The commute - The Jeppiaar years contd.

Now to my commute portion of the story. My assigned bus, as I mentioned earlier, was Route 43 serving T Nagar. It made a stop near the IIT-M campus - which was the last on the route - before turning right on OMR and all the way to Sholinganallur, which in those days was little more than a sleepy suburb with not much going on besides the few colleges that had begun sprouting along the road. Once you crossed Tidel park, there was nothing to suggest that IT was going to flip this area upside down in a few short years. The swathes of swamp land were still swampy. I'm going to sound like my father here but there were actually mango and coconut orchards on the west side of the OMR -- Rajiv Gandhi hadn't lent his name then -- giving way to the occasional house here or a small factory there, including the Aavin dairy at Thoraipakkam that announced its presence with a strong stench. Barring TCS, which had a facility further south of Sholinganallur, the other IT giants hadn’t opened shop yet. And the numerous high-end, luxury, deluxe, state of the art, 10-minutes-from-the-airport apartment monsters were not even a concept.

It was a short walk from our house to the bus stop. I would walk out of our campus, turn around to wave to my mom who would, without fail, stand there till I went out of her line of sight, cross Sardar Patel Road and walk along the CLRI campus wall past an Aavin milk booth to the bus stop. The tea stalls would be open for business and so would the restaurant Vasantha Bhavan. Even as I crossed the road, I could tell what lay ahead. If I could spot my classmate V and a bunch of others standing there, I knew I was OK. In the very early days of my first year, when I was running late, I would hurry, break into a half-run with every intention of boarding that bus. And on those days the bus was leaving just as I reached the bus stop, I would wave and signal for the bus driver's mercy. It worked on a few days and not on the others. Then the teenager in me began to notice that my actions had an audience: members of the opposite sex that had a fantastic view of my mendicancy through the big windscreen. Here is stating a matter of fact. Not all the girls in our bus were exceptionally good looking. But they were girls! (Yes, I hear the shouts of a misogynistic MCP directed at me.) And pleading with the driver in front of girls, no matter how they looked, was not cool on first principles. Period. Not cool at all. Mm hmm...

So I instinctively stopped doing it. Right away. Instead, as the bus passed me, I would turn around and walk casually to the Madhya Kailash traffic signal which was just a short hop from there. The cycles were long and at every red light at that time of the morning, a handful of our college buses would stop. All of a sudden, I could actually pick and choose less crowded buses with available seats and arrive in style. Of course, over the months, you start having a cup of tea with the drivers here, strike up conversations on the sly there and you build a rapport. And lo! No more leaving me behind. No more frantic waving. A look and the driver would actually stop and let me board. It was not bad at all. And in the evenings, I would get off when the bus slowed down at the Madhya Kailash junction rather than go all the way to the bus stop. 

The activities on the bus itself were pretty dull during the entire semester. Most of the students that were doing the long haul would be asleep. The ones awake would either be discussing girls, cricket or movies in no particular order. Sometimes in turns, over and over again. After all it was the 90s: Sachin and Sourav were playing like Gods, Kamal and Rajini hadn't gone haywire and could still turn out good movies, AR Rahman was still making music for Tamilians and Indians, and girls were, well, girls. My good friend R, from T Nagar, maintained a live database of the girl students across two colleges, ranking them, revising their ranks on a daily/weekly basis and documenting the reasons for the ranking changes. And they hire Pricewaterhouse Coopers for the Oscars. Good guy, good times. He did this on all days except those days after an India cricket match when all talk between us would be a critical, statistical analysis of the feats that had been performed the night before. Mind you, this was the 90s when Sachin was at his best. You can imagine the buzz around the key events - the twin centuries by Sachin in Sharjah - desert storm innings and the final of that tournament, the 10/10 by Kumble at the Kotla, the Chennai test defeat against Pakistan, the '99 World Cup fiasco. And then the usual academic stuff too: borrowing lab coats, calculators and set squares for engineering drawing. 

During the semester exams, the bus would transform into a frenetic, throbbing study room on wheels. Notes would be passed down the aisle, the last hour cramming into temporary memory and hurried revisions and the works. The study material was divided into five units for each course. Invariably, revising the fifth unit would be allocated to the 45 minute commute in my case. But I always got motion sickness which, in hindsight, explains my scores.

