Coming soon ....

> Ragging
> Sachin Nambiar
> Hey Dorothy ...Tin-man is crying !!
> Sanjana Kapoor
> What is LOU ?!
> Buddham saranam gachami ...
> Hey Akshay ...I'm not writing the exam
> There must be a way out !!

DISCLAIMER

> All the plots and characters in this story (even those based on real people ) are fictious .

> Any resemblance to real life incidents is only partly co-incidental , and must not be taken as a standard for any judgement .

> there are some really embarrassing flaws ...lexical , semantical , spelling and grammer .... it happens wen u try to write an epic in 8 hrs ...so kindly oversee all these blemishes !

> i'd implies both .... I wud and, ... I had

01. Pilot

Hi ! My name is Sameer Khanna and I'm a 30yr old "BOY" living in Tahiti,Frech Polynesia .I grew up in India and lived my Indian dream (which is to dream of living the american dream) for the first 25 yrs of my life and then after hopping a lot of continents I landed up here in Tahiti !

Three years back I used to work as a managemant consultant at Lehman Bros , but I left that job to pursue my childhhod dream of writing . Ok fine, that was a lot of crap.... the real reason is that i was caught sleeping with Mrs.Lehman , and they fired me . The only thing i've always been good at is doing nothing , you see that's how I became a consutant. But now with that out of the window, the only thing I could do was writing .

I started writing about girls , u know about how dumb they are and stuff like that ; but then after two assassination attempts by female activists and after being banned in 23 countries , I decided to write on less interesting topics .

This piece of " literature " is about a phase in my life . I believe that Life can be divided into many phases and no phase is less or more important than the other . Each phase has got its own feel and Life is all about getting the feel of this feeling ... I'm not sure myself of what i just said , but anyway this is all about my undergrad days , that seemed to be the longest 4 years of my life .

If u are a boy , who loves cars and computers ; has an inclination towards science and if discovery channel had always been ur favorite channel after Cartoon network , then there is nothing else you would want to become , but an engineer .....And thats where one makes the mistake . In India if u r not in IIT then u r better off not doing engineering, even if that is wat u want to do . I dont remember using any of the engineering principles that I was supposed to learn in those 4 yrs , but all the non-engineering stuff that I learnt thru experience in college gave me a whole new perspective of looking at life .

Experience it with me vicariously as I try to relive it !!

02. P.O.A.

Back in school I wasn't like the brainiest child in the class , but I was always considered more than fairly decent .I loved math and physics ,and though I agree that I spent more time watching Extreme Machines on Discovery Channel or , dreaming about owning my robotics company that would make 'femanoids' { mime robots that look like females ,and when I say females I mean Victoria Secret models} , instead of reading those elephantine tomes of Math , Physics and Chemistry ... I'm sure I dint muck up so bad , to land in one of India's worst engineering colleges .

But then one must be positive in Life . I'd always been "The Man with a Plan" . I believe it kind of runs in the blood . My dad was in the army and all his adult life he made strategies to kick the enemy's butt or save his own .Though I dint seem to inherit other virtues of his like a strong physique or a good height and eyesight , the strategy-making-gene passed on . So at every instant in my life I always had a Plan of Action or POA(as I used to call it). So though not making it to the iit(s) was quite depressing , I had a POA that was very simple and workable .

The POA was to join this college with half a million other goons who had no idea of what engineering was all about , and not only top the class but also get a University rank through the 8 semesters ( this seemed to be a simple job...a cake walk , if u will ... as I'd made it through the IIT screening tests and after all I'd read Dr.Feynman's autobiography when I was in the 7th grade) . With such amazing grades any American University would give away their right hand to take me, but I'd accept only GeorgiaTech's invitation and pursue my Masters in Robotics . From there a job in NASA would be a natural step . After making a couple of Robo-Rovers for the Venus mission I'd leave my job at NASA to start my own venture ..." Venus Inc. " , that would make Fe-manoids . I would later sell my startup to GoldmanSachs for a couple of billion dollars and then buy a resort in Aspen,Colorada and call it Beaver-Creek , where I would live happily ever after , with beavers ... and chicks who worked for Hugh Heffner earlier.

Yes , so my POA was that simple !! But sometimes simple things can get complicated .I dont know what went wrong , a cliched phrase to describe what happened to my plan would be ... " I got on the wrong footing " ; or was it - "My first footing was wrong " ; no it is - " Got wrong my footing first " ... ok I dont know wat the apt phrase is but I guess you get the picture . So step one of my algorithm never took off and with that the succeeding steps fell like an array of dominoes !!

