25401600 Seconds at IIT-R

Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee! That's a name with quite some weight, isn't it? Well, I was thinking the same when, in the first allotment of IIT-JEE, I was offered a seat in this college! I was fairly sure (and this fact was proved later) that had I applied for the second allotment (according to my choice list), I'd have got a seat in Mechanical Engineering in IIT, Patna, Mandi or Ropar. I thought hard for a few seconds and came to a conclusion that it must be a signal from God Himself (it seems crazy now, though) that I somehow got into IIT-R and decided to go with it. Little did I know what was to follow...


It has been a year now, and when I look back at the things that have done, I have absolutely no regrets! There are so many things about IIT-R that if I start to tell you everything, I will probably keep on writing till morning... However I'll take you through a few things which were very special to me...

Firstly, the moment I landed on Roorkee (I use 'landed' figuratively, Roorkee has no airport, I had to board the Shatabdi from Delhi), I tried to find reasons to make me stay happy enough in the five years that I was about to spend here. Sadly, I found very few then. We got Rajendra Bhawan, the worst hostel in the campus, opposite to which there's Radhakrishnan Bhawan, apparently the best hostel in IIT-R. Add to that the 'awesome' mess food and the great (did I mention ridiculously "clean"?) canteen. (Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you, I used Indian toilets again after over 10 years of the western versions!)
However, I did find out reasons to smile soon after discovering the hardships I had to face in the near future... Over the months, I have realised my roomie (ex now, I just got a single room in Cautley), Meenan, is a gem of a guy! His attitude is one of the reasons my head didn't blow after the torturous first few months. Also, the whole corridor has given me a lot of happy memories in my first year. The nicknames that I got (and gave to others) have been really memorable (sorry, can't share all of them!), the most important being Dada(coincidentally I actually don't remember who started calling me that!!!) From a Math Genius (Vishal a.k.a. Vaishali courtesy of me!), who's faster than a CalC, to the Geek Gerent (Megh Shah a.k.a. MegSah, courtesy our HS teacher), who has the ability to clear millions of viruses together, in case you're dumb enough to hack Fb after downloading a hacking software, the CS Czar(that's Counter Strike for the non-gamers)(Rohan Arora), the Physics Paladin (Ashmeet a.k.a Baba) and Father of FIFA (that'd be me!)- we've got it all in our corridor! Add to that the unanimous CR (that's Class Representative for the non-IIT-R junta) in all the subjects- Jindal (a.k.a Jukul Mindal, courtesy Mehta Saab), Animesh (that's one guy you DON'T wanna mess with; you give him one nickname, he'll instantaneously give you 10 more) and Vikhyat Kumar Gupta (a.k.a. LK; no expansions for this one publicly; and Netaji, because he was the Wing Secy and I almost forgot, Surathkal ke Bhaiyya, not because he's from Surathkal but because he spent one year at NIT, Surathkal prior to this)! And there's Bandi (a.k.a the French Band, for this french cut, courtesy a guy nicknamed Porny and me), who, apart from being the biggest Kobe Bryant fan in the world (and only one in the corridor), liked ManU like hell just to irritate me (he doesn't even know Vidic is the captain). And there's the bunch of GT guys (Aditya a.k.a *** Adi; only other Bong in the corridor, Abhinav a.k.a. Porny, Anchit, Harshul a.k.a Harful; who's not even 18 :P, Piyush a.k.a Pammi; supposedly Jindal's spouse, Dhruv a.k.a Brubrubru(try pronouncing it using only your lips, only then will you succeed), Badal a.k.a. BDM, Rohan & Rohan) who seem the coolest of the lot! GT Rocks :D
Btw, did I mention Awadhiya a.k.a Shitty :P, who seems to have completed all adventures possible in the small place called Roorkee! Him being a Meta guy, I can understand, other prominent guys in Meta include Manish a.k.a Manishwa (no prizes for guessing, as he's from Bihar), Praveen a.k.a. PKG(PK Ji) (his initials), Jitendra a.k.a Jitu Paji and most importantly Chintakala Chaitanya a.k.a. Chi-cha, Chitze and as modified my me- Chu-cha(I hope you can understand what it means)! Although there's a saying- Meta Rocks, I seriously doubt that :P

The first group I joined, WONA (Watch Out News Agency), has a special place in my heart. The lone reason I applied for it is due to the fact that I felt I belonged there! And, I got selected in the Web Design section (un)fortunately. That was the time the Web Designer in me woke up. Solely due to this fact, I applied for the Web Design section in NSS and ended up making the first website of my life, along with Ashwini (using something called AJAX, with which I am surely in love and which is an integral part of all sites I make :P). That gave me enough guts to apply for IMG and the rest of the IMG story can be found here. I also made a site for a competition(along with Ashwini again and Sukun- the others in the first year Web Design team of WONA), Ex-Nihilo, in Cognizance (the tech fest of IIT-R), which, as expected, didn't come out to be as expected...

Except my geeky activities of IIT-R, I did watch quite some football in my first year, especially before the end sems! One memorable incident was the Chelsea Liverpool match in Feb (Torres' first for Chelsea), where I had to go to each TV room, just to find it closed and finally ended up in Azad where I could watch only till half time (because of a certain unfortunate incident in our college that day all TV rooms were closed). I, then, made my way to the IMG lab, where I did some live streaming, only to see Chelsea lose!
And I must admit, the biggest Chelsea fan (even in a higher position than me) on campus is (was) Kondy. I actually felt very sad that Chelsea couldn't win the last match for him on campus, anyways congos for the Schlum thing!

In addition to all these, I'll always remember the journeys back home on holidays- I was always among the first to leave for home! And the very thought of going home made me homesick :P

My thoughts have undergone a sea change in the past year, but do I look like I even give a damn! In short it seems the first year at IIT-R should've gone a bit longer, but second year seems to offer a lot more fun and excitement! So, just wait and watch!