the most painful Birthday ever ....

Those who have read Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets may recollect the name of the first chapter viz 'The Worst Birthday'. The teeny weeny portion of my entire lifespan beginning yesterday at around 11:45 PM and lasting till today 3:00 PM ... very nearly became one. In fact had it not been for some other not-so-bad stuff that silently crept into my life during these hours, it ould have indeed become 'THE Worst Birthday'.

Since its a good habit to begin at the beginning, I shall, without further ado, do the same. And in case, if you are still wondering why this hullabaloo about a birthday, and whose birthday it is, let me clarify all doubts and enlighten you with the fact that today was ... no not Harry Potter's ... but mine very own birthday ...

Since I had already seen the degree of ... erm ... harsh treatment, a poor BITSian Birthday Boy (or maybe a Girl too, I'm not too sure on that front) ... has to endure on his/her birthday, for the simple reason of being born on this date several years back, I had drafted a plan in my mind some time back, to make an attempt at reducing the same that would invariably descend upon me. So, it was a very indiscreet me, who locked his room door from inside and prepared to take out his Biology text book to start studying for the exam on the day after the next. That was when disaster struck. Not a bolt from the blue, rather, a bolt from the murky dark. (I was actually expecting it ...).

As you may observe from the lack of exclamation marks in this post so far, that I am far from an exuberant state of mind at the moment. The events that happened thereafter more than justify such a mental state. The disaster that I mentioned a few lines back ... was in the form oft he Biology text book, that was missing.

I was obviously very much aware of the gang which was behind this malevolent act, but I decided to maintain a low profile, and ... quietly borrowed another guy's textbook, turned on some Metallica on my phone, locked the door, and started studying. After some time and a rather casual dinner, I quietly slunk back into my room (my roomy was roting stuff in the library), locked the door, and re-embarked on the process of learning. It was around 10:00 that I realised I should got to sleep, otherwise, things might just turn out to be hairy. It was precisely at 10:30 that there was a soft rap on the door. The butterflies that had calmed down in my gut, started fluttering again. It was my super-sidey (thats BITSian lingo for the sidey's sidey), who bore this cheeky grin on his face ... which even a lay-man could decipher as "We Know ... you can't hide the fact". I heaved a sigh of relief ... that the conflicting emotions in my brain could now end, and that my destiny was inevitable( as it generally is). After a lot of show of illness, fever, and other such faked stuff ... that was far from convincing, I managed to arrive at a pact. I would do, what was wanted of me, provided I was allowed to sleep peacefully till midnight. This evil creature then left, with another condition that I just couldn't reject ... if I didn't wake up, I wouldn't see my Biology textbook. As you can understand, a very cleverly hatched conspiracy. The pact was sealed, and I was left ... in the darkened room ... apprehensive of what could possibly happen. As the guitar solo of 'Enter Sandman' died down ... I turned off the music and went off to sleep. Or was it sleep? It was more of an unstable state of mind, copuled with a voluntarily immobilsed body ... fraught with demented thoughts and the wish to live long ... or at least ... till morning.

I awoke with a start ... when some five pairs of hands shook me harshly. It was 11:45 PM, and there was this evil glint in the eyes of the miscreants, that plainly read ... "You can't escape" ...
I had to succumb to their demands ... as I was lifted by my limbs ... and taken outside the room and in the corridor. More people flocked around me, till I could identify at least twenty ... all bent on the one plan of making this night ... a hellishly memorable one for me. The kickes flew in from all sides, and all angles. idecide that there was no use protesting, so I just closed my eyes, and thought of birthday cakes, teddy bears, warm cushions ... but the more the kicks that kept landing on my poor bu** ... the more my thoughts kept deviating towards ... iron maidens, and racks, and other medieval instruments of torture. Suddenly it stopped and I was put back on my feet. My posterior was aching ... I would have actually been surprised had it not ... but I could walk. There was a lot of shouting and cheering and jeering going on around ... pictures were clicked ... pictures I dare not put up on the net ... and there was around of wishing me a very (ironically) happy birthday. No sooner had I thought, that the treatment was over, than round 2 commenced. This time, with a change of state. the previous round had comprised of solid kicks ... this time it was liquid water ... frigid and numbing. As two entire buckets were empttied upon me, I stood under the waterfall ... teeth chattering and entire body shivering like that of a doe in front of a lion. Round 2 part A was next followed by Round 2 part B ... which was similar to part A except that this time there were two bottles of fevicol mixed in the chilled water. I couldn't stand this anymore ... as the first bucket headed my way, I caught its top and swung it the other way around .... and there was one of the gangsters ... soaked in a fevicol-H2O concoction, and a vindictive smile on my face. With one man down , I had to fend off the rest ... but this time lady Luck was on my side, and as the second guy came rushing at me with another of those potent fevi-H2O mixture, he skidded and slipped on the massive water puddles and emptied the entire mixture in the corridor ... Two down!!!

