Dev Kile's Tuition

So I have never liked math. During engineering, we had M1, 2nd yer M2 and 3rd yeart M3. Lets just say that it took me at least 1 attempt to clear these subjects. All those of you who are snickering while reading this, well fooley on you, those subjects were hard dammit especially if you didnt take a liking to math. So anyways, our first class of engineering math Prof. Dev Kile walks in. Now this guy has a commanding no nonsense presence about him. (It was only later that we found out how much masti he had inside him. At his private tuition of course.) So, I sat through class thinking how in the world I was going to make it through engineering. If only we could do without math. Oh what a wonderful world it would be! Anyways. Dev Kile sir as we used to call him, had a very serious stern look on his face, and had a beard to go with that. It was only his eyes which had some kind of mischeif in them. He was good at what he did solve math problems, I had no interest in solvingand had no clue how to. Its not that I couldnt, I just didnt like to.

Well, Dev Kile ran his own private tuition after hours in the evening. I think Kenny was the first guy to decide, he was going to go to dev kile's tuition even if it meant facing the seniors ragging business when returning to college. I think me and a bunch of other guys joined later. It was good fun to get together in the evening and catch hold of a tam-tam (six seater) while trying to avoid being spotted by seniors at the canteen. We would all pile up in the last one that left campus and go to tuition. Of course since we didnt go to the canteen and get anything to eat at the canteen, we would stop by on the way to Dev Kile's tuition at Sweet Home, and get a whole bunch of Jalebi's for 5 bucks. Oh those were the sweetest Jalebi's we had and they were mmmmm mmmmm good. Well so we walked from the main road to his tuition eating jalebi's on the way and then after that we sat for about 2 hours in his  class. He used to be good at explaining stuff but, after you are stuffed full of food, what is the next thing that comes to mind??? yes thats right, sleeping. To top it all off, Dev Kile used to have this slow monotonous tone and his droning way of saying things would put even a seasoned mathematician to sleep. Well yes, you are right if you assume I went off to sleep. Of course I did and so Dev Kile goes :

In his deep slow monotonous tone....

Dev Kile: "Deeebaa by Deeba x + deeba by deeba y is equal to ..... Chahuan... bolo.... "

I am still dozing away to glory.... 

Dev Kile: "Chauhan...." I wake up...."Bolo... Kya hota hai" I have absolutely no earthly idea what he is asking me about.I was dreaming about how cool it would be to eat more jalebi's...

Me: "Sir..... ummm....kya bolu sir?"

Dev Kile: "Kya Chauhan... kya kar rahe the.... mai idhar padha raha hoon... tum udhar so rahe ho....kaise hoga....(raises his eyebrows...) bolo.....(shetty is snickering... as ususal.... starts everybody snickering.... )tum sab log kya has rahe ho..... itna jalebi khaoge to "___ ___"(Those who know will know this person...) jaise ho jaoge..aur sote reh jaoge...(Whole group bursts out laughing....)"

That my dear friends ends my recollection of Dev Kile's Tuition....

Tyson sir

Rav as we all call Ravelino De'souza was this roundish sort of guy who had a ponytail. Now this guy was a senior to us and went by the alias "tyson". All seniors were into having aliases as they served a dual purpose. One, the juniors only knew you by your alias and and so it was hard for them to identify to any officials who it was that subjected them to ragging. Secondly, it served the purpose of creating an image of terror or fear in the minds of juniors. Names like "badshah khan sir", "nana sir", "akbar sir". etc... were ubiquitous. Anyways I digress, So Rav was this golu molu pony tail toting cute sa senior who was literally a terror among the first year students. His favourite dialogue used to be Bhen-ch** FE and its complementary gali Ma-C** FE. Of course now Rav is every bit as cute and as cuddly as he looks but at that time none of us knew him so well and he was busy trying to intill fear into all first year students.

