In our obsession of trying to impress the
fairies, we completely forgot about Chitragupta, who I noticed was staring at
us with a blank expression.
“Boys, that was very well put. What next?”
asked Chitragupta. He seemed bored and his voice was dragging his words with
great effort.
“Let’s play ‘Truth or Dare’,” suggested
Vidya. I had to agree, by default. And the rest followed suit.
We took a bottle of vodka that Big Boss had
gifted to us, now emptied and started playing the game. The bottle pointed
towards Vidya and she chose to dare. Chitragupta suggested that she dance for
us on a song of her choice. I requested that it be a special heaven song, for
that would be something new for me and Aditya. She happily obliged and ended up
enamouring me more than I could imagine.
The bottle was spun again, and its new target
was me.
Before Vidya or Veena could suggest anything,
Chitragupta asked me to spill out a few truths of my teenage and engineering
years. Chitragupta had given me a good chance to impress Vidya, and show her how
honest and frank I was!
I said, “I am a twenty-nine-year-old virgin!”
I saw Vidya’s expression, she was blushing slightly. I got the signal I was
waiting for and continued. I saw Chitragupta rolling his eyes from the corner
of my eye, but chose to ignore him.
“I have loved only two girls in my life. But
they were good girls who wanted to marry the guys chosen by their parents. I
didn’t want to go against my parents either.” As I started spilling out the
truths of my life during engineering days, I thought why not convert that
discussion into a whole chapter! Everyone agreed.
So here is a list of universal truths of the life
of an engineering student!
------------------------------
1. Every
class in almost every engineering college has at least three prototypes: one
Vijay or Siddharth or Priya. Siddharth would mostly be a handsome and studious
guy; Vijay would be a joker-cum-average-guy who feels that he knows everything
there is to know about engineering, but would get disillusioned once the
Mechanics 1 results are out; and Priya would mostly be a studious yet arrogant
girl who would always throw a condescending look on fellow batch mates.
2. No
matter how old the canteenwala or the Xeroxwala is, he will always be an “Uncle” for the engineering students.
3. Your
parents might pump in some false ideas of your intelligence in you when you
score well in school. Once you are in an engineering course, you will realise
where you actually stand. Passing XII grade with flying colours is not at
all a sign of your being intelligent; you mug it all up! You can consider
yourself the best of the lot if you can clear Mechanics 1 with more than eighty
per cent marks.
4. The
very first day of your college will be spent in gauging who is worth being your
friend. In most cases, by evening, you would have finalised the group of
friends who will stay on to be your best friends for life!
5. If,
on the first day of college, you try to be over smart or a studious ass,
chances are that you would end up in a group of friends who will not even care
to remember you after the last day of college. Trust me, you wouldn’t even want
to remain friends on Facebook!
6. ATKTs
will sooner or later convert you from an atheist to a firm believer in god.
Mechanics 1 and Basics of Electrical Engineering 1 will make you realise that
you pass those subjects not because you have a few grey cells churning out the
right answers, but because there is an angel looking after you –fudging the
ruthless minds of the sadist professors and making them give you passing marks.
7. If
you get a score of 40/100, then be sure that the professor had evaluated your
worth at 33 or 34. The remaining 7 or 6 marks were added by him because he must
just be repaying the favour that he was bestowed when he was himself a student
getting ending up with that score!
8. Every
engineering class has 2-3 students who are the Original Creators of Submissions
(OCOS). If they make any mistake in their submission, the same mistake trickles
down in the rest submissions automatically!
9. Every
engineering class will have one group of students who would just swear at
anything and everything in vernacular languages. This would make the rest of
the class bracket them as “gavthis”. This group of vernacs will
laugh their lungs out at even the smallest of jokes, presumably extracting some
non-veg juice out of those harmless jokes. The Priyas and Vaishalis of the class would cringe
whenever anyone from the aforesaid group makes any remark on anything.