And, with what magnificently contrived beauty they fell is what u'll learn about in the other chapters !

03. The Begining of the End

When you work your ass off for two long years , and you come to college you want to take it easy and try out new stuff instead of wasting time on useless activities like studying. That doesnt hold good for me , cuz i never worked for those 2 years or I wud have not been here , yet the latter part was very inviting .

The courses were really simple . Same old math , physics , chemistry with an additioanl "engineering" attached to it as a prefix .The only interesting course was "Mechanics" .I'm not sure if it happens to all the boys but ....the smell of fuel,sleek curves of a car ,sound of the engine, burning of rubber , the shape of gears and clanking of metal against metal ....well it just turns me on ! I was born for this stuff ! Why do you think they call "Popular mechnics " , popular ? ...cuz of me .

I kept joking , saying to myself that even if I dint study a word I'd make it through sem 1 . Sometimes jokes can program your brain !! And thats wat happened . I literally dint study anything . Sometimes inorder to make oneself look cool ,one crosses the line . Well I did . The image of the guy who doesnt work , who lives on the edge and yet gets thru was so ....SEXY !! Thats one word that was never seen near my name , and here was an opportunity . I took it and realised that being sexy comes with a cost .Anyway I somehow did manage to study for 1 hr the day before each exam and did all of them pretty well . Saving Mechanics ....

The Mechanics paper got leaked a day before !! Wow , now that was cool ! Though I dint like the idea of all the dolts knowing the questions before hand and cramming the solutiuons , the whole notion of an exam paper of a University , that suprisingly makes it to the Asiaweek Ranking , getting leaked was just too cool !! Now i felt like I was in college . The university came to know about it and conducted a retest and inorder to take revenge ( cool huh ?) , set an olympiad level paper . Nobody knew jack . I managed to solve 2 problems which was a big deal . Finally the results came out .

Andrew-65 .....Anil-60....Akhay-80... ...Sanjana-65....Sameer-50 !!!
fifty !!! I got fifty in Mechanics . I . Me . Sameer Khanna . I got 50 in mechanics !!!!
remember the wrong footing thing ....

Wassup Man ?!

In every phase of our lives , we all have a pet phrase that we use redundantly .
6 months into college and my pet phrase was " Life sucks! " .
Initially I really meant it , each time I said that . But later it became more of an involuntary action . And with an extra "Wassup mon ?!" added to it , it became the best way to start , end and drag a conversation . And , they dint act like two distinct phrases . After asking the person this magical question {..Wassup mon?..} , I wudnt wait for him to respond . I knew his life sucked . if it dint then , well it should . And by saying the other half {..Life sucks..} , I just extended my support , by letting him know that my life sucked too , just as the day before .

X: GoodMornin
Me: wassup man ? life sucks !

X: so how was ur ya day ?
Me:wassup man ? life sucks !

X: so how was the movie?
Me: wassup man ? life sucks !

X: dude - hot chick - 11 o'clock .
Me : Whoa man !! life sucks dude ! life sucks !

I'd used the phrase so often that it kind of became hollow .
I'd accepted the fact that life sucks .
Life sucking had become an intrinsic and important part of my life .
Infact it would suck big-time , if 'life dint suck' .
I became inert to bad things happening to me .It dint matter if it sucked more .
It was ok that my life sucked . I was home with the way my life sucked . and even if it dint suck , I wud still say it sucks !

04. The ball kept rolling ....

After the first sem , it dint look like I was going to get 85% and conquer the world.
All I wanted now was a meagre 80% ,just enough for GTech to still accept me .Mechanics was jus the begining . After that there was a similar scene in every semester . In the 2nd sem they almost flunked me in 'Data Structures' , now I may not be a genius in Semiconductors and I really hate Chemistry , but DS was my forte . It was after the second semester results that I created my theory ..." What you write , is not a function of what you get " . Later it became popular as the " Sameer-osky Theorem " , and was used by everyone as an excuse to not study , primarily by me .

With that loss of trust in the system , I really stopped caring about exams . The aggregate declined logarithmically ,and with that expectations too . By the 4th sem , all I wanted was 75% with distinction , I could still make it to GTech provided I also won a noble prize in Computer Science and if I dint ... then , Have u heard of "University of Western Milwaukee " ?!! I mean hey its atleast in the US .But somethings never come true ....

In the 4th sem we finally got a course I'd been wanting to do ever since I saw that episode of "Beyond2000" in the 6th grade .......Robotics !! The more I loved the subject , the more I feared flunking in it .... and thats exactly what happened . For the first time in my life I flunked , and the irony is that i flunked in robotics !!

