The Night After

My first night at Chiplun passed by pretty uneventful after the initial hiccup. The next morning my Dad came to the hostel pretty early. I was planning to attend my first class of Engineering. Was pretty excited about it. I had generally inquired about classes and had realized that college had begun quite sometime back and guys who had joined during the earlier rounds had in fact covered quite a lot. Also came to know from them that students had to buy Drafters, Drawing Boards and Tools for Workshop. I was pretty overwhelmed as I had NOTHING with me at that point of time, except for a couple of note-books. Now that I look back, I was pretty ignorant about what all a student needs for Engineering. But anyways I had decided that I would manage everything myself and found out that all I had to do to get the basic necessities was to go around asking seniors if they have anything to sell off/discard. One small problem though, they were seniors waiting for juniors to come in :P

Fortunately, the guys of room number 9 had told me from their ragging experience, the code of conduct. "Koi bhi senior dikhe, seedha hello sir bol dena." Showed me one senior and told, "woh dikha to Jai Maharashtra bolna", pointed to another one and said, "usse duur rehna :P". They also told me a few seniors who would probably be able to help me with the things I required. So I went around collecting stuff, making sure not to make eye contact with anyone in the corridors. 2 reasons - I couldn't distinguish between seniors and juniors cause I knew no one; These guys could see fear in the eyes :P. I later realized that it was easy to spot a junior (Once I became a senior :D)

The next morning I was pretty confident (I think it was sunlight that brought the confidence :D, sort of like in horror movies, where you don't feel scared if its a day scene) Soon after my Dad, in comes Sameer and Nicholas! Abhange (our store in-charge and a kamina) leading the infantry :P. Sameer (henceforth also known as Sam) had come with his uncle while Nicholas (henceforth also known as Nickso) with his Dad. Sameer had an expression of being extremely bored and generally disinterested in all the going on. His uncle though seemed very cheerful. Nicholas looked like he would cry any moment while uncle had a serious, gentle look about him. I am sure Nicholas was the saddest of us all to come to Chiplun. It was decided that we would have breakfast and then go attend class while our Dads would make the general arrangements :)

Anyways lets just go on to the night. :) We were settled in and generally trying to get acquainted with each other. Just for the purpose of anonymity let us call ourselves Alpha, Beta and Gamma :D. There was another code of conduct in the hostel. If a senior walks in, you stand up! Or u r screwed. We were generally sitting and each doing our stuff when a senior walks in. Beta and Gamma got up but Alpha conveniently continued to lie on the bed. The senior found it extremely insulting. He spoke to B & G and threatened A that he was yet to see fireworks. All of us were pretty scared about that statement. We decided that we should just sleep off. I don't know when exactly but suddenly very late in the night, there was some serious noise happening. Alpha was being given lessons on respect. What happened was that Alpha had opened the door after some heavy banging. It was the senior who had come earlier with the scary one (refer above "usse duur rehna") and a couple more. The scary one had a rod and he was threatening that if Alpha didn't respect seniors, then the rod would go up a certain not so nice place. Well I think Alpha remembered that for quite sometime.

Meanwhile Beta and Gamma had realized that something was fishy. Beta had raised his head to see what was happening but under strict orders of the scary one, "Abey tu uth mat! soye reh!", decided to follow orders. By the time Gamma woke up things were almost done and he decided to carry on with the sleep. There's a very high possibility that Alpha didn't sleep much that night.

The next morning we didn't speak much about it, though we do laugh about those days now :) The following night was better... lol pretty hilarious, now that I recall. :)