Three days had passed since the time I had come to Pune. My
dad left the day after my admission and we manage to find a new apartment for 3
of us at KRISHNA KUNJ after paying a huge brokerage to the broker. Three day
after we moved in, we found a new roommate from our home city BOKARO itself. Kaushal
too was admitted to MIT in 3rd round and wanted to move in with us. I
remembered to meet him at Nagpur during CAP rounds. He got in contact through a
mutual friend, Ashish who got his admission at PICT. You can call it a great coincidence,
4 people from same city following different routes eventually came together to
live in at one place.
We called our self “DARK”
. D-Devoo A-Arvind R-Rohit K-Kaushal.
As per the time table, we had our class scheduled at 10:30
am. All three of us, got ready. The best part was that MIT had uniform only on
Mondays and Thursdays. We had to walk 100 m to catch a bus from the main road
which dropped us at MIT stop and then we had to walk another 150 m on MIT road
to reach our college. We were on time. I was allotted division 1 and Devoo
division 2.Kaushal went to division 9. We bid each other good bye and moved in
to our respective class. The building was newly constructed and the class
looked beautiful with new paints and glassed window. I looked around .There was
a vacant bench near the window. I occupied it. I turn around to check out the
crowd. Most of them were from Maharashtra itself and talked in Marathi which at
that time made no sense to me. Engineering colleges never had a lot of girls. I
don’t remember the exact numbers but our class seemed to have around 10-15 of
them. I had already seen the list at the office. Since the name was
alphabetically distributed, we had two or more people sharing a common name. Slowly,
People came in. Some of the girls looked pretty but being an introvert then,
never gave me the confidence to talk to them initially.
After the first lecture, I moved out to check on Devoo. We
met at the lobby. We both discussed our class, the teacher, the boys and
checked out the girls around. He gave an idea to move in to 1st
division or me moving to 2nd division so that we will stay together.
For the second lecture, I took an empty bench again .A guy sat near me and
introduced him as Aditya. He said that he is from Bihar and how he quit NIT to
take admission to this place. The teacher was a bit late and so I took an empty
page and started sketching as this was my favorite time pass for boring lecture
back at school. One of the girls from the front bench turned around and praised
it. Maybe she was trying to make friendship with us or maybe she too was an
artist like me, but as I was a dumbo back then, I just said thanks and resumed
my artwork.
After 3 lectures, it was time for the lunch break. Me,devoo
and Kaushal went to the nearby shops inquiring. We found a place serving thali
@ Rs 30 each. The place looked busier than our fish market. We waited for a
free table. The food was good and tasted very much like the north Indian thalis.
We were scheduled for a workshop in the second half.
The smell of wood can be felt from distance as we approached
the workshop. I made few friends by then. The instructor asked us to make chair
and gave each one of us a log of wood and a sandpaper to rub and smoothen it. We
all took out our blue apron and started the thing. The blue apron looked great
on all the kids and we clicked some snap wearing it. Initially it looked fun as
this was a new experience. But only after 15 min, it seemed to be a boring job.
It got over after 2 hours. We had couple of class scheduled after the lab. We
left for our flat by 5:30.
The day brought many new experiences. Academically, we were
learning many new things. Moving in to a new state was giving me the opportunity
to witness new culture and new kinds of people. I was surely facing language
issues then but comparing it to south India, the situation was pretty good. I still
remember the bad old days when I went to CUSAT for counselling. For north Indian,
it’s close to hell. The thing which bothered
me most was the high cost of living of the city. Most of the things around was
very costly and somehow managing rent,food,daily expense and everything under
my pocket money of Rs 5000 would seemed to be a problem. We enjoyed the rest of
the day exploring the places around Krishna Kunj.
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