10. There
will always be at least one group of students who will speak in no other
language but in English. This would make the other students christen them the “shiner”
group – the kind of students who walk in english, talk in english and do lot
more in english! The Siddharths of the class would normally belong to this group. The Vijays, on
the other hand, would neither be the “gavthis” nor the “shiners”.
11. If
you are a beautiful girl, then chances are high that some smart senior will
come to you in the initial days of your joining the college and tell you that
he has been assigned as “Your Buddy” for the next few months to guide you about
the tricks and trade of the engineering life. Since you are beautiful (and
assuming the “beauty X brain = constant” to be true), chances are high that you
will easily get tricked. The less good looking ones will try to open your eyes
by telling you that you are being fooled, but alas, you are beautiful and hence
will not realise the truth until you fall in love with the senior.
12. If
you are from Mumbai University, then chances are high that you wouldn’t have
cleared your F.E. without reading “Fanatics”
series for every subject. (For the uninitiated, it’s a very famous series of
notes/study material for every subject in engineering; “Fanatics” would be/ would have been your bible for the F.E., i.e. First year of Engineering.)
13. PL or Preparatory Leave is the holiest time for an
engineer as “thy shalt readeth the books boughteth for the first time”.
14. Before
your PL starts, you will plan a movie with your friends and then each one would
try to show off the extent of ignorance of the subjects each one has. A
dialogue or this sort might ensue:
Engineer
1 : Hey man.
How are you? I feel we are lucky that we get this PL man! Otherwise I’d have been
totally screwed up!
Engineer
2: True man! I mean,
all I know about this sem is that we have 7 subjects! Right?
Engineer
1 and 3 (thinking)- Feku Fakirchand! There is a limit to bragging, man!
Engineer
3 (wanting to be the smartest): By the way, tomorrow I am
gonna go and check out the notice board to see what all subjects we have! I
hope I don’t goof up like I did in the final exams of XII – I prepared for Math
for two days and then when I went to the exam hall, I found that it was the Physics
paper!
Engineer
1 and engineer 2 (thinking): Ch****** L****** M*********
B********
15. If
you are done reading “Fanatics”
by the time the first semester exams start, chances are high that you will
start mugging the LDR (Last Day Revision) or LMR (Last Minute Revision) notes ‘sold’
to you by your seniors.
16. Following
up on the important part of the previous point, money doesn’t grow on trees.
So, your seniors won’t give away their books or notes to you for free. It’s a
law of nature to be fooled by seniors when it comes to buying books from them,
because they will try to sell you the books that they bought “by mistake”, from
their seniors!
17. Engineers
consider “Time Table” for exam preparation an obsolete concept.
18. “Load”
is the most common word used in lieu of tension and pressure.
19. The
amount of time spent studying any subject is inversely proportional to the
number of days available for the exam.
20. The
amount of money earned by the best professors offering crash courses in your four
years of engineering to make you pass in your exams will be more than you
will ever earn in your entire life time!
21. In
some states, if the government puts a ban on coaching classes, the universities
will be forced to offer engineering degrees in five years instead of four!
22. During
the PL, the Xerox centers near the college flourish and make enough money to
just dawdle away till the next semester.
23. Before
the PL starts, you will go to the college library and borrow books by foreign
authors with the assumption that you will read those books and your
fundamentals will get clearer. Just as the date of the exam nears, you will
switch to local (Indian) authors or read the notes to be able to pass!
24. Your
chances of clearing any exam are highly proportional to the possibility of
appearance of the questions from the chapters you studied in the last twenty-four
hours.
25. Just
as you reach the exam hall, you will find the Rahuls of the class talking or chatting on BBM or iPhone or will
be talking over phone saying dialogues like “cool yaa… ma ass is gonna get f******
bro!” The Vaishalis of the
class would be discussing with birds of the same feather a few theorems or
formulae, etc.