So four years and may be 4000 miles kms later, my bus commute came to an end. It was time to move on. And move out. Out of Chennai. Out of India. 

The commute - The Jeppiaar years

The gangly teen that had just entered college, yet to even have his first shave in life, crossed the empty road to the other side. Even as he was walking towards the bus stand less than a hundred meters further down the road, he could see that the bus he was supposed to take was just leaving from the bus stop, having collected the few students that had assembled there. He was late by less than a minute, 45 seconds at the most. He took the bag from his shoulder and started waving his hands, perhaps a bit frantically, for the driver to stop. He had established eye contact with the driver. Yet, the driver kept going on. As the rickety bus thundered by, it stung him. Not the driver's pushing on, but the glances from the girls seated in the front. Something changed that day. No, he didn't start arriving earlier. He never plead with the driver again. Ever. 


Commuting to college, if Tamil films are to be believed, is more fun or at least as fun as attending an institution itself. In most of these films, made much before air pollution was a lesser evil than today, the hero and the heroine would always take public transport. And the leading lady - right from the days of Aradhana's Ms.Tagore - would always be seated conveniently by the window to get a ringside view of the hero's amorous antics. And would, at some point before the intermission, fall for the hero. Never mind that much of his actions can be called, if you are in a particularly charitable mood, eve teasing.

Into this scheme of things strode Jeppiaar like a colossus. After having already sanitized his group of Alcatraz engineering colleges to such an extent that they started looking more like middle schools, he proceeded to grab the idea of commuting to college as it existed by its horns, turned it upside down, pummeled it with his bare hands, spat on it and spat on it again. Still not done, he then burned it down and then peed all over the ashes for good measure. All the while being cheered on rather boisterously by the parents of his students.

For a sum of Rs. 3,000 per year per student - that financed the many luxury cars that he and his family were seen riding around in and the fancy bungalow that had cropped up along OMR - he offered to scoop up the boys and girls from the bosoms of their parents every morning right into the outstretched arms of the eager faculty, standing in front of the cells classrooms eager to impart engineering knowledge. This he did by running a fleet of buses that crisscrossed the entire city and its far flung suburbs like Manali or Thirunindravur, ferrying sleepy, future engineers to and from the college's campus on OMR.

Now, the idea was not bad. Mind you, it was much easier to take a college bus rather than be at the mercy of public transport especially if you had a monster commute. But as the saying goes, the devil resides in the details. Many good ideas bite the dust because of poor execution. And sadly, this idea was no exception either.  First off was the price itself: rather steep. As a marketing professional, I understand value pricing and also the pains that it can inflict in consumers. The second point that irritated me was this: at Rs 3,000, one would expect at a minimum to get a seat on the goddamned bus. This was not exactly the case. Especially for me and the others that boarded at our bus stop. Ours was the last stop on the route and on nine days out of ten, we would end up standing all the way to college or share the seat with friends. And on the return journey in the evening, we would have to race from the labs to the bus and reserve seats with the help of notebooks, textbooks, lab coats and other paraphernalia. This, we could have done on a Pallavan bus for a fraction of the cost. We had spoken to the man himself on a couple of occasions but to no avail. And finally, the separation of the boys and girls. A few seats from behind the driver's seat was the Lakshman Rekha - a length of insulated electrical cord was intimidatingly tied between two metal poles. Although there was no written warning posted, the way the cord was tied around with pliers spoke many threatening words, leaving no doubt that there would be consequences. The girls sat towards the front side and the boys to the rear. At some point in the past, a lady had crossed a forbidden line resulting in an epic. Mercifully, in the four years that I was a student, no such error in judgement happened and we collected our degrees without event.

Time now to give credit where it is due. But for the above points of inconvenience, the bus enterprise was so well run that had he decided to float a private bus business in Chennai, Jeppiaar would have driven Pallavan Transport Corp into bankruptcy in a matter of a few months. There were at least 30 buses that were all maintained really well, excepting, of course, mine - Route 43 servicing T Nagar which somehow resembled a wounded, rabid dog on a wet, rainy day. The drivers must have been ambulance/fire engine drivers in the recent past for once they got behind the wheels, drove like maniacs with the sole aim of reaching the campus by 8:00. To their credit, there were definitely no fatalities nor any serious casualties throughout the time I was there. Partly because all the burning of the rubber happened before the real peak hour started.

