Nostalgia - Kahan Gaye Woh Din

Planet Pilani

By Laxman Mohanty

Two days back I was traveling by the morning 5.15 bus from Jaipur. Till Sikar my eyes were closed and I was in a kind of trance. I had to get up very early in order to not miss the Jaipur station; otherwise I would have landed up in Old Delhi station. After Sikar, as the sun light transformed to its glorious form I also came to my own self. Then I sat down looking outside at the babul trees passing by. Babul trees looked superb with new green branches just coming out and appeared like green cotton wrapped at the tip of all branches. The air was cool and this glorious morning set me to think about my association with a place called “Pilani”. More...

I am arguably the most ancient BITSian in Hyderabad , if you go by alumnal status. (Professor TSKV Iyer is of course the oldest Pilanian of us all in Hyderabad , but then he taught, while we learnt!). In fact, my claim to fame in this context is earlier than even BITS came about, since I am an alumnus of the Birla College of Science, having gone there for my Intermediate in Science in 1953 (as an innocent 13 year-old from Madras), and obtained my M. Sc. in chemistry from there in 1959. I taught there for 1 year before I left for the US in August 1960. Those of you BITSians who are interested in alumnal family tree should bark up my trunk, since I lay the claim to be the Jambawan or the Neanderthal of all alumni/ alumnae.

I have a familial interest too. My uncle was Professor V. Lakshminarayanan, the Principal of the Birla Engg. College, who in the early 1960s fused the Birla College of Engg, the Birla College of Science, and the Birla College of Arts and Commerce into BITS. Having stayed with him as a member of the family during my years in Pilani, I had a ringside seat to the goings on, and the evolution of BITS- a process that started as an idea, after the first of the IITs got started at Kharagpur- into a comprehensive center of higher learning, where technology education will comprise some sciences and the arts- in order that the graduate is an all- rounder (as all of you no doubt are). Help from MIT in Cambridge , MA , USA came in the form of academic course planning, lab practices, semester grade system, periodic tests and evaluation, and practical training. Thus, all you people can trace your academic DNA to my uncle!! And since he had six daughters and I was his "son", trace it to me by proxy!

When I look back at how I had to ride a camel back from Loharu at 2 AM all the way to Pilani right on my first entry to Vidya Vihar, and that the only way you could get to Loharu, Chirawa and then on to the Evil World was through rickety unpunctual buses, I can see how we guys were made of steel. The tempering of the steel was of course done by the Pedas of Madanjee and the supplies of Bagaria Stores at Connaught Place and the trysts with the girls behind the tall walls of the Vidyapeeth. Happily enough most of these are still extant, so that quality steel production has been an ongoing enterprise at BITS.

Of course, we should sing a requiem to Madanjee the great. Many copycat Pedawallahs have since sprung up, and the last time I was in Pilani about 9 months ago, we could still buy those delectables - but then Madanjee was something else, he was to Peda what KC Das was to Rossogulla.

Soon after I joined Pilani in July 1948, my Dad wrote a post card to say that i had got admission in Benares also. I had paid at Pilani Rs. 347  (a lot of money those days) and I did not feel like throwing it away and rushing to Benares for the course in combined mechanical & electrical engineering. I stuck on at Pilani, and when I graduated in Sept. 1951  and soon joined ACC.  At the interview, the MD Dr. RR Hattiangadi asked me how good was the Pilani institution and I said " I had an option to join Benares, and if I had joined Benares I might have been (deemed) a better engineer, but Pilani made me a better man" And this was quoted by the MD of ACC on many occasions when I went up the ladder in leaps and bounds. Those days if one said "Pilani" it was assumed that you never got admission elsewhere and so rushed to Pilani, where a South Indian was the principal and encouraged boys from South to join BEC. And we believed that he also kept a watchful eye on the bright students as he had 5 daughters.

"TIME lapses,

TRADITIONS Change,

GENERATIONS pass

But WISDOM endures;

The Future is built with the WISDOM of the past"

It is 50 long years since I left Pilani after graduation, but at every opportunity I fly Pilani's flag high and mighty.

