“I expected something better”
“This is all they have got here”
Ashwin reluctantly took the bread pakoda in his hand and then smelled it.
“Just eat it” Sulabh barked. Ashwin made a face and then slowly took one bite. A moment later the expression on his face changed.
“It is not that bad,” he said and took another bite. Sulabh offered a piece to me too but I declined
“I just had lunch” I signalled him towards my tiffin box. He nodded and started chomping on his own bread pakoda. I turned my eyes in the direction of the vast ground in front of me and the construction work going on beyond that at the other end of the college. There was nothing beyond that. In fact, we didn’t have anything in a radius of over half a km.
I remembered my first day when I had visited here with my father. My jaw had dropped upon seeing a solitary building with just over half a dozen Lecture theaters, few big rooms housing different labs, a library, and a large hall on the second floor. My school was more than twice as big as JEC. My father, though, was unfazed.
‘Bhalla Sahab had already told me that infrastructure development will take another year. Anyway, with just around 150 students in your batch across the streams, this construction will be sufficient to take care of your needs in the first year’
In the end, the college was able to fill just over 100 seats with even Electronics & communications, the most sought out branch in the private colleges in Rajasthan, failing to secure 100 % admissions.
And I was stuck here.
I sighed and looked at the three guys sitting behind me.
We were well into August and I had now spent close to 30 days in this college. Barring a miracle in the second counselling, this was the place where I was destined to do engineering. I too had accepted this truth, at least for now, and that had helped me in making a few friends in the college.
Ashwin Joshi, the slightly chubby guy with a child-like face, was the first person that I had befriended in college. The first thing that I had noticed in him was his naivety. He lacked the maturity that is expected from boys of his age. Based on my conversation with him since I had known him, I could bet that he had rarely taken a decision related to his life on his own. Right from the subject selection in class 11th to the engineering college and the stream, every single thing had been decided by his family and he had happily obliged them. He was good at academics and his 10th and 12th percentage vouched for that, a somewhat inferior rank in the PET had brought him here. But he wasn’t complaining. Ashwin was a jovial, fun-loving guy, even if he was a bit childish.
Sulabh, on the other hand, was just the opposite. He came from a rural background and had a good athletic build. He had been living in Jaipur with his cousin for the last 3 years. He was a bit of a rebel and a number of his decisions in the recent past had been driven by this attitude. Sulabh was the first guy that I had befriended in my daily commuting when I had finally stopped doing pretension in the metro. Though he belonged to a different tutorial group, we had hit it off instantly owing to our common love for the Superhero genre in the movies. He was pretty blunt and didn’t like to sugar-coat his words.
Ranjan was not exactly a part of our group as he would join us occasionally and that too mostly during the lunch hours. He was a very peculiar kind of guy and I frankly didn’t know much about him even after a month. He used to come to the college sans any book, water bottle, or lunch box. Though he was taller than all of us, he was a bit paunchy, and his body language was lethargic. He used to sit in the last bench of the theatre and always looked uninterested in whatever was going around him. He talked very little and that too mostly with Sulabh. I doubt even he knew why Ranjan seemed so out of the world.
“Aren’t second counselling results coming out today?” Ashwin asked me as he licked the tomato sauce from his fingers.
“Yes,” I nodded.
“When will they upload the results today?” Sulabh asked.
“I think around 6 in the evening” I replied
“What do you think are your chances?” Ashwin looked at me curiously
“I don’t know” I shrugged “Of course, CSE in RV is out of the question. Only a miracle can get me a seat there. I hope to get one at least in SLC. Last year my friend’s brother had got admission there in CSE in second counselling”
“Did you just fill up the CSE branches or the rest of the branches too?” Sulabh asked
“I had filled up all the available choices.”
“Why did you do that?” Ashwin was surprised a bit.
“He can get the branch of his choice in the second year if he scores well in the first year”
I was surprised to hear Ranjan’s voice as he rarely spoke.
“Yeah” I nodded “2 years back my neighbour’s son had got Electrical engineering in RV in the second counselling. He scored 78 % in the first year and moved to the Electronics stream”
“Isn’t it a risk? What if you don’t score well in the first year? What if you get stuck in the branch you don’t like?” Ashwin’s mind was coming up with all sorts of gloomy scenarios.
“Electrical is not a bad branch,” Sulabh said while delivering a soft warning punch on Ashwin’s shoulder.
“Any branch that doesn’t involve drawing is fine for me” I declared.
Just then the hooter sound signaled the end of lunchtime.
“Seriously, are we still studying in some school?” Ashwin complained.
“Yes, just without any uniform” Ranjan opened his mouth for the second time today “If you really wanted to have a typical college life, you should have gone for Arts or commerce or cracked a Govt. engineering college.”
Ashwin let out a sigh. Ranjan had spoken the absolute truth bluntly.
“Let’s go.” Sulabh said “and have a blast in Mechanical Engineering class”
Barely 5 minutes later, we were back in the lecture theatre where Prof. Makwana had just completed the attendance-taking formalities and had picked up chalk to start the lecture.
“Today we are going to study the concepts of thermal engineering and complete the first law of thermodynamics by the end of the day”
I almost felt like banging my head on the desk. These laws of thermodynamics have been a pain in my neck for the last two years and there was no escaping from them even now.
‘God, I’m here to study computer engineering and not the stupid mechanical engineering’ I muttered under my breath as my eyes instinctively went to the wristwatch.
There were still more than 4 hours to go before the declaration of the results of the second counselling.
To be continued ...
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental
