PROLOG. Sorry! PROLOGUE
I would like to ask you to read the previous pages. Every word you choose to ignore is the money, which you have given to buy this book, if at all you really bought, you waste.
Before I jump to tell you what this book is all about, I would mandate a few statutory warnings…
This is not a love-story. This could be a “hate” story. This is not against womenJ. This is definitely not about three students and a girl with whom one of the students had sex. This is not a chapter from my autobiography. Not even a semi-autobiography.
Do you feel that this is a pessimistic start? Well, I can’t help it. You’ll realize it later.
I also recommend angry feminists not to proceedL. People are used to such kind of warnings from thriller movies, porn movies, family planning ads, usage of condoms, etc. People always ignore those warnings and suffer at the later stages. Please take these warnings seriously serious.
“All the characters in this story are unreal. Any resemblance to living or dead is an absolute coincidence. It is not meant to hurt the feelings of human beings, animals, plants, micro organisms and even non-living things.”
At last, after all the formalities, let me tell you about the book. If I want to define this book in a line, it would be something like, “This is a story of an engineering student, who later turned out as an engineer and lived happily ever after :P.” I can’t avoid the annoying smiley sometimes. You may see some annoying programming terms too. I’ll try to avoid them as much as possible.
This is a college story blended with corporate work life. Almost 50 percent of the movies are college-based stories and few bestselling books too. They portray ragging, crushes, love and friendship stories, and end with a touching farewell session. Then why should one read this?
The answer is simple. To know that it is not the same kind of storyJ.
People work hard to earn not only for current expenditures but also for future and post retirement. It is not only important to save money but also memories for retirement. Many beautiful memories are completely forgotten unless someone remembers and tells it often. Pen down your sweet memories as and when they come to mind. These memories might not help us now, but definitely in future, when we are lonely.
People are often disinclined to put their memories to words, when they are young, because they remember things. There is no need for documentation, they think. The fact is that, documented contents are referred to only when something is not known completely or clearly. So, I request you to put your memories too here, if nostalgic thoughts grip your mind. Don’t feel shy.
Episode – 1
The Good Day biscuit packet, which was opened the day before, was still lying on the table. The mouse crept stealthily near the packet and backed away. Again, it moved towards the biscuits. This time it touched the pack cover, making a rustling noise in the process. The mouse backed away. This cycle continued for more than 10 minutes. At last the hand, which was operating the mouse, took a Good Day biscuit from the packet. The dialog box with a progress bar was reflected on Koushik’s brand new rimless Fast Track sunglasses.
Though Koushik’s laptop was on, he looked away from the screen to take a breather.
Koushik was sitting in his cubicle, working hard to solve the last bug for the project he was working on. He had been working hard since the last few months. Koushik considered Java to be his mother tongue; he had mastered the programming language so well.
He kept thinking random thoughts. He thought about people with different attributes and identities. People with peculiar mannerisms; people whose words would seem nonexistent, it was just their sound that existed; there were people whose appearance would seem of utmost importance to Koushik. He failed to recall everything that had happened to him in his life. His mind registered only a few things, the cricket highlights, for example. His mind was playing tricks with him. It registered important events by erasing the least important ones that made inroads into his mind. Koushik never really got a chance to recollect them as with every attempt, another memory was lost. But he never noticed anything amiss.
Memories are funny. They come back as though they happened one day before. But whenever Koushik tried to remember any memory in particular, the things around, the date, the passersby, the climate, position of the sun and many such things, he could not recall much unless they were extremely important. He couldn’t care less, though.
Koushik relaxed, and stretched after clicking on ‘Run Project’ in Eclipse. The biscuit fell on the carpet. Koushik saw the broken pieces through his sunglasses. Koushik seemed to be lost even as his eyes were fixed on the biscuit pieces. Had he not been immersed in deep thought, he would have heard the sound of children playing in the narrow street, the chorus of street dogs and sounds of cars.
There were too many biscuit pieces scattered on the dusty floor, on which a dozen legs were moving. There were 10 hands and it was very difficult for Koushik to fight them. The empty biscuit cover on the floor was trampled over.. Nothing was left of the biscuit packet. Even the minutest of cashew pieces that had got stuck between everyone’s teeth didn’t seem to bother anyone standing in front of the men’s hostel Room No. 515 in B block. The biscuit packet seemed to have been gang raped by beasts. Now their tongues were working overtime to locate the cashew pieces.
It was 1 a.m. Seven and a half hours were left for the internal exam. There were three internal exams in a semester, and the better of the two would be considered. The average of the two would be considered as the final internal marks in the useless education system in vogue.
There was no tension on their faces, though more than a hundred pages in the text book and a bunch of sheets photocopied from Vidya’s class notes were untouched. More importantly, none had a decent average in the previous internals and one had even bunked the last internal.
