The pep...

Snoring at 10'O clock was our habit, not getting breakfast in the mess was just one of the consequences. Either of us, who ever got up first jumped into other's room and banged the door, loud enough to wake up the other nocturnals in the hostel. Rakesh, at least had good reasons to be awake late in the night, with all the image processing algorithms and stuff. Next event in the morning was the phone call from Neeraj (my lab mate) asking " kothai" ( which means "where" in Bangla). You will get the Bangla connection in very less time.

Rakesh and myself strolled through the campus to reach the department in the shortest path. Sometimes , rather very occasionally, On our way I used to meet a gal near the library and he used to wait till I completed my conversation with her. After those conversations he used to pull my leg so much that I started ignoring her when ever he was around. We used to split in the department and went to our respective labs to do the so called research.

Our lab meetings never happened in the lab, but in coffee board, which was located diagonally opposite to our department. Madhurima Chattopadhyaya, my another lab mate, annoyed with our ill managed research schedule used to give a stern look after meeting us in coffee board. Neeraj, happens to come up with some or the other Bangla story to change her mood in seconds. The coffee tasted much stronger to Madhurima if we were having a Bangla glorified stories. The stories included names like Satyajith Ray, Sourav Ganguly, Amartya Sen, Mamatha Bannerji etc, and topics like West Bengal politics, Rabindro Sangeeth, Bangla literature, etc. But the evil in Neeraj and me tested her temper by bring up some dark sides of Bangla stories. In one occasion I pronounced West Bengal as Waste Bengal and that had infuriated her like anything. Neeraj and my self never missed a chance in pulling her leg in this front. Never the less, She retaliated with her facts and figures about Karnataka and Bihar, leaving us hiding our faces. Ganapathy Subramanyan, rather Gonapathy, our junior from lab, famous for stretching time limits, used to join the "social networking session" almost in the middle of our conversations or debates. With his entry, stories about Chennai were invariably comprehended into our discussions. Our morning lab meeting were like a forum to understand Unity in Diversity :).

After spending some quantity of time (not sure of the quality) in the lab we used to meet again in the coffee board. The evening coffee sessions were more fun since we had our friends from other labs and other department joining us. We had more leisure in the evening sessions. The discussions were mostly about the proceedings of the day, about some movie, TV show, past experiences or about some professor . On some evenings we had discussions about marriage, love and responsibilities. For instance, one day we were talking about love marriage vs arranged marriage, when I was asked which I prefer ,I had given a quick response as " which ever comes first" and the whole group had laughed at my answer for several minutes. We shared our opinion on various things , cribbed about various issues and on few occasions we discussed some technical stuff as well. The evening coffee sessions ended with Madhurima leaving to play home to pick her daughter up.

After we left IISc even the coffee board was also closed, with that it was like an end of an era for us. To keep a warm feeling, I came up with a new classification of human beings , those who got a chance to have coffee at coffee board and those who dint. I came to Hyderabad and so did Neeraj, on pursuit of corporate career. I happen to meet him today, we had our dinner in some good place and most importantly we went to a place to have coffee. Although we got tea instead of coffeee, we had those discussion which we did each and every day. Those stories in which we irritated Madhurima, those stories of individualism, those stories of girls, those stories of Goa -Gokarna, those stories of our friends... I was not sure when we were going to meeting again , but I always had the habit of telling him what time I was going to meet him next, this time I told him " I will meet you next time probably ... next time when we meet".