OKBaba's Ashram

Flashback to mid'95 --

As my steps drew me closer to the warden's office and H4, I heard echoes bounce off the walls - from a bygone era when yelling "Oay!   Saaanay!" was a way of telling the world you have made it past this day. The silence was deafening as I turned towards the mess.

I witnessed a horrible sight - about fifteen clean pajama-clad individuals were engrossed in their reading while Morey dished out the idli-waada tiffins.

The mess-workers were like the eternal undying fans of a sports club. They stayed on through the years, and were the only true repositories of what 'culture' used to be in these hostels. I was welcomed and offered free food, as well as the good-old choclate milk-shake by Vishnu. Like long lost friends, we caught up with a bunch of things. And then there was a long pause. Vishnu's eyes had a crinkle as he told me what I had suspected all along - "This place is dead now, saheb - nothing like what it used to be". I was cautioned not to talk to the adolescent looking crowd playing carrom, but the cold shock of the whole thing had not  registered yet. 

I asked (actually, requested) a neatly dressed kid his name. He looked lost and dazed, and stuttered as he replied with something like a  Ganesh or a Rajesh, and hastily added that he had only 20 mins to get to LT for a lecture. Stunned by his fears, I told him to sit down and chat with me for the next five minutes! I mean, it should have been the other way around, with him *wanting to talk to the old-hats ... while this was going on, one of the braver ones playing carrom walked up to us and said to Ganesh "If you want to go, you can. He cannot rag you now !!". Picture this well folks, I mean the ones who understand me when I talk of the IITB 'culture'. Amazed as I was while I looked into this new arrival, I wasn't ready for the climax to follow next. 

I stood up and eye-balled this new thing, could see his neurons come to a dead stop, and in a gravelled voice asked of him what I used to ask of freshies "What do they call you here, Son ?". His reply ? "Umm .. errr.. you cannot rag me, I am a second year-ite" ! KHALLAS, Finito, The End. I saw it written on the blank notice boards outside the mess, heard it echo through the corridors as feet shuffled silently. Vishnu asked of me "Do you believe me now ?".

At that single kshaan (cute, isn't it ? "kshaan" instead of moment), anyways, at that moment, everything that spelled "home" to me about H4 vanished. The feeling was worse than looking for my EE-grades, more devastating than losing to H3 in the inter-hostel basketball final, deadlier than watching my Sophia's girl with another guy at Mood Indigo!

A living entity had been sucked out of this so-called second yearite. Like zombies devoid of life (culture), they walked the life of the  wakeful dead. I crawled out of the place.

Flashback mode off.

Deeply disturbed, I summoned the one-and-only OKBABA. He was an ex-techno-nerd, J.Krishnamurthy, Balaji(R), etc. rolled into one.  Graduating from the chanshaa-school on the banks of Vihar, he had also held numerous lectures at RLC to sounds of "Thomas! Ek pachaas".  Today, he was stirring some egg-burgee in his camper by the Russian River.

He grunted a welcome for me, and poured out some chai. And then, the question - how could one best define the IIT-B 'culture' ? It was the  rite of passage for a confused 17-year old. It was the only true compass that helped identify one with the oneness around one. Either one had the culture with him or didn't. The cultured would forge lasting   friendships that spanned decades. Well, barring the few that resorted to tearing out pages from reference books in the library. Those few are probably teaching at Saskatchewan or Nebraska, doing Amway-on-the-side.

So, were all those inter-hostel rivalries, the socials, the Bhaang after holi, the false medical-certs, the collective mug-sessions an abstraction of this thing called 'culture' ?

We pondered upon these while we gazed at the Redwoods outside OKBABA's camper. Lately it seems, freshies have been segregated to avoid ragging on campus. I asked OKBABA about this - I mean, one one hand, at best we could expect IIT-Bombay studs to look more like the IITB-wannabes (eg. the IIT-M crowd). On the other hand, what would this segregation mean   from a 'preserve the endangered culture' perspective ?

OKBABA sipped silently and succintly summed his thoughts as follows - "If culture was this sleeping King, and 'ragging' took the form of an irritating fly, this measure was like giving a monkey an axe to get rid of the fly".

Will we see the king alive ? Or would we be condemned to live the rest of our lives talking about "sightings of the King" eternally ?

OKBABA probably knew, but did not want to give it away. Instead, he asked me if I had ever wondered - "Why do sane, pretty women marry IITians ?"

Now that, my cultured friends, is another story.