The Violinist - Part II

Here is part I of this two part series. [I'm not saying you must read it first. But if you did, what follows won't be as big a waste of your time than if you hadn't.]

We knew we were busted as soon as R's summon was read out. A meeting with the director usually meant that something was either very good or very bad. And since R hadn't done anything even vaguely spectacular in his curricular activities, it didn't require too much mental gymnastics to know what was up this time. R stood up deliberately, clicked his pen close and gave us a look. If looks could kill, he could have been charged for mass murder right away.

As he was whisked away, our minds focused on what lay ahead. We had safely ruled out any creative answers from R to defuse the situation and save our lives. You know, something like "I stopped playing since my guru passed away", or perhaps "I only play during the Thyagaraja aradhana in Thiruvaiyyaru" etc. We would have lined up to wash his feet afterwards, I'm sure. Also ruled out was a miracle or a divine intervention during his walk to the office that bestowed on him the skills to perform a stirring rendition of Bach's Chaconne from the second Partita and make the director reach for a tissue. (I looked up "difficult pieces to play on a violin" on the interwebs.) By a method of elimination, aided by our knowledge that coming clean under pressure was R's charcater, we gave ourselves about ten minutes max before he would let the feline life form out of its container. The only question lingering in our mind was whether R took an actual test on a violin. Which, we learned later, wasn't the case.

We had been conservative in our estimate. In 5 minutes, the office lady made her third appearance to be greeted by looks of "What took you so long?" Her missive this time around: round up all the boys in the class, head out to the office. As we approached the said office, R came into sight, as he stood looking folorn in a corner of the passage. An air of heavy silence hung over the place like a blanket as the male half of the class joined him.

Anybody that has watched the Egyptian queen in the opening sequence of the Michael Jackson video Remember the time needs no further introduction to the director. Nobody personified the new rich, the shallow and the bored better than the daughter of the Godfather of engineering education, Jeppiaar. Typical directors would be actively engaged in or directing research, publishing papers, stoking the aspirations of future professionals and may be teaching a final year class or two. None of these for her majesty. Her dad was rich, bad and powerful. And big daddy had given his charming little girl her very own college to run. Unsurprisingly therefore, her list of daily directorial duties involved breakfast, lunch, handling a disciplining session here, presiding over a student humiliation there and slapping an arbitrary fine before driving away in a brand new Merc. Ladies and gentlemen, say hello to Mrs. Sheela BabuManoharan, the Queen Nefertiti of engineering education.

She was quickly brought up to speed on the crime that was committed in section D. In most colleges, this incident wouldn't have registered a blip. Hell, pranks in our high school were more creative and frivolous. But on our college indiscipline scale of 10, our prank ranked a high 8 for its daringness. She gave us a withering look, said nary a word and simply waddled away. This was their classical response: no response. That would keep us guessing as to what lay ahead. After all, isn't the anticipation that is more thrilling than an actual roller coaster ride?

In keeping with standard practice, we were made to stand in front of the office with no chance provided to meet the powers that be to initiate our apology/punishment procedures. I've got no pride: we were beginning to get a lot uneasy. I mean, my high school principal, a strict person with the most authority that I had met till that point, seemed like a loving aunt compared to these guys. Our school principal took the bus to school. These folks drove around in brand new luxury cars. And while the former was an educationalist, these were ex-mafioso posing as businessmen who wouldn't think twice about spoiling someone's academic life. Thoughts of a curtailed undergraduate education did cross our minds. Would only the first 6 months of an engineering program amount to something in the job market?

But after 3 days of the standing out routine, the management somehow got wind of the fact that perhaps we were beginning to "enjoy" this sentence. With no classes, food on time and a bus ride to and from the college this seemed like a vacation rather than a sentence. For a few days, we were like, I don't know, regular college students? We were then barred from taking the bus which hurt as it meant taking public transport from what was essentially middle of nowhere in pre-real-estate-boom Chennai. But still, it was not too unbearable. If these moves were meant to break us down, they ranked somewhere between "useless" and "counter-productive" and we seemed to show very little by way of repentance with time passing.

