Like everyone else, I have too many fond memories of my IIT days. However, two of them stand out in my mind.
The first memory is that of returning to the hostel from home one Monday morning. As I unlocked the door and entered, there was a sense of total confusion. I had to step back out and make sure I had indeed entered my own room. Nothing in the room was mine and yet it looked eerily familiar. Just then I realized that everything in the room belonged to Narendra Goliya!
My wing mates, Nitish Thakor and other co-culprits, had switched Narendra’s and my rooms over the weekend! They had to switch all the furnishings and belongings between our rooms via the balconies. More significantly, they had placed all the items in exactly the same locations within the room – quite incredible. I remember Nitish saying, “We were working very hard to do it just right, exactly by memory and all of that. But the whole underlying reason was to watch your reactions – exactly those first 30 seconds or a minute of reaction! We worked on the switch the whole weekend, you know.”
Obviously, they had a hearty laugh watching my puzzled face as I kept looking at the room in disbelief.
My second memory also relates to Narendra. One day we decided that we should get drunk to experience what happens when a person gets drunk. So, we went to a liquor shop in town and bought the most affordable bottle of booze. It was a weekend, and we asked a couple of the wing mates to keep guard and observe us. And then we started on the drinks. After a few drinks, we figured it was time to get involved in a different type of activity and decided to play carrom downstairs. By this time both of us were quite high and the guys “looking after us” were having a great deal of laughs, watching us aim in one direction, look in another direction and ultimately strike in a totally random direction. By the time we finished, we were totally drunk and couldn’t do anything. The guys brought us to our rooms. I dropped in my bed, and in a matter of minutes totally lost my senses.
It was a ‘senseless’ but a truly memorable experience, because we tried an experiment that was impossible to conduct in the city. It could only be done in the hostel among friends. All these years, no one said a word about our carrom game! Only much later, during one of the IIT meets, we did open up and shared this great memory with our spouses.
Those five years in the hostel have left an everlasting impression on me. I always tell my children and my grandchildren that in every student’s life, five years of autonomy at a university level is a must. One must have that experience to make a man out of you. That life experience makes you independent and alters your life completely. Fortunately, my son experienced this independence earlier than me, during his years in a hostel from standards 6 to 10. I know for a fact that it has completely changed his life – his whole trajectory changed after that. So, these are the takeaways for my real hostel life.
IIT Bombay 1974 Reunion 