August 2nd 2009, 7:55 am in ATB Drawing hall 3-A which was converted into a classroom for Civil and Mining students, saw Darshan, Manoj, Shiva and I take our first class. I remember it was Dr A.C Hegde from the Department of Chemistry talk – No, whisper – to us about being ready to face criticism from many a faculty and fellow student who look down on us as the prodigal section of the college. But my mind was on the branch sliding process to be held in 3 days time on August 5th and that day saw me getting into Chemical Engineering, a move that shaped my entire life. I also noticed a group of people in the ATB seminar hall, where this was going on, just having a lot of fun while everyone else was pretty tense. I later learnt them to be the DASA students, and prominent among them were two behemoths: Govind and Tariq! While one joined me in Chemical and became a very close friend/fellow mischief-maker, the other: Well those who know shall know!
As the day ended 30 students became part of the 1st year Chemical engineering section:- Aditya Pai, Alok, Arvind, Christina, Debananda, Deepti, Dipankar, Govind, Hardik, Hitesh Sharma, Indu, Jayanth, Kiran, Manoj, Shiva, Nitin, Prabha, Prajwal N. Bhat, Preet, Rajesh, Ravi, Rohit, Sachin, Sourabh, Sourav, Sindhu, Suhas, Swapna, Varun and Yuvaraj.
The second round of sliding held on August 18th brought newer faces and assigned roll numbers after Yuvaraj’s 05CH30: Arati, Arun, Manish, Nikhil, Sandeep and Sanjay while 2 left us for Mechanical engineering: Aditya Pai and Prajwal, leaving 05CH01 to receive a customary “Branch slide, Sir!” during attendance rolls. Of course by this time we hadn’t yet been taught the fine art of Proxy’s and the only weapon in our pathetic arsenal was the elusive Mass-Bunk which I believe our class has the dubious record of being the only one to never orchestrate a successful one ever. In fact one trial ended up so bad that we left the ATB hall from one exit only to enter it via another entrance some 25 seconds later upon sight of the faculty concerned!
It was the dreaded Chemistry cycle of courses first up for us and we had bitter experiences a lot…
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