26. When
the exam starts, you will spend the first five minutes trying to find out which
all questions are from the syllabus that you read or the syllabus that was
covered in the crash course. The next ten minutes will be spent in analyzing
your classmates’ expressions to see if you can find who all are going to be
your would-be-ATKT- mates!
27. You
will spend at least an hour and a half in the exam hall writing something. That
something could be directly or distantly related to what is asked in the
question. Diagrams totally unrelated to the question will be drawn. One thing
you will make sure is that the handwriting is good and that you fill at least
one page for each question.
28. The
last fifteen minutes in the examination hall are spent smiling at each other.
Engineers are very good at reading each other’s smiles. The bigger the smile,
the greater the chances that he is going to appear for ATKT exam later. If you
see an engineer laughing his heart out, you know what to assume! But this rule
is not applicable to the Vaishalis
and the non-Rahuls
of the class. If they smile, then they are going to pass, and with good marks
at that.
29. Most
of the Mumbai University F.E. students will come out laughing after the Mechanics I / II paper or
after B.E.E. (Basics
of electrical engineering) or after E.D. (Engineering Drawing). That laugh roughly translates
into sentences or phrases such as
a. “Lag gayi be!” or
b. “L***** lag gaye” or
c. “Maa ***** gayi” or
d. “B******* baj gaya” or
e. “G**** fat gayi”
f. “C**** gaya” and many more!
30. Most
of the “Bar and Restaurants” near the college are full after the above
mentioned papers. Even the waiter knows how many pegs he has to make after
which paper! For instance, after Engineering Drawing, one might take two pegs
of SmirnOff, but
after Mechanics I, an engineer needs at least five pegs of Absolute Vodka to erase
every smidgeon of insult heaped unto him by the questions in the paper!
31. After
the exams, it’s the time for results. Almost eighty per cent of the engineers
get at least one KT in their four years of engineering.
32. The
rush/crowd around the “Results” board is similar to the rush that you find in
the Mumbai local trains!
33. One
of the best rumours making rounds right before the announcement of results is “Yaar, 75 % of the class have KT in
Mech…I am so gonna be screwed!”
34. No
matter how good or bad the results are, the “Bar and Restaurant” near the
college will see drinks flow like water because the ones who have cleared the
exams will drink out of happiness and the ones who have failed will drink out
of sadness!
35. In
a viva, an engineer blurts out not what is asked, but what he knows. It’s up to
the examiner to see what question to ask so that it fits the answer that the
engineer throws at him!
36. No
matter how bad your college canteen is, you and your friends will always love
to assemble there, have a vada-pav or
idli with coke and laugh your lungs out!
37. Out
of a group of ten friends chatting in the canteen, there will always be one guy
who will belch out some gyaan to the
‘chotu’ who gets the food to the table. He will say some apparently smart thing
and then ask ‘chotu’ – “Samjaa na chotu?
Bade bhai se gyaan lete jaa, bahut aage
badhega life mein!”
38. Sooner
or later, after engineering you will end up doing MBA or MS or MCA or MTech!
39. If
you have money and a very strong urge to live the American dream (rather the
Indian dream), you will take GRE and go for MS.
40.
Just as every other
engineering student, you will ask yourself many times “why did I think of
pursuing engineering?” and you will “like” various Facebook pages take you back
to the engineering days…. pages such as “Facebook.com/Er.Planet”, “Ye engineering hai bhidu”, “Aap Engineer Hain”, “Being an Engineer doesn't
means I can repair TV , Fridge , Computer & All”, etc…
41. Industrial
visits are not supposed to enrich your knowledge of your stream of engineering.
They are rather meant to enjoy booze, freedom and are supposed to be the final
hangout when you could impress the girl you like!
42. Every
engineer will second my thoughts when I say that four years’ hostel life is the
best time of your life. Hostel life is when you will develop as a person, you
will learn more about life and people and that will help you more than all the
formulae or theorems that you will learn inside any classroom.
43. After
passing out of college, every time you are drunk and are talking about life,
you will mention about the good time
spent in your college hostel. There are very high chances that you will add mirch masala to what you will blurt out
in the drunken state and portray yourself as the hero/ stud!