Suprisingly , the first thing I did on hearing the news was ...LAUGH . It somehow seemed really funny . I'd heard about people taking weed and laughing non-stop for hours together . I experienced something to the same effect . I wasnt sure wat i was laughing at ?! Maybe the fact that I wont be making fe-manoids anymore ? or how the thing I'd predicted (as a joke)actually came true !!
or how even Milakauwee will not take me !!

But there were many other levels to this flunking episode than just career , as u will soon know ....

Akshay

I think there is this rule that people who get ragged together go on to become best friends .

We didnt go through any major ragging , but that is how I met Akshay .
Akshay Singhania .
For some crazy reason I never understood , our seniors used to call us in a group of two to get f'd ....no we are still on ragging .

Now there are three ways of handling the seniors when they start asking you really wierd questions .
One , you answer each question obediently but with full confidence . His aim is to irritate u , but if u dont get irritated he'll hit the wall after sometime . This is the strategy I used .
Two , you make a ridiculously sad face and look like a veal that is going to be slain . The trick is that the seniors will feel sad for u and just let u go !
Or three, you become more aggressive and try to act smart . You might think that this is the most dangerous way of dealing with it , but suprisingly it works .... And Akshay knew that trick .

It seemed like he just knew all the tricks .
Whether Akshay was so cool because bad things never happened to him , or bad things never happened to him because he was so cool , remained the ultimate chicken and egg question throughout those 4 years .

Apart from being the math-smartest amoung all of us , he was also the best HR guy . The only difference between Akshay and me was that , he did the right thing - at the right time- at the right place and I did the right thing-at the wrong time-at the wrong place !!

But through those 4 years , or for that matter thru my whole life , if I could relate to somebody on almost all issues it was Akshay .

Farah

Farah Jamal . Farah was a biological mishap . Her right brain was that was of a girl and the left that of a guy . So she was both girly and logical !! ... and thats wat made her the BEST .
I always used to wonder what girls mean wen they use girly phrases like , 'she understands me ' and 'he know me inisde out" (he hehe ...ok i'm sorry) . But in the case of Farah ....she really did read minds . Infact I felt really vulnerable with my head open to some girl like that !!
But then ,she was the only girl on earth who dint hate me at any point in those 4 years . The only girl who saw every situation from my point of view . And for that they should actually dedicate a different species by her name !!

06. Surely U must be joking Mr.Khanna !!

My whole life I've been the class clown .When u are 20 kgs overweight the only way u can arttract the opposite sex is through humour . But that never worked for me , mainly becuz girls were the thematic object of my jokes most of the time . So though nobody found my laboured jokes funny , they would laugh when I said something serious ! The more they laughed , they harder I worked to be funny . Again that never worked but I somehow ended up becoming the class clown everywhere I went for something I dint even do intentionally .

Thru the years , though 15 of those 20 extra kgs got burnt by laughing at my self , the joke-producing organ stayed . I realised that my jokes and ppl calling me a clown were two independent disjoint things . But , I'd tried so hard to be funny and cool , that the neural connections in my brain got hardwired to be the same .Now I made jokes not to attract women but scare away my worries .Laughing at myself and my horrible life ,was my weapon of confronting with problems .And since I made these jokes for myself , I was bad at picking the moments to say the right joke.

This is what happened whenever things would get tensed for reasons I found very amusing . And like we all know , girls take everyting so seriously that they are not really game for some lily white humour to break the tension . Soon , girls started hating me . The organ was functioning for exactly the opposite cause for which it was created 10 yrs back . All things hit the peak , when the results came out . I was sad obviously , but my way of beating it was thru humour , not by crying and dwelling in sorrow for things that u cant do anything about . Soon ,from just the wierd guy I became the heartless, emotionless wierd tinman guy .They actually think that boys can be emotional ...HA ! those poor things.

So though it dint really matter , it did matter . I just wished all the girls in world knew , that we do care about things and feelings , but we dont really find it necessary, being emphatic about it all the time . Also why cant they take things a little lightly (.... maybe its because they dont watch porn !! ok I'm sorry I dint say anything please dont expel me from Tahiti now , I really have nowhere to go ! )

07. CLAUSE 6.3.1

Clause 6.3.1 :
Only a candidate who has secured not less than 75% of overall
attendance shall be deemed to have satisfied the requirements for
completion of a semester

This two lined clause is what my whole college life revolved around .
Going to college was an ordeal. First the long 2hr trip all the way from home sweet home to college via I dont know ...PLUTO ?? Cuz it really seemed to take that long .
And once there , one had to sit there listening to these wierd looking creatures {...I think the bus picked them up on our stopover at pluto..} , teaching in a language that they claimed to be english !!
All my peers would dilligently write what they called "notes" after deciphering what the bugger had crapped . There were times wen I made attempts to listen to what they were blabbering .... and it was nothing but MURDER of science !!

