Of lands wondrous, across the blue seas,

Of the heavens above, studded with stars,

Of the soft breeze rustling through her hair,

Of an angel’s lips on his cheek,

Of times gone by, both melancholy and gay,

Of lonely times yet to come,

And of lives lived and maybe yet to be lived.

And so the song ended,

As a soft golden dawn broke.

A smile came upon her lips,

and a tear rolled down his cheek.

I waited.

Always in her dreams
Did he come
And always she fell
Into a deep dark abyss.
No hand to catch her,
when all she wanted
was a touch
was a smile
was a word
to help her
feel alive

none came.

And in her dream
the one she fell in
Out of the dark
came a rider
On a steed so brilliant it shone
With the promise of freedom,
of a land afar
and times much better
He held out a hand.

And yet.
She faltered.

This is a dynamic list, and I will keep adding stuff when it catches my fancy.

1. Skydiving: On the list even before ZNMD – and done as well – London Oct 2010

2. Bungy: Macau seems to be the best bet for now.

3. Manali- Leh – Srinagar on bike – Must do for adrenaline geeks, the small amount of time I spent on bike in Leh set the tone. Also a 10+ day hike on the frozen Zanskar river (tad too ambitious maybe, but what the heck)

4. Update : 15 Oct 2011: One of those awesome drives down a US coastline or across Europe, yet to crystallize this one, but its on the list as well.

Any more crazy ideas for this list?

A hill, with vast expanses of green, and a view.

A view of a lake, calm in the winter morning, a stray ripple disturbing its surface.

A ripple, fleeting yet sure, mirroring first light.

First light, peeking through the clouds, onto a dewdrop.

A dewdrop, glittering now, on  a blade of grass

A blade that shuddered in the slight breeze.

The breeze which whisked her hair from in front of her blue eyes

Blue eyes, deeper than the lake which she looked down upon,

As she sat on the wooden bench, old but still sturdy.

Alone.

But this. This has gone on far enough. I thought I could secrete it in the farthest corners in my mind, where all the other bad stuff is. It was easy at first. Nobody even realized. Then things started happening. It was on facebook, in the newspapers, on TV. Anxious girls crying, clamouring, to get a glimpse, the constant updates from news channels, all the viral stuff on social networking sites. Everybody loved it. And with each status update, each news report praising the new phenomenon, it kept clawing at the back of my mind, enveloping my thoughts, and pushing itself forward. Its talons were cold and clammy. Soon it enveloped me. All I could see was “it”, laughing at my weakness that fateful day when I picked it up and leafed through it. I don’t know what had come over me. It was so enticing, erotic even. The smooth exterior beckoning to me. Calling. Enticing me into sin.

Life has been hell since.

And I have realized redemption lies in confession.

I did it.

I read Twilight. (All those who are reading this, please, do not judge me. It is in no way a reflection of my sexual leanings.) All the hysteria, the hype, it got to me. I didn’t realize at the time that it be the worst piece of claptrap that I could possibly have laid my hands on. Even Chetan Bhagat is better.

I swear it was a moment of madness.

And then I did something worse. I gave the book to someone else. Only to get rid of it. I only realized later that I had dragged him down into sin with me. If you are reading this, please, from the bottom of my heart, I am sorry to have thrust on you that abomination. If we ever meet again, I hope you will not hold a grudge.

And just when it was fading from my conscience, I hit rock bottom. They made a movie on it. The posters, the “I Love Robert Pattinson” status updates, the fan clubs, the madness. It was too much for me. I had to confess.

“Forgive them father, for they know not what they do.”

God save my soul. Amen.

1 hot girl travelling alone, and trying hard to ignore the stares.

1 extremely overpriced food stall, comes free with one pot bellied guy staking it out.

1 family with 3 over excited kids and the mother trying hard to herd them in.

1 bored business man talking on his smartphone and typing on his laptop simultaneously

1 Malayalee traveling to the “Gelf”

301: Anuj Gupta

Anuj has relinquished his spot as the epicenter of all things green. That seed now grows somewhere in DFE. He has now found a pastime as a serial entrepreneur. After T shirts and a partnership with Pan IIT 2k9, his latest mission: Bringing light to rural India. At the time of writing, Anuj is on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange unveiling his startup. As the rest of us spring forth into corporate bastardness, this guy has been there and done that.