Then one fine morning, out of the blue, Queen Sheela initiated the trial. She was flanked by the principal Mrs. Jolly sycophant Abraham and the HOD of Mechanical Engg Mr. Yes-man Jose, who I suspect held secret aspirations of toppling the former and hence made regular appearances at these trials.

Sheela: You must be ashamed.

Jolly: Oh yes, ashamed.

Jose: Ashamed you must be.

Sheela: You are not students.

Jolly: No. Not at all.

Jose: Rowdies are what you are.

Sheela: Even I have children.

Jolly: But they are well behaved.

Jose: Hey Jolly, you stole my response!

Just as things were flowing smoothly towards the regulation apology letter before being allowed to resume classes, Sheela's detective skills were stirred.

Sheela: Who shouted out R's name?

Jolly and Jose: Yes, yes who did?

*crickets chirping*

Multiple rounds of persistent questioning yielded nothing more than incoherent murmurs. Stunned by the resistance that was being put up, shotgun justice was dispensed. Our academic records were pulled out. The top ranker, Daniel George, was threatened with dire consequences unless he identified the culprits. Instead of mumbling his ignorance and falling silent, he launched into an expansive lecture of how if he pointed at someone, that someone would in turn point at a third guy and that it would be a never ending game. He earned an arbitrary yet well deserved steep fine. But more importantly,he made it clear for the rest of us that academic performance was one thing and street smartness was quite another. You don't teach the nuances of money making to Suresh Kalmadi!

Every one of us was asked to pay some arbitrary fine. Keeping those mercs running ain't cheap. The apology letter was asked for and filed. It touched upon the usual topics of realization, discipline and repentance with promises of good behavior in the times to come. Upon Jose's recommendation, for good measure, the usual suspects were also asked to bring their parents. And they did what was the right thing to do: hire parents from Kodambakkam rather than bring the original ones. We even made a few last minute changes in assigning parents so as to not get caught in a back-to-back scandal. One dad-on-hire even went to the extent of slapping his "son" in front of the director, asking him to behave well. He earned his keep.

Jose and Jolly Abraham then sermonized us on morals, student ethics and college discipline, trying to out do each other in impressing Sheela. While her ego was sufficiently massaged by all of this, she never quite got to know just who it was that proposed R's name.

(Original image is from here. Excuse my poor MS Paint skills.)

As for R, he earned some interesting nick names and became the butt of quite a few jokes that involved either a violin or music in general. This incident never did any harm to our friendship. If anything, we became even better friends.

Oh, and the orchestra that year was short of a violinist. Apparently, the closest that they ever came to finding one was R himself.

The Violinist - Part I

Early this morning (or was it last night?), my faithful dream machine beamed up a scene where I'm back in college and applying for a week's leave. What for? I don't know/remember. But what is clear is that I have a heavy sense of foreboding as I submit the letter with much apprehension and anxiety to the big boss of the institution himself. As if I were committing a sin. But I can easily rationalize the dream given the notoriety that my alma mater has earned for itself concerning issues of student discipline. Here is a related entry, if you really should know. Anyways, as I woke up, this blast from the past dream opened up the floodgates to memories from the four years that I spent pursuing a degree in engineering. And thus inspired me to weave a post from a college anecdote.

This was an incident that happened in my first year (freshman class). The college day function, an event that had as much potential for fun as a dentist appointment, was around and preparations were afoot in right earnest. A bit about the way this was held in our college wouldn't be out of place here. I'm sure you have, at some point in time, attended a birthday party of a one-year old. The one where all the arrangements are made by the parents: they decide the guests, the menu, the theme and they decide when the party begins and ends. All that the toddler is required to do, as he is carried in arms to the table, is to look pretty and try to blow out the solitary candle. Well, our college day festivities had the feel of one such party where we, the students, were the toddlers, while the staff and management played the role of strict parents. Any chance for the students to either exhibit or acquire organizational skills were clinically nipped in the bud and then stomped over for good measure. All that the student body had to do was show up, behave well and put on an impression of having been entertained and everybody went home happy. [Atfer 4 years of this routine, a lot of us were well prepared to take on real life where an impression of being happy was called upon more often than the annual affair at college.]

