CHAPTER 6- A TYPICAL DAY IN DAVIS LIFE
This is how a typical day went by in my life. I had a couple of classes everyday on an average- one in the morning and one afternoon (identical to JD as we took similar classes but a little different from MS's where he often had late classes- so he didn’t need to get up that early and I was so envious of him for that). For a class at 10, I used to get up at 9.15 and rush to get ready to go to college. It was especially difficult as the three of us (MS, JD 'n I) shared a bedroom and a bathroom, for which we had to wait for turns to use. One of us often ended up not being able to take a bath because of the lack of time.
Every morning, we took a resolution to get up an hour and half before class in the morning from the next day so that we could get ready at leisure, but we never honored that till the end. Often I ended up getting up early, but then I would look up (rather look down as I was on the top bunker of the bunker bed) from my bed to find JD and MS (he didn’t need to get up early that often as he didn’t have a class until late afternoon) sound asleep. My conscience would tell me not to bother about that and get up and wake them (at least try to) and start getting ready, but the evil side of my head (the part which incidentally gets up late in the morning) would tell me that I, in no way, deserve less sleep than the others and while they’re sleeping soundly, why should I alone take the initiative of getting up. As always, the evil part would win over the good part and I would go back to sleep, with an itching conscience, ignoring the multiple alarms on my iPod and the vibrating alarm on my mobile, which when combined would be alerting me every five minutes and also ignoring JD's alarm on his mobile, which was so loud that one would have to question the appropriateness of having a small quantity called decibel to be the SI unit of sound. Poor MS was quite sensitive to alarms though, and he would get up, unsurprisingly quite irritatedly, each time one of our alarms rang. As he had the bottom bunk of the bunked bed, he would also feel the vibrations of my vibrating alarm on my mobile and would wake up for that too. Sorry mate.... :D.
Later, with only 40 minutes to go for the class, my good conscience would finally prevail over the evil part, and I would get up on my bed and exclaim "Oh F***" after looking at my watch, to which MS 'n JD would get up too and we’ll all start getting ready, swearing all the time and resolving to get up early from the next morn, knowing secretly that we weren’t going to do it for sure. This became such a daily routine that, my "Oh F***" became JD's and MS's last alarm. I’ve heard of people praying or chanting mantras just as they get up from bed, but my routine was quite unique.
It would be a running race into the bathroom, as the first one in got a chance to take a slightly more leisurely bath, and I often won that battle as my recovery time from sleep was quicker than JD's, who had this ...ah...custom of sleeping on the floor just outside the bathroom for about 10 minutes before he really got up properly. We would then put on some clothes in a hurry and skip breakfast (didn’t fancy eating bread and cereal everyday anyway) and run to the bus-stop, which was fortunately right outside the apartment to catch the Unitrans bus to college. We would often end up just missing the bus while waiting for the pedestrian signal to change to green to cross the road, to get to the bus stop. The cruelest sight was to watch your bus go by, just a few metres away while you’re stranded on the opposite side of the road waiting for an insane signal to turn green. After a few such times, we didn’t give a damn about signals and just ran across the road, waving our hands at cars going past by at 50 mph to stop, the typical Indian way. :D
We would have to run to class from the bus stop at MU to make it on time, and we would often grab a hot chocolate on the way, as that was the only thing that would keep us awake the whole class. It wasn’t so much a problem in the graphics class to keep awake unlike the scientific data management one, but still we became addicted to that chocolate in the morning that it became impossible to concentrate in any class without sipping on that. After the first class, we would hang out at the Silo, for a couple of hours and have lunch at Carl's Jr/Pizza hut. JD would have his at Crepes every day, to the astonishment of even the shop owner who was not used to having customers eating there regularly.
We would then go for the afternoon classes and sleep through it as it was often scientific data management and sometimes programming languages, which had started to get boring as the quarter went on as we stopped delving into system study by studying programming languages in general but started studying specific programming languages like LISP and Prolog, from the point of view of a person who is going to use the language for programming rather than a compiler designer who would look at the general aspects of the language which would help him develop a compiler, which is the angle I love.
