Getting Wasted on Frankies

It’s hard to keep up with your attendance at college when you have more important things to attend. Like attending the local fast-food joint/café “Fifth Avenue”, for some quick chicken frankies. Or hatching ingenious plans to destroy the day for Badruka and his cronies (snobs all of them). It’s hard to keep up with classes when you are needed at the college parking lot to carry smoked out Javed to safety. Or when you have to listen to Savage Garden and Mission Impossible 2 OST back-to-back because Rahil won’t lend the CDs to you.

I attended the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan (BVB) for a whole year. By attended, I mean that I was a student of Bhavan’s for a year before dropping it for an under-grad in computer applications. My real attendance at college was 23%. I am still surprised at how I got past our screaming principal, Kakade.

We spent most of our day in the college parking lot or the cafeteria. In case of excessive monetary funds we would be chilling out at FAVs (local acronym for Fifth Avenue) munching through Frankies and sandwiches and gulping down cold/hot beverages. I must say I have never eaten anything as HOT as a Frankie at FAVs.

When we somehow happened upon a class it would be either QT (Quantitative Techniques) or Eco (Economics) or a language class (English/Hindi).

The QT professor was a newbie, this job being his first-ever gig. This was about the time when that movie Mohabbatein was out. Suddenly being a Professor became cooler than those frigid tins of coke at FAVs. So the QT professor, the young chap that he was, started acting all RAJ A. MALHOTRA on our collective asses. He would come to class, a sweater thrown over his shoulders like Shahrukh Khan, and a pair of plain glasses on his eyes. He also wore those pleat less pants. Those vanilla-palette shirts. The poor fellow even acted as nothing was out of place with that sweater on his shoulders, keeping his back warm. Even when we tried to bring out the sweater-issue he would deviate us with some deviations questions. The weirdest part was his name: RAJ.

Half the Eco class was ruined most of the time because it came right after recess. And we attended recess rigorously. This caused us to return to our classes a bit late, 10-15 minutes usually. Plus, there was Rakesh’s awfully distracting entrance in the class every once in a while. He used enter the class last, wearing his helmet and then would sit half-way through the lecture without taking it off. The professor who had already witnessed/annoyed/threatened over this regular masquerade wouldn’t say a word and carry on with her lecture.

The only professors I would ever like were the English ones. Right from school, through junior college and the under-grads I had some great English professors. It is only now that I’ve realized the amount of interest I paid during those monotonous sessions of Keats and Wordsworth. I didn’t like poetry as much as the next guy sitting beside me, which would be Javed most of the time. But it would have been worth the attention that I never gave. At least I would have had a grammatically correct blog.

It is funny how we waste our college days over these moments. These moments of convenience food and parking-lot-adventures. These moments with peculiar professors and their prejudiced remarks. These moments, they become surreal, almost dreamlike after you leave college. But they persist. Funny how these wasted days are perhaps the best days of our lives.