farces & firsts

Meet Jay. His first day at Insti was exactly the same way that Harry’s at Hogwarts wasn’t.

Jaykant was here, and miserable. His first encounter with a Tamil auto rickshaw driver was horrific. All his future encounters were just as bad until he found a very Tam girlfriend, eventually, ephemerally, but he didn’t know that yet. He just knew that he had paid a hundred rupees to go from GC to Brahms because he prematurely got off the bus.

Elder Shikre had accompanied Jaykant to Chennai, to settle him in. After sweating his son, who was on the right side of the broom for the first time, in the hostel room with the “fan off” because the “dust will fly”, he thought it appropriate time for a monologue on how not to ruin life. The details will only bore you, so a succinct summary would be thus: Do nothing that’ll end up with you in a ditch, literal or figurative. (Euphemism, ’cause his extended family will render him unmarriageable otherwise.) He slowly, and consistently, inched close enough to camp by it nonetheless.

Soon his roommate arrived with a suitcase as big as his wasn’t. It did not surprise him. What did surprise him though was the roommate’s mom going, “Beta, your broomstick has added more dust than it has removed. Looks like it’s a new one.”

“Of course it’s new. Who would be stupid enough to carry a broomstick over a thousand kilometres away! I am not.” He smirked at his new roommate. He, of course, did not say this out loud. That would be an awful way to talk to his new roommate who he hadn’t had enough time to judge properly yet. That would come later. The mom though had used a broom she borrowed from the janitor to clean up. The lesson did not hit him until a few days later. The broom didn’t either. His birthday was in two weeks.

No IITian has bothered to calculate this but it is common knowledge that nine out of ten mothers believe their IITian child is guaranteed greatness. The other one is a qualified dentist.

(If at this point, you find a lack of validation or scientific temper, you should go have a double tea at Ramu and rethink life.)

Aditya Jeevannavar