We would come home in the evening at about 5 pm in the evening. And till I slept very late into the night or rather early next morning, do not ask what I did during that time, because I cannot think of what I did. I seemed to have no time at all on my hands, either to do the assignments, or play sports or even follow sports I love which is a shocking thing for me as I have always been an ardent sports fan.
Thinking hard, I guess this is how we passed time. We cooked dinner for 2 hours, ate for an hour (that’s just my usual eating time anywhere, and luckily I had JD there for company as he was a slower eater than me, which is quite an accomplishment for anyone), cleaned for half an hr, then spent the rest of the time chitchatting with each other, pulling each other’s legs, playing pranks on each other. We spent a lot of time making badusha, with AZ involved (can’t expand further on it again… :D).
BADUSHA- A LIVE DEMONSTRATION
Of course all this in the time I did not spend praying. [no comments on this please] :D
Initially I had got the impression that all my homies would be mature, serious no-nonsense people, with the exception of only JD who has always been quite a clown. I especially thought JB was a totally nerdy chap who would be studying all the time and AZ would be the kind of chap who would be quite serious when he studies and ditto for MS. I found how wrong I was soon after we started living together. All 5 of us were as freaky and immature and childish as the other, always wanting to have fun and never serious. The others had a similar impression of the rest including me and were as surprised as me when our true selves were disclosed. So, as we all found each other to be equally crazy, we all got on well and wasted a lot of time together too.
DURING SOME OF OUR CRAZY MOODS
We also spent a lot of time talking cracking random PJs (popularly called mokkai). JB was and is GOD at that and he was inspiration for us. A couple of his trademarks- you ask him "what’s up" and he’ll reply "ceiling", much to your amazement initially and to your exasperation later; you tell him in exasperation "be serious", he’ll nonchalantly reply "no i am harry", (hope u got it); you ask him "are you ready?" and he’ll reply "no i am not reddy. i am jb" which later turned into “No, only Sahithi is :D”. MS and I became his disciples soon, admiring his craft and spent a lot of time cracking such PJs and though JD and AZ were initially resistant to it, they ended up cracking some amazing ones. And thus, JB converted us all into ...ah...weirdoes... And proud ones at that too. Thank you JB! Apart from spending time in such pursuits, being a Man Utd fan, I spent quite some time arguing football with a Chelshit fan, JB and an ardent Arsenal fan, AZ.
Considering all this, no wonder I was short of time for assignments. I did well on the graphics ones, as it is my subject of interest. I did surprisingly well on the scientific management one, as it wasn’t time consuming. But I did poorly on the programming languages assignments, as we had to spent sooo much time on each of them, which is what we lacked. We often ended up having to do half of the assignment, on the last evening before the midnight deadline. And we had to wrap up with whatever we were done with at 1130 pm and rushed to document it and login to our accounts and submit it. We never submitted an assignment before 1155 pm (5 minutes before the server closed) and we submitted one as late as 11:59:55. Now that’s what I call perfect timing. AZ and JB who didn’t have such deadlines in the subject they took, often came to our room just to see us frantically hurry hyper-actively to turn in the assignment on time. That was unsurprisingly, a good hour's entertainment for them.
TEARING OUR HAIR OFF AND THEN FINALLY LAUGHING AT OURSELVES AFTER TURNING IN A HALF COMPLETED ASSIGNMENT
Apart from all this, we used to spend some time on the net randomly browsing and downloading and streaming stuff and I spent quite some time filling the new 250 GB hard disk I had bought (Blue flamez-no comments please). I also spent an hour everyday chatting with my, anxious perhaps even over-zealous, folks in India. We also spent a good hour’s time everyday just polambifying (grumbling) about how difficult life is (lol... thinking about it now...we didn’t find anything difficult... we just were grumbling without reason just to pass time...but after 3 yrs in SRM which pampers you, life was indeed more difficult but hey that’s a part of the deal). After all this, it is not so surprising that we went to bed only at 3-4 am and so we struggled to get up next morning till my customary "Oh F****". This was the vicious circle we were in.
(TO BE CONTINUED... NEXT POST SUNDAY, 30th AUG)
