Cheap Times, Cheap Thrills

Exam time looms near. Just when I should be stepping up a gear, I find the urge to blog more than usual and post something other than New Zealand match reports. My overall handling of the work ethic here reminds me of a blurb from an Archie comic:

ARCHIE's MOM: My Archie's like a car...always on the go.
JUGHEAD's MOM: My Juggie's like a car too....only he's always in neutral.

My latest musing is that life is quite trite and unnecessarily expensive at the moment, compared to my undergrad days. You, the college goer, must have looked back on school days and thought "Shit...there was a whole lot you could do with 2/5/10 bucks back then...those were such fun filled days." Think on those lines and you'll get my drift. Now I spend about 10 to 15 dollars a day on food and other things (as well as unmentionable amounts on textbooks, etc), which feels like wasteful extravagance when I look back at the RV phase (the 'tax free' days as I'd like to call them). Trouble is, I'm not sure whether that phase has completely passed and I'm supposed to move on, or I'm stuck in some state of flux between that phase and the next one, whatever it is. So it's time for nostalgia once more, a list of random things I miss about college life back then. Since very few things are free, I shall preface the list by saying the best things in life are cheap. Beneath these layers of assumed sophistication, I'm still a cheap guy.

1. BIRDWATCHING
THEN: I think we were really lucky to be in the Electrical Department. Not because it attracted an exceptionally interesting crowd, but it had some architectural significance. We would position oursleves conveniently atop the parapet adjacent to that classroom (103 was it?) and survey the expanse below for potential eye-candy. The forerunners of this mostly fulfilling exercise were two good friends, whom I shall call Bajaj Chaurasia and Sincerely Darker (the major characters in my soon-to-be released fiction series, "The Chronicles of Bajaj: Misadventures of a Simple Mind"). October, it was acknowledged, was the season. That was when the junies came in. Bajaj was the database: his in-depth expertise and knowledge of any details concerning the individual specimens we sighted was peerless. Darker was the able spy, and I chipped in with useful strategic advice and imaginative inputs of my own. All this ensured reasonable ROI without ever having to reach into our own wallets. Unambitious, we were. Anything beyond? Never struggled for it, never achieved it.

NOW: The endless mass of distant white faces + lack of well-informed peers + the unwillingness to move my ass means it becomes a tiring exercise in UT Austin.

2. THE CANTEEN
THEN: Our RV Canteen was low on variety but high on dependablilty. Idli-dosa-vada, however, is something my stomach is fine with any time of the day - breakfast, lunch or post-lunch. The real bonus was when the sambar would be steaming hot - you could feel the satisfactory effects in your bloodstream. No fuss at all, and for a price range of 3 to 20 rupees you could feed yourself well enough. We graduated to DL as the years went by and our craving for variety took over. The ability to extract treats was something of a sport...a battle of wits and a means for one-upmanship. Having been on the receiving end a few times, it felt a bit like having the rug pulled from under your feet and landing you flat on your face (minus the physical injury of course). As a couple of classmates would have it, "All in the game".

NOW: Spending five bucks (dollars) per meal on a sandwich/burger with a zillion toppings to choose from somehow doesn't cut it. Extra for a drink is a bigger turn off, fortunately the water is universally good. Treats? The last I remember I gave one to some kids who came knocking at the door on Halloween night.

3. XEROX
THEN: The lifeline of every aspiring engineer. I must've spent a good chunk of time whiling away in xerox shops while some material (which would ensure I cleared the internal the next day) was being duplicated. I find the act of lounging about in the cheap, dingy atmosphere of xerox shops mildly stimulating in the same way some non-smokers feel oddly at home in a smoking zone. Xeroxing in bulk was pretty expensive, but it was always a vital investment. Besides all xerox shops in the vicinity were well mapped so you were spoiled for choice: 30p, 60p or Re1 xerox - take your pick. Add to this the cost-cutting 'mini' xerox (2 pages on a sheet), and the nefarious, last-resort 'micro' xerox, and you had quite a few options to work with as the situation demanded. On the subject of xerox, I think a shop that calls itself 'Krishna Xerox' in Malleswaram deserves a mention. I'm sure most modern Bangalore engineers would agree.

NOW: In an entire semester, I've done one bit of xeroxing. I had to purchase a card for that, credit it with a certain amount, insert the card and what not before I could use the 'copier'. A fine way to take the piss out of one of life's simple pleasures.

4. THE COLLEGE BUS
THEN: This entry is the odd one out in the list because the bus fees for a semester was expensive to the point of being a ripoff, something like two grand or more. They say the RV bus 'never gets full' and there seemed to be some truth in it - the bus would be overcrowded with people packed like sardines in a tin, and yet there was always room for a few more at the next stop. The drivers (probably taking a cue from us jobless college goers) decided bring some fun into their exceedingly mundane lives and travel at breakneck speeds, not giving two hoots (pun intended) for the rest of the traffic. Schumi deserves honourable mention here. In later sems, Schumi and co. had the added luxury of the radio at their disposal, subjecting us to 100 plus dB of acoustic torture . These travelling conditions as well as the long distance to college and back seemed to bring out the character in everybody. If it got too much, I found myself reaching for my walkman and playing a tape at full blast. Those cassettes helped pass by many a tiresome hour, and I miss them like crazy.

NOW: At least something's free these days. Being a UT student, I don' t have to pay any fare for the shuttle service and the metro buses all over the city. Given that my place is five minutes away from campus by bus, it doesn't really count.


5. QUIZZING
THEN: Sometimes the college routine got to you. If, like me, you had no life and your classmates weren't big on the idea of cutting class for a movie, you needed other excuses to get away. Back then, quizzes used to take place quite regularly in the IEM audi and provided a much needed diversion from the monotony of the classroom. Quizzes and fests in other colleges were even better: you could actually claim attendance on the basis of 'representing the college'. Quizzing apart, i really miss the concept of those fests. Travelling all the way to a rival college, comparing the crowd, canteen and everything else there to what we had in RV. These events were chronicled in some detail by me in a log I called 'Joyrneys of a quizcorper'.

NOW: Quizzing, I found, takes on a whole new meaning here. I enrolled for an Antenna theory course numbered 325K, missed the first class and trudged in for the second. I found everyone silently scribbling on sheets of paper which i learned was the weekly 'quiz', held during the first ten minutes of every Thursday's class. After three failed attempts at scoring even a point on these quizzes I duly dropped the course.