Have you ever wondered why a Hostel is called so? Have you taken the pains to dig deep for its hidden meaning, its origin or its expanded version? Well, let me enlighten you…it stands for How Often Someone Talks about Everything (il) Logical…. I know it sounds outrageous but believe me, its bonafide. 100%. At least at IITGn that is….
For when you cross the hostel threshold of IITGn, the first thing that you notice is the ceaseless, intermittent (and sometimes annoying) chatter. The students here just can’t resist the chance to talk about everything under the sun – right from why Kapil Sibal should be honoured with a B.Sensible (pun intended) degree to why you should be ready to even lick the feet of Sachin Tendulkar; from the Parliament’s Jokepal Bill to why the IOS-5, Android and Symbian can never have a threesome. Then there are those never ending debates: Firefox v/s Chrome, Laptop v/s Tablet, Messi v/s Ronaldo et al. Inadvertently, the winner of these debates is not someone participating in it (it is difficult nay impossible to prove an IIT`an wrong…he is right half the time and violent for the next half) but the Night Canteenwalla who took me aside the other day and said he was planning on expanding his business as he had sufficient capital in the bank. He thanked us profusely for our philanthropic contributions and asked if we would like to invest in the enterprise. Jesus….
The time when we are not chatting is frittered away in LAN Gaming. It would not be unusual, then, to hear phrases like: Go Go Go! Fire in the Hole! I’m at Bombsite A or Cover my back, I see the bomber! Consequently, one can be forgiven for phoning the police and informing them of a Terrorist Cell operating at IITGn. Of course all this is interspersed with VERY GENEROUS dosages of swearing, cuss words, insults, fist pumping etc. Yeah, there is a lot of fist-cheek contact too.
We take immense pride in inventing a novel way of time-pass: it’s called the fake sponsorship calls or just FSC. Basically, it involves just calling some gullible peer, senior or faculty (yeah, it’s true…God save me), pretending that they are the marketing managers of some top-notch company, firm or corporate and requesting them to associate their respective establishments with the cultural or technical festivals of IITGn. Sometimes we ask them to collaborate with non-existent IIT’s for non-existent fests having some really funny names. Samples include IIT Barkatpura’s famous techfest Lolita, IIT Dholavira’s cool cultfest Madhumati, and IIT Cherrapunji’s trendsetting management-fest called Chamelia and so on. You get the drift. Just a couple of days back we raised the bar by calling our dhobi and urged him to associate the esteemed Sanjay Pressing Line and Associates with IIT Azerbaijan’s world renowned fest “The Ilekrama” (disclaimer: I don’t know if such a word exists and I hope that I get credit for inventing it if at all it is used in the future. I’m sceptical though…). Currently, we are negotiating with other IIT’s for outsourcing this insanely hilarious pastime and have also applied for a patent. God-willing we’ll get it.
The rest of the time we are studying, studying hard; trying our futile best to understand hitherto ‘uncomprehenable’ concepts. We literally gobble up books, solve sums, and mug up useless definitions all in an infinitesimally small time interval, ‘dt’. And even though the odds are stacked heavily against us, we usually end up passing with flying colours. It’s uncanny how we do it. It can be labelled as the “World’s Most Baffling Conundrum”. Maybe that’s why we are IITians. Genius is in our blood.
