Beginnings (of the end) Part 1

The Front Row

The front row is for losers. All the while I was in school, college (B.Tech), college (M.Tech), and the beginning of another college (IRMA), this line was imprinted in my mind. The front row was for geeks, the underbelly of any educational institution, the teacher lovers, the note takers.....the front row was for geeks.

But there it was. A slip of paper bearing my name stuck on the seventh seat from the left in the front row. They had taken 'C. Sudhir' as a name beginning with 'C'. God, I hated being a madrasi. So, there I was, having never sat so near the teacher......now I had to do it for two straight years. As the students started coming in with their books, bags, one guy had even brought a newspaper.....was this the fucking library, I thought.

I was seventh from the left, the first guy was someone who reminded everyone of Bhagat Singh, the second guy was Amit, the third was Anshuman, the fourth Ashish (with the newspaper), the fifth Ashish (kinda angry looking, maybe he was pissed at the front row too) and my partner was Farzana. On the other side was a guy called Deepak......With these two on my side, I was stuck in the middle....right in front of the teacher's desk....

Right through the prior six years of education, I had slept in my own little cozy corner in the classroom with no one disturbing my siesta...but here I was, wham baam in front of the teacher..how could I sleep...my eyes rolled up a bit, my head swerved, everything went hazy, and I reached my own little wonderland......First class, I still had two more to go.....

The classes in the first year begin at 9 am and each class is of 70 minutes, with a break of 15 minutes during two classes. As soon as the clock hit 1010, everyone started running out of the room, guess I wasnt the only one with the nap problem. But damnit, it was the first lecture.....

After the break, another class with another professor....10 minutes into the session, I was again playing in my wonderland when a hand touched me on the elbow. It was the girl sitting besides me. "Here, take this", she said. I saw that she was handing me a piece of paper with something written on it, a chit. It said, "I heard you listen to rock music - Ashish". And that is how we both met.

As time went by, the front row became the Times Square of Section - B. The four of us became adept at passing chits right under the teacher's nose, we became adept at helping each other out during the surprise quizzes, with assignments, and I became quite proficient at sleeping with my eyes open.

We also had another gem among us in the front row, Hakikat, who could make the most innocent of situations seem like a scene from a porn movie.

Ahh.....the front row was no longer for the geeks. It was now for the chit passers, quiz cheaters, class sleepers, and above all it was for some of the coolest people on campus now. Life wasnt so bad after all........

PS: Names have been changed to protect identity of the people involved