So there we were about a week before our freshers party and ragging was in full swing. So all seniors were making the rounds of FE hostel. So this one guy got it into his head to get all of the first year students into one room i remember it was Toshal Burde's room and all of us were dressed in formals. Every persons dress code was checked and everyone was asked to stand to attention. Imagine a room jampacked with first year students all standing to attention in formals and in walks Tyson.
Now when so many juniors get together someone is bound to laugh. Usually it was Shetty. Shetty had this uncontrollable need to snicker at the most opportune moments, and this would land everyone who was with him at that time in trouble. You would think whats so funny about the situation.. you are being ragged out of your butts and all of a sudden you hear Shetty snickering and this would almost always drive any senior including Rav(Tyson) absolutely hog-wild causing the rest of the party to burst out into a snickering fit. So in walks Rav and is ordering people about trying to get everyone to march for some weird reason and you can hear Shetty snickering in the back. (We are like, sala hasna hai to dil me has na bahar nikal ke sala sab ko hasata hai aur sabki vaat lagata hai....)
So anyways Tyson(Rav) hears snickering and knows its Shetty, and launches into the longest cussing spell I have ever seen or heard in my life... I swear in all honesty he must have cussed BC*** FE, MC*** FE at least for a half hour if not more. That sorted everyone out and everyone quiet down allright, but Shetty got some special treatment from Tyson for that. So that was Rav or shoudl I say Tyson Sir's intro to all you guys....

Some notes about some friends...

I dont know or dont care to structure my thought process here so I am going to continue in whatever fashion I feel comfortable....

I think I will try to write about each of my friends and something about each person that is characteristic about them. Now keep in mind... this is will also mean that I shall recount some or the other account that involves each person and some of them may be embarassing... But, who cares.... it was fun.
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Met Vinay I don’t know when but struck an immediate chord with him. I just thought of an incident that happened with him which was my first memory of him. We were walking back to the FE hostel one time and for some reason had to take the route in front of the senior hostel. It was about evening time and Vinay was wearing this silver locket around his neck which you wouldn’t notice normally. Well we had to stumble upon a crazy maniac senior and he started bumming around with us. I swear at that time the guy looked really menacing. Well this guy gave Vinay a really menacing look especially because he knew that Vinay could beat him up and parcel him back home in no time. He noticed vinays locket and started messing around with him.

Senior: Kyun be shane bahtu charbi hai tereko
Vinay: Silence
Senior: Kya locket shocket dal ke ghumta hai bahut shana banega hain ?
Vinay: No sir.
Senior: Religious hai kya?
Vinay: No sir.
Senior: Fir tashan marne ke liye pehna hai kya ? (fiddling around with the locket.)
Vinay: No sire, Gusee ke liye.
Senior: (Doing a double take as if he didn’t hear him right.) Kya?? Gusse ke liye ? tere ya mere?
Vinay: Sir mere. (By this time we other guys were out of the frame and were like man this guy has guts answering back to a senior.)
Senior: Tere gusse ke liye ?
Vinay: Sir who gussa control me rahe isiliye...
Senior: Next time tereko dekha to locket dikhna nahi chahiye
Vinay: Sir, theek hai sir.

And that was that we were let off. But from that moment on we had respect for Vinay.
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It was my first time smoking and the man responsible for it was Raghu George. I don’t remember the exact circumstances that I met Raghu in, but I know we started a great and lasting friendship on that night. So there I was, I think Kenny was sleeping, as usual he slept early. Raghu was showing me how to smoke. I was not so sure if I should do it. Mainly because I was scared of the seniors finding out (As there was hell to pay if they did according to their threats.) which raghu assured me would not happen because “Nobody” knew me as one of the smokers. Well so we locked the room from the inside and he says to me. Light it up, take a small puff and breath in the smoke that’s the right way to do it. Well, I did what he said and I felt the strong acrid smoke go into my lungs, it didn’t taste all that great, but it didn’t cause me to start coughing up like I had imagined it to. I was amazed and oh by the way the feeling that came with the nicotine hitting my bloodstream was out of this world. Suddenly I am going from oh I don’t know if I should try this or not to hey this is awesome dude…. And that’s what got me started. All through FE I smoked on and off and nobody knew (Among the seniors.), because I never bought any cigarettes by myself. Somebody always gave me some. Among the smokers only a few people knew so I was kind of safe. Just to re-affirm, I don’t condone smoking any more, I left smoking after two years of starting to smoke, but I enjoyed every puff.

