Return of the Jedi

Darkness.

It was 5.30 am in the morning. The air was damp. Visibility, limited. A sudden gust forced me to draw my jacket closer to my body. I was surrounded by trolleys and shoulder bags of various sizes and brands. Beside me stood Bharani, similarly attired, surrounded by his own luggage, having just paid off the taxi-wala a whopping 900 bucks for a 45 minute ride.

We had just traveled a 1,200 km over 29 hours in a rusty old train – an average speed of little more than 41 kmph. My mom rides her TVS Scooty faster than that. And then the taxi for the 22 km to the college, paying a higher amount than for the train. Anybody would be exhausted.

We were not.

Because we were finally inside the hallowed grounds of NITIE. We were standing right outside the legendary MDP Hostel (more on it later), facing a map of God’s Own Campus*. Of course, we’d been here once before – during our trip here for the GD/PI – but this time was different. We were students now! It was one of those classic ‘dream come true’ moments to cherish.

Even before coming to the campus, us PGDIM students had a fair idea about life at NITIE. We’d talked, heard and read quite a bit. From forums, blogs, seniors and the aspirant relations team. We even have our very own Life @ NITIE page. So we were forewarned about the series of case study competitions, the lush, green, campus, the constant rain, the 96 stairs every morning, the pathetic food, NITIE Sarovar (our very own pond) and even the leopard that pays a visit every winter (seriously). But the first thing that struck me about NITIE that morning, as we entered the ‘reception’ area of the MDP Hostel was none of those things. (Of course I wouldn’t be writing this blog if it were the leopard!) It was something far more beautiful, yet far more terrible than the leopard. No, the first thing that caught my eye was –

Insects.

Of every shape, size, color  and variety. Estimates put the number of extant species of insects in the world at anywhere between 6-10 million, potentially representing over 90% of the different animal forms on Earth, and easily more than half of all known living organisms; 900,000 have already been identified. It is said that, for every human alive, there are about 200 million insects in this world, and that there are more insects per square mile on an average, than there are human beings in the entire planet. They’re also some of the strongest, most stubborn and highly adaptable creatures ever. A cockroach can apparently live for up to 9 days without its head, post which it dies, only because of starvation! And scientists and Hollywood producers have more or less agreed that the first ETs that we’ll encounter are most likely to be bugs with antennas protruding from their heads.

...and then we'll insert the tubes into your brain-thingys and switch on the power!

So you could understand our apprehension when we stepped into the hostel and encountered about half of those 900,000 in the reception area. If that doesn’t wake one up, I don’t know what will.

Anyway, the initial shock buzzed down and we came to accept the reality – that like it or not, we’re going to be sharing the campus with these guys for the next two years, and that there’s absolutely no escaping it. And to be fair, they were here before us and are probably going to outlive us easily too. We might as well try and get in their good books. No point antagonizing them. So, taking extreme precautions to not step on any of them, we made our way to the couch and tried to rouse the warden who was fast asleep, seemingly oblivious to the danger in every inch around him.

Five minutes of broken Hindi and 400 bucks later, we finally held the keys to our room for the day, and now faced just this one small hurdle of getting 10 pieces of luggage up 6 floors to our room. Thankfully, the elevator worked, and we managed it in 3 trips.

3 hours later, I woke up with a start. To the theme music of ‘Soodhu Kavvum’, as mum called to enquire about everything. After quickly reassuring her that everything was fine and wishing her and dad a happy wedding anniversary, and my sister good luck for her first day at her new school, I collapsed on to the bed again, and didn’t wake up for another 2 hours.

Once we woke up properly, the rest of the day went by pretty much normal.

As normal as it could get considering it was your first day away from your family and home that is. A few surprises, a few not so. But we had a lot of our firsts at NITIE that day. Our first stroll around the pond and discovering a huge dead silver snake by the banks; our first exploration of the area outside NITIE, and deciding never to have a chai again in that shop near the end of the road; our first photographs of the campus with the cameras in our phones, and wondering if we should’ve brought something bigger and better; our first cash withdrawals from the ATM inside the campus, and realizing with dread that there would be no more credits to the accounts; our first walk to the football ground and getting caught in the downpour on the way back, making a mental note to never leave our rooms without an umbrella again; and our first breakfast in the college mess, where we couldn’t even make it to our third dosas, another first!

And then it was time for the hostel registration. The MDP hostel we bunked in that morning was only a temporary arrangement as we’d arrived much earlier than necessary. This meant one thing.

