Flashback : Second Year in College

Written on 4:10 PM by nitesh

Coming to second year

I forgot to mention few things of first year, most enjoyable lecture used to be of sameresh chatterjee sir imitating his ‘k’ do u have any doubt. Unscrewing the screws of benches of LT-2 and then throwing them in front became a routine unless they were screwed back very tight beyond our reach to unscrew them.

There was no chance of going home after the end sem exams as our internship was supposed to begin the very next week after exam. Purna Chand proposed the idea of going to mehsana shankoo’s water park. All enjoyed rain dance, skidding down the giant octopus and many more stuff out there.

Rural Internship

After the semester we were supposed to land into the tribal area of tejgarh for our rural internship. There was a caravan of 5 buses to take us to the academy of Proff. G.N.Devi. There were two hostels reserved for us one was in ‘zoz’ and other in ‘chichor’ both in opposite directions of the academy. In early days we were allotted to collect details about sickle cell anemia in different villages of the tribal belt. There were few incidents like arjun mullakala and group being chased away by the residents of the village where they went for data collection.

Most memorable part was going back to hostels from academy on jeeps fully loaded with 30 students, there used to be fight for sitting up on the jeep and first place to be filled was right above the driver head after that the seats were filled. 15-16 kms journey was covered by singing songs and one day there was a marriage procession passing by and the tribals were playing with swords and taru sardana was lucky to escape the sword just by few inches.

We used to sleep on the dice/stage of the school (our makeshift hostel) and in the night that stage became a casino with cards being played in all the areas of the stage. We slept with cards and woke up with cards. All became very good players of cards games after internship. After few days mercury rose to late 40’s and to our delight the little bit work which we used to do was also stopped, breakfast was delivered at our hostels. A bat was bought from the ‘Haat’, a weekly market place in tribal areas and cricket season started in the classrooms and stage area. Some days kabaddi was also played but bruises which all players received stopped out dreams of bringing gold in Olympics.

We also became cops as a drunken thief who stormed into the zoz hostel was caught (by raju, amit singh and many more) beaten and locked up in jail. Fast food outlet in chota udaipur became a common outing place. Other source of entertainment was provided by watching movies @3 in the STD shop in the zoz area.

One night while sleeping we heard lot of noises, actually the marriage season was in full flow at that time and a group came celebrating the marriage with all their paraphernalia consisting of swords , sickles , knives etc. We were completely confounded and to say the least horror-struck.
There were other small incidents between manu suryansh and sid pandey and prabhat, which I guess prabhat can describe in detail.

Censored News
Chichoor students used to tease our ass of by telling us (zoz people) how they woke up early to watch the 2002 batch girls going for bathing and other stuff, there was time division between boys and girls over using toilets and bathrooms. I can’t go in more details here.

After few days heat waves stopped and we all were divided into 15 groups of 14-15 students and were allotted different projects like virtual hospital, virtual museum etc. All groups were allotted one jeep to their disposal and our group under my leadership started visiting different primary health care centers to gather details.

Agony

We tried to finish our project fast so that we can go to hapeshwar (tri junction of Gujarat, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh border), river Narmada passes through here. The way was full of steep gorges (normally during the rainy seasons river flow through that way in which we were traveling), so a very good jeep was needed which we had. We somehow reached the river bed and visited the temple there, watched hundreds of owls swinging on the banyan tree there and finally swam in the river. When it was time to we saw 10 sadhus up on the top of our jeep. We told the driver that it would not be possible to transport 25 people through this difficult way, but no he said he will, and as luck is never with me the jeep stopped after 300metres and we had to push the jeep to get it started, the driver said he will park the jeep at a near distance not far away, sachin ran and jumped on the jeep. But that son of a bitch fellow didn’t stop the jeep after that, we 12 guys had to walk in the scorching heat and in the difficult mountainous track on foot for whole 8-9 kms. After approximately 6kms all we nearing to collapse, nihar was not feeling well because of dust. We somehow found a hut and drank the dirtiest water of my life. Finally after 3.30 hours of walking we reached near the jeep and shouted on both sachin and driver. We questioned idiot sachin ‘why he didn’t stop the jeep’, he gave bullshit answers like driver didn’t stop. Somehow they were lucky not to be hospitalized that day otherwise the combined effect of our hot heads, scorching heat and the agony we had suffered might had caused something severe.

