really know him. We wish we did."
Then, we began hating the media. The truth of "news" and invasion of privacy had caught up with us.
Initially, it was in the turn of phrase, the slightly sarcastic way of saying "disappearance", quotes included. Then it escalated, the front pages were splashed with his picture and those of his grieving parents. "Leads" were being followed. And everywhere we went, murmurs followed..
"Oh, so you are in CET. That boy..."
"He was my classmate..."
"Oh...." A long pause invariably followed. "What kind of boy was he?"
We hated the question and the answer equally. "We didn't know him all that well."
I gave up reading the paper for the next week. When we went back to college for our sessional exams, his pictures were put up on every wall, and I couldn't bear to look at it without remembering him with the half smile on his face, which he invariably had.
He had been one of us. All of 21 years of age. His life was nipped in the bud. Murdered for no fault of his own. Senseless, violent murder for no reason at all.
In his life, an average engineering student, having fun in his own way. One of the faceless, nameless thousands who pass out of such colleges everyday. In death, he became a political statement and a media frenzy. And like all political statements, short-lived. For some days, there were placards around the Secretariat that said "Bring the perpetrators of the Shyamal murder to justice." Those eventually disappeared too.
The Shyamal murder... Shyamal was a person to us, he wasn't a statement. These two words are something none of us can reconcile with each other, try as we might.
This is my prayer, dear god, give his family the peace of mind they need and the strength to face the tempest ahead.
Sunday, June 11, 2006
The VisitThe fan was creaking in the room; it was the only noise in the silence that had suddenly descended. This was the sort of silence where the participants smiled quick awkward smiles around which never meant anything special. She spent sometime looking up at the rafters of the house. The burnished wood looked like it had survived the ravages of centuries.
"I wonder how old this is? Dare I ask him?"
She dragged her eyes back to his face. He was smiling his usual wide toothed grin: slightly ingratiating and almost a smirk.
"So, what are your plans?"
She mumbled an answer that seemed to cover her near future adequately. Her mother broke in smoothly to cover whatever confusion she felt. That left her free to look around the room again. Her eyes wandered over the cheetah's head, the staircase to the loft, the basement (which her mom had told her was used to store grain in the old days) the calendar fluttering in the breeze, the tattered furniture. Incongruously, a huge Coke bottle stared back at her; they said it was a CD player. The modern touches in the room: a TV, a VCD player, the music system and a curio shelf filled with cheap dolls, just served to remind her how far they had come.
Twelve-thirteen years ago,there was no TV (She'd cursed that, "NO TV during VACATIONS?"), no video player or music system. The radio cranked out Akashvaani. But they still had fun. They'd sit outside on the porch during power cuts; all her cousins came together for vacations and sang and played cards even by candlelight. She remembered being the pesky little kid, the one everyone pampered and spoilt with toffees. The one that used to ensonce herself into the nearest cousin's lap and demand to hear a story from, the one that begged to be allowed to play grown-up games like Monopoly and '28' because there was no fun in being left out. She remembered the nights, sleeping on a straw mat, a tasty snack for mosquitoes; the shadows outside looking more menacing in the darkness, the table-fan whirring in its futile crusade to drive the heat of the night away.
Her grandmother and she had arguments over who had the last toffee, at least until the year ammachi had completely lost her memory. The new routine included the question, "Are you married yet? Who are you?" everytime she visited. Laughter almost bubbled to the surface when she remembered the expectant look on ammachi's face as she used to look at her hands to the ever-present packet of toffees her visitors brought her.
There were no toffees this time.
She snapped her attention back to what her uncle was saying, "...And they'd taken his gall bladder out." He finished it off with a kind of gory delight.
"Don't you need a gall bladder for proper functioning of the system?", asked her mother.
She mumbled again, "It's just for enzymes."
Her uncle laughed, "Yeah, they do it at the Sayippu's Hospital even now."
"So, how's your health today?" enquired her mother of her aunt and uncle.
"Haha.", he laughed, "I am still taking my pills. Five of them, three times a day."
Aunty added, "I am better than usual. I had an eye infection...." They were confirmed hypochondriacs, a genetic failing she always hoped she'd never inherit.
Her mother was continuing the small talk, "I thought you'd be busy today."
Aunty dear stood up with pride and looked at her busy husband, "He had three separate appointments today. A wedding, a baptism and a funeral.. "
"Speaking of weddings, when is George's wedding?" George was her favourite cousin, the one whom she teased mercilessly about how he was going to die a bachelor. So far, he was on the right path; her only unmarried cousin.
