WONA Turns 15!

Watch Out turned 15 this year (yay!). Sunky and Co. brought out a 15th anniversary special, wherein they'd reserved some space for us elderly members to write in with a piece or two. I wasn't in the original writing party, as the focus was mainly to be former members who were no longer on campus, thus ensuring more eyeballs reading this issue, via their status as 'Alumni'. But Dela called me up sometime later, asking me to write some grub as they had to fill pages. I was in no mood to take up the arduous task of penning down a memoir, but on being told that Mr. Saagar Sinha and Mr. P. Tejo Vihas had already contributed with their senti pieces, I felt a need to contribute myself, if only to say goodbye.

Writing senti stuff can be as formidable a task as any. I fought hard, trying to add some verbs and prepositions to phrases like 'memories etched in my heart', 'those wonderful times', 'an unforgettable phase of my life' et al. but what resulted was a chopsuey of incoherent sentences. So, I gave up and instead wrote the following piece. Some of you might have already read this in the magazine. Until I think of something to write on the blog, have a look at this.

I’m probably expected to write something senti here, about how my three years in Watch Out were full of memories that I’ll always cherish and how I’m reminded of Bryan Adams singing ‘those were the best days of my life’. However, I’ll not delve too much into that because it would amount to me taking the role of Captain Obvious and also because I’d rather not highlight my gross ineptitude at that kind of writing. So I’ll share with you an incident that happened during my third year.

This was the day of the Watch Out interviews, where we select the new team from the first year crowd. As always, we’d done our share of running around RPM and RK Jain, for that elusive early date for the interviews in a bid to say “Muhahahaha” to other groups on campus. So, every thing was in place for the auditioning of people. Or atleast, I thought everything was. As it turned out, the same day, a cousin of mine was getting married in Delhi. Now, I couldn’t have cared less about the wedding if my mom, apparently, hadn’t been so close to my cousin’s family. So, there I was, being subjected to intense emotional blackmailing for three consecutive days from my mom. As you would expect, it was the usual trickery being employed; how she’d promised everyone in their family that I’d turn up and how I would let her down in front of the whole fraternity if I failed to show up. Her plan succeeded, for god paid me a visit (no hidden references to Chetan Bhagat or call centre employees, though) and reminded me of the eleventh commandment, ‘Thou shall not make your mother lose face in her social circle’.

Hence, I made a slight change in plans. I would leave late night, reach Delhi early morning, attend the ceremony, stuff myself with the eight-course meal that was to follow, scoot over to ISBT, catch a bus to Roorkee and be back by eight-ish. The plan didn’t get off to such a promising start, though. It was difficult getting a bus to Delhi at 2 am and I had to settle for a pretty shady-looking private bus with dim orange-and-red-and-blue neon lights inside. After managing to grab hold of the only available seat, a pleasant surprise welcomed me in the form of a co-passenger snoring his lungs off. Half an hour later, the late night show of Patthar ke Sanam began on the television that almost appeared out of nowhere. That being that, I somehow managed to survive through the journey and reached Delhi at the break of dawn. This was followed by the usual meeting up with Mom and relatives and getting ready for the ceremony, which was to be held in a gurudwara in Greater Kailash.

Needless to say, the gathering comprised of highly impressive (an earnest attempt to tone down my real opinion) women, whom I’d heard of in wedding-related fairy tales recited by my friends. Finally, I was surrounded by a swarm of highly impressive (again, same thing) women whose average beauty was a few orders of magnitude more than what I’d seen in Roorkee. I pinched myself twice, both times happily concluding that this wasn’t God’s way of mocking me. It was natural then, for my mind to wander and think furiously of intro one-liners, conversation topics and in one case, the awesomeness of the female form of life. But hang on, wasn’t I supposed to be back to Roorkee in a few hours, interviewing innocent first yearites, asking audacious questions to throw them off? My first impulse was to call Tejo, tell him that I’d quit Watch Out, effective from that instant. However, better sense prevailed and I decided, rather sullenly, to stick to the original plan. I know you don’t go to weddings for trying your luck at highly impressive women (a blatant lie, that), but hey, maybe those were ‘happy hours’ in God’s court of justice. In hindsight, that was the correct decision, because you don’t stand much of a chance of befriending members from the opposite sex if you possess the social skills of a raccoon. Anyhow, the disappointment was made up for by the aforementioned eight-course meal with more kinds of Paneer than there are countries in the world.

Finally, the time came for the goodbyes and the see-you-arounds and also for sadly closing the door on a much-awaited social interaction session. I picked up my bags, went to the bus terminal and started my journey back. I was keen to come back for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I’d missed the previous year’s interviews to a similar social obligation. So I wasn’t around when Lefty and co. were picked up. Hence, I was in no mood to miss it this time around. Plus, I feared that if Tejo happened to be experiencing one of his routine mood swings that night, well, then god bless us.

As you would expect, the bus found a way of getting stuck in traffic, true to Murphy’s theory and got delayed by an hour or so. So I began calling people, trying to know what was going on, and as expected, I found out that nobody was present at either SB or RJB. This was followed by a series of phone calls, coaxing people out of their laziness and some threatening-with-dire-consequences. In a moment of genius, Tejo and I had decided to send that wonderfully reliable trio of Pulkit, Shubham (of the kelvinator fame) and DJ (of the pink cellphone fame) to SB to conduct the interviews, hence I was all the more eager to get back as soon as possible. Ultimately, I did make it back without being too late and we managed to pick a pretty nice bunch of people (political correctness is the ‘in’ thing these days).

All said and done, I’d definitely say that the magazine has progressed during my five years in Roorkee. The overall look, the kind of articles etc are much better than what we could come up with. On the personal front also, I feel there’s been an improvement. The bonding between the current lot is really nice to see and it’s a piece that was missing in the years gone by. It’s a matter of pride for me to have been a part of Watch Out, and I wish I’d be writing something like this for the silver and golden jubilee of the magazine as well!