The Tech Nut at IIT-G : Chapter 8

Sorry guys, this was the chapter I accidentally released before the exams. Anyway, that wasn’t exactly complete. Ankur, feel free to lol again.

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Can’t believe it’s taken 7 chapters, just to reach Day 1!

DAY 1

The alarm wakes me up first, and I switch it off, and kick Karthick awake…sorta…:-P It’s 5 in the morning. We had decided to wake up early in the morning to avoid the morning rush for the bathroom. We did. But the bathroom was already at full occupancy…crowded…with…

Mosquitoes…bigtime…small ones…but lots…ambush…aargh…

Luckily, I didn’t feel like going to relieve myself that day, cause I couldn’t bear to think of proffering my behind to those bloodthirsty (literally) vampires. In one of the bathrooms, the shower head had come off, but Karthick realised that only after he got in. I got in the second. We had been warned not to get into the third, because it was the abode of Aragog, the king of spiders. I really didn’t want to come face to face with him.

The water was ice cold. Seriously, there was a geyser, but the geyser was outside the shower cubicles, so unless I had a bucket, I couldn’t use the warm water. The moment the water touched me, I got goosebumps. Five minutes later, still shivering, I walked to the room, and changed.

Food was based on a coupon based system. You bought a breakfast or evening snack coupon for Rs. 10 and a lunch or dinner coupon for Rs. 20. The school was paying for all this. Thing is, we didn’t have any coupons for breakfast. Ma’am had given us one each for lunch/dinner, but that was it. So Karthick and I had to go over to the Married Scholars’ Hostel to buy it. The others weren’t up yet or were just in the process.

It was raining lightly, so we took an umbrella, mainly for the camera. I clicked quite a few picks, of the morning freshness. Anyway, there were restrictions at the Married Scholars’ as well, like the girls hostel, and we had to enter our names in a register and then the guard knocked on the door. Apparently, the married scholars got a small flat to themselves. So someone else was staying in the main room, which was larger, and ma’am, Aishwarya and Vishaka stayed in the slightly smaller inner room. But they had to share the bathroom.

Anyway, ma’am was impressed to see us awake so early (am grinning from ear to ear), and she gave us the coupons for everyone. We decided to run back in the rain. Except that when a puddle came along, which Karthick couldn’t clear properly, I got splashed pretty bad! Was cursing him under my breath for a long time, because I didn’t exactly bring a lot of clothes to soil…

Breakfast started at 7:00, according to the schedule. And there was still quite a lot of time left. So, Karthick and I decided to make some repairs to the turbine assembly. After Karthick had decorated it, at the airport, we had smashed it, so a few bent blades and a few balancing issues were normal…hehe.

We took it apart, and were in the process of putting it back together, when we heard an announcement outside, that breakfast was at 7:30. After that, something was supposed to happen at 7:45, which we didn’t hear. We thought that breakfast for the hostelers was at 7:45. So, we just leasurely finished our work by around 7:30, and went for breakfast.

It was toast with an option of aloo tikkies or boiled eggs, along with butter. Then we noticed everyone was in their uniforms. Then we saw our schoolmates, and learnt that the bus was going to leave at 7:45. So, basically, we wolfed down our breakfast, and ran back to our room to change into uniform. Luckily, the same bus had to make a few rounds because there were quite a few people in Kameng hostel.

I should point out that the water coolers in all of IIT, Guwahati are weird. They’re about 5’5″ tall, and the taps are really, really low, around waist level, which makes drinking water directly from it, really difficult.

The bus took us to the auditorium. We met Aishwarya, Vishaka and ma’am there. We also gave ma’am the Teachers’ Day card. The girls had signed it in the shop itself. I’d taken it with me, and then gotten it signed by all the guys the previous night. Aishwarya didn’t get time to take a bath, because the people they were sharing the bathroom with got up early, and had hogged the bathroom ever since. They had no time for breakfast, so they went off to the canteen for a quick bite. By the way, Aishwarya was livid when got to know that we had taken apart the turbine blades. Then, Y. Nishant Babu gave a welcome speech, followed by a lecture on fibre optics by a professor of Physics, from the college itself. Karthick fell asleep during this, and we took pictures of him. I discovered a way of taking photos in the dark without the flash. The pics are really grainy and are greenish in color, but you can make out faces. After the lecture, we had a short break, followed by Confuzone, the IQ test.