The 4Ds of College life.(LXII)

Reviewed by Lakshminarasimhan.

This post is dedicated to Ridhi and Arulmozhi for having this blog's link as their status message in Orkut and Facebook, thank you.

The cultural fest of the odd semester was over. Shantanu settled all the accounts and submitted a complete report on the event. He really had half forgotten me in the past month. I got back my priority.

The 5th semester almost came to an end. Our 3rd assessment tests and the mini projects were over. Unfortunately I couldn’t do projects with Shantanu as the projects can have a maximum of 3 in a team and people around us did not approve of the 2 of us being in the same team.

The most intriguing thing about Shantanu was that his mini projects were one of the best in the class. I asked him how he managed to do the projects good when he rarely cared about academics, but he used to give me some vague reply with pride overflowing in it.

The responsibility of being a cul-sec or his other leadership activities involving tens of juniors under him never made him proud. But even a single step better than me in academics will make him feel like he should advertise it on Google’s homepage.

We had a week for our first exam of the 5th semester. So we had ample time. Even the geeks will not be starting their semester exam preparation by this time. So our room turned out to be the chitchat corner as usual.

Occupants of the room-myself, Anu, Sangi along with Divya, Sindhu, Saranya, Abi all gathered in our room, and we were having the time of our lives discussing, gossiping and everything. I was texting messages to Shantanu side by side. Not just me, but Abi and Sindhu were also messaging someone.

The usual stuff about love affairs, suspected pairs and accusing other girls as bitches and making fun of flirts were the main constituents of our talks. We had only girls from ECE and CSE there. Nevertheless we had more than 300 people to talk about in our year and the same amount in each of the other 3 years.


Generally many unknown love affairs used to come out in the 4th year after people get placed. One of Divya’s geeky senior and his supposed to be just a good friend turned out to be lovers. Saranya opened this up. All of us were thoroughly surprised.

The talks turned to Sundari, our class beauty sensation. Anu accused of her facial fakeness. I wondered why guys were so crazy about her. Sangi retorted that if not for her make up stuff she would just look like a beggar girl from Bangladesh. I didn’t make out why she pulled in beggars from Bangladesh, yet we didn’t want to spoil the spirit by asking for explanations.

Divya as always thoughtfully said that Sundari had a lot of attitude problems and it’s just an illusion that guys go crazy about her. She added that guys are intellectual and will not just be easily deceived by attractions of her appearance.

The conversation grew intensely on Sundari. Anu said that Sundari told one of her juniors that she would better not tell anyone that she knew Sundari or she would be constantly bugged with love letters addressed to Sundari. Girls raged that how could someone think so much about oneself?

Sindhu added that, this problem with her attitude was why she rarely had a good friends circle. Sangi frowning said that Sundari had got friends too. Saranya said that it was because of a communal bond. Abi agreed that Brahmins are all the same and they hang around with their own.

I retorted that, the kinship of Sundari’s friends with her had nothing to do with her community. Sangi countered that I support the cause of Brahmins just because I am half Brahmin myself.

Divya roared, “Stop this nonsense. Already the country is split into a million pieces with all these religion, caste and shit. At least in college let’s not speak of it.”

We had never seen Divya emote so much. She always was calm and cogitative. We were all taken back for a second. The flame from her eyes momentarily set them on fire. Everyone grew silent. The room remained in grave silence for a minute.

Finally Sindhu broke the silence, “If only we had a bottle of vodka now.” She exclaimed.

We all laughed at this statement. We started speaking of our first experience with vodka and the vomiting and stuff. We had missed vodka this semester as it was kind of a busy and a shorter sem for me the vodka gang leader.

Sangi breathed heavily, saying that I was the luckiest of them all. We asked her why. She said that, I had everything one could have at college. She explained the 4 dimensions of college life.

Dimension one is Studies, two having fun with friends, three having a boy friend and finally the 4th one is getting out of college with a good job offer. She said that, I had almost everything of the four.

Studies! Though I had a CGPA of 9+ in the past 4 semesters put together, we still had 4 more to go. Fun with friends was something undeniable. We roamed around the city across all the big theatres and shopping malls and most notably we had vodka, which was forbidden to most other college girls and at times guys in the state.

Third, yes I had Shantanu. Nothing was skeptical about me having a good boy friend. If not for someone like Shantanu, whom would one call a good boy friend. Finally the job offer; my long forgotten pet name ‘Microsoft’ was re-established.

I had never given a thought about Microsoft that semester. First the internship, and then the college elections, then Shantanu’s proposal, dating, culturals and over all that, making up for lost classes all this had pushed Microsoft down into the depths of my consciousness.

Anu said that I will for sure get into Microsoft. Based on this statement Sangi finally concluded that, I had or will have everything i.e. all the 4Ds of college life and felt envious that most people had only one or two of the 4Ds.

After a few more talks on a dozen other topics we finally went to bed after Shantanu calling me and Anu half a dozen times and asking us to go to bed.

I went to bed thinking rather than dreaming of Microsoft. Anu’s words were encouraging, yet I feared, ‘Whether I would make Shantanu proud!’