In your growing years, the next in line of influencers after parents are your peer group. Your schoolmates, neighbours, playmates, and others with whom you begin to interact on a daily basis. Living in NDA especially, made us a lot closer to each other and we all literally grew up together. Life after school hours was essentially spent in the NDA with the same NDA Friends. These were our adolescent years and we changed from small boys to young men with all the changes that go along. Infatuations and crushes, petty jealousies, rivalries, not on speaking terms today and BFFs tomorrow, all these were a part of these years. Yet, 50 years later we still remember each of them with so much fondness. There was Nimmi Sawardekar who was the first friend I had when we reached NDA. She stayed across the road and she led me by my finger to NDA School on my first day. I was 5 years old. Vinay Kaul was two years older and a role model – always first in his class, soft-spoken and a good leader, someone you could turn to if you had a problem. We spent some years together at IIT Bombay too. His sister Nisha Kaul was in my class, equally clever and my first crush according to my friends. Didn’t know it was so obvious. Ruma Mukherjee was another neighbour and was coincidentally a class teacher for Mohit in Vishvabharti School, Noida. Then there were Anil Virmani, Prabhat Shandilya and Jasmine Rao, all of us being in the same class, quite inseparable as friends. We were 15 years old when we all graduated together from school and were in tears when we left, wondering how we were going to face life without each other. But just weeks into professional college, as we pursued our different career choices, a new lot of friends entered our lives and the school friends, though not forgotten, did get overwritten. Your school friends are indeed major influencers in your early childhood, but it is in professional college that lifelong friendships are really made. So it was with me.
In 1967, all of 16 years of age, I left the security and safety of my home to join the IIT at Powai. I had never lived in a hostel before and the thought of being in a new place without my parents was frightening. Still, I could hardly expect to be tied to Mummy’s apron strings for the rest of my life, so there I was, a fresher checking into my Hostel room at Hostel 2. Hostel 2 was actually a snob hostel – It had bigger rooms, was meant for Foreign Students and toppers and my being allotted this hostel was an error of sorts. I stayed in Hostel 2 for about 6 weeks and when the error was discovered, I was unceremoniously evicted and sent to Hostel 7. From the nerdiest Hostel to the most notorious Hostel on campus was a drastic change, but fortunately, a group of classmates took me under their umbrella and made my move smooth. Almost two months into the academic session meant that all the good rooms were already taken, and the few rooms left to choose from were the rejects. The best of these rejected rooms was the one occupied by the Gurkha watchman and he was evicted to make the room available for me. Dirty walls, the smell of beedis, a cranky bed, crooked table – some issues we could get fixed, some we fixed ourselves (budding engineers remember), and thus managed for the rest of the first year. The following year, a large number of rooms got vacated by graduating students and our entire group was able to get rooms on the First Floor of the most prestigious Lake Wing, situated along the edge of the Powai Lake and we spent almost the entirety of our remaining stay in IIT in that wing. Our long stay together, through tough times and fun times, really got us to bond together even when you think that we all had our own individuality, were pursuing different branches of engineering and were perhaps in a way as different as cake and cheese.
In every group, there is one and just one person who sets the pace. He is more street smart than all the others, knows how to find his way around, has the right resources and everybody automatically turns to him for help. In our group, that person was indisputably Shreekant Bhasin. He looked a lot like the Mad Mascot, Alfred E Neuman, right down to the missing front tooth so no surprise that he was immediately christened Alfie. Every weekend, his main job was to go to Kemps Corner where he was a member of a lending library called Kamal Book House. It catered to the affluent and stocked all the in-demand reading stuff – Magazines like Playboy, Penthouse, Mad Magazine, hot books, and other hard-to-get exclusive stuff. There was an organized queue as to who would get what on what day – or rather night – and for how long. This was to ensure that nobody got left out. Then next weekend he would return these and a new lot would arrive. Careful handling was of prime importance, as many of these foreign magazines were pristine issues, expensive, so anybody not treating them right was blacklisted. The Playboy Centrefold was to be admired very very carefully. Alfie never asked anybody to contribute towards the subscription he was paying and I really don’t know till today what arrangement he had with the book house. I know it wasn’t free because I had accompanied him many times and seen him paying. His room was the common room to sit and hang out, chat or play cards.
