Chapter 3

Those were the best days of my life!! The quarterly examinations coincided with the World Twenty20 Competetion. I was rooting with all spirit for India. Morever, I was to go to Malaysia for a small trip of 5 days and hence, the exams were getting less importance from my side. But still, I managed to scrape through them with an above average performance. But then, the twenty20 tournament was reaching its ending stages. That was when I started getting particularly close to Vidya. We used to discuss matches ball by ball through messages and it was an experience in itself. That was when she apologised to me for have not voted for me at the beginning of the year. I had almost forgotten it, but when I heard this, I felt really bad about having made a big deal of the vote earlier. This drew me much closer to her and made me feel extremely comfortable in her company.
At this juncture, our IIT classes were also on in full flow. We were having a great fun. Other than the time we were exposed to some awesome physics, chemistry and mathematics, the remaining time used to be spent in some fun gossip. There was also some real fun had during this time.
Once while having a break, three of us, a guy called Anirudh Narasimhan from our class, along with Karthik, was narrating to me a story for which he wanted me to be hero. I was unsportive at first and then decided to listen to the story. They brought in the name of Priya Raman to be cast as heroine and slowly shifted to that of Priya Rajan, which was actually the name of our ex-chief minister. There was a guy walkin in front of me, who I didn't know was a party labourer of the ex-CM's party. He came to us and started blasting us for have used the party leader's name in bad light and he told us that he would have killed us if we weren't kids. He picked on Anirudh, and a scared Karthik ran for his life. Then, I spoke to the party guy to get Anirudh out of trouble. Then, we discussed this in class and had a hearty laugh.
At this point of time, I started realising that my chemistry was absolutely pathetic and that JEE was going to be all trouble unless I did something serious about my chemistry. Life was getting more about studies and I was slowly getting used to all this. It was at about this time that Sailesh Shivakumar, a really dear friend of mine was losing track. Till my class 10, Narayan, Sailesh, a guy called Vasanth, and I were dearest of friends. Vasanth had moved to Halebid, as his dad had been transferred there. Sometime around the 10th holidays, Sailesh had lost his dad. He had changed schools, but was still an avid student of Mathematics and Computer Science. But sometime around this period, I started recieving some sort of a negative report about him. He was losing concentration, something that was extremely vital for him at this juncture of his life. He had fallen into bad company, and there seemed nothing which could get him out of the company he had made. Suresh and I tried a lot of speaking to him, but there was nothing we could do about Sailesh.
At around this time, there was a physics project we had to do at school. Initially Vishnu's team had taken me in, but when the submissions had to be done, he kicked me out of the team. I realised then that it was just a trap to get me into trouble, perfectly engineered and executed by Vishnu. Now, when I was in trouble, Suresh told me to get him two creative articles and those were enough to get me into his team for the project. I did two articles on Robotics olympiads, and the chemistry behind robotics within a day, and Suresh had me into his team list for the project. That just shot the amount of respect I had for Suresh, and then he became one among my best friends of all time.
My interest of music grew multifold in this period. I used to listen to a lot of music, be it Carnatic, Hindustani, filmy, everything in this period. I had developed into a huge fan of A.R.Rahman in this period and even started collecting a lot of trivia about him in this period. The interest grew more so thanks to Rajesh, who was a really good singer, and used to every now and then hum a different song. I started listening mainly to a lot of filmy stuff only due to him, and the interest generated by his humming. In this juncture, I have to mention, Karthik was a huge fan of Himesh Reshammiya's nasal twang, and this made him a constant object of ridicule amongst us. He used to sing Himesh's songs with a nasal clarity which even Himesh would not have been able to achieve. Such would be his dedication to his songs!!
Our quarterly practicals were a total mess, as the guys like us who hadn't come all that prepared had a field day. We had made a fool of ourselves, especially in the chemistry lab where making a fool of yourself wasn't anything new to all of us. It was a lot of fun flunking together, but still we did somehow manage to scrape with practical scores of above 25 on 30. The theory papers were even worse. A 40+ in Chemistry, and Computer Science seemed an achievement and a 50+ in Physics was out of the world. But these were forgotten quickly, as a short and sweet second term was awaiting us, and so were we awaiting the hectic test schedules, the bunks for the olympiads to follow, the olympiads themselves, the various subject projects and then the JEE practice tests.