There are so many memories so where do I start? Every year there was some excitement!
Well, my first year’s memory is arriving with a high degree of excitement after having gotten into IIT and meeting some other wing mates, particularly C and Rathin were my neighbors and, therefore, us and our parents already had a feeling that it’ll be OK. But soon after of course there was all type of ragging that we had to face. To be honest, it was fun, in a challenging sort of a way, both complying with silly things and butting heads. If you took it sportingly, nothing bad happened.
One of my first year’s memory is that the rare “blue movies” were shown in the hostel; you know these are essentially very short pornographic movies done in black-and-white and they sort of looked bluish. Some back room in the hostel would show the movies and you paid something like five rupees to go and watch a 10-15 minute crude movie. There would be a very large number of students who would be crowd into a room, and of course there was a long line outside the room. I guess we were so pent-up young boys in essentially an all-male campus. I even jokingly used to say that they should have a medical school so that there would be a lot more girls on or near the campus to socialize with.
My second year’s memories are about playing a lot of Bridge. I learned Bridge during the summer, and I brought that knowledge (bidding, playing) to our wing, because by then about eight or 10 of us had consolidated into a close friendship and then stayed together for many years. So, in one of the back wings, we played a lot of Bridge, and did a lot of ragging too. We just had the most fun and possibly the lowest grades of our five years. One of the highlights was to have the freshies carry cards back and forth between rooms and then entertain us when we played. My favorite was AC-DC mimicking AC-DC electricity (you can only try to imagine how this was done!). Another highlight was to do water fights, the best of that was to throw water on the PGs, the post-graduates on the lower level. They were nice people, older, but se sadly looked down upon them (literally and figuratively).
In a later year I got the corner room and, of course, for that privilege, that room was by default the gathering room – that’s anyone and everyone was allowed to use it. From there you did a lot of social things, like playing Bridge or doing “gali” competitions with the 2nd hostel, etc. But that year, my highlight was that on one weekend I had gone to the department buildings and wandered into the Physics building. I saw that there was a fire extinguisher so, on a lark, I picked up the fire extinguisher and brought it to my room where it stayed with me throughout. Then in the 5th year it came into good use. So, when the 2nd hostel people were doing a bonfire, I don’t know whether it was for Holi or something else, it was my proudest moment to go there and use my fire extinguisher and extinguish their bonfire!
Last but not least, how can I forget our wing Olympics. None of us was particularly athletic. I took tennis and table tennis lessons instead of NCC/physical training, but I was not competitive. So, we ran a wing Olympics where we planned multiple events like a decathlon, such as fast running, long running, discuss throw, slow and fast bicycling on the track. We used to keep score on the wall, and I think Shekhar won. My highest achievement was to win the 1-mile, long distance run. That is the only other achievement beyond winning third prize in musical chair when I was in kindergarten. But, oh, the Olympics was so much fun late nights on the track and field, and I think it was just an outlet from studying and other highly demanding things that we did.
IIT Bombay 1974 Reunion 