Part 1-Free fall from glory

This is a journey through the life of some hostelites, their joy, despair and the harsh realities of hostel life and how they struggle to scrape through the system that is btech...The original title was meant to be 'the screwed system' or something like that but later i decided to abridge the Big B's words from my fav hindi movie sarkar...
"mujhe jo sahi lagtha hai me karhta hu, woh chahe bagvan ke khilaf ho, samaj ke khilaf ho, police ,kanoon , ya phir, poore system ke khilaf kyu na ho"

Free fall from glory:

Aug 26th 2003.... the premiership season had just started and my team manchester united where doing great. Although the arrival of ruud and departure of beckham had put me in a difficult position as to continue my support to man u, I remained a faithful man u fan for 30 more days until super frank came to the forefront with chelsea...Well.. seems i ll have to write another page on my premiership faith change..


But the other main story of august 26 2003 --> that was the day.. i arrived in tvm to seek admission in the best engg college in the state. I am the second among 3 boys in my family and i was the favourite as far as my parents were concerned to top the academic charts... I did justice to their faith somewhat as i topped every year thru my high school and managed to get 12th rank in SSLC( the biggest and the easiest exam in asia!!!). To be frank I was embarrased really to be noticed ( the only 'boy' to do it from calicut that year). All i did was mug up my lessons again and again. I was such a devoted mugger that i cud remember the pages of the text book in the exam hall(all right that was a bit too much..sorry!) Then i went on to get formidable ranks in CUSAT and AIEEE and a reasonably good 778 for kerala.


Right ..enough for the self procclaimation. The reason i went for that little flashback is to prove the magnitude of my downfall. I remember my father telling me that he once heard from an astrologer that there is no one to beat me in studies!! My parents expected me to obviously top my class and ofcourse get among the university rank holders... but little did i realise what CET had in store for me.


The first year came and went as i scored 79.93 in my unis. Obviously my parents couldnt digest that but they later learned to digest my results(or in other words, i taught them) !! In s3 2 supplies and by the time i cleared them...i was 72.7. and then in s4, there were no supplies for a change (and yes another minus 7) and 65%. As you can see i was steadily loosing 7% each sem and all my parents care about now is that i get thru without any supplies. So that is how i taught my parents to digest engg results. And now, after the s5 exams it looks like i ll continue the arithmetic progression(or degression rather) but this time with a bit more dignity (maybe 1 or 2 supplies).


Eventhough i am staring down the barrel, I still have a chance of getting a job just because of the reputation of my college.. but the downward momentum is pulling me further just as mother earth pulled the damn apple on to newton's head. But one relief factor is that i am not the only one experiencing such a free fall as we will see in part-2. (to be continued)