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I know I met Gangzy or Ganguly for the first time when we guys had been screwed the previous night by seniors for not being supportive and not having realized that one of us was sick and taking him to the hospital. A lot of the folks were like ganguly who? How the hell did he fall sick, and why are the seniors using this to get their frustration out on us. But anyways, we had collected money to have him admitted to the hospital and Vishal had taken the money and done the formalities I think and so when his dad came to pick him up, he met with us and thanked us for taking care. At least that’s the story I remember about gangzy falling sick.

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Nanju and Kali shared a room and it was next to us. The first time I met nanju was when I heard him shout outside our room in the middle of the night at somebody. I was like wtf is that. Well we got to know Nanju a lot better over the next few years but that first night was like man this guy is a whacko, which he wouldn’t mind me saying so, in all honesty he still is. Well that was my first impression of Nanju.

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Kali was like this loner who lived in the room beside ours along with another little guy from Arunachal Pradesh. I know Kenny had a ball of a time trying to modernize or teach worldliness to this guy (which we used to call molesting). Oh and by the way Vishal enjoyed Molesting kali in a similar fashion, except he would try and get him to do kung foo and show him how to use the Nan-chucks.

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I have more coming…. Wait for me to post…. But in the meanwhile please feel free to post comments that recount your few kissa's from college.

Shetty
- Tikku’s pimp.

Tikku
- Golu molu… tharki sala. We (mainly Raghu) used to tease him saying what is your smuggler bringing home. (People who know him will know what I am talking about. He took it sportingly.)

Vasan
- Huge ass puppy dog.

Ashu
- Guy who lived next to the haunted room, and had a secret stock of ciggies that no one knew he had and he didnt even smoke then... or at least no one knew he did.

Sunny
- Guy who spent half his FE year at home but still managed to pass with flying colors.

My First Day at Engineering College

My First Day:
So we went to Ahmednagar looking for our fortunes. The first time I saw our college, I thought, Oh my God!! Yeh kahan aa gaye hum…..
Well anyways we went about the task of registering for classes etc.... The first thing I noticed was (and this was one of the life lessons I learnt about getting work done and never letting your emotions get the better of you.) how the clerks in the office treated every student. Almost as if they were the ones who controlled our destiny here (To and extent they did. If you were friendly with a clerk, you could get work done in half the time it took to do any paperwork in college.). More than the general dissent for students, these guys had an un-understandable hatred for people coming from outside Maharashtra. I have no idea what pissed them off so much. Anyways, what I learnt was to never speak in English, always use Hindi if you did not know Marathi. If you used Marathi you were golden, if you did’nt you were slammed, and this was not just with clerks, this was the attitude some of the teachers also had.

So we finished our task of registering, by having to fight like mad bulls in a queue if you would call it that. Next it was off to the hostel to register. FE hostel, the first sight of it was that of a lone building standing on the edge of a field that looked like a cross between a football field, a basketball court, a volleyball court and a small hill. After all the registration was done, we had the sad task of saying bye bye to our dad’s. The sobbing session with mom was already done at home a long time back. With dad’s you don’t cry, you just watch them go until you cant see them in the distance any longer. So I held my own .
So, we spent the first night at the hostel in room 007 (Thinking woah cool Bond... James Bond) on the ground floor. It seemed as if all the rooms on the top floor were occupied. The first night, we slept on a thin sheet of bedding which we had brought from home, on those cold steel cots they called beds. Well, we weren’t maharaja’s so we didn’t expect any better. The next day we found out that there was an opening in one of the rooms on the top floor. Kenrick Fernandez (Kenny) had already been culled into the system and was putting up with two other marathi boys in room 204. One of them had found different roomies and had decided to move out and Vishal was trying to move in. So, we had a talk with the other guy and he was at first unsure of moving out but then decided to move out. That’s how we became roomies to Kente Prasad Chausrasia as Gangzy later christened him. A few days later, we had (Roddy) Rahul Rodrigues come in and that completed room 204 (Live life King Size.)
Now I don’t know remember how I first met each member of our gang and will leave out details if I don’t. Please feel free to add your own stories of how you met me or anyone else in the gang.

