NEW LIGHT IN COUNTRY DOOM

Reported by Waste from Planet IITD, in customary disarray

Sassi ka Dhaba, 8.30 PM, 20^th January, 2008

Hi. I write this on my laptop as I wait for my plate of Maggi at Sassi, and everyone around is staring at me as if I am some peculiar specimen of alien life. Presently I light myself a smoke, and suddenly there is a collective sigh of recognition. Oh, all right, he’s one of us, they say. Us, dear reader, refers to the inhabitants of Planet IITD, and if you aren’t a member, you probably have no business reading this. (But you might as well go on and get some of your theories verified. Trust me, if you manage to reach the end of this article, you’ll be clapping yourself on the shoulder and shouting, “Hey, I was always right! IITians really are geeks from outer space!”)

Smoking kills, I know. But anyone who’s more than “just tried it out” knows that not smoking can kill just as effectively. So it’s a Catch-22 situation and so I am caught up on one side of it, so what? Well, let me tell you what. I had seven hours at college today, four of them in a workshop jammed with metal, grease and sweat, and the rest in impossibly packed antiquated classrooms. This is my third cigarette since then, and guess what, I’ve already wiped myself of half of those hours. Plus I feel curiously free, stupid as that sounds. So, Momma Mia, could I care less?

Okay, I guess that’s enough, you know I am a smoker, and you know I am an IITian (not necessarily in that order, but they sound about the same, anyway) and I know this is not really going anywhere. But then, what is? So tough luck; I’ll stay.

I am facing the main thoroughfare, and the crawl of the vehicles is slow enough for me to glimpse a face inside, every now and then. In the ghostly half-light inside their cars, some faces are happy, some are frowning, some bilious about the obvious mismanagement of road traffic (courtesy our very own PWD), some in outright rage about it, but most are just weary. Yeah, just weary. And suddenly the same ghost light switches on inside my head, as if some dormant circuit has just been joggled and juiced up. It stays for just a moment, but quite enough for me to register what it showed: I can be anyone of those faces; maybe am, already. I can’t really tell. I can’t really tell a lot of things, and that doesn’t only mean the stuff about three-phase autotransformers I was forced to swallow on this, the zillionth day I attempted to attend class. Sure, I can’t even begin on that, but who gives a flying fuck when you can pass with no mean measure of respectability with no more than getting hold of the professor’s bag of tricks? Try dangling the world’s juiciest carrot before me (like a promise of a night with Jolie, maybe) and my answer would still be “not me”.

Here’s my range of can’t-really-tells. I can’t really tell professors from Mr. Bean, and sometimes from Old Heckles who could have had birds. I can’t really tell laboratories from hockey fields, and I can’t really tell IITD from Pornographer’s Paradise. I can’t really tell lilac from lavender, I am that canned. I also can’t really tell how I ended up here, in this giant dungeon of the country’s most… ahem… brilliant dragons. I know I took an absurdly hyped examination roughly one year ago, the same day I took a crap. As to which served me better, I can’t really tell.

Hold up ahead, my Maggi’s arrived. I puff one last time on stick no.2 of this sojourn, and snuff it out under my sneakers, mentally admonishing the fat guy with the ear-stud who’s brought me my dinner. All for wasting a good smoke. Yeah, I am into it, neck and all, I know. I know I’ll die someday soon. I also know I am an IITian. Someone told me that kind of makes up for everything else.

More claptrap later. I have so much to say.

The Temple of Technology, 10.15 AM, 27^th February, 2008

Okay, this is it. I felt I’d been too harsh on my alma-mater writing all kinds of shit about it at Sassi, but it turns out I was woefully wrong. I tried not to continue, I swear. But just as the pump turns on in ecstasy, so it sometimes does in frustrated ennui.

I am in class for a course that claims to cater to my core requirements. Sounds rich, but I tend to disagree. My girlfriend’s seated next to me, you see, and talking of core requirements, I feel positive she can take much better care.

Moments back the technological genius (who also happens to be the worst teacher on earth) uttered “squirrel cage” and I almost looked up from my reverie. Next breath he came up with “transformer”, and my head plopped back down. Now he’s going on again with something that seems to be meant exclusively for the first two rows of the lecture theater, and I feel bullwhipped into writing shit again.

A cartoon drawn on my desk catches my eye. It has a gravestone with the following epitaph: “In loving memory of the child who died waiting for this class to end”. I’ve seen that one before, but never appreciated it as much as now. It’s been done very expertly; I can tell by the strokes. I think I know who drew it, and if I am right, dear God, this piece is the righteous mother of destiny.

