Stuff that happened at Ragam ‘08

We left Trivandrum on the evening of the 26^th. Boarded the train, everything was looking hunky dory. Sri-Sri couldn’t make it because he had a basketball match the next day. The six of us - Charakku, Guru, Theppan, Dash mon, TyKuPe and me - went in and hogged a row of seats. We didn’t plan on sleeping that night. As usual, it turned into a football match, if you know what I mean. If you don’t, we spent a lot of time on ye olde pee-jays. To be more accurate, we were making fun of each other. There’s a lot of history involved in the football match story. When someone gets made fun of, it’s referred to as a goal in their goalpost. Get the picture? Good! I would be wasting time, trying to translate our dialogue into English. I don’t usually lapse into Malayalam when writing, but this is just one of those times it can’t be avoided.

Theppan: Aliya, kuppi onnum eduthille?

Guru: Edukkan patteella…veettil pokki. Achan baginakathu kuppi onnum illallo ennu chodichu. Appol njaan melil chennu kuppi eduthu flush tank-inakathu vachittu bag-um eduthu vannu.

Dash mon: Akathevide? Mukalilo thaazheyo?

Theppan: Thaazheyaanenkil flush cheyyumbol ellam pokille?

Dash mon: Pinne ninte parambil kure peruchaazhikal paambayirikkunnathu kaanam.

Me: Appol peruchaazhiye pidikkan varunna paambo?

Guru: Paambu vazhiyiloode nadakkumbol peruchaazhi paambaayi kidakkunnu. Paambu kili!

Believe me, that was only the start of it all. We did have to go to sleep that night though. Apparently there were other people in the train for whom the lights being on at 1 am would be a problem. So, sadly, we had to switch off the lights and get into our bunks. The football match continued till at least 2 though. It ended with the ultimate goal by Theppan…a Carlos-esque free kick around the wall, shall we say? TyKuPe and Charakku conceded at the same time. TyKuPe got a kick in. Charaks though, was too busy with his pod to hear anything. It went like this…

Theppan: Charakku enthey?

Dash Mon: Avan thirinju kidakkuva

Theppan: Ohho, chumma alla, nokkedey TyKuPe-ykku kambi!

:|

I woke up at around 6 the next morning (don’t quite remember what the others were doing by then). The next football match started almost immediately. We reached NITC at last, got registered, got our rooms, went out and had some frightfully expensive food. The rest of the day was kinda a blur. Except for the Western Orchestra prelims, that is. Wannabe rockers with hair dangling halfway down their backs annihilated classic songs. There was the dance contest at the end of the evening. That was pretty darn cool. Well, some of it was anyways. NITC’s dance was mind-boggling. I know of only one dance that was more mind-boggling than that. I guess everyone that matters knows what I’m talking about here. Since it was quite boring and we had nothing to do, Guru went out and got some alcohol, 750 ml of scotch whiskey to be precise. Charaks was a teetotaler (hell the guy’s so fucking obsessed he doesn’t let anyone who’s drunk or who has the vaguest smell of cigarette smoke, anywhere near him) and he went and sat in the other room. In our room, the 5 of us plus a friend of ours (lets just call him deep throat, shall we?) got together and got vaguely drunk. Well, drunk to the point of vagueness I guess. Na, I’m just kidding, none of us got that drunk. 750 ml of alcohol, 2 litres of 7up, you do the math! There were 3 of us smokers (deep throat, Guru and myself). We kinda drank and smoked and made merry – TyKuPe had his very first sip of whiskey (he had around 3 in all I think) and even smoked his first cigarette…all the way to the butt! Well, the whiskey got over pretty quick. I think I overdid it with the smoking. Got a wee bit carried away, shall we say? Then there was some pretty unpleasant stuff. It isn’t particularly pleasant when you’ve smoked way too much. You start gagging. I don’t think I need to elaborate here. Met Cain in the middle of it all too. He saw all too clearly the condition all of us were in :|

Well, after that we toured the campus up until around 2 am. Saw the entire bloody area, we were singing, walking…Guru, Dash mon, TyKuPe and myself were walking around collectively for most of the time. I was feeling a bit woozy so they stabilized me. After a bit of walking around, we reached a stretch of lawn, in the middle of which there was a staircase…well it was no ordinary staircase. It had a coupla flights of stairs going up, and it ended in the air. There wasn’t any building anywhere fucking nearby. TyKuPe says ‘ethu myiredey ee padi ivide ketti vache?’