PS: He sure can throw a party, Mr. Fidditch will vouch for that.

302: Mithun Madhusudan

Sometime over the last year Mythun decided to expand his playing field. Not content being the darling of the wing, he reincarnated himself as Badass Babykutty on facebook and had boys (and girls) swooning all over him. No wonder his “Pehla Nasha” hit a half century of intoxicated fans. Now if only this virtual affection could be realised.

The wobbly head not-withstanding, since being cute (and rich) was not good enough, he actually thought that a guitar will help him get lucky. Sadly he is still single. At least he has gotten over his mallu-phelia and has put a half-way-around-the-world-long-distance on the table.

All in all, Mr. Best All-rounder of the hall has conquered pretty much everything. We wish him best on his trail to conquer the fairer sex. Maybe the chinkies will bring you luck.

A usual practice for him these days includes giving “high” funda sento sessions to juniors (and batchmates). Most of the time he repeats the same story (of how he came to Patel) and asks the same feedback question: “Would you rather to be in any other hall”. But ab bande ka sento hai to hai!

PS #1: Since orthopedic surgeries turned out to be quite expensive he took his chances with the cardiology department. (@myth: I couldn’t get it any subtler.)

PS #2: Daal mein obviously kuchh kala hai !!

303: Anup Bishnoi

The impossible has happened. Bishnoi has gotten weirder. None of us can quite pinpoint the start of his descent into randomness (he calls it an ascent, and we, since we are used to it now, put him off with a wry smile.) Maybe it was Inter Hall Choreo. Or maybe it was the brickbats that KGP Explained Season 2 has earned him. Now he has a flute and a small jhola for company. Neither of which do any good for those around him. Bishnoi once again would beg to differ, as of course he is “the pied piper of KGP”. A commendable achievement for him is graduating without a single F. Till last year the rest of the wing had a lot of money riding on him to be the last one to graduate. That fund has now been wisely dissolved.

PS: He makes stuff. Up.

305: Apurv Gupta

At this moment it is not possible for us to write anything about Apurv, since the time he spends off stage or practicing for events, the only person he talks to is in Hyderabad.

Sigh.

But we are obliged to try. Let me try and list all known facts about Apurv.

He can sing.

He has a girlfriend.

He can do Abhishek Bachchan on stage (do as in impersonate )

He has a girlfriend.

His girlfriend lives in Hyderabad, works in Deloitte, and visits him in KGP once a month.

See that’s what happens when you talk on the phone through your waking moments and piss people off. We screw your wing writeup .

PS: He won the Alumni Cup from the Gymkhana, the Best Social and cultural from the hall. And has 6 Inter Hall medals this year. But who cares….. He has a girlfriend for GOD’s sake!

306: S V V S G S Raju

A year has passed and Sagi Veera Venkata Satya Ganapathy Subrahmanya Raju’s name hasn’t gotten any shorter. Damn. Double damn for all the second years.

Although he has shown a tendency to get fatter and crankier, we know what cools him down now. Jack Bauer. Yes, you read it right. (I hope I got the spelling right. I’ve heard he breaks people’s fingers just for that.) Sagi once went on a 24 spree that lasted a week, and had the rest of the wing wondering how long it was before he beat the crap out of one of us. Practice, you see. Thankfully Jack Bauer stayed inside the monitor. And Sagi emerged a happier man.

Has taken a liking to 2.2s. Well, once every week at least. Or wait, is it two weeks? Bah, trivial details. Sagi runs. Period.

Sagi also draws and paints and sketches and models. And he does it pretty darn well too. Spectra folk would vouch for that.

We as his wingies vouch that whenever we need a place to party, Sagi will lend us his private island (no kidding, the guy already has one, complete with obligatory palm trees and shack.) We also vouch that his mom makes the bestest fried prawns in the galaxy.

PS: Little secret, Raju andar se haraami hai.