TV Balan (1948-51)

Tuesday night dinners? Always a little dreary: slopped into one of the compartments in our thalis was a concoction that, we were led to believe, started life as kheer.

When Dinesh and I sit down this Tuesday, that RPA mess servant institution, Girdhari, sports a troubled look. Before passing our thalis out, he turns one over. "Look," he says. "The stuff stays there." The kheer. It does. Stay there. So congealed, it won't fall out.

This is not something to take lying down, or even sitting there. We summon the manager. I speak to him. Meanwhile, Dinesh lugubriously picks up his spoon, sticks the business end into the kheer, and thumps the other end with his hand. The small piece he shovels out of the once-kheer then goes into his mouth. He drops the spoon. Thumps his head with one hand, his chin with the other at the same time. This way, he munches through the stuff.

Lugubrious still. The manager gets the point.

Maybe not. Next Tuesday, the kheer is the same.

We called Nitin "Bondo" for no apparent reason other than it was one more of those peculiar BITS names. But he was, in the very best sense of the word, peculiar anyway. One incident summed up his outlook on life for us.

In a long-forgotten test -- some 3rd year Maths or Physics course, I think -- Bondo came home with half on twenty-five. (I got a big fat zero, but that's another story). That's right, half a mark out of a maximum of 25.

Still, that fraction alone was not what made this a special occasion. Good old Bondo picked up his paper and streaked off to the concerned professor's office. To protest. But not, as you might imagine, that he had been given an unfairly low mark. Or half-mark.

"Half a mark is a disgrace!" he wailed at the bemused professor. "Please reduce it to zero!" he pleaded. "At least then I can show my face to my VK wingmates!"

We’ve all been confronted with payment options while shopping and even at work – of course we have. Earlier it was barter, then it moved to currency and then credit cards and debit cards and what have you. The list is endless and mind-boggling.  But BITS had evolved a wonderful payment system called Baad Mein. I think, esp. with the kiosks or rerun’s as we called them, 80 % payment occurred that way. The interest option must have been weighed against the opportunity cost of losing lots of broke hostler customers and so on. Credit ensured a steady stream of business. There was a write-off of bad debts as well, occasionally, when somebody passed out (literally or figuratively) without paying up.

But most guys (since the kiosks flocked around the guy’s hostels mainly) survived on baad mein. Till money from home arrived. They would have chai (a hot cuppa tea) on baad mein. Nimbu paani on baad mein. Cutlets and samosas on baad mein. Even ganne ka ras (sugarcane juice) on baad mein.

Baad mein being synonymous with pata nahi kab…

And then some of us would take advantage of that and have a-little-something (as Winnie the Pooh calls his frequent snacks) and say, add it to our sub-account in our friends’ accounts - Panda’s baad mein or Dev’s baad mein or who-have-you’s baad mein. Which we would pay up later. Because everybody’s pockets were empty.

If ever anybody paid up in cash, everybody stared at him/her as if the person had gone nuts. It was not done. As a student, it was illegal to be anything but broke. Or transact in anything but baad mein.

The wiser kiosk chalak’s realized that and wound their way around that, wrapping themselves around the pinky fingers of eager baad-mein clients.

Except that when the bills piled up, they were mind-boggling, running into hundreds. And one would ask for an account, which was equally mind-boggling. I mean, how did I end up consuming 11 cups of tea and 13 samosa’s in a day. But I did. Over a period of time, spread over the day. Food expands to fill the hours available.

It’s just when they were ‘heading home’ in filmi style that they went a-collecting. Once a year or maybe once in two years, they went from Bhawan to Bhawan, demanding, pleading and trying to raise money.

And put it in my BM account is still oft heard, oft repeated and dreaded…Old habits die-hard. When we BITSian friends meet now, we try and palm off things to the BM account…but we are now older and wiser…and don’t get conned having learnt the fine art of conning (and hogging) – amongst other things - at Birla Institute of Technology and Science  Anu Gupta (’86)  ■

My College, My Country

By Dilip D'Souza

Left alone in my room, suddenly the only certainties I had were the clothes in my bag and the cheque for my fees. The five years that stretched in front of me seemed endless, unknown, threatening. I got up and looked around: the expressions on the faces of the others in VK Bhavan were just as hesitant and unsure as mine must have been. Oddly, that made me feel better. I was not the only one who was scared. Here was a good lesson for a first day at college: shared trepidation is a fine stimulant.
 