That our glorious partnership was about to come to an end.

For both Bharani and I had pre-booked our roommates for the two year stay at NITIE. Mine was to be a quirky, bespectacled character named Eshwar S Raman Bharadwaj.

The Jedi!

Match my sexiness, you shall not!

I’d first met Eshwar during the GD/PI rounds 2 months earlier, and couldn’t quite place him one way or the other. Now, as far as first impressions go, he might come across as this really nerdy guy who keeps talking and worrying about exams and placements and committees and whatnot. It’s really quite amazing how he can go on and on and on discussing his fears and skepticism about everything in life - it can annoy the most patient people easily at times.

But then he's also this extremely charming person with such a diverse profile, he can keep you interested and entertained easily. Each day you discover something new about him. So far, I’ve managed to figure out that he speaks about 5 languages fluently (including Sanskrit and French), is proficient with the guitar and the mridangam besides having a striking command in vocal music, plays cricket as a genuine all-rounder, has a brown belt level II in Karate (he’s very particular about people not forgetting the level II part), and is gifted with incredible networking and communication skills.

This awesome guy does not really belong here. A combination of ‘family’ commitments and a childhood resolution meant that he had to decline his on-site (Russia) posting offer, quit his job, and pursue his MBA at NITIE like the rest of us.

But I did not know all this back then, and when he had called me for the first time to ask me if we could be roomies, I had my reservations - I generally don’t like to plan much in advance, and simply go with the flow. But having Eshwar as roommate offered its own brand of safety and attractiveness – here was a guy who was sincere and serious enough to keep me in check and make me study should I get distracted, a fellow Tambrahm and teetotaler  and most importantly, someone proficient in spoken Hindi. The last point, especially, had vetoed the vote in favor of his proposal!

So it was that on the afternoon of the 12^th of June, 2013, Bharani and I were to part ways (for the time being) and register for our hostel rooms separately.

Fate, as it turned out, had other plans.

The rules strictly stated that we could register only for ourselves, and cannot save the other slot for a friend not in campus at the time. And both Eshwar and Ramkumar, Bharani’s would-be roommate, were flying in only later that night. Which put us in quite a dilemma. Either we could wait for our roomies to arrive and register for the rooms the next morning, or we could change the plans completely and register to be roommates ourselves. Seniors had very strongly advised us to get done with the booking ASAP before all the ‘good rooms’ were taken, and that we would soon learn to get along fine with whatever roommates that we ended up with anyway. A lot of phone calls, discussions, negotiations and apologies later, Bharani and I finally decided to go for it ourselves, and to face things as and when they come.

Though I had a suspicion that all the events of the previous 8 hours had been somehow, naturally, leading to this point, I somehow couldn’t get this nagging feeling away – that I’d broken a promise to this Eshwar guy. What if he didn’t find a suitable roomie when his turn to register came the next morning? Would he still want to be friends with me? I couldn’t shake off the uneasiness. Neither of us could – Bharani had done the same to his guy. Still, we did what we had to do.

We entered our signatures in the log and finally obtained the key to room number 207 – beautiful number. Ours was on the ground level that still had to be accessed via a set of 6 stairs due the incline (NITIE is basically built on a small hill you see). We were greeted by a whole lot of garbage strewn about carelessly outside in the corridor, ominous signs for what lay within. And then, summoning all our courage, we pulled aside what was once probably used as a mesh-door, unlocked the main door, and taking a deep breath, pushed it inside for a first glimpse at what would be our home for the next 24 months.

Now, NITIE is known for a lot of things, but habitable hostel rooms clearly isn’t one of them.

My first instinct was to run back to the MDP hostel and hide under the bed. Memories of my room at our place in Chennai came crashing back to me, my constant whines to mom that the room was not big enough to play carom on the floor, haunting me with each passing minute. That was a palace when compared to this. For this first time in my life, I really, really, felt the horror of young Harry Potter being made to live in that cupboard under the stairs for all those years.

Our room basically ended before it started. There were two creaky old iron beds, with worn out, pale blue mattresses from the 20^th century. The 2 speed ceiling fan was a foot away from our heads and we had to be careful not to stretch our hands while standing, lest we lose a finger. There was this one common dirty wardrobe for us to keep our clothes in, and two other cupboards for us to keep books or other miscellaneous stuff – I tried one of the doors of mine, and it came off completely in my hand! The toilet/bathroom was a haven of insects from ants to spiders to centipedes to even snails, and the latch wouldn’t work. There was crude graffiti all over the walls, and there was a balcony overlooking the road that leads to the mess below us, completely covered by shade from the giant trees above – no chance for the sunlight to get in. We were each given a desk for the laptop/books, and mine couldn’t be brought in from the balcony, try as we might. There was just the one small light bulb/night lamp which wouldn’t work, and there was a stack of old, smelly newspapers in the corner. Both the LAN ports were faulty, as was one of the plug points.

