You Me And SASTRA

Somewhere around last week of july 2005 I happened to land on the soil of Tamil nadu.Back then being a north indian basically the picture that used to come to my mind about a southern state was some place with full of coconut trees ( and only coconut trees!) and people with better hold on English language than the species found in the north, and yea, the girls, i don't know how and i don't know why but all i could picture about a typical south indian girl then was "Shakeela" (glad that this presumption was proved wrong later). This picture of a south indian state was changed and quite a bit. Trees, i could find every kind of tree other than coconut, People definitely are sound when it comes to english but the problem is the language they speak is tanglish(tamil+english) which resembles english on various occasions, and believe me this tanglish language is not the easiest of languagaes to decipher. Anyways i should get back, so I am in this place called tamil nadu, and the final destination was the SASTRA University .

Finally reached the university. Though the decision to join SASTRA instead of the college i was offered in the north was mine, but the smile of satisfaction i could see on my dad's face was like he was responsble for this! And there was a reason behind the smile, all you could see when you stand somewhere near the entrance of this university is students coming by bus, offering prayer at the temple and heading towards the canteen for the breakfast and finally towards their respective classes, no girl in a jeans or anything near to a jeans, forget t shirts and stuff( though the conditions were better in the later half of the stay in
that college). Dad could not help and finally said" ye jagah bus tumhare liye hi bani hai, yahan 4 saal agar ruk paye to pakka sudhar jaoge". We were escorted towards the admministrative block where the admission formalities were to be taken care of. And this was the very time when i started to sense that future was bleak for me now, for atleast 4 coming years, and i was not the only one feeling that way. People in that college know only three things ' Rules, Regularity and Rasam'. I will come back to these later. Rules, mind you, are not the rules specified in the constitution or in any other preamble, they have their rules, and you are not
supposed to toy with them, under any circumstances. For instance, the rule is not to wear t-shirts to classes or to any other department inside the college, makes a lot of sense, as t-shirts can go real nuisance at times, but consider this, a guy during the admissions had brought a passport size photograph of himself in which he was wearing a t-shirt, and he was sent back to get another one, beacuse t-shirts are not allowed in SASTRA, "not even in photos". So mostly all the rules are as funnily absurd as this one.

Cattle always walk in herd, watever the first one does, everyone emulates that. And people at SASTRA have taken this very seriously, but have you ever noticed that if the number of cattle is not much they are kind of confused, confused that which way to go, they tend to lose the 'walking-with-the-herd' property of them, and this is wat people at SASTRA have taken even more seriously, so to avoid this confusion the intake of the students in that college is humungous! So that students just walk with the herd, and don't even think about revolting for anything, and it has paid of well. The number of student is so fucking large there that you hardly can find a vacant space in the large ( my whole city wouldn't be of same area i guess) campus. Many guys don't get hostels in the strange land in first year, owing to the large number of students including poor moi. And trust me not getting hostel in the very first year could very well be the worst thing happening in your life, more so when you get an accomodation where eating in its mess is compulsory if you wish to live there. Some of the dishes served there still haunt me in dreams! Anyways, haunting dreams apart, SASTRA is not that bad place to live in, unless and untill you have the minimum needed percentage of attendance in the classes, yea that's another of their 'rules' i talked about earlier, funnily absurd.You got to have 75% of attendance, 'under any circumstances', yea you heard it right, be it a fracture, be it jaundice or be it your real sister's wedding but you have to be in class and take notes and nod for every crap they talk and what not for more than 75% of the classes conducted.

to be continued..