The festivities would have an unmistakable Talibanesque flavor with clearly demarcated events for the two genders. Each side of the male-female divide would come up with a perfunctory dance performance, a clumsy fashion show and the regulation skit peppered with insipid jokes. Not to mention the inevitable "Modern Ramayana" or "Modern Mahabharatha" set to the latest songs that got thrown into the mix. But the one event that stood out was the musical extravaganza where each batch contributed to the cacophony. [In keeping with the rules we were operating under, I can't remember of any duets being performed as that would require a male student to share the dais with a girl student.] This event also saw the odd member or two of the teaching staff put their vocal skills to use for something other than peddling engineering concepts. Usually with varying degrees of success. Participation from other colleges was deemed illegal and any notions vaguely resembling fun and frolic were deemed blasphemous. In short, we were the Afghanistan of engineering colleges.

Since we were in the first year, nobody quite knew what our individual musical abilities were, and the parents, err, the management were scouting for students gifted with the ability to play various instruments. We were informed that most performers had been identified and that the first year orchestra only required the services of a single violinist to be deemed complete. Which was why a lady from the office entered our class that fateful day, paper and pen in hand, looking to hunt down that elusive violinist among the studious pursuers of academic excellence.

This was a few months into the year and clear groups had already been formed based on mutual interests (cricket), abilities (cricket) and we were a bunch of guys that stuck around, collaborating over many assignments, class tests and other academic misadventures. Besides the many hours of playing cricket under the sun, that is. We were in our teens, brimming with creative energy to be squandered on anything that held the faintest promise of fun or adventure. So it came to pass that we proposed, rather loudly, the name of a friend from this group, R, for the vacancy of the violinist. For some reason, the rest of the class that had been silent till that moment, somehow sniffed out his hidden musical abilities and soon his name was being cried out by a vocal group. The guy looked up in genuine surprise and started to protest but the rest of us were loud enough to convince the office lady that she had discovered a second L Subramaniam in I year, section D.

It must be added, for the benefit of the innocent readers, that we were fully aware that he was as accomplished a violinist as Pratibha Patil is a president. For non-Indian readers (just play along, will you?), he was not a violinist even by the widest stretch of imagination. The guy was a fine chap alright: he was a good friend, one could count on him to knock up a few quick runs in a tight run chase, was always up for some fun, and didn't earn the displeasure of the rest of us with a startling display of academic brilliance. Ever. But truth be told, he couldn't play the violin to save his life. On a good day his musical knowledge would have perhaps allowed him, at the most, to identify the cello as a XXL violin. Not his fault entirely, mind you. Here is a thousand words on his abilities:

(The image is from here where there are a few more funny cartoons and a couple of violinist jokes to boot, if you are interested.)

I don't know what held R back from making it clear to the lady that he had no appreciable skills in the fine art of playing a violin. Or handle any object with the potential to put forth a musical note for that matter. Perhaps he had noticed that the otherwise indifferent girls in the room were now paying attention to the musician in the class. Or perhaps he was hesitant to rise and announce aloud that he was violin-challenged in a class with a significant number of members of the opposite sex. [He had perhaps worked out the "I-chose-not-to-play" defense in his mind already, if at all questioned by a girl later.] Or maybe he simply got carried away by the moment while his name was being cried out aloud. Whatever the reason, and if memory serves, he stopped his protests, flashed a bright smile, waved his hand at the office lady who was watching the proceedings with marked indifference, and sat down as she pencilled in his name with an air of finality. Whether he had intended to catch a hold of her later after class and clarify the whole thing is one for conjecture.

From years of watching Discovery Channel, you're familiar with the routine of capturing specimens of rare and endangered species for relocation to safe enclosures for study and protection, right? I'm talking about that kakhi clad white guy, chest deep in a murky river somwehere in Borneo trying to capture a python that looks like a freight train or the one sawing off the horn of a sedated, endangered rhino in Botswana to implant a transponder (and you are trying not to gag on the heavenly sambhar sadham that you are savoring). Well, since Albert Einstein, I suspect that violinists with more than a passing interest in science/engineering have found a spot on the endangered species list. So much so that, whenever one is spotted, immediate capture and scrutiny by the authorities follows. I can offer no other explanation for the office lady's reappearance in less than five minutes since the commotion from her first had died down, with a message that the director of the college wanted to meet R.

Soon with the rest...