307: Swapnil Sahu

The thing about Swapnil is, there are more people enquiring about his whereabouts than any single person in the hall. Why? Because he doesn’t have a cycle. For his own that is. Other cycles he has aplenty. First and second years are his favourites. They are the youngest and best to ride. Ermmm…..the cycles. The cycles are best to ride. Last we checked he had a wide variety of keys on his table. By his own admission he doesn’t know which cycles those belong too.

Apart from his fetish for cycles, this guy can dance. Oh boy can he dance. Rumours abound that he even dances in his sleep. And on top of it all he has a girlfriend. She has been visiting KGP too. (Yeah the rest of our wing is sad that way. We just have each other. Or Myth.)

Sahu’s life is more like a bollywood movie than any other person we know. Or at least he tells us so. After a couple of drinks that is.

PS: All the keys, the ones on his table, they tell a story, a story of Citibikes lost, and Razors broken. Ask him some day.

308: D Sri Harsha

A year on, and the three most dreaded letters in Harsha’s life have changed. From B, T, and P to M, T, and P.

We mentioned that the wing had a bet running on Bish graduating last. It might be prudent for the bankers among us to get that bet going for Harsha. The only time he is unnaturally quiet is when he takes infinite load. The only time he takes infinite load is when the letters M T P are uttered, in that order. Apart from that life is huha peace. Wiki page, youtube, tech gossip, Harsha always has the latest bytes from everywhere. And is always ready with those bytes, even when people around don’t need it . A fact that we have uncovered over the past year is that he is socially challenged. Can’t put a sentence together in front of girls for nuts. Put him in a quiz team, though, and you have mindfuck.

PS: Funny story – Oh we had a funny story for Harsha … but he thought that would be too embarrassing, so we had to remove it. Tch Tch !!

309: Shiv Prakash Upadhyay

Axiom of life 1: Chacha ko chai pasand hai. He will do literally anything for it. Instances of him bullying his hapless depmates to come to Bhasky at 2 in the afternoon, in the middle of summer have surfaced. He has also gotten wing mates returning from Sher-e-Punjab to abandon sleep at 6 in the morning and dragged them to Bhasky. Hopefully CIL has loads of tea. Otherwise its going to be a very short trip.

Axiom of life 2: Ek Chachi hai jo chacha ko pasand karti hai. This news is fresh of the rumor mill folks, so don’t tell anyone yet.

Axiom of life 3: Chacha Tarzan ban chuka hai. Eye witness accounts place Chacha on top of a branch of the tree in front of Frusst corner at 1 in the morning shouting “AAaaiiiiiiiiyaaaaaiiiiaaaaaaaaa” (Amresh was dumbstruck for once). It is reported that eyewitnesses could not string together words to describe the event, settling instead for the faraway look in their eyes, which one sees when commonly confronted with the answer to life, the universe, and everything.

310: Kumar Ritwik

Since Ritwik wormed his way to the centre of last years wing write-up, we have decided not to write anything for him.

On second thought he probably would send in an entire page about himself if told to. So to spare all of you the torture of wading through an entire page, here are a few words.

Ritwik has gone the girly way in the final semester, spending half of his waking moments in CCD, in a vain attempt to thin himself. He has also vigorously denied any associations with members of the opposite sex, instead proclaiming to the world his undying love for Myth. (Myth replied: Get in line.) After his failed attempts as Rao Da to get the wing to Goa, and instead settling for a Go Goa themed Wing treat, Rao Da has relinquished economic control over the wing. The result has been utter chaos. Apurv has managed to blow all of his GE and GATE money. Myth’s Barcap money went up in smoke. And wing trips generally got more chaotic, with everyone ending up owing money to each other. Not an ideal world. And to top it all off, the hall has gone and given him the Best Outgoing award. Another trophy for him to cuddle up to. Well maybe that will get his hands away from Myth.

What has the world come to?

PS: In spite of reports to the contrary, Keeda apni bandi ke saath ghoom raha tha. Sahi mein.