On the whole, we had lotsa fun. Dash mon kept rendering and re-rendering the song ‘ponmagal vandhal’. You ask him a question, he’d think for a minute and then go ‘ponmagal vandhal, porul koodi thandhal’ I think that night was the best part of the entire program lol. Then we reached the hostel and went to bed. I was up for a while, and then finally got to sleep. I think I got around 4 hours of it; woke up feeling like someone had fired a gun against my ear. I had drifted off thinking ‘Wow, I wonder what my first hangover is going to feel like. Am I drunk enough to even have one though?’ Sadly, there was no hangover. As it turns out, I drank nowhere near enough to have a hangover. I still recollect everything that happened, vividly. At least that night’s antics led me to a good place. I’m never smoking again, and I’m never ever getting drunk out of my senses. Let’s get on with the second day then…

It started with Sri-Sri’s arrival, early in the morning. No sooner had he arrived than he took out a cigarette and puffed away to glory (it smelled absolutely icky!!!). Typical Sri-Sri! In fact, his name originates from this very behaviour of his. Charaks was the one who christened him thus. Gow and I had a prelim to attend at 11.30. Well, actually, Charaks and I had a prelim to attend at 11.00 but he was too busy at the canteen and showed up around 20 minutes late so we didn’t bother with the quiz prelims. Gow and I went straight to the prelims of something called ‘What’s the good word’. It was a vocabulary based thing and I had decided earlier that I was going to tag along with her (I’d figured, if anyone had a chance to win it would be whoever was on her team :) smart eh?). The prelims went off pretty well. I did mess up on the clues I was supposed to be giving her (completely misunderstood our strategy) but managed to guess every word I was supposed to. The questionnaire was kinda good as well. We managed to get everything except around one and a half questions. But guess what?!? We didn’t fucking make it through. At the end of it all, the results sheet showed that all six teams that had made it to the finals were from NITC. This made the entire day seem a whole lot worse; worse than I felt when I heard one of them wannabe rock bands play ‘Hallowed be thy name’ (I could’ve wept when that was going on, I swear!). There was a concert by Karthik in the evening. Guru didn’t attend because he wasn’t in the mood for it. I didn’t attend because pop really wasn’t my keg of beer (Oh, I’m already imagining a host of alcohol-related metaphors!). I slept till the rest of them got back. I think I ate something in between but I can’t entirely be sure. They got back; I opened the door, and slept again. TyKuPe drifted off as well. When I woke up, Charaks was sleeping too; deep throat was in the room; Sri-Sri was watching porno off a laptop; a few of the others were talking and taking intermittent peeks at the laptop. Then I guess we all went to sleep. Sri-Sri and I had to share a mat. Its no small thing, he’s a pretty huge guy.

Saturday came along too quickly for my liking. I woke up at around 6.30 – why the fuck doesn’t this happen when I have college?!? It’s always the same fucking story then, I wake up at around 7, go back to sleep because I’m too fucking sleepy and tired, and ultimately get irritated because the alarm goes off every five minutes because it gets set to ‘snooze’. I got a call from a friend (I am not mentioning her name as I doubt she’d want her name to be associated with this) who wanted my help with the debate. Sri-Sri was her teammate. So I ambled along to where they were sitting and we started putting together something for their respective speeches. It was slow going. The topic was just plain dumb! Something along the lines of ‘Sacrificing the people’s political rights to promote economic growth’ or some such rot. I could see they were desperate…people usually are desperate when they turn to ME of all people, to help them. So we sat together and wrote something. She really didn’t need any of my help, neither did he, but I sat down there just the same, occasionally voicing my opinions. Had breakfast after that and was walking about all day. Sunday was the most boring day of them all because nothing was fucking happening. Guru, Dash mon and I gave our articles at the Program Counter. There was a creative writing contest and a love letter writing contest. I tried my luck at both. In the creative writing thingy, we had to write a story connecting three pictures. They were an elephant, an I-pod, and an ancient manuscript. In typical fashion, I came up with a story about Elephant People invading earth with giant I-pods that played ‘60s music non-stop to drive the people insane, and a superhero named Ancient Parchment Man who sacrificed his life to save the planet. The whole of the last page was filled with ‘fuck’, ‘fucking’, et al. There was also a sonofabitch slipped in somewhere in between. Astonishingly (sarcastic note here), I didn’t win the contest. You have to admit it was creative!

Well, at the end of it all, there was unbearable pain. We were to miss the White Noise concert and the fashion show. Screw the fucking fashion show. WE MISSED WHITE NOISE! WAAAAAAAH! Fuck! That was one thing I was totally looking forward to. We left the campus by around 8.15. Got taken to the railway station where we found out that our fucking train was going to be fucking late! We went out, had dinner. Sri-Sri, Guru and a mutual friend (let’s just call him Jay) went to have a beer. I was in a crap mood, so I said no, though I wish I hadn’t, later on. TyKuPe, Charaks and I went and had dinner (a scintillating combination of chapattis and fish curry), got back to the station and got into the train. We played a little bit of football on the way, so that made me feel a lot better. The train finally got there, around 20 minutes after we got back from dinner. We got in, got our seats, and went off to sleep almost immediately. Woke up at 5 am this time, and rolled around on my bunk till about 7. A few practice goals later, we were at Trivandrum. I walked back home, and that was it…man its good to be back!