Alfie was a person who liked to live dangerously. Like when we would go out together to town to see movies or for a meal, normally one person would spend all the money and we would settle with him after the trip. Alfie had clear instructions that a local train ticket would not be bought for him. Anybody who bought a ticket for him did it at his own cost, he wasn’t going to pay for it. If he got caught, that would be his problem and he would be happy to pay the fine. Not once in the trips we made together did he ever get caught for ticketless travel. And the only time he did get caught was when he was alone, returning late in the evening from a weekend visit and he had no money in his wallet to pay the fine. He settled with the TC for whatever he had in his wallet, except for bus fare from the station to the hostel and then made the TC escort him to the exit at the station lest he gets caught again. There was also the time when he organised a late-night Blue Movie session on the rooftop terrace of our hostel. That meant renting a 16mm Projector and Screen, picking the right films, and also other logistics. It cost money, but he intended to recover it and make a tidy profit as well. Short of putting it on national TV (oops, there was no TV those days) the event was an open secret and almost the entire campus was abuzz with the information about the date, place and time. Alfie was himself at the ‘gate’ – the steel ladder used by maintenance to access the rooftop – collecting the ticket money (not that any tickets were being issued), we did pitch in to help, and the large crowd that gathered certainly gave me the shivers as I felt we could be in for big trouble with the authorities if we got caught. But when the Hostel Warden, (a PG Student) along with a couple of his colleagues also sauntered in, I guessed it was going to be okay. I can’t remember if he charged them or it was free. That was Alfie.
There was also Rajen Pratap, he had come from Delhi and was Rank 5 in the IIT Entrance. His father -a Captain in the Indian Navy- was being posted to Bombay (Captain of INS Vikrant, India’s Aircraft carrier) which is why he opted for IIT Bombay. Super Intelligent but not a nerd, and the brains in our group. Doing crosswords, playing chess and bridge in Inter Hostel competitions were things he enjoyed. A good fun loving person who met an untimely death as a result of a car accident while returning from a stoned trip to Goa. He just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
There was also Francis Coelho – he and Rajen had been mates at St. Columbas Delhi and had decided together to come to Bombay. Francis was another really helpful person and it was he who got his cousin Prafulla to rent me their apartment in Central Bombay when I had just got married. He even took me to his tailor for me to get my Wedding Suits stitched. He insisted we go to his family tailor as most tailors are notorious for delaying timely delivery of Wedding Suits and then charging extra to finally deliver them right at the last moment. He and Prafulla came all the way to Nagrota to attend the wedding. Sadly, Francis too passed away while still in his 30s, a victim of the Big C.
There were many other hostel friends and we would all hang out together but in a manner of speaking, it is these three who were really responsible for my initial grooming and for changing me from a social ignoramus to a different person. They were surprised to learn that I had never ever had a Chinese Meal and insisted on taking me to the Chinese Room at Kemps Corner where they ordered everything from Spring Rolls, Soup, Various Main Dishes and Fried Rice, all new to me. One of the best meals of my lifetime and I still remember the Sweet n Sour. I think they rather enjoyed educating me in this manner, telling me about each dish, and for me, I know it helped. Several years later, just days after our marriage, I similarly took my wife out for a Chinese Meal (yes, it was a newbie for her too), hoping to impress her, we couldn’t really agree on the choice of food, and to add insult to injury she got an upset stomach after that meal. So much for that. But we really and truly enjoyed Chinese Food and binged on it during our stay in Nigeria and especially in Ghana.
With Facebook and Social Media, it became possible to locate long-lost IIT Friends once again and in 2012, some of us made the effort to arrange a get-together in Bombay so we could all meet after almost 40 years and relive the memories of the years we spent together in IIT. I was staying at Alfie’s house for those two or three days of this reunion and on the day of my return to Delhi, Alfie and I drove down to the IIT Campus, visited our classrooms and our Mechanical Department and our beautiful Hostel 7 before he dropped me to the Airport. I think Alfie and I have met only once after that, we would be on phone off and on, and even that’s given way to an exchange of just WhatsApp memes and jokes in the past years. But our affection hasn’t died and we cannot forget the best times of our youth that we spent together.