Night outs..

Scene 1 - A bunglow somewhere in manekbaug area.
Its 11 pm. In 2 reasonably large rooms at upper floor, scattered bags & notes seen everywhere. Sofa and beds are occupied. 5-6 library books stacked in the corners. A laptop is lying on desk with shortcut to “counter-strike” icon on its desktop. Lots of food of different kind and nature is available. TV is on, but sound is muted.

Scene 2 - Somewhere in Prahladnagar
A few hours past to Midnight. One bedroom at ground floor. One PC and 2 laptops are working. Mere sound of striking keys, mostly Ctrl+c & ctrl+v, is breaking deafening silence. Smell of Seriousness and sincerity in the air.

Scene 3 – Naranpura
Few minutes past 10 pm. A spacious house on 5th Floor. A room well customized for comfortable sitting of ‘players’. Colourful bowls loaded with money coins. A few Fresh packs of cards on the deck. A ‘locked’ showcase of Liquor bottles with keys out of reach.

My friends and I are very familiar to all above-said “Night scenes” (no second thoughts on this word please!!). I hope you have figured out what situation does each scene describe. Its exam time, submission time and Teen Patti time respectively! (Locations can not be revealed under applicable law).

Before coming to CEPT, I hardly could imagine myself even daring to ask my Mom for permission to spend a night outside at someone else’s place for whatever reason. But during 5 years of collage life, it has become quite a normal thing. Our working style, sometimes overload of work and the most important thing – teamwork inspired us the most to make things happen together at someone’s place mostly at night – always few hours before deadline to the next morning.

For us, the most common reason to get together at night was “Exam”. Though exams were arranged by faculties well in advance, we never studied in advance. We all were suffering from Short-term-memory-loss syndrome like Amir Khan in Gajini. (Some of us used to have those kind of “tattoos” made with ball pen all over their body, incase they forget in exams !!)We only remembered for 12 hours what we read before exam. When we get together, we make plans for what to write in exams and “where” to write before exams..!We generally start reading around 12:00am and continue studying seriously…till 1:30!! There comes the “maggi” break! (Already explained in earlier blogs) Depending upon seriousness of the exam, we have more study sessions like the one above mentioned. Otherwise, counter-strike, TV, movies, songs, masti, food, talks without subject, pulling legs of each other..everything except study!!! Small verbal conflicts between Sonny/Chintak and me, Bhavin and Rushang, & contra (Ashay) and everybody were purely fun and testing/ improving one’s communication & reasoning skills.(!)

Not too much fun while report making in the nights, all boring work. Simply copying stuff from everywhere and pasting the same in proper sequence. If we are meeting at chintak’s Dad’s office, we are not students, we are “counter-terrorists”!! We play Counter-strike on LAN almost the whole night - from 11 to 5, except an hour when we go to Manek chawk for pet-pooja.

In last 1 year of collage, a new reason for night out was Teen-patti at Deval’s place. Pure time pass. Some of us are good at playing (Deval, Chintak, Jimit) , and some of us are good at cheating (Yashesh, saumil, hardik, Tindwani). Whole night passes in shouting and masti. Of course, we do not play with actual money (atleast I never did! :P). No one loses..it all winning there for ever one – worth more than money.

The Most common place to hang out was yashesh’s place! Let it be exams, submissions, cook-n-eat parties, movie shows, or just a gathering without reason. And the frequency of the hang out was some times as high as 6 times a week!(That’s why one BRTS root is allotted to ManekBaug to handle the increased traffic !) I really appreciate patience of his neighbors. It is a big deal to tolerate noise of 10 odd people that too often almost whole night!

It has been more than 8 months till the last night out. I don’t even remember the last occasion. But I do remember almost everything what we have done. Above is just a tip of iceberg. 5 years can never be explained in 5 paragraphs. I have not even touched some events like nights in campus – in festival times.

They are all in the memories now – Don’t know how my friends are going to recall them and cherish the moments. So, here is a small help to them in form of a blog. Something to remember them by..!

-Asthir Amdavadi
(Kush)