"My dear uncle, always so busy with the small world around him," she thought and smiled slightly and looked at her daughter. She remembered being overawed by her oh-so-grownup cousins. They could do everything so much better than her, they could do nothing wrong. Surely, they were supermen and women.
And then, suddenly that awe had vanished. She'd grown and they'd suddenly diminished in stature. They were as mundane as the rest of the people she knew. It wasn't their fault, she knew that, but was it hers? She suddenly wished she had the old days back.
She stood up abruptly, without excusing herself and ran outside to the porch, to the steps she remembered. This was the front of her ancestral home. It was seldom used now, the cars used to stop at the back door now. But the water wasn't as she'd remembered. Water hyacinth grew thick on its surface and the boat was pulled high and dry. She knew it had been ages since boats had plied on the small canal (could it be called a creek?), but she also remembered shivering on the steps leading into the water. There had been a time when they went to church on a boat; that had been nice. They had gone to the church, before coming home.
Even the church had changed. It was painted properly, the vicarage almost shiny and new, the water flowing past it had become murky brown, as if angry at the present. There was a pristine new macadamised road now. Everyone walked or came by vehicle to the Sunday service now. The cemetery outside the chapel looked dilapidated and uncared for. Huge granite slabs marked the life and passing of the beloveds of so many members of her family, family crypts and tall monoliths graced the small place. The paint was peeling on one showy tower that proclaimed its residents to be a loving couple. She remembered idly wondering how many more people could have been buried in the same space if the family hadn't decided to be ostantateous. She'd picked her way gingerly through the dense foliage, feeling sorry for all the poor souls on whose final resting place she'd stamped on. The weeds were nearly as tall as her at the grave and she stood there silently praying for the souls of her departed ones and for the strength for facing the future.
It was almost a family church, they told her. This is where many of your forefathers lived and were buried. She was never sure if that a badge of honour or something to be resented? She was slightly afraid of going there when there was no service on. Afraid even of making conversation in the lonely silence that breathed of centuries of so-called tradition. It was stifling.
Almost as stifling as sitting inside the house. It was much better standing outside, staring at the courtyard. The porch was as she remembered it. An insect bit her, not an unusual happening at all here. The 'muttam' was swept clear of all leaves and the sand was clean. The vines were climbing up the pillars. The bamboo grew sturdy and strong by the waterside, and there was that small chair in the corner as usual. Her dad's. Another baby of the family, she remembered, laughing slightly. The one who got into the most unholy scraps and the one who always strived the hardest: the daredevil of the family. She'd inherited all the traits in equal measure. Her mother used to wonder out aloud what exactly the Fates had done by making her a girl.
There were other kids here: her little nieces and nephews. She particularly didn't want to meet them, then she couldn't let her mind wander. But her uncle had other ideas. He went and woke them up.
"Get up, babies, look who's here? See this chechi. Do you remember her?"
She corrected mildly, "Not chechi, aunty."
"Oh. Yeah, we forgot the baby has grown up so much."
"Well, I became 21 when none of you were noticing, Uncle." she smiled sweetly.
The kids stared resentfully at her, yawning and rubbing their sleep out of their eyes. "No, little ones, I am not invading your space. In fact, I was always a visitor here." she told them silently.
"Kiss chechi, kutta," her uncle wanted to show off his grand-daughters. She obediently turned a cheek to the toddler who bumped her nose against it.
"No. no, you can do better."
She hurriedly got up and cast a significant look at her mother, "No, no, Uncle. We have to go. We're going home and we won't get there unless we leave now."
Her mother got up from the sofa, smiling. "Well, then. We'll see you later."
The final byes were exchanged, with hugs and promises to come again next year. She smiled at her cousin and hugged her tight for old time's sake. "You take care, chechi and say hi to your husband. I'll see if I can come for George achachan's wedding, whenever he finds a suitable girl. It'll be like old times again."
They sat in the car and waved again, preparatory to leaving Suddenly, her uncle ran out. "You forgot to pay the servants."
Her mother rolled the windows down and asked softly, "How much?"
Her father's elder brother smiled ingratiatingly again, "Whatever you can afford. You know you only come once a year, and from the city too..."
Her mother silently handed over a wad of notes, rolled up the windows and she took the car out of the back courtyard and into the narrow alley leading to freedom.
"This needs to be written about. Maybe on my blog," was her last thought before her mother started talking about their next destination.
About This Blog
About Me
Previously, On Brain Freeze
Ice Box
Defrosted
Proxy Wars
Psychos, Unite
BlogSpectacles!
Ice-Cold
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