About FE hostel
The FE hostel was a place that almost kind of came alive at night. Almost every room had something going on. People were having parties, people were studying, dancing spreading rumors about seniors getting inside and ragging people, running around the hostel top floor, screaming at the top of their lungs (Machhar (Akshay Bhardwaj) was famous for that Nilendu’s roommate don’t remember his name running behind him shouting mayovaa). That always cracked me up. We had so many good times in the hostel. We would play every conceivable game in the small little ground inside the hostels 4 walls from football to cricket. Oh and by the way the hostels bathrooms deserve to be mentioned here. They stank!!! Or Stunk!!! Or whatever you call it but it was baaaaaaaaaaaaad bad bad. Especially when we had to use the loo. No more details will be given out. Ugggh!!!

I remember the time

I remember the time right after we had finished out 12th grade. My cousins and I had just got our 12th grade results. We had given almost all conceivable entrance exams. So, here we were sitting in Mumbai, Malad to be specific. Like every normal Indian, you have to have a relative or a family member in Mumbai who can be called upon to provide shelter in times of need. So it was in our case too. The reason we were in Mumbai was that we had the very important task of attending admission counseling sessions for the state of Maharashtra.

So, it was a nice day, we had on the previous night reached Mumbai and let ourselves into an uncle's apartment. I had imagined an apartment to be pretty bigand spacious. From where I came from, they were simply humongous compared to what we saw there. This was my first taste of Mumbai, not to mention the travel in the Local trains (Of which I will be talking about soon.) So, we were hungry, andmy cousin sister's dad being the person who knew how to do a lot of things, helped us cook. Until that time I was pretty fussy about eating food. Well not any more. Heena’s dad made undhiu and khichdi or at least that’s what we called it. I hated it but ate it without much comment .

Mumbai Trains:

The next day we had to go and attend counseling and so we decided or at least our dad’s decided that Vishal and I were going to go on to the counseling center alone. We were grown up now, we shold be able to handle traveling alone in Mumbai or for that matter anywhere. So Vishal and I headed out to the Railway Station at Malad. It wasn't too far away, and all we had to do was walk across a vegetable market to get there. So we got there at the station, bought the tickets and proceeded towards the platform and my reaction was:

Whoa..!!! where did so many people come from??!!!

Whoa! Whoa!! What in the world. I hade never seen so many people in my entire life. Well you gotta do what you gotta do and so we did it and we went on down to the platform from the walkover. We chitchatted some while we waited for the train. Suddenly there was a burst of activity and we noticed this meant the train was arriving. Well, we said better get ready to climb on because it did not look like there was going to be any order whatsoever for people to enter or get off.

As soon as the train pulled up on the platform, people started to jump off and climb in at the same time. It was a sight to see. Both Vishal and I were just stumped. Before we had time to realize what was happening, people pushed past us and the train was moving again. Whoa!! Well like the decent non-mumbai’ites that we were we thought if all of these people just got on the train there wont be many who were gonna get on the next one. So we waited for the next one on an almost empty platform. But wait…. Whoa !!! Even before we knew it, the whole platform was full of people once again waiting on the next train. I kind of got the feeling we were not going to make it again.

Well there we were thinking we could handle Mumbai by ourselves…. So we tried and we tried and we tried for almost half and hour. Trains came and trains went, and we never caught one train. After about half and hour of sincere trying to get on the train, we gave up and went back home to report that it was impossible for normal people like us to catch a train in Mumbai. So we went by taxi that first time….

But, if you stay in Mumbai for some time, you learn by experience and that you cannot exist without learning to travel in the local train and so we did. That’s another story. To make a long story short, we went to counseling, we got our admissions and Vishal and I got admission to the same college.