This was when my tormentors thought ... "Enough is Enough", and allowed me to go for a midnight bath ... to clean myself of whatever had gotten upon me. But by then, I already had had received some 10 missed calls on my phone from my good friends in other parts of the country ... so I had to opt for some rapid and a rather shivering telephonic conversation with some of them. before hading for a bath. There is also a "Gaseous" part to a standard BITSian birthday torture, and another incredibly painful episode called "Rapid Fire" ... which thankfully they decided against. After the bath was over, I took out my wingoes to the All Night Canteen and treated everybody to whatever they wanted ... and after that, we decided to visit the haunted wing of Gandhi Bhawan. That and the other BITS Ghost stories shall suffice as the contents of some other posts . After the treating was over ... I came back to my room, and went to sleep ... it was around 2:00 AM in the morning.

With that I thought that the "celebrations" of my first Birthday, had ended ... but ... false hopes. It was precisely 2:45 today afternoon when I got this call from this friend in my neighbouring Bhawan ... he needed me desperately to solve some Rotational Dynamics problem, and he had a tutorial test at 3 ... so I had to get up and from the afternoon siesta that I was enjoying and hurry for his Bhawan. Poor gullible me!!! I had just stepped into his wing when commandos jumped up from all around ... and a painful realisation dawned upon me. A planned ambush, was it? And a planned ambush was it. The same thing that had happed the previous night follwed ... and believe me these kicks felt way more harder and crueler ... on my poor sore bu**.

That lasted for around 15 minutes, and after another ironical round of wishing me a happy birthday ... I escaped and went off to sleep. After an hour or so resting my bu** on the soft mattress of my bed .... well ... here I am ... writing this.

PS; well the one good thing that happened to me was that I received my Chemistry Test 1 marks and I had scored a whopping 35 where I had expected around 20.

Plus of course ... there was that additional, latent joy of experiencing my first B'day in college.

Thank you all guys!!! for making it so memorable!!! (Now, that is honest :D)

Durga Puja @ Pilani

the first thought that hit my head when I opened my eyes to the gleaming sunbeams that heralded the morn of
September 24th 2009, was "OK... this is just gonna be another of those pathetic days ... filled with lectures and
tutorials and tests and assignments and quizzes and ... all such things that exist to make your life miserable. I
gotta wake up now,and brush my teeth ... ". This was followed by a short bout of nostalgia ... the days in Calcutta, when my mom had had to put up a Titanic struggle to wake me up. I quickly got rid of them, because they generally made you sadder the more you allowed them to invade your mind.

I looked to my right ... my roomie was snoring lightly, completely unaware of the fact that a humungous life form
had actually waken up from a state of deep slumber and was looking straight at him. I reached for my cell phone ... my only companion in times such as these, and was quite astonished to find an unread message in it. "OK, so who would care to message me this early ???" Closer investigation revealed that it was from my father, wishing me a happy Durga Puja, and saying that my folks back at home were missing me a lot.

And with that, something hit my mind like a bolt of lightning and my head started to reel. It was like a wilderness of assorted feelings that surged through my body making me numb. Shocked, stunned and totally flabergasted.

"Holy crap", I nearly whispered aloud ... "Today is MahaShashthi? the first day of Durga Puja?" I just couldn't
believe it! How could such a day actually be as mundane as this? My mind raced back to the previous year, and the
ones before ... to the days when Mahashashthi meant an eager me clambering out of bed to be kissed and hugged by my parents ... to the smell of new clothes, and the sound of the dhaks in the nearby pandals ... to the enchanting
atmosphere of the grand season of Durga Puja, that unites all us Bengalis across the planet.