We had all come to this tiny town on the edge of the Thar desert in Rajasthan, where there was the incongruously green campus of an engineering college. Many of us had left home for the first time, fresh from generally protected childhoods. Twenty-six years and change ago, I first got to know Ravinder Kichlu and Neeta Gupta and Humayun Khan and Salil Agrawal, along with dozens more from every corner of my country. I don't know about the rest, but I certainly had never run into the sheer variety of Indians I met at Pilani. My country in microcosm: that was my BITS experience. More...
 

On the Road to Pilani

Three batch mates take a delightfully funny journey back to the Vidya Vihar campus after many years…

By Suharsh Dev Burman

“A ten point agenda?!?” I nearly fell off my futon (which is hard to slip out of if one has lounged on one). “You have an agenda to cover during this trip! OK, what would be some of those must do items on your list”, I asked. “Parathas at Kapoorji’s (sorry he died – no parathas), drinking in Nutan (not allowed anymore), Fried Maggi & Chickoo shake at C’not (still there – yippee), chai n ciggis at sky, samosas at Naagarji… “

I smiled as I quietly slipped a strip of Pudin Hara and some Alka Seltzers into my tote without them noticing.  Yes, this was the one trip we were all looking forward to for some time. Been planning it over a few months, across a few thousand miles with the help of a few hundred emails on varied schedules of 3 men who bonded over a decade ago and were deciding to revisit the starting  line, where, as someone aptly said – “the journey begins…” More...

Featured Article

Naagarji's - The Final Frontier

Remembering the idyllic times at the blue redi on bent benches, the author argues in defense of the last bastion of BITSian gastronomic culture

By Sandeep Mukherjee

The initiation of the Indian palate to western fare ranging from hamburgers to chicken in fried batter has been fraught with emotion, controversy and political dispute. The depiction of America’s food chains as symbols of western imperialist greed isn’t new, at least not in the context of the past few decades. However, it appears that much of the resistance has been overcome, as India is dotted with KFC’s Smiling Colonel and MickeyD’s Golden Arches. Well not entirely! One small village of indomitable BITSians still holds out against the invaders. More...

Re-living BITS

The author returns to Pilani to find a lot has changed, and some things haven't

by Laxman Mohanty

17years have passed. When I left Pilani for my PS-II station in Bombay, I had no idea that I would be coming back one day to this place where I studied less but learnt a hell of a lot about myself. After coming back and spending two months on this campus, I have a bagful of feelings and reflections.

In returning to a place which had important influence in one’s life, we risk that our carefully preserved mental images may be blown away. But surprisingly. Pilani has remained very much the same after almost two decades. This makes me happy as I know I can find my way out and even predict the dinner menu in the mess on a particular day. But it makes me sad too. When everything in this world is changing so fast, how can things here remain the same? More...

Far from ordinary – Cricket in the Common Rooms

By Sandeep Mukherjee

A couple of weeks back the Indian cricket team, much to the delight of its cricket crazy populace, defeated Pakistan – but you knew that already! While enough has been said and written about the game itself I wondered if any of us, i.e. ex-BITSians, felt t-rex sized chunks of nostalgia doing the rounds of our cranial cavity. I sure did and I only graduated a couple of years back.

Cricket in the common room was anything but! More...

Featured Article

Crossroads

A nostalgic poem

By Sagarika Jaganathan

Life brings us to many crossroads
Lets us entwine our varied paths
With those we may never have met
Or known
Or cared for,
Ever before.
 

More...

The Encyclopedia Pilani-ca

A list of every term and phrase you remember

By The Class of 1996 Yearbook Editorial Team

Acads: Incidental pastime of exceptional BITSians (refer Ghotu). To most when ACAD software is running in the IPC on 10 comps.

APOGEE: Point at which moon is farthest from the earth. Here, A Phillums Oriented Gathering Over Educational Experiences.

ARBITS: Actually Rock But Into Techno Soon.  More...

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