ANOTHER DAY

Rakhi is never a official holiday in ITER. Every year we drag ourselves to college only to find that a mass bunk is in progress (it’s more a procedure than an event). It was no different today. I was on my way to canteen (so as to derive some satisfaction out of my otherwise pointless trip to college) when Rishi (CS) showed up looking all purposeful and spoke about some guy giving a talk in college and there being a problem to gather crowds. I agreed, actually having nothing better to do. As I waited for a friend, Rishi herded a bunch of first years towards the conference hall. They moved in tight packs, the physically stronger ones pushing their way into the centre of the pack as the weaklings hurried along in the side, with vacant expressions that comes from a perpetual ignorance of what one was getting into.


When ‘some guy’ started his talk there were seven people in all in the room (it grew slightly when the first years arrived). He seemed pleasant at first but 10 minutes in he asked –“why engineering ”? There was absolute silence. *dramatic pause*. Not that it had shaken our core or anything but because we never answer unless specifically asked to (straight faced smiley). What it did manage to do was board me on a train of thought that led to elaborately choreographing fight scenes involving the faculty sitting in front of me (with the kill bill soundtrack playing in the back ground). An hour in and our guy seemed to make lesser sense with every passing second. He was making a rant about how we had no idea how we ended up in final year of engineering in our streams and that we never seem to realise what we actually learnt since paying that huge college fee for the first time (who invited this guy ). Nothing an individual with mediocre IQ has already come to terms with. It was time to leave.


To think of it the only purpose engineering served was silencing a handful of social elements for a brief number of years and setting us up for silencing them for good by becoming respectable (read pseudo; pharji) system analysts for MNCs. Am 21; with what might well be a quarter of my life behind me and I don’t really have a sense of accomplishment. What’s worse is that I might have secured my next quarter to be no different.