I never understood the concept of taking notes . Why would I waste time , ink and paper , to write something that I would never read , or SHOULD never read.... cuz for one , it was a disgrace to the english language . Two, we all knew that the prof knew zilch about the subject , and he would anyway dictate it from some book ....why couldn't we just read it directly from the book ?!
The objective of engineering is to decrease work and we were working exactly against it !!

LakshmipatiKrishnaswamy's notes became hot stuff a week before the exams . Many precious redwood trees were felled to make his notes . U name a kid something like that , what do u expect him to become ?!! Had I been LK ( and thank god I was not ) , I'd have made some green bills selling notes . LK however was not that smart , infact he was the total anti-thesis of smart . But lummox-heads like him were worshipped and looked upon as brainy people . Whilst anti-notes-writing logical lesser mortals like me were supposed to be idiots !!

***
Imagine sitting 8 hrs of 2 hour shifts straight, on a wooden bench , nodding to the rythm of the lecture that was delivered in pseudo-english but with a strong sing-song cadence of the local dialect.
Obviously I couldn't go on like that . One must focus on solutions . And thats what I did . I devised algorithms to make use of this time ...
soln #1. Sleep ..... dint work . got caught twice just attempting to do so .
soln #2. Sing ..... well it did work , but it also resulted in being thrown out of the class twice .
soln #3. Read .... this one was the most effecient algorithm . I'd read not less than 100 books just in the class . I'd enough time to rewrite LOTR .
soln #n. Other temporary solns involved .... designing cars , making cartoons , writing poems .

So basically , coming to college was an ordeal , and I made sure that I dint attend one more than the required no. of days .However math can get tricky , specially when u are assuming too many parameters.
It was jus another day , two weeks before the exams , when the peon came and read out the circular:
" The following students will not be allowed to write the exam for lack of attendance :
G.Ramaswamy ( rollno. 47) and Sameer Khanna(roll no. 56) "

Well , I dont know if it is physical disfiguring of the neural patterns or plain dementia , but my body doesnt respond humanly to stimuli like this . For a moment I was the cynosure of the class . And the only thing I was thinking of was to say something really funny , that wud make me look really cool !! I was very aware of my facial contortions and my tongue .
I mean , here I was virtually sentenced to death as per Clause 6.3.1 and I wanted to crack a joke!! Then gradually as the news sank in , my heart rate escalated . I did manage to keep a very amused look though . And as I walked towards my friend .. wats his name again ... ya Ramswamy someone .... I ran thru wat my life was going to be ..... I dint care of GeorgiaTech , even if dint never made it to the states it wud be ok , all I wanted now was to live a normal life ...

As I walked people stared at me hoping their life wasnt as sick as mine ... that's wen I started laughing , its a dysfunction , I cant control it ... and then they all were sure that I kind of deserved it .... this is wat happens wen u act calm in situations where u are not supposed to .... u get the sympathy of people only when make a big deal out of it .... see thats how girls operate ... they totally freak out for the smallest thing and then get their way thru with all the sympathies .

Anyway , with some quick math , I calculated that I might still make it to the other side of 75 if I came everyday for the next couple of weeks and boosted my attendance . But one cant live under assumptions . I'd to go to the Principal , and do some major negotiations where I was labouring not to laugh , more than getting my point through .
Then with a little help of my acting skills and after giving my virtual mother a virtual disease , and after writing half a dozen letters , on A4 sheets { that suprisingly just disappear from the face of the earth in situations like these } , in the correct format {..does TO come before FROM , does SUB come after SIR ....who the F*** cares ?!! ... my life was hanging on really weak sliver of hope and they cared about the goddamn format ?!} .... I escaped being detained a year .
Phew !!

Everytime I think of how bad it could have got , all the blood just drains away from the head region .
But , at the end of it all ...as my dad would put it ... it was a good experience !!

09. ...And ROLLING

After flunking once and with an aggregate on the lower side of 75 , I knew there was no way I could get into GTech. And the way things seemed to go , it dint look like I wud ever make it to any decent graduate school . My dream since the 6th grade , was no-where near to coming true .... femanoids will never be made , what a great loss to hu-MAN-ity ?!!

