Where the party was that night, Part 1

I was just sitting there, minding my business. That means I was raking my way through some dude’s SMS inbox, or trying a ‘new’ hairstyle, or something similarly uninteresting, when Rahul walks in.

Now, Rahul’s this tall guy… and I mean that in the context of tall guys. He puts the others to shame, I tell you… apart from creating nightmares for the Civil Engineers in the group, and quite a business for these bruise ointments when he walks into a room… Once I counted him banging his head against the ceiling/stairway/fan 6 times en route to the mess. Which is no small feat, even in a place like Agate, where most wall fittings seem to suffer from acute vertigo.

Anyway, the point being, Rahul’s usually sober… not like the rest of us who go jumping around, getting high on sugar, SMS-es or CT marks. Or in a particularly drugged-looking friends case, getting high on boredom. This particular gentleman makes it a point to test my nerves in these moods… plays basketball with the
light, tag with my room door and ‘dodge-the-water-i-found-next-room’ with unsuspecting souls that walk around the corridors late night. Very becoming on an 18 year old…

But I digress. To recap, I was minding my own business when an unusually chirpy Rahul walks in. Now it is a testament to my powers of concentration that I didn’t notice him just standing there doing nothing but make small chirping noises. Finally satisfied with a thorough bulldozing of a friends credibility and leaving him to clean up, I turned…

“Hey da!”
“ehhh… Hi…”
“Listen… we have this thing coming up… called Mr. Freshie”
“…”
“So I was thinking… you know… you could participate!”
“…”
“So watchoo say?”
“…”
“Enna daaa?”
“I’m waiting for the punchline da… all good jokes have one these days”

Come on… you cant blame me! I have an excellent reputation of falling flat on my face in public. There was a time, when innocence and no small measure of enthusiasm accompanied my trysts with the audience. But that was a different time, when the world was one large playground, music was more than remixes, and there were no Bush jokes. After a particularly devastating outing in my twelfth, I decided to bridle my enthusiasm once and for all.

“Hey, I’m serious da… I’m sure you ll do good… in fact the prelims is a written round. Why don’t you attend that? I’ve already put your name in for it…”

By now, my friend had started to sound increasingly like those random advertisements on TV for a lucky charm, fitness belt or an extra brain. But old habits die hard, and alert as my subconscious was to the change in speech patterns, it found itself a silent observer to a question paper so mind-numbing, it would have been criminal to not attempt it. And if you listened hard enough, you could have heard the unmistakable sound of a nail being driven into a coffin...