44. The observation table in any practical will be
similar to the same practical performed by your immediate seniors. All that we
engineers care for is that the end result must be met. We don’t care how!
45. In the final year project, there will always
be one guy/girl who no one else wants to accommodate in their group. Finally,
one of the professors will intervene and adjust that odd-boy/girl-out in some
group, making it all awkward!
46. If
you are smart enough, you will build a good relation with the handyman in the
laboratory so that he can help you in the practicals and also help you get the
folders from last year’s journals. You will save a lot by not buying folders
and just reusing the stolen folders.
47. As a fresher, you would always want to buy
“Steadler” pencil for Engineering Drawing. Sooner or later, you will realize
that it is not the brand of the pencil that creates beautiful, correct
diagrams!
48. Your chance of becoming a worthwhile engineer is directly proportional
to your father’s dream of seeing you excel in your field of engineering, and
not at all on your score in each semester.
49. Your ability to understand what the professors teach during the lecture
is directly proportional to the number of ATKTs the professor got when he/she
did engineering. The more the number of ATKTs, the clearer are the concepts of
a subject.
50. The number of correct answers in the submissions by the class is
directly proportional to the intelligence and dedication of the OCOS (original
creator of submissions).
51. The number of students a company picks during on-campus placements is
directly proportional to its need to have juniors stocked “on bench” during
client visits and is hardly a measure of your talent.
52. Chances of a non-Rahul landing
a hot non-Vaishali are
inversely proportional to the number of non-Rahuls available to do her donkey work (submissions,
journals, practicals)!
53. The distance between you and the electrical equipment during practicals
in machines lab is inversely proportional to your knowledge of electrical
circuits!
54. The possibility of you (a non-CS or non-IT student) joining a software
company after engineering is inversely proportional to the depth of
understanding of your stream of engineering!
55. The hotness quotient of an engineering college is inversely proportional
to the distance of that college from the city.
56. The more boring a lecture, the more are the chances that you will
discover the cartoonist in you.
57. The number of boys found in a
room in the hostel is inversely proportional to the number of hours remaining
for the final day of submissions.
58. In your four years at the hostel, you will find hair and such stuff in
your food more number of times that you’d like to imagine.
59. The mess (not literally, but the
place where you are served food) that you choose in your hostel will always
serve the worst food of all the other messes. Just as you decide to change the mess,
you will end up in a literal mess with the previous place serving better,
tastier food.
60. The number of khatmals (bed
bugs) on your bed is in direct proportion to your weight. Khatmals are God’s way of keeping your weight intact by sucking all
the excess blood from your weight.
61. The chances of your parents
keeping a track of your scores during your engineering life are inversely
proportional to your willingness to solve electrical, plumbing or mechanical
(car or bike related) problems at home!
62. The chances of you wanting to do MS after engineering are directly
proportional to the number of American sitcoms or thrillers or dramas you watch
in your engineering days!
63. The chances of you wanting to do
MBA after engineering are inversely proportional to your understanding the crap
of your stream of engineering!
64. The probability of you preferring
M.Tech to MS or MBA is inversely proportional to your financial condition and
is directly proportional to the number of times you watched the movie Swades.
65. The more the number of hours you
spend with the girl/boy of your choice in the canteen, the more are the chances
that you will graduate out of the college as a couple!
66. Your attitude towards your
studies in your engineering life is directly related to work ethics. The OCOS (original
creators of submissions) are the ones who become TLs (Team Leads) early in
their professional life. The ones who just copied from these OCOS in their four
years turn out to be Production Support guys/ Testers in the IT industry!
67. The number of professors that you
would remember even ten years after graduating as engineers is directly related
to the most freedom a professor gave you or the most Hitler-like a professor
was! You would slowly realize in your professional life that aforementioned
second category of professor is better than a cruel and demented project
manager in office!
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