by D. P Agarwal

I had planned on going to the Engineering College in Indore and was already accepted there. However, some time in June, an application for admission to IIT Bombay arrived mysteriously at my brother’s home. I was spending part of my vacation with my second brother and contacting me there would have taken some time. The application deadline had either already passed or it was fast approaching. Assuming that I must have sent in for the application, he filled it out to the best of his knowledge and sent it in. He also thought that if I was going to go to IIT Bombay, I might as well study there something other than Civil, Mechanical or Electrical Engineering, which were the only choices available in Indore. The steel plants offered big opportunities in those days and so he put Metallurgy as my first choice. The next thing I knew was that my application was approved. To this day, I do not know the identity of the person who sent that application to my brother. I did not have an interview either. My friend Chandra Khattak told me recently that he was asked to come in for an interview. He made the long trip from Dehradun to Bombay only to learn that he was on a waiting list for his first choice in Metallurgy.

I arrived in Powai about a week after the classes had started. That meant that I was spared the famous initiation ceremonies known as ‘ragging’. A few of my other late arriving colleagues were not so lucky. The second year students had already had their fun. Thus, my classmates who had suffered through this humiliating experience themselves only a week earlier, decided to subject at least a few of us to these rituals. Ours was the first five-year batch and it seems that a large number of us arrived late. Therefore, many of us also had the distinction of being ragged by our own classmates.

My first order of business after arriving in Bombay was to purchase a raincoat and a pair of gumboots. However, these were no match for the Bombay monsoon season and a new campus in perhaps the most inhospitable area in Bombay. It looks picturesque now, but it definitely did not look that way in 1960. Walking to the classes involved wading through puddles and small streams, and within a week the skin of my feet was literally dissolving in water. I was assigned to Hostel 2, which was still under construction. In fact, everything except Hostel 1 and a laboratory building, was under construction. The rooms were new, but the beds and mattresses were not. If it were not for that mattress in my room, I would have never appreciated the true meaning of the phrase "sleep tight and don’t let the bed bugs bite". We were all used to mosquitoes, flies and other insects, but the sight of those bugs in my bed was completely new to me. I am not sure how we got rid of them, but I do not remember seeing them again.

I have forgotten the names of many of the teachers but the memory of one person is permanently etched in my brain. That memory is that of Sardar Pritam ‘PT’ Singh. He was the one-man athletic department. Brig. Bose was the Director, and it was the duty of PT Singh to make men out of us new recruits. He conducted exercises in the morning and his demeanor was akin to the Sergeant in Gomer Pyle episodes.

I was planning on writing about the five years of my life on the campus, but the memories of the first few weeks seem to have taken more space than I had planned. Therefore, I must stop here ...