Phone to dean incident

Some students couldn’t bear the heat and were not satisfied with the work being given and complained regarding this to the dean and requested for the shortening of the internship. Our internship coordinator on hearing this news got angry on all of us and asked us to give the names of those who complained, failing will result in we being failed
in internship. After long meetings and discussions it was decided that students (who ranged) will volunteer themselves. Night time at around 10.30 was allotted for meeting with proff. G.N.Devi.

As my group consisted of 3 students who ranged to the dean, I though of taking the moral responsibility and stepping down from the post of leadership but there was no such option. I had to stand again and again 3 times when the professor asked for the group leader of the students. Girls and few boys left 10 days earlier and many remained there in tejgarh, last assignment was living in village for 4 days. It was very wonderful experience, eating tribal food, green groundnut there. We were lucky to have toilets in our village while many of our friends had to wander into the shrubs to answer the nature’s call.

Semester 3

Our college was going to add one more big family of 240 students as new batch was due and we were excited thinking about ragging the juniors. For few days we were able to do some personality development test (PDP) but later on our seniors were given the responsibility to stop the ragging, group of seniors were assigned to each wing. Still we ragged some juniors , an extravagant farewell party was thrown for their formal acceptance in the college with loads of prizes for Mr and Miss freshers . Mr fresher carried on the trend of a DPSite running away with accolades.

With third sem also came back sanjay sir with oop course and biswas sir with iel course. Third sem was the most hectic semester with regular assignments regular exams and projects. We bunch of 5-6 guys including sachin , dk , vivek , kikad, taru and me and many more used to sit together for doing iel assignments, one silly mistake and the question was to be done again. Mid semesters of iel were also either one week before or after the scheduled mid sems so for the whole semester we were busy giving exams.
Imitating Suman Mitra sir in dim lecture provided lots of entertainment during his deadening lectures. Respected sir was nicknamed ‘halwai’ in this semester because of his resemblance to a halwai, students visualized him wearing an undershirt, dhoti and a turban on his head and making ‘roshogullas’. (Statuary Warning No disrespect against the professor)

Group one remained unlucky in every electronics course as our labs used to be on Monday, we used to spend four and four and half hours in labs for finishing experiments. Most frustrating part was ta’s revolving around the beautiful damsels of our batch during labs, we had to call them 3-4 times to solve our problems but only one call by the girls was enough and the whole problem was solved, ta’s used to solve the problem themselves but we unlucky ones have to solve ourselves.

Incidents like ‘run java’ by KD and ‘show tables’ by chotu were the highlights of our java project presentations. Our plans of going home on diwali vacations were disrupted by IBF course instructor who scheduled exam on the day on which we had planned to leave, our requests for postponement was denied and our confirmed tickets had to be cancelled and I was forced to travel by bus to Delhi to enjoy diwali.

We used to have long and sleepy lectures of sts normally exceeding by atleast 20-30 minutes , but one day out of the blue chakku came to our rescue and asked a very innocent question 'sir why do u always work overtime'. Professor asked who is this curious guy and chakku got completely carried away by sharad into standing up and accepting his bravo. Actually there was no other alternative sharad had raised his(chakku's) hand in the lecture. Then there was a long debate with professor suggesting alternatives like tuts etc and chakku said he don't have any problem with them. We all guessed this confrontation would snowball but better sense prevailed and chakku apologised for that later.

With third sem came useless Design Project in which we 6 lazy fellows though of making some wireless speakers (u play song in on room say F-107 and hear it in any room say in A wing). But we know how we passed the dp after (3 years in starting of 8th semester) submitting reports on Bluetooth and CDMA three times.

Sports culture was taken to a new level with the starting of annual sports festival, seniors and juniors rivalry in sports extended further with points tied after 4 games which included football, basket ball, badminton and table tennis. We lifted the badminton and volleyball and were defeated in football and table tennis. Winner was to be decided by cricket match. Fate was not with us and our 7 match undefeated run was broken and we lost the match on the big day when Anil Ambani paid a surprise visit to the college with his wife and mother and handed away the trophy to seniors.

This is all i remember till sem three

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Flashback : First Year in College

Written on 7:41 AM by nitesh

An era is nearing to end, the place where we spent most days of our lives after our home will no longer be ours, We will have to leave daiict to start a new life in the corporate world wearing formals 'suited up' (barney quotes from how i met your mother) for consecutive 8 hours.

