First Impressions - Episode 1

Third post in two days - I am on fire !! I asked my friends' opinions about my last article and quite frankly, the opinion I got was - 'Why so serious?' So, while I will continue to write posts like that, I want to do something lighter myself. Now, satirical writing is all well and good, but truth be told, that seems to require a lot more work than I thought it did (at least when I want it to be good). So I have decided to fall back on some sort of narrative, so that I have easy content to work with.

At this point of time, and in the preceding four years, my college friends have constituted a large part of my life, so why not write about them? So then I thought, writing about how I met them, or at least my earliest memories with them, and my impressions of them then, would be fun. Plus I really want to remember this stuff, because basically it's important to me. So I am starting something of a series, writing about my friends going clockwise in the extended L in our final year (people who don't understand this, it doesn't matter, we always used to count ourselves this way in our hostel). So here goes.

I begin with Room 40, and I really could not think of a more perfect way to start this thread. The two illustrious members of this room got together quite by accident, because one of them had unwittingly promised the other and hence was forced into doing it. Years after the event, I cannot think of two people who are more rib-ticklingly (I don't care if that's not a word) and intellectually suited for each other.

First, Harshavardan Kasturirangan (nickname Poi, although he got that much later) - quite a mouthful. The first time I saw him was in our 11th Standard IIT Chemistry Tuition. Me and my friend Bala were sitting outside the Sathyamurthy School Classroom waiting, along with other school mates. The Shankara boys whom we had befriended in TRS (IIT Maths) class showed up, with one diminutive figure, with a 'cool' funk haircut and an incredibly serious, piercing look in their midst, like he could read your soul. They came met us and we got to talking.

Now I don't want it to sound like I am trying to create an impression or something, but I distinctly remember being shocked the first time I heard him speak. It was a deep baritone that fat opera singers possess, and it was strange hearing it from this guy. And the first thing he said was something highly technical about their BioTech Lab stuff or something, correcting a friend of his (I am not lying, I have a good memory) and I thought to myself - 'Wow, he's good - nalla padikkara paiyyan' (Yeah I know, but please, I was a 11th grade nerd in IIT class). And then he started talking about Harry Potter and stuff - I felt like we were kindred souls. (We even read Harry Potter 5 in a later class simultaneously).

Another early memory I'll never forget is him sitting on a desk next to me when we were writing a test due to lack of chairs and suddenly Kasthuri (a drunkard attendant kind of guy at the school) showed up, rushed towards him and started shouting, "Dai! Korangu Mandaya! Time over nu sollikittu irukken nee ezhuditte irukka??" (I am not going to translate) We could barely control our laughter, and he must have imitated that a 1000 times later on. It was a Poi characteristic, repetition. To be fair to him though, I never really saw many Poi characteristics at that time in him.

Yes he was confident (real understatement) then too, but he was inevitably right. If there was one guy's knowledge of organic chemistry I respected more than mine (Yeah I had an ego about this that time, but moving on), it was his. He was a pampered boy genius even then, but the former part never really showed much, and I always felt he was very self-sufficient at least when it came to these classes. Keeping it short, that was Poi, ladies (Who am I kidding?) and gentlemen.

TO BE CONTINUED...