Thursday 4 October 2007

Chapter 2


Some of the most memorable moments of college occurs only when someone or the other is pulling a fast one, making a horses ass of himself or someone, so on and so forth. Huge syllabuses and massive amounts of curricular work left the malignant spirits sated for most of the time, but youth is a rather elastic time for evil minded destructive elements, of which yours truly was wholeheartedly a part of.

As in a previous time, I told you of how our seniors set us such a great example of ragging the professor’s silly during the annual examinations. Now it was up to us to continue in the very best of traditions and as events proved us out, we did not do too badly.

The next rag to be tried was when a few of the fifth years, on leaving the college, decided that they should be remembered by their much suffering teachers. After all, what’s the use of waging war if the enemy does not remember their eye-watering defeats, they reasoned? The faculty was enemy territory as far as the hostel boys were concerned and the feelings were mutual.

So, the whole batch of the seniors started cutting out coupons for anything and everything and getting all the proper addresses of all the professors in the college, not to mention all other means and methods of documentary warfare

The whole thing was conducted like a military operation and the then law students, now lawyers truly showed their true capabilities when planning some really deep down dirty and crazy.

About twenty of the seniors started a junk mail chain all directed to the principal and the proportions it reached were gargantuan. I believe, one of them, even signed up one of the professors for the SSC in the armed forces. He wrote (honestly) that he had graduated from a fine college and was interested in the Army, Navy, Air Force, etc. etc.

About 7 years after the senior’s departure, the poor man was still getting phone calls from 2-4 times a month.... they were very persistent even over he (loud) objections that he was 45 and not interested in a career change...

A couple of the other seniors were more inventive. They went and found some phone books for large cities, like Mumbai, Delhi and Chennai. They found names in the phone book, that is, they found persons who had the same name as the targets. Then the whole lot of them went down to the post offices and filed a temporary change of address for the respective targets forwarding their mail to themselves in a far away city.

Some of the meaner ones went around to the offices of real estate agents and second-hand furniture dealers, movers and packers and finalized deals for sale, transfer of furniture etc., all paperwork to be completed at the house of the target. There were regular crowds every other day at the college premises of people who wanted to finish the deals.

Another person I know managed to copy out the vice principal’s business stationary on MS Word, and used it to place an order for a 70,000 kilo steel coil to be delivered to this person's address. The coil showed up and got dumped on the front lawn and payment was demanded. He also placed orders for bricks, cement, sand and iron girders.

A prize goes to the chubby girl who was the butt of jokes of a chauvinistic professor who used to make out of line remarks during class about her size. She got him a paid subscription to a raunchy skin-mag delivered to the college address. He got called on by the enquiry committee but good, and the Principal (quite a round female herself), would not believe his protests of innocence…

With precedents set like this, there war hardly any holding back as each class attempted to break records set by previous years. Some batches loved physical jokes while others preferred to set their professors rooting out their hair and howling at the moon with more subtler forms of torture.

Most of the professors cursed the gods in general and some in specific, but then, it was always a considerable annoyance to any Indian professor with pretensions to culture that they were ruled by gods whose idea of an uplifting artistic experience was a musical doorbell with ten differing tones, but more on this later.

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