The guy who I figure is the artist is dead. He hung himself from the ceiling fan in his room a week back. He left a suicide note saying: “I have failed for the first time.” I wager he was being figurative, but I’d say he had solid facts to back him. He had had a remarkable first semester, and he’d been well on his way to making this semester nearly as remarkably disastrous. Until, finally, he decided to wave his final goodbye; all of which is quite reasonable, I am sure. I guess if you got an avalanche when all you asked for was a castle in the clouds, it does a number on your head.

I know I sound like a sick, twisted bastard saying it, but if this piece of art was his last work, I’d say bravo!, he made much neater use of his talent than this castle could ever have.

Look, don’t get me wrong. It’s not as if I hate being at this place; far from it, actually. I never saw no dreams about green green grass, never came expecting no palace on the plains, let alone a castle in the clouds. So no issues there. Not sure if you’ll actually believe what I am about to say after all I seem to think, but you know what? I love it here. Its one hell of a ride, maybe not one of those classic college merry-go-rounds your life is supposed to get on, but one rollercoaster of its own cast nonetheless. So baleful brickbats are not my point, provided one exists.

So why not let the spades be the spades and the king be the king? Is fun not the king, is it not the real thing? Hell, yes, it is. But hey, wait a waver, I have some more on that. What fun is a place haunted by ghosts of kids dead on account of things not excluding the place itself? You can say the kids were weak. You can say they caved in when the heat was on. You can say all that, sure, but listen up when I say they were kids nonetheless. College doesn’t suddenly turn everyone into a robust ranger or a double humped camel right out of some Persian fable you heard as a kid. Some people are still kids, some people still yearn for those fables, and when you load them with all kinds of gibberish in the name of God and technology, and maybe ride them (and whip them while at it), sometimes the knees give up and the load slips off the camel’s back. Sometimes the camel escapes, but if it’s still a kid, you manage to hold on, and whip it some more. You know what happens then? Then you have a kid one moment, and next moment you have a dead kid. That’s not fun, no sir, that’s manslaughter.

I don’t really give that much of a damn about the kid. He was a nutcase, as far as I am concerned, but maybe I am not the only one concerned. And maybe that’s the whole point.

Coming back to this lecture, I feel almost as one with him. I know what you are thinking. No, I won’t hang myself tonight. I have a pot session with some seniors, and then maybe a drinking binge. And later, if things are sober enough, some wild oats to sow. Too much to let go of, if you ask me. And too little time to live.

I know I give the impression of a confused mind, and deep inside I know it’s not just an impression. The professor’s livid with all the distracted actions around the class, and he’s singled me out a couple of times. For all my inner rebellion, I don’t like to be thrown out in front of a hundred other kids my age. So I’ll stop, and seeing how very pointless all of this seems, I don’t know if I’ll bother finishing what I wanted to say in the beginning. I’ll need some help remembering too, I will.

The Reading Room, 12.30 AM, 30^th April, 2008

I guess it’s been a million years or so since I last modified this file. And one hell of a million it’s been too. Ups in drips and downs in deluges. That hardly belongs here, though. What does belong here is an end, a tail to the monster’s head I birthed one smoky, dreamy evening a long, long time ago. Seeing I am far more proficient eschatologically than academically (as it seems), I decided to deliver the knockout blow on a fitting note. I have a Major on Applied Mechanics seven and a half hours from now. I figure I could have seven and a half light years and a pumpkin pie for good measure, and I would flunk all the same. Down Glory Road to Pussy Palace, it’s the same ol’ story. Might as well furnish an end meanwhile.

Okay, so I left off in a haughty huff, or so it seemed. I am not really good at conveying the subtleties of my emotions, but you were right if you thought I was thinking I had my institute by the balls with that dead kid theory of mine. How time can make even the most stolid of statements seem gauche and sheepish. I went overboard with some things, I did. And worse I painted an utterly befuddled picture of my thoughts. Let’s do some summing up then.

I am currently seated in a corner of the legendary room of retards, also known as R2. Around me is my group of cronies, some sleeping, some chatting, some trying to come to terms with the mysteries of gravitation and rotational mechanics, a la IIT Delhi. I am writing, of course, and listening to some soul-searching death metal on my plastic monster of a cellphone. All of us buddies have one thing in common: we have given up. We might be trying, yes, for human nature fails to recognize failure until, well, until you’ve actually flunked. But deep within, naked in a vaunted realm of utter honesty, we have all accepted defeat. All done, dusted and doomed. Hail King Mechanics!

