Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Retrospection

The wrist watch pointed 8:25 in the morning. A number of students , all casually dressed, stood gossiping outside the door. A number in white over the dark brown door wrote F-236. Cacophonous babbling penetrated the wall to fill the corridor. The door revealed a dimly lit room filled with strangers. It was full to its maximum or perhaps more. I wasn't late but a awkward thought of not getting a place to sit occupied my mind. Soon a cleanly dressed man with papers and files in his hand entered the room and I followed him. That was how I stepped into my first ever lecture class in IIT KGP. The first lecture for Section 6 of 2003 entrants was Mathematics I by Prof. M.P Biswal. Later that day we had Electrical laboratory which imposed on us a number of rules and regulations. I was grouped with two students of the EC dept, namely Piya Pal and Argya Bhowmick. These two never stopped hassling on the experiments. That was my first day in IIT.
Fellow students made it difficult to catch hold of books in CL by misplacing and hiding the books. This made me a regular visitor to the CL to get the books from the Reserve Section. Foundry classes were really backbreaking. Though my partner Pavan did a lot more work than me , the ambiance was so arduous that it made me tired by mere standing. Life was moving in a fast pace. Bright faces of few of my school friends in the common lectures elated me.
Wednesday evening NSO classes provided me with a sound sleep in the afternoon after lunch. The only sleepy afternoon apart from the weekends.
Basic Electronics Lab were frustrating every Monday afternoon because of the instructor who was so querulous that we named him "FOX". Not a single day passed when he didn't find a single mistake in our lab notebook. My lab partners Meenakshi and Madhuri used to complete the Lab note book just an hour before the Lab class which made me rush to the hall having half my lunch every Monday. So did they.
Alternate weeks of experiment and tutorial class of Electrical engineering were frightful. Though huge electrical appliances and voltages and current made me nervous working with them but the constant chirruping of Piya and Argya made me enjoy the three hours.
Lab partner in Physics , Jayant kept himself miles away from experimenting. "Arre experiment kya karna, reading taap lo" is what he said every time with a notebook of readings from some or the other classmate for every experiment.
The lab class which I enjoyed the most was Engineering drawing. Scored some good marks in the paper work as well as CAD.
A harsh comment from Prof Anjali Roy before the mid-sem exam made me weep. That's the way I express my grief and contempt. This made me much focussed to score a good grade in English in the first year. I landed up with an A.
I am thankful to Rohit, Mtech dual degree of Aerospace, for helping me understand a topic in maths. "sigma-epsilon method" is what it was called as far as I remember. But alas !!! I made a silly mistake getting a zero which I could have scored full marks otherwise.....
I still remember, I found a boy of my class very annoying and irritating. He came up to every one with stories of the various insects found floating in various items of his Mess food. He is Joydeep Banerjee popularly known as JDB.
My appearance was austere. A typical "behen ji type" or may be fogyish. With loosely fitted salwar suits and oiled hair sticking to my scalp made me look something else apart from an IITian.
My image of being a bookworm followed me from school. Soon next year a new adjective came flying to me from all around. "Phodu" one who excels in some field, and for me it was academics since I never participated in any extra curricular activities. Staying at home I had little scope to join the midnight sessions of practice and rehearsals.

Strength of the class reduced drastically from 88 in the first year to 15 in the second year. Classes were now mostly in our Dept. New faces now occupied the seats in the classroom. My friend Mohona knew a couple of them. Day in and day out the same faces appeared in the class room. Lab classes gave us plenty of time to do our chatting and gossiping. I knew not when these strangers became my friends. And then.....

I'll stop my writing here for I need to keep something stored for my next post.

3 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  2. nice 1....u stole my idea though unknowingly ..i was just thinking 2 write abt this..but i m writing the next 1......lets c if i can steal ur idea abt the "next post"

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  3. that was good..taking on some new ideas and reminding of the first yr classes...
    will b waiting for d continuation of this one in your next post

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