Yr 1" What is to become of me?"

ETDS

I could never act, just didn't have the "skills", so to speak...
So when they(Read: seniors), were conducting auditions for English Dramatics, i turned up with all hope of being laughed at....
i wasn't...but i wasn't selected either.
A few close friends however did get selected. They were now officially members of...be prepared for this...English Technology Dramatics Society, also known as ETDS. There is another fixation here for the word Technology...we have the Technology market, which is like any other market, Technology Dance society, which doesnt involve dancing robots, but a bunch of people who cleared the JEE and thought that they had a rythm in their bodies...a myth i would like to clear...the hindi and bengali dramatics societies are also abbreviated as HTDS and BTDS (stupid....really stupid)
Anyway, over time all the guys at ETDS in my batch became really good friends, for various reasons... and i had to go to their rehearsal just once in all the 2 weeks that they practiced( the reason of my visit involved 2 mugs of beer, a first-time drinker who was my friend, and a lot of high speed monologue on his part...only in english)
The hindi and english dramatics societies are fresher societies...ie they have just one fresher production...though the dramatics positions are fiercly competed for.
My batch guys ( and girls, some of which i didnt know, still dont) had chosen to act out a part of the famous "pygmalion"...
A keen interest in photography gave me special rights to photograph their play...
It involved some brilliant performances by
1.Abhas= Prof. Higgins....brilliant
2.Vijay= Col. Pickering....his clay pipe became the butt of all our jokes and we thought of handing it over to the next batch of juniors as a souvenir.
3.Toshe= Liza Dolittle....a famous line by her will follow shortly
4.Prateek= Nepomuck....except for him, everyone remebers his entry with both arms flailing wildly, shouting"Maestro!Maestro!"( btw, his original introduction on stage was going to be, "the hairy faced dick!")
There were a lot of other small roles which were done out nicely, but too numerous to mention. i hope none of these "roles" will take it to hard for not being mentioned.
Fun fact: IIT is probably the only place where one rehearsal is dedicated to "hooting practice"...concerned seniors come, sit in the audience while the rehearsal goes on the stage and ridicule the performances by making cat-calls and using profane language.
During the final performance however, hooting checks in the form of "Daku" were found lurking around( You'd rather crap green all over your pants before messing around with this guy!)
In a moment of frustration, the female lead(Liza), exclaims"What is to become of me?".....in the pregnant pause that follows an enlightened soul thought it best to lighten the mood by answering the question by a nonchalant, dry, "IITian".
What followed was a burst of stifled laughter...even on stage!

Nevertheless, the governors congratulated the actors by telling them that this was the best fresher's performance in years!

Yr 1:"YO RK!!!"

The halls here are named after important erstwhile citizens of the country as mentioned before...
Though you might think that this is a very good thing, the students here have their own variations of these names, the most common being abbreviations involving initials of these people.But some are worse, like Lala Lajpat Rai being addressed to as "lallu".
For celebrating the birthday of Dr.Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan( 5th sept), the students of RK hall organise a nice show at the Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose auditorium( by now i know that most of you must be worried about the administration's fixation with such names, but you havent yet seen/heard about the whole list!)
This show/performance can be very much visualised for most of the part by anyone...
just think of spectacled geeks, in checked shirts, dancing(trying to...)
but the other "attractions" are the eastern and western musical performances which are surprisingly very good...
The last item is a set of Rock songs(western musical...).This was very much a time by which most of us rock worshippers had been waiting for...pure, unadulterated, rock...no mushy crap.This is something i know is hard to imagine for most of you people outside the hallowed walls...a bunch of geeks head-banging as if there were no tomorrow. We drowned ourselves in the melodies of Iron Maiden, Creed,Bon jovi...a night i wouldnt forget ever..as it was my very first experience of a rock concert!
Near the end, all i remember is, us shouting "YO RK!" till our throats throttled in pain...