Life on a Tuesday Evening

The run-o'-the-mill teenager residing in the austere premises of the forest that calls itself the Indian Institute of Technology Madras finds himself, even on the very best of Tuesday evenings, thoroughly defeated in his strongest and most sincere attempts to maintain a state of wakefulness in spite of the ongoing discussion on the fundamental principles of organometallic chemistry. Mustering all the will power bestowed upon him in blood and soul by his illustrious ancestry and peerage, your humble narrator, scarred and wounded, valiantly stages a counter-offensive against the indomitable forces of chemistry and boredom, which are no less fixated upon their motives to undermine his consciousness. War cries fill the fateful classroom, blades clash, shields are shattered, lances make pincushions of helmets, walls shudder with the voice of the esteemed professor, instilling slumber in the hearts of the forces of light, formations are broken, battalions uprooted and platoons devastated, elbows limp, vision hazes, fingers lose their grip on writing equipment (if any), eyelids droop, the head drops, and before you know it, the battle is over, and darkness prevails yet again.


But of course, ladies and gentlemen, everyone wakes up at the end of the class (with a tolerance of 3 minutes), unless you're the prof, in which sad case you're committed to stay awake the whole while. The next two dozen minutes are largely un-Tuesday-ish, involving an appreciable amount of activity dedicated to homing in on your friendly neighbourhood bicycle, followed by the tour-de-IITM, cumulating in the regular two puffs, yo-ho-ho and a bottle of  milk (neither shaken, nor stirred).

Not yet, ladies and gentlemen, have you been educated as to what essentially defines a Tuesday evening for your humble narrator. All of us, some day or the other, are bound by fate, the Geneva convention and the red herring prospectus to end up in a C-programming class. But only the unfortunate few way down in the gutters of fortune face the dread of a lab session and a chemistry class in the same evening. So there, ladies and gentlemen, was your humble narrator munching off in all glee and glory at the pathetic excuse for lemon rice that is regularly passed off on myself and my comrades in the infamous mess, when the bloke on the other side of the table (BOTOSOTT in short) makes a point.

BOTOSOTT: (candidly) Its 7:30. Methinks thou art perchance a tad delayed for thy laboratory session. (in a bit plainer English, come to think of it)
ME: (even more candidly) Yes, I am.

So off I went, off on my bike, no time to offer a lift or a hike, riding high, riding low, sometimes fast and often quite slow. Pomes apart, your humble narrator lands safe and in one piece in front of the Building Sciences Block, which happens to house the scenic computing facilities of the department of Computer Science and Engineering, which, sadly, is where the ominous TAs (Torture Administrators, for all I care) of the comp sci lab hold court.  Talk about a good room filled with computers ruined.

You'll know you're not way too high on the virtue of punctuality when you realise that nowadays your watch faces from you the query of, "By how many minutes am I late?" more often than ,"Am I late?". This revelation, ladies and gentlemen, struck your dear friend and humble narrator in the face like a crusted apple pie on the face of a feline fiend, hurled by a hunted rodent on an animated show usually seen succeeding the roar of one of the lineage of the royal family of the forest.

Minutes from the hall-of-an-eighty-machines-running-linux:

Prof: (without smile) You're late by 7 minutes. Why?
Me: (sullenly) No excuse, sir.
Mind voice: (confusedly) Hmm.. the watch informed me it was more like 10 minutes.

Prof: (with smile) You were late last week too. Any problems?
Me: (sullenly) No, sir. No problems.
Mind voice: (smirkingly) Gibbering goose-buns. If going late to class meant problems, I'd have been Bane's roomie in Arkham by now. But yes, the prof seems like a nice guy.

TA: (initially) Have you written down the programs for the assignment that you are supposed to code today?
Me: (nonchalantly) No ma'm.
Mind voice: (surprisedly) Of all the turquoise unicorns that ever roamed the plains of Andalusia!

TA: (non-understandingly) You didn't write last week either. Why is this so?
Me: (unabashedly) But ma'm, let me show you, I know how to do it. Thats why I thought there was no point in writing it down.
Mind voice: (amusedly) I'm perfectly sure I know how to input the radius of a circle and, after running a recursive algorithm with an exponential amortized complexity on the input float value, print its area.

TA: (irritatedly) No no. Rules are rules. Even if you perfectly well know how to do this, (in tone of "even if you are the President of India" ), I can't give you any sort of exception. You have to write down in your notebook a C program that takes the radius of a circle as input and outputs its radius. (note: nothing about the recursive algorithm)
Me: (protestingly) But ma'm, I've been learning C for 2 years. I assure you I can do this fine enough.
Mind voice: (even-more-amusedly) Circle? Circular queue, anyone?

TA: (even-more-irritatedly) NO. You write or I won't grade your assignment.
Me: (Resignedly) Oh, all right. I'll write.
Mind voice: (what-the-hellishly) Of all the sea cucumbers in the Baltic Sea! Just don't complain if you don't understand my handwriting.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how your dear friend and humble narrator ended up being pushed to commit the unforgivable cardinal sin of writing a piece of code on a notebook with proper syntax., as he figured that the TA (look for expansion a few paragraphs above) was but doing her job, and troubling people is actually not that nice a thing to do. After a few more such misadventures in the hall-of-an-eighty-machines-running-linux,

TA: (finally) NO. Even if you finish your programs in 15 minutes, you're not allowed to leave the lab until 9:30. And no, you're not allowed to do anything either. Just sit there and do positively nothing for the next one-and-a-half hours.
Me: (blankly) Oh...
Mind voice: (@%*$^-ly) &%*^#$@%&  &*^%*$*&% !!!


And that, ladies and gentlemen, is, for your dear friend and humble narrator, an average Tuesday evening - one unlike any other evening of any other day, one that demands extreme valour in the face of battle, one that serves you rice-mixed-with-baking-soda with a trace quantity of citrus flavouring to it, one that calls for superhuman hamstrings, one that introduces to you profs from Earth and TA's from Kerala, and beyond all, one that offers you experiences you can snigger about on the less happening Wednesday evenings.

Life, as they say, is a jumbo-sized blob of fun. Most of the time.