Kumaon Times

Published the following article in Kumaon Times on the occasion of my farewell!

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Saying Goodbye and Everything Else

As far as I recall, Arya was the first person I met after reaching Kumaon Hostel on 27^th July 2006. He had taken up the responsibility of showing us our rooms. My father thought he, my seniors, was going to be a beacon light in my life; I thought he, my senior, was going to be a ragging nightmare in my life. No awards for guessing who was right!

I enter my empty, dusty room. Of all things they had brought along – my parents forgot to bring broom. Rohit, gave away his broom after much ado (and a scary – give it back warning). After having cleaned up the room, and having jumped with joy on seeing Sankalp (finally – I had found someone from my Bansal days) I welcome my roommate – Nikhil. O the first sight of him never warned me that he would be the dirtiest creature on earth. His socks used to stink the whole day; he slept over his books and clothes and the cough syrup bottle he spilled on his study table wasn’t cleaned until it got dried and was scrapped off, gram by gram, by the blowing winds.

We used to get up at morning 5, were made to run till 7 by our seniors, eat breakfast – run for PHP lab and other crappy stuff only to return late in the evening, get ragged till midnight and then gossip away till wee hours. And soon after that we were swept away by Kumaon fervor. Some people were cleaning fans, some were hiding in the rooms of their seniors, some got influenced by Puneet’s speech and started playing hockey, some were busy sneaking out of the hostel by throwing their bags from balcony, some people asked other to lock them up, while some people mistakenly locked their rommies, some got influenced by the to-be IIMA guy and tried shouting Jai Kumaon just like him – In all this, I was busy acting. Time passed – grades came. There was a lull after the storm. And then things started all over again.

Suddenly one fine morning we walked out and some skinny guy called Dhanda was pole dancing. I realized-we had become 2^nd yearites! I don’t remember anything from the year except AOE, Swimming, Apping and R2, oh and o’course the mess-became-good for a change fiasco!

Come 3^rd year and we were made the mentors. Some mentors had to paint their faces black; some were already black.

Oh and then the wretched final year which was mostly hazy: Drugs, Booze and Nights Out: either devoted to Dota or to Series or to BTP – there was hardly anything else which people did!

As the days of solitude draw near I have started looking at thing from a different viewpoint. Some things haven’t changed even a tardy bit: Nanda’s “Tu…Kat” and a long distance high handed “Hiiii” is still as charming as it used to be in the first year; Chachha‘s philosophies are as intact and his room as clean as they used to be in his first year; Ghoda is as beauty conscious as he used to be in his first year and so on. But some things have: for a change some guys names after a school have become exceedingly foul-mouthed people and have got a bandi. A Chennai born, Maharashtra-living Gujrati, studying in Delhi is going to Calcutta. A high-school stud re-found his studness by taming an animal. Some Gaziabadians deflated, some Delhites inflated, some people from East-India started giving hugs to random firangs sitting in parks, some bihari proved to be worth a dime as he entered some gate and so on…

Ah, it feels so :( when you think you will not be living with such people anymore. Sometimes it feels like I will never experience a change as monumental as this or, will I?

Dosvidania and everything else (hugs, kisses, shoves, nudges…)

Nishant Ranka