These last few days have been very weird, trying to cram in everything on my bucket list, doing all the things I’ve always wanted to do. Friends met, we drank, talked and made merry as if there was no tomorrow. But there sadly is a tomorrow. A tomorrow where our days do not start at 12 noon, when days and nights will no longer melt into one for submissions, where maggi will not be available 24 hours a day at different parts of the campus, where you cant always find company to get high and bitch about profs, girls, friends, enemies, life, the universe, and everything. There will be no more asking rickshawallas to let you ride the rickshaw just so you can act macho (in the outside world that is enough to get you labeled a weirdo. Sucks ), no more fighting with the Vegies Dada when he gives you 8 eclairs instead of 8 rupees change, no more midnight 2.2s, no more drunken nights on Lallu top, no more tempo shouts in Netaji, at TSC, the basketball court, or just about anywhere, no more GC madness, no more dereg heart attacks, no more chai-sutta at Bhasky, no more sunrises at Shankarpur, no more.

Today life as I have known for the past five years, and probably the best phase of my existence so far, comes to an end. There is of course the faint hope that I will go back, and relive some of these moments once more, but that prospect is too far in the future for it to have any bearing on what I feel now.

KGP has been very forgiving to all of us who slogged through JEE 05 (the last REAL JEE , yeah F U 4th years ), and cursed their luck the moment they stepped off the train and onto the erstwhile longest platform in the world. All we were told about life inside those gates was that we should, theoretically, be involved in academic activities. Now we know how wrong that was. Life on campus has changed all of us, more than we would have believed possible. All of us have made mistakes here, some of us really really, f-ed up. But here, in these secluded environs, we have been given second, and third, and fourth chances. Maybe its just that we _are_ sort of stuck in a time warp here. But we can be sure of one thing, life outside Puri gate is a bitch. There will be no more second and third chances, and the knowledge that we have already screwed up more over here than we could have imagined, is a big part of what we take away from KGP.

To all those who I have not said this: I will miss KGP and all of you. I can only hope that our paths cross sometime in the future, and the 10 hours that we talk about our years here, turn out to be too less to express what we feel about KGP. It is not a five years easily forgotten.

“Dada, station jaana hai”. One last time.

Perhaps the most in-your-face aspect is the child labour. Children work on all the eateries on campus, including the late night eateries inside the halls of residence. I talked to Bimal, about 14 years old, who was working in one of those eateries, and one of the few who knew Hindi. He seemed happy, said that the owner treated him well. And he went to school as well.

The law of course does not permit him to work, but he seemed better off with the job. And here the moral question arises. Do we have the right to enforce the law and get the child away from the work? Are we not robbing him of what he was earning for his family?

I went and met them. Bimal lived in a small chawl just outside campus (distinct from an urban chawl, where the houses are much closer together). All the houses were kuccha, made from mud and thatch, needless to say there was no running water or electricity. This was one of the many small settlements that dot the land around our campus. Most of the manual labor for work in the campus was drawn from here. I met his mother and sister, and with Bimal translating, talked to them. As was expected they had nothing good to say of the administration, the only good things they have are because of the IIT (the campus Rural Development Center works with these settlements to help them in irrigation, cultivation, and new techniques which help them to be self sufficient). I asked his mother if they voted, and they said no. When asked why, they said they had lost faith in the system years ago. It wasnt hard to see why Lalgarh only a 100 km away is Naxal hotbed. I also figured out that his parents thought Bimal was old enough to work, and that since he was attending school as well, he was doing the right thing for the family. I realized that this was a matter of pride for Bimal, even at such a young age.

The question I had to ask myself is what is the right thing to do? What would I achieve if I took the job away from the child and sent him to have a “normal” childhood? How far would the State’s child support machinery support him? Would he be able to get three square meals a day? What about the income that the family lost? We might argue that it is not a child’s place to work and earn money, but you also have to look at the fact that we live in a far from ideal society, where you couldnt guarantee a childs future just because the State was bound to take care of him. Wouldn’t it be better if  I just let him be? I am sure our lawmakers would have deliberated at length on this aspect, but I do not see a simple answer. One of the deficiencies in our system seems to be the lack of guarantee of support to rescued children. Although NGOs in big cities seem to be making inroads into this aspect, out here Bimal is just another statistic.