And here??? It just seemed so very terrible ... stuck up in a confounded desert state with people who think that
Durga Puja is just another holiday to waste your time and fool about ... who possibly even didn't know how many
hands Goddess Durga had! Trying my best to keep all such feelings out of my mind, I reached for my tooth brush and
headed for the toilet. The next half hour or so, was possibly the worst half hour that I have spent in BITS till
now. When I returned to my room, my roomie had woken up, and was looking at me bleary eyed. After a short
conversation wherein I didnt at all mention the word Durga Puja, I opened my almirah and glanced through the
clothes. Another bolt of ligtning shot through me, as I remembered the previous years of Durga Puja when I used to
wear new clothes everyday. My phone started ringing, and I took the call. It was from my mum, who wished me on this auspicious day, and asked me to stay happy and celebrate with all my friends here. I vented my feelings out to her, and I would be lying if I said that I wasn't on the brink of tears by then. She consoled me and told me not to give in to such thoughts and reminded me of the new colthes she had left for me in the suitcase. I glanced up at the loft of my room. "Awesome! There are actually new clothes in that thing??? OK ... something to smile about" After hanging up, I brought down the suitcase and opened it. Out spilled a flurry of clothes ... kurtas, T shirts, shirts, jeans ... I couldn't help smiling. I quickly took out the black and white kurta and studied it. "Hey ... this is cool!!!" I took out a pair of new blue jeans and ... well it matched perfectly with the kurta!!! I couldn't help loving my very thoughtful parents all the more!!!

In this state of jubiliation I put these on, and studied myself. Yes ... I could now actually feel a fraction of the Durga Puja atmosphere around me ...I had a Thermodynamics lecture at 9 o'clock and then a Biology tutorial at 10. So I hastily put on my new clothes and got onto my cycle and reached the lecture theatre. And man!!! Was I the center of attention on the roads ... people actually craned their necks to take a look at me!!! In the lecture, it didnt take long to find all the bengali first yearites, and we all sat piled in one corner. They, it seemed were feeling much the same as me too, and even they had adorned themselves with new clothes that they had brought. In the evening, we went to the Durga Puja celebration that the Bengali Association arrange here every year ... I mean the profs and the students. We had to help out with the carrying of the idols to the pandal, and some minor tweaks to the decoration. The pandal was pretty small by a proper Calcuttan standards, but at that instant it felt like a Godsend blessing. And all of a sudden, I started loving it.

The work was fun, the people were fun, the profs suddenly seemed so very nice and friendly (not that they aren't,
but it seemed a lot more then!). And the entire night, we students spent in that pandal, chatting, playing random
stuff, singing... The next day, Mahasaptami, was even more eventful. We were asked to help out with the packaging of the prasadam, and boy! Was it fun!!! It was aorund 6 or 7 of us first yearites who sat huddled around a huge mass of assorted edibles, packing them into neat .... er ... packets, and throwing random stuff into our mouths. The evening was spent rehearsing for the cultural programme that was to be held the day after the next. Mahaashthami, followed and this day turned out to be realy special for me, because I danced for the first time in my life ... the famous Dhunuchi naach, wherein you dance ... or for that matter ... random steps while balancing and rotating earthenware filled with buring embers. It was soooooo coooool people!!!And the night was even better because we were invited to a dandiya event organised by the Gujarathi Association.
And we had fun!!! Awesome fun!!!

The next day, Mahanabami was the day of the cultural programme, and man! was I amazed at the audience turnout!!! When ours, I mean the students' programme began, there was a gargantuan holllering and shouting and cheering from
our fellow BITSians. We did some songs of Rabindranath Tagore (I was in two of these songs), and our seniors danced to some adhunik (modern) bangla songs. After that was a bangla rock performance (well ... nearly rock) which included me on the keyboard and vocals, and two others, one on the guitar. I'll upload pics on facebook by tomorrow guys, so if you can catch up on those then. After an exhiltrating performance, we went to treat oursleves, and after a very satisfactory dinner, went back to the puja grounds to spend the rext of the night, dancing, enjoying and chatting. What amazed us even more was the suddenly accquired enthusiasm of the profs, who seemed to had gone crazy. In fact when we came back to our rooms at 3 o'clock in the night, they stayed on ... dancing and dancing into the wee hours of the morning.

The next day was the last day, Dashami, and there was a sudden atmosphere of gloom that seemed to suck all happiness out of our lives. The visharjan (immersion) procession began at 4 o clock in the afternoon, and we boarded two tractors, and slowly headed out of the campus with the idols. It was actually pretty fun, and we all shouted "Jai Durga Mata ki Jai!!!" and "Asche Bochhor Aabar Hobe!!!" throughout the journey. By 6 o clock in the evening we were back in the campus, and the wonderful five days suddenly seemed so distant and unreachable, like a rainbow in the sky.

But well things do end, and they come back again ... and you gotta live with it... and stuff that seemed non existant for a period of time, suddenly come back to haunt you ... like say, a 60 mark Thermodynamics Test I had on Wednesday ... which I screwed up pretty badly ... but which, I must agree was a rather nominal price for such an experience of a lifetime!!!