Saai, one of his friends, started the conversation about beautiful screenplay, direction, music and awesome performance by the crew in the latest patriotic movie that had been released a few days ago. The movie was about the corruption rampant in MiG aircraft. Ashwin, another spoiler in the gang, who had a thought of joining politics after completing engineering plunged into the story and strongly supported the points, which were put forth by Saai. They started abusing every reeking system in India.
Ashok, who was patient, started to resist, when Ashwin abused the quota system for getting admission to engineering colleges. First Koushik, then Daniel, and finally Shyam were drawn into the altercation one by one. A few others joined the discussion. Around 3 am, after deriding Indian politics, economics, financial situation and the damn citizens, they realized that their discussion was useless, just like their previous discussions. Shyam left the place. Others left too, after half an hour of technical discussions and 15 minutes of preparation and went to sleep. Koushik found sleep to be illusive because of two reasons––one being hunger and the other the internal exam.
Shyam got up after wrestling with the chilly morning at 8:15 am (usual time). Five minutes were more than enough to brush his teeth and peeing. He realized that everyone in the wing was in the same state. Most of the faces, which went to study with other groups, had same annoying, tensed, awkward smiles. None took a bath for sure, save Karthik, who was a martinet.
Ka told Koushik, “None of the walls on the fifth floor have heard a single word related to ‘UNIX internals’ and I’m damn sure that the stupid mugging creatures in that hostel,” pointing in the direction of ladies hostel he continued, “would have even mugged all the edition of this text book,” showing the book which he had in his hand for revision while walking (everyone would like to revise because that was the quickest thing to do).
Koushik replied, “They even know during each edition’s release who was the spouse of the author.” That’s one of the things which he had been following from the first year. He had always thought that foreign authors were damn lucky, because they changed their wife after releasing an edition or two (You can see that in the ‘Dedications’ list). Ka gave a quick smile and started fumbling with the pages of the book. They crossed the hostel gate. Hari and Shyam joined them, near the gate.
“My mind is a RAM. It can store all these snapshots for an hour and I’ll forget all these things after the exam,” said Hari.
“My mobile is a hard disk. It can store the snapshots for ever,” said Shyam.
Koushik and Ka were taken aback. Ka gave the book to Hari, who was fighting with him to look at it and switched on his mobile Bluetooth. Both Shyam and Ka were busy transferring stuff.
Ka thanked the technology. He always did that. He was very passionate about computers and hardware but not about academics. To him, it was a bull shit practice followed from ancient days. Everyone entered the exam hall. All the internals used to take place in their respective classes, once upon a time. But later the management decided to conduct the internals like semesters in separate halls with hi-fi security, but what they never realized was that students were way advanced and would not get caught.
Koushik took his seat in the exam hall at 8:35 am. The question paper was already there. He just got the answer sheet from the hall supervisor. He realized that he had no pen with him. All the ball point pens were under danger during exams. He forgot to protect his pen, which he thought would be in his trouser pocket, where he had kept it after writing the previous exam. There was no time to investigate all these things. He borrowed a pen from the hall supervisor. Adjacent to him was Deepika’s place (FYI: She is not the heroine. She could never be :D). She was very busy with the question paper and answer sheets.
The morale which he had saved for that exam was totally lost after seeing Deepika’s table. The gears which she had were too much. She had two blue pens (one ink and one ball point), one black gel pen, pencil, rubber, a 15 cm scale, a 30 cm scale with a plastic cover over that and sharpener, and to top the list she had five different colored stick pens. Koushik wondered why she did not carry a compass and protractor. He had not carried all this stuff even for his engineering drawing semester.
“What an obnoxious creature,” muttered Koushik to Ka, showing Deepika’s place. Ka gave his usual smile and engaged himself with his gadget for answers to the questions.
The search was simple. He simply entered the key words and searched the entire storage device. The photo scanner program scanned the JPEG files and converted the text to word file and it was ready before the exam started. The file reader program was reading and Ka was listening to it through his wireless head set. It was completely camouflaged under his long hair.
Everyone admired Ka for his James Bond kind of things. Koushik was dreaming about how Ka could convert someone’s small idea to a massive killer project, that too in a short period of time.
Saai showed the ‘V’ symbol from the last bench. It really kindled Koushik’s anger. Koushik thought it was a bad day. He opened the question paper guessing what his marks would be. Most of the questions were from the last few chapters, which he hadn’t gone through. He tried to remember something, which he wrote the previous year for many seniors for their assignments. He could get something on his mind and framed his fiction around it.
A small boom sound from the laptop disturbed his running thoughts. Worse things were waiting for him. The screen saver disappeared. The null pointer exception in red color with line number, file name and stack trace was on the system console. Black and white stuff suddenly became colorful.