I mean, we’d gone in with very low expectations to start with. And the room still managed to shock us! If possible, the feeling of guilt was even more pronounced now – was this room really worth all that urgency? Did I bail out on Eshwar for this? Would he ever forgive me?

The rest of the day was pretty much uneventful. Bharani and I decided to keep the time spent in our room as minimal as possible, so we went back to the villa that was the MDP hostel. (It primarily exists to house distinguished guests, alumni and corporates who visit the campus, so is much better furnished) The lunch was so bad we started to pray for a better dinner already, and Bharani and I did some light shopping in the evening. Throughout the day we kept running into vaguely familiar faces from the GD/PI process, Impact-ers, and other classmates we met in the Impressions meet in Chennai. But nothing could lift my spirit. At about 10.30 pm that night, as I was watching Spiderman 3 in the TV in our MDP Hostel room after an equally depressing dinner of roti and dal, I received the call.

The Jedi was in town!

His parents had come to see him off, and the family had taken up a room in the MDP Hostel too, just a couple of stories beneath us. But I was really worried about how I was going to face him, that too with his parents beside him. Would they judge me? As it turned out, he wasn’t in much of a hurry either, and we planned to meet up the next morning, in our room. So I finished my movie and retired to bed on my first day at NITIE at about 1.30 am that night, and dreamt about home and mom and dad and sis and friends and Darth Vader. It was a disturbed sleep.

"Give yourself to the Dark Side. It is the only way you can save your friends!"

Morning arrived, and we had to vacate the room. Two daunting prospects were in store for the day. Finally coming face-to-face with the man, and the first module registration and document verification process. As I was still deciding which worried me more, the knock on the door duly arrived.

Moment of truth!

I opened the door, and one look at the smiling face of Eshwar swept away all my apprehensions and doubts. There is such a charm, such warmth in his smile that makes you feel he really is happy/ pleased about something. With Eshwar there’s no faking. No sarcasm, no middle ground, no grey areas. Either he’s happy or he’s not, and he’ll let you know without question. And that morning, it was all happy.

We exchanged numbers, swapped stories of how we got here, our jobs and resignation, leaving Chennai and all those friends, and the formalities that lay ahead. And for the whole time, he did not once mention about the promise I’d made to be his roommate. As fate would have it, he had registered for his own room with none other than Ramkumar that morning, and they were both happy to have landed up with each other.

Everything became easier after that, and we spent the whole morning and afternoon together, for breakfast, registration and lunch, and we knew something special was in store. There was a bond. I could tell.

But the thing that truly made me let go of my guilt and regret was later that afternoon when Bharani and I went to visit their room in Hostel 1. It was in every way worse than ours! Now I truly got what our seniors meant about taking up the best rooms in Hostel 2 at the earliest. I am a nice guy with conscience and all, but I couldn’t possibly live in that space that they called a room!

So as they say, “All’s well that ends well!” Two months of classes, case studies and cleaning later, my room doesn’t suffocate me anymore, I can find my stuff after less than 10 mins of searching in my bed, the flush works almost daily, I’d learned not to slip and fall down on the wet floors all over the college, we’d encountered 3 more snakes but 0 leopards, and Bharani and I have our own pet dog outside our room at all times – she’s totally the sweetest little thing ever!

Best of all, we’d found a new best friend in Eshwar Bharadwaj, and hang out all the time together – arguing/fighting with each other, doing assignments, discussing girls, eating Maggi noodles, or reading from Heizer’s. These days, on a typical night at hostel room 207 at NITIE, one would witness a scene somewhat like this -

"~~Welcome to the Hotel California!~~"

Life's good :)

[Note: Ours is the rightful claim for the title ‘God’s Own Campus’ – IIM-K do not get it simply because Kerala is God’s Own Country. In any case, they spell the last word with a ‘K’ as is their wont with everything that starts with a ‘C’, and we aren’t too bothered as long as NITIE figures in 7/10 first page results in Google Search.]

[This post concludes the 3 part series describing my experiences on my first day at NITIE. If you’d stayed with me till the end, RESPECT.]