On the table next to ours, lost in the world of dysfunctionally smooth pulleys and harmlessly academic collisions, are two people who, taken in one gilded frame of common purpose, officially epitomize success in IIT Delhi. They are the king and the queen, stamped forever with the blood-red ink of genius. Ask them about the peak of the world, and they’ll say Mount Ten-Point-Zero faster than you can spell humbug. They’ll rock tomorrow, just as they’ve been rocking all year.

So much for rhetoric. You might think I am green with loserly envy, but this time you’d be wrong. I actually appreciate these kids’ single-minded pursuit of whatever they think is the most important. They are the best of their lot, and that, at this place, is one lot indeed. So far, so good. I’ll bet my battered bottom they’ll set these Majors on fire, but go and ask them, pray, to tell you of their impression of a world without grades, and you’ll probably come back branded a zany jerk.

Their bad? I don’t think so. I’ll risk the cliché. I’ll risk being baked on a spit over a thousand years in fact, but I wouldn’t fall back on blaming the system for it. Yes, that’s it, that’s the alpha and the omega of it, that’s the one word that gets thrown around like rat-fink in a hurricane, and yet that’s the only word that can, though only just, bring all my babble to rhyme and meter.

Maybe I am blind, or maybe those kids’ are stupid. I do admit there is something to the “work hard” theory. But here’s another notion I borrowed with my precious ass for collateral (seem to be making a habit of it, don’t I?): if you roast your butt on a barbecue, you better do it right. Work hard, true, but work the right way.

The right way. The right way. Man, I could say that a hundred times and still not make it mine. Yes, I am blind. I was born blind. I guess everyone is. You come out crying, thrashing mad, and you come out seeing black. And then, somewhere along the way, the black turns off and you find a color for yourself. Thing is, but for the luckiest ones, you need a tuner to go. Some people never find that tuner, and they die seeing black. Some do, and they party. Sounds like cheese with a bit of salt and a bit of pepper, doesn’t it? But not to be, Buddy-O, for some people find a bad tuner, and that, for all I know and all I don’t, is the worst.

If you’ve ever been at the receiving end of a broken promise, you know what I mean. That’s exactly how the bad tuner operates. All black. And then, POOF! You suddenly see purple, and what’s more, it comes with a mouthwatering free gift of tinsel and glaze. And then, just as you begin to smile… POOF! Back to black, Jack, just kidding.

I would never admit in public, but I do hope those two darlings of our famed academia don’t turn out, in a couple of years’ time, as babes lost in woods of their own making. I think I can safely say that for all of us who share this common fate of being an IITian in Delhi, no comments, came expecting to find our tuners, subconsciously or otherwise. Some of us have succeeded, and a vast majority of these are people in the same exalted league as the crown and his lady in waiting. Tuned to waste no time, tuned to keep their heads buried in text or work for as long as they can, tuned to procure the creamiest of garlands for their non-stop academic ass-busting. Tuned good, you say? Bah!

There are some others who know more of their colors now, and I risk saying they belong to the “luckiest” category I mentioned in passing. They didn’t need a tuner, and in fact, (and I say this strictly off the record) they rejected the offer from our beloved institute to be theirs. In my still blind eyes, these are the people who make a difference, the ones whose brilliance of skill and strength of character is claimed by brand IIT as its own. I state unabashedly that I have failed in my quest to be one of them, at least so far. And I know, in spite of my current state of total and absolute hopelessness, that it’s a dream I’d love to live.

And so the cat is belled. So I sign off, listening to Ozzy Osborne’s Suicide Solution on my headphones, vaguely recollective of the point where I began this ill-fated tale of a hundred hairpins and volte-faces. Around me my gang of hara-kiri hustlers from Country Doom are all snoring now, my girlfriend among them. I take her hand and stroke her hair for a bit, drawing comfort from all the affection I feel for her.

People around are staring at me as if I am an alien, again. Déjà vu? Hah, you bet! I quit smoking some time back, after I realized it’s the worst habit. It’s much like the bad tuner, showing you dreams that would most likely never be. But that’s not the only reason I keep my extraterrestrial act up. More than anything, I don’t feel the need to be one of them anymore. All that I feel about this place holds true, but I don’t really need those feelings anymore. What I need is freedom, and a little bit of peace. What I need is change. It’s time, it seems, to abandon idle prattle and step up from denouncing geeks to announcing myself in the league of extraordinary gentlemen. In other words, to be a true IITian, lost as the term sounds.

I don’t quite know whether this is still more hollow trope, only time can tell. No saving me from tomorrow’s thrashing, however. You might as well expect Atlantis to rise from the ocean, palm trees waving.