But it wasnt just about getting into GTech , it was about the present .
The same ppl who blamed the system {...and rightly so..} for being unfair , considered the univ exams as a standard to measure intelligence .
At home , folks stopped asking for explanations, after I stopped giving them the same . I dint expect them to understand the situation . But it was sure that they wished I'd joined defence and carried on the family trend , and not tried new things with life that dint work out . They never complained , but it was understood that they dint have any major hopes from their son .
Initially it bothered me , but later I became numb to such feelings . I really dint care wat people tgt about me now .
And this 'Dont-care' feeling extended to almost everything ....

It made no sense to spend 2hrs copying LakshipatiNarayanan's ( or Krishnan or wateva the guys name was ..) assignments that had no creativity. And being creative with assignments was not only not appreciated , but also decried . Now I was obviously not going to copy LK's assignments even if it meant losing 20 marks {out of 1200 !! }.There were things I could do and things I couldn't . And clearly this fell in the latter category.
The same happened in the internal tests, where one was meant to cram the notes given by the prof. {in his version of english} and then reproduce them in the tests . HA !! and they tgt I was going to do that. Besides when u sit in the last bench and are caught either sleeping or singing or reading every single day ,u manage to leave a very GOOD impression !!

But atleast I somehow managed to pass in the internals . Thats all I wanted . With time expectations had gone down , and i would be satisfied if I passed without any drama !
That too was going to come to an end . The university started alloting marks for attendance .... things like these really tickle my funny bone and I couldn't stop laughing . Now there was no chance that I was going to get the min. marks in internals !!

And considering that my essays were evaluated by some sex-deprived man or raped-under-marriage female , who was waiting to vent out his/her hate somewhere .... the odds of me getting a decent score in externals was equivalent to the reciprocal of the no. of times Pam Anderson got scored !!

This meant that I could keep flunking , over and over again .
GTech was way out of the league. No University would take me , if they called my transcripts as "credentials" .
I needed a miracle to get a job !!
Infact it would be a big deal if I even graduated within four years !!

What happened , what went wrong , where did I muck up ?
I was Sameer Khanna .... President of the Science club , Captain of RedHouse , Editor of the school mag , a top rank holder throughout my schooling !!
And here I was hoping I would get an engineering degree from what I considered to be one of the world's worse engineering colleges .
I was almost detained for low attendance , I could have been expelled for ragging , I'd flunked in my favorite subject , I'd lost my friends for either being funny or to insanity !!

WHY ?!

Finale : And then what happened ...

> Akshay went to the states to do his MBA , but he came back to India after a couple of years to start his own business in Mumbai , that hit off really well .

> Farah got into big time singing . She now has her own recording studio in Chennai . She'd come to Tahiti for a vacation recently with her 2 kids Samya and ....Sameer!

> Sanjana is married and is in Australia now . With the flexible rules there ,instead of doing a MBA , she pursued a course in psychology and works as a Child Psychologist . I tried to talk to her seriously into divorcing her husband , but she laughed and said something to the effect of me being really funny !!
I dint bring up that topic again , but astrologers say that her husband might die in a freak car accident ! ...and I will have nothing to do with it ...i swear ...nothing !

> Sachin stayed back in Chennai and works as a manager in a SW company . He won the "Best Singer Award" on the Anniversary day at his workplace . I know from my sources that he bribed some people hansomely to get that done .

> Neha got married to some tall IITian dude and went to Canada . She now works as a senior reasearcher for Bell Canada . I met her once on my way to Greenland , she seemed pretty happy .... finally !! how come the things tat I wish for everybody else but myself always come true .

> As for me ....well I dint get into GeorgiaTech or even Milwaukee ... I did not make any amazing inventions that would have changed the face of science ... I did not become an entrepreneur... I decided against making femanoids , cuz watever said and done femanoids can never replace females ... I never went to Aspen , or sleep with Heffner's ex-girlfriends though I once saw a hooker who made it to the playboy cover , but that was just a glimpse ... I've not yet bought my DodgeViper or Ferrari , but once I drove the BMW Z4 , and that baby rocks ....I've dropped the idea of buying the Hayaboosa ... I might get a Ninja next year if this book sells well .... I ended up becoming a consultant and later a free lance writer ..... My first book said a million copies sold the day it hit the stands ! ....that trick still works !

So though none of my dreams came true and I'm a marked man in 23 countries ...I'm a happy man ! .... I wonder if I wud have been this happy , if I had got all those things that I had dreamt of .

And when I look back , lying on my hammock in my small apartment villa overlooking the beach in Tahiti.... those 4 years dont seem that horrible .