up and told me that there was some problem with the question paper pattern and
that all chemical students were gathered in
a ground floor room trying to figure out
what needs to be done. I went down and
saw the whole class, with a few of them in
tears. Earlier we used to answer five out of
eight questions and in the previous ‘ordinance paper’, it had become four out of six.
The complexity of the problems had gone
up as well. Some of the studious ones were
trying to decipher the question paper and
all others were surrounding them to make
some sense out of it. In that commotion I
could not understand what was happening
and went back to my room to sleep. The
exam began the next day at nine, and for the
first 15 minutes almost all of us were staring at the question paper, not knowing what
to do. At the stroke of nine-thirty, the first
bold one stood up and walked out of the
exam hall. That was followed by a mass exodus. A few of us stayed back to fight. These
setbacks never diminished our enthusiasm
in life or in engineering and many of my
classmates went on to become CEOs and
Managing Directors. It was indeed a very
eventful second year.
When I joined the institute, there were
only three girls, one each in fourth, second
and first year. All were day scholars. When
we were in second year, two girls joined and
both, being from far off places, had to stay
in the campus. One girl was from North India and used to play tennis. A lot of guys
thus took a fancy to tennis and would
hang around the tennis courts in the evening. Every one-act play, every drama, be it
in English or Kannada, in the inter-block
competitions would involve one character,
dressed like a girl with a tennis racquet in
hand, who would be ridiculed by all the
other characters in the play. This girl tolerated us for two years and then called it quits.
She took a transfer to some other institute
and went away. We must have been one horrendous lot in those days, because no girls
from Mangalore colleges would participate
in any of the cultural events conducted at
KREC. The quitting and going away of the
‘girl from the North’ made us realise our
uncivilized behaviour and from then on,
good sense prevailed and the results are for
you to see today.
In 1977 as the country came out of
‘emergency’, we wanted to open up and
started the inter collegiate cultural festival,
which in 1980 took the name ‘Incident’. For
a week, the programs would begin at 5:00
pm, after college hours, and end at 10:00pm.
The number of participants and the variety
that we had were plenty. The Films Club
was among the only entertainment we had
(the Nataraj Theatre at Surathkal, where we
would watch night shows and walk back to
the hostel, was another) and there would be
movies every week without fail. This being
the sole entertainment would result in all
“
I could master only the
‘Tapori’ language during
my stay at IIT Bombay and
made it dignified, proper
Hindi after watching Humlog, Buniyaad and Saans
”
faculty and their families being present for
every movie. Holding umbrellas to watch
movies in spite of heavy rains was the defining part of this unforgettable experience.
I knew no Hindi in those days and during
comic scenes everyone would laugh and I
would be silent. Slowly, I learnt to understand Hindi by context. I never learnt Hindi
even though my second year and third year
roommates were from Bihar. My second
year roommate, on the day we met, put a
condition that we need to converse only in
English; he had failed in the first year English paper. He later discontinued his studies because he could not clear the English
paper. My third year roommate had no such
problems with English, but he hardly stayed
in the room. So I never learnt Hindi while at
Surathkal. It is a different story that I could
master only the ‘Tapori’ language during
my stay at IIT Bombay and made it dignified, proper Hindi after watching ‘Humlog’,
‘Buniyaad’ and ‘Saans’.
Fans were provided in the hostels when
we were in our final year. Till then we had
lived without fans. There was no generator
backup back then. Many a night was spent
in candlelight preparing for tests and exams. Campus placement was next to nothing, and if my memory serves me right,
only three from our batch of 250 received
campus placements. Lack of opportunities
made many take the entrepreneurial route,
and you get to see a lot of them these days
(very successful ones) when they come back
for reunions. Hotel Sadanand