Day One (Part I)

Due to various delays such as going out for dinner with the family, tiredness from the Kerala trip etc. packing of my bags wasn’t completed as per schedule on the previous night. Hence I had to get up about an hour earlier than usual (usual being 5.30 am) to supervise the packing, not because my parents weren’t competent enough to do it themselves, but because I wouldn’t have remembered what was where if I hadn’t seen it being packed. Once everything was safely tucked away inside the 2 bags, one bearing the logo MARS and another SNICKERS, and after getting bored of double and triple checking their contents, it was time to head for the bus stop.

This time, I was escorted to the bus stand by my parents. Not to ensure my safety against hyperactive pups and cud chewing, tail swishing bovines, but because they wanted to make sure I got onto the college bus and did not take the first auto to the CMBT. At the bus stand, I was pleasantly surprised to see a few chaps more than on an ordinary day, all of them accompanied by parents. Our stop being the first, students from the next few stops had turned up there hoping against hope that the whole farce had been called off. After introducing my unfortunate fellow inmates to my parents, and bidding them farewell, we waited for the bus. Usually, our bus turns up at around 6.30 am. Now the average time shown by all our watches was closer to 7 than to half past 6. Just as we began to believe that maybe the P.O.P. had been called off, we saw our bus rounding the corner at the end of the road and proceed at a stately pace towards our stop bringing back images of a horse drawn hearse with Chopin’s Funeral March playing in the background. Once the bus came to rest silently in front of us, we clambered aboard at a pace that a sloth would have considered slothful and placed our luggage in strategically vital spots to ensure that those daring to climb aboard at future halts would appear even more sluggish than we did. Thus, after securing our luggage, we chose our seats and did what we Josephites are renowned for, stare emptily at the road and slowly pass onto dreamland, the transition from one state to another being so smooth and slow as to be undetectable. After a dreamless 45 minutes, as we neared college, some part of our internal clock that got synchronised to this particular journey, woke us up on cue. As we passed the Sathyabama Gate, most of us were awake or in the process of waking up, we had our last look of the true masters of our potholed roads, the ubiquitous plastic-eating-cattle.

As we got down inside college, baggage and all, we felt a lot like what we did upon getting off that bus the first time a long three years back– clueless and doomed. For the first time, since my first week in college, I headed for one of the trolleys, around which my classmates usually congregate, which bring us our breakfast and got myself a plate and started eating breakfast. Although I don’t quite remember what was served that fateful day, I do remember that it still tasted as bad (objectively speaking, it was probably due to the fact that I am not used to eating that early) as the first time I ate it. With some help from friends who couldn’t find plates, I managed to finish breakfast. Then we just sat around and stared at each other, wondering what to do next. Then, in that wonderfully inaccurate way in which all vital information gets disseminated in college, word of mouth, we came to know that all “male” luggage had to be deposited in rooms 31 and 32 while the “female” luggage in room 34 and then head to our respective classrooms. This raised another question – what classrooms? Again, we learnt from the grapevine telegraph that each department had been divided into 14 batches and that each batch with the same number from all the departments would constitute one heterogeneous class. After marvelling for a while at the sheer joblessness of the person, who so dutifully split all the classes into 14 batches and the pointlessness of the whole exercise we decided to go to our allotted classrooms. I was in Batch 13 and for the first three days, we would be tutored by BKS Consultants (wonder why the plural? There was only one guy teaching….) along with batch 14, specialising in mathematics.