Life will not be as enjoyable as it was here; some one has said rightly that

We run life inside the college gate
And life runs us outside the college gate

So now in this my first blog I try to recapitulate last four unforgettable years in daiict.

Counselling

Starting with counselling on 9th june 2002( not sure about date), I came here with my father and we were greeted by smiles of sumukhi shukla sitting at the help desk . My counselling was on second so I was not sure whether I will get the seat or not as my rank was 501 double the required capacity, but was relieved to know that only 80 seats were filled the previous day probably because of Gujarat riots 2-3 months before this day very few parents opted for sending there wards to da-iict. Last year all the seats were filled by rank 425 so my anxiety was valid. I met here with sumit goyal who later on went to become one of my best friends in college. There was an orientation lecture before submission of fees by director Prof. Kudchadker. I don’t remember the whole lecture but I liked the way he spoke, we were shown some dreams of taking this college to a world class level and I guess we all were mesmerized by the oration of Proff. Kudchadker that included words like innovation, generalist specialist, jack of all trades and many more. The orientation removed any doubts which me and my father had regarding taking admission in da-iict which at that time was offering diploma reliance name assured that da-iict will become a university in 6 months. Fees were deposited and as we were to stay outside campus in the first semester so were shown the place where we were scheduled to live somewhere in sector 6.

On 6th july came the news that the father of Da-iict Mr. Dhirubhai Ambani had passed away, so this was not an auspicious start to our life in daiict. Later I came to know from deputy registrar P.K.Chopra that there is one more guy from hisar (my hometown) who also got registered in da-iict but his counseling was on first day. The guy was vivek goyal my roomie for 7 long semesters.

First Semester

On 18th July we (me and vivek) landed on the land of Gandhi with new hopes and vigour to make a bright future. We were allotted rooms in sector-7 in different blocks from 76 to 95 and 16-20 students were to live in each. First few days were like adjusting to new environment and meeting and making new friends. On Monday we 240 fresh faces well dressed came to college to for regular studies but first there was a orientation lecture by deputy registrar P.K.Chopra which I will never forget as in the orientation he spoke the word smart card around 100 times.

Our first lecture was supposed to be Professor R.N.Biswas but we came to know he has not yet come in college as he is joining with our batch as a permanent faculty so Professor Sanjay Chaudhary came to take the lecture in which he talked about the password and other profile stuff and the important incident of the lecture was his quote ‘u red shirt sitting on 4th row 1…2…3…4 are you sleeping’ the guy in red shirt was Deepak Gulati (charsi) first guy to be kicked out of the class.

We all were horrified by the professor and many of us stopped wearing dark clothes in his lecture. There was not much fear of ragging as we all knew that our seniors were not ragged so we hoped they will not take cruel ragging but somewhat lighter one. We all were right to some extent leaving behind few cases. The common ragging stuff included things like giving introduction and bending in front of seniors, ‘90 maar’.

Somehow some seniors had some how taken out the list of students of our batch there was one student Taru Sardana who was most looked after as his name gave the impression of a sardarni girl but the outcome was a guy with a beard and moustache. Some seniors also came to our blocks during night for ragging but next day we saw 2 guards outside the main office. Ragging was over with fresher party after 20 days and we attended the maiden jam session and still I all feel that was the best till now in college. After few days came our first mid sems exams, for the first time we had 2 exams on a single day.

I still remember how all of us were literally pushing each other in the tv room to get some place to stand so that we can watch movie ‘kamasutra’. Running back from college to watch cricket matches was also very exciting, tv room used to be jam packed we also used to sit on windows to watch the match. Started watching English movies in R-World at the cost of Rs20 and icing on cake was that free coke was also included in Rs.20.

Eating dokhlas in sector 7 market and dinner at vishal’s home became a regular routine.We all wing mates became chetan baboor (national table tennis champion) by playing tt on four tables combined to make a table. Final exams came and were over by week and our first long one month break started.

Second Semester

Second semester started on a sad note for me as I screwed in the finals and my cpi touched down south, though I passed all the courses but surprising part was getting C grade in BEC after scoring .5 marks in final. Our honeymoon with sector 7 blocks was over and we were to shift to brand new hostels in college campus. As girls were supposed to live on first floors of F-E wings I remember seniors requesting first floor B-wingers to swap rooms as direct view was there towards girls floor.

The shifting of hostel the depicted real example of metamorphism during which we transformed from sincere, hardworking, energetic boys to not so sincere not so hardworking and not so energetic lazy lads during that period we would had denied ‘indras asnas’ in lieu of our beds. We ate to live and lived to sleep and I guess things didn’t change much after that. As Glen McGrath used to keep waiting to get sachin out, faculties used to keep waiting for us for the lectures, attendance touched rock bottom to 16 in DFS lecture.

Making of KBD ( kaun banega draupadi pati)

Bunch of 17-18 guys decided to become serious actors by doing a comedy play later on titled ‘Kaun Banega Draupadi Pati’ for the upcoming blitz-03. Fifteen sixteen nights which we spent on writing the script and thereafter practicing the play were most memorable days of my life. Blood circulation increased during the nights (when we all sat together to decide the script ) watching dk enacting almost all the actors of bollywood, nana patekar was favorite of all.

Convincing honey to become ‘gandhaari’ was the most difficult part as the character was supposed to cover her eyes. Idea of using 2 balls (in absence of honey) to give male ‘gandhaari’ a realistic look was also discussed but later on rejected. Saurabh Nandan (chotu) was most supportive as he easily agreed to become draupadi. Draupadi was reincarnated in a 6.3 feet tall guy and bheem’s reincarnation was done in a underweight ‘akha bukha India’ type of guy sumit goyal (kikad). I was supposed to play ‘dhritrashtra’ and the song to be played on me and gandhaari was ‘aankho ki gustakhiya maaf ho….’ Entry of pandavas carrying plastic guns with song 'tha tha duniyi di tha tha' was most comical. Crowd was on their feet watching taru bond dance (enacting bhishm pitamah) on song ' i am a bachelor akela hoon bimaar hoon'. Sachin (duryodhen) made them made requesting me ( his father dhritrashtra) on song ' shaadi karva do meri shaadi karva do'. Both's dancing styles later on led to a craze among the masses. Raghu Movva aka 'karna' transfigured into prabhu deva while dancing on song 'mera baap mila de mujhko doon lakh duaye tujhko'

Our play was 21st century’s Mahabharata in which ‘dushasna’ who in real epic went to bring draupadi by pulling here hair, here in our play was brought in lap of draupadi in the ‘durbar’ . Another laughing incident was bheem’s (kikad) tearing apart his undershirt during the wrestling round in a style, to make it easy to tore the undershirt a cut on the upper part was made but we forget to make the same on the lower part of the undershirt, he was unable to tear apart the undershirt so this shrink guy somehow took it out by making various tilts to upper part of his body Dressing up chotu and honey in saree and all others was another difficult part but somehow with the help seniors and lots of shouting by all of us (aise nahi aise kar) was done somehow. The play ended with raghu aka prabhu deva dancing on the song 'mera baap mil gaya hai meri maa kho gayi hai ' Stomachs of every one out there were aching because of excessive laughing.

Cricket crazy da-iict got the first chance to play on the lush green ground with the first inter group tournament being organized by DCC , with director sir playing the first ball, thanks to amit singh for kicking start sports culture in college. I will not forget my debut match which started with a record which no bowler would like to hold, I bowled 11 wides in an over. Wherever I tried to bowl ball swung incredibly and the result was wide. Group 1 came out champions and I was part of winning team. Batch team was formed and I was lucky to represent my batch. Cricket tournament was followed by carom tournament. Players played with bats worth 10,000 each, life time of those was not more then 30 days, this is still a mystery were they really of 10,000 bucks.

One day during sas tutorial came the heartening news that our college has been made university under start act by Gujarat government, we celebrated the day with a tea party and a big card was made and we all signed on it. In the end of semester there were nightmares of course DFS as some one had complained about the copying of assignments, many students were caught and many were unluckily punished with F’s ( the most till now around 41).

Peaceful bond between juniors and seniors was broken with secret seven of our batch beaten by seniors probably because senior ‘sabu’ being pushed on the roller (by one of them) which resulted in his shoulder dislocation. There were many other reasons for the fight, later on matter was resolved by warden proff. Ingle and no one was punished.

Internships and next two semesters coming up in next blog