The Lab - I

Now, Now I arrive on to one of the favorite parts of my IIT Kharagpur (Hereafter abbreviated as kgp) life.

Labs! We had four fucking labs in our first semester (I have omitted the NCC training.) It goes without saying, how enthusiastic I was (and the remaining two gits) about labs. Puneet and me were more or less serious towards academics, Pandit G was a renegade who probably would have abolished labs (or atleast the tradition of writing lab reports).

So it turned out that the first afternoon of my first academic day at kgp turned out to be an electronics lab. In the morning, Prof TKB had lectured on the prospects of Electronics (Geeky stuff mostly, I distinctly remember him speaking about some medical injections for diabetics to be controlled by sensors planted in the Human body, Yawn). Stuffed up with the trash served in the mess, I was already skeptical about my chances of remaining awake in the lab. But, it was the first day, first lab. So what if this was IIT, humans study here after all and are taught by humans. Who would start a lab on the very first day, with the students knowing next to nothing about Electronics. I expected to be back in my room within half an hour. I was miserably mistaken.

A bald man with a crown of scanty hair diminishing with his age, was our professor for the lab. The serenity on his face camouflaged all his other 'angry' features. He was accompanied by his two cronies with spectacles who stood as sentinels on the either side of the lab door. He began writing on the board with gusto. Phew, I thought, So it would be another bout of lectures. He completed his writing and turned to us. He gave us 5 minutes to form groups of three people. I hadn't met Puneet yet, so he had formed his group with two bongs. I had my fortunes connected with those of two biharis. Anyways, I was convinced that this group forming ritual being completed, we would be set free to go to our room and snore.

Mr. Prof. had other ideas. He pointed out to the first two experiments on the board and yelled, "you have to finish them today and you have got less than two hours left." I seriously thought he was joking, much to my chagrin, he wasn't. He yelled at two girls (the rare few and the endangered species), something about how we had to stop being spoonfed. Old Man was serious and meant business definitely. We were to be graded on today's performace apparently.

I looked to my left, Daroo was in the next group. Next to him was Puneet, trying to put his point across to the two bongs (who sadly were missing it). Daroo was obviously undaunted and pulled out a sheet of foam (how did it get there ?) under the table. He sat on it relaxed as the pied piper of Hamelin. I focussed on the task at hand, the first was about a multimeter and the second was about ahhh, yes Thevenin's theorem. Agonizingly simple topics, if someone knew them beforehand.

We had never touched a multimeter in our life, but it appeared simpler than Thevenin's theorem (some jerk had named a simple obvious law after himself as it appeared). I glanced at our table, We had a circuit board, an oscilloscope and lots of wires. So for the next half an hour we kept crossing them here and there on that damned board. No answer so far, the Prof. was now coming down our way. I nudged Daroo and he immediately made the foam vanish and stood up trying to knock a nerdy aura to his style of imitating the same combination of wires on my board.

Old Man, understood we were fooling around and did not make an attempt to hide it either. We were given a dressing down which cost us another fifteen minutes which left half an hour on the clock for us to complete both tasks.

Now, Daroo had this habit called 'jugaad' and whatever he knew or didn't know, he knew how to 'jugaad'. Soon we had the multimeter bit wrapped up and were showing off our recently acquired multimeter skills to the girls opposited our table. From where Daroo got his 'jugaad' remains a mystery to this day. Old Man realised we had enough and mercifully banished Thevenin to the next class. But.... He ordered us to come with a lab report with our 'independent findings'. Now that was another caveat to make sport. Some guy dared to ask him how to write a report and was answered," Write your autobiography, but write something and come".

Old Man with his cronies barged off. I on the other hand leaned against the table and sighed. Was this going to be our Monday afternoon for the next 12 weeks? Thanks to Daroo who was always an example to behold and think, this guy will always give company! Puneet was still busy over wires and his two bong pals (who always waited for him to finish and leave so that they could work in peace :))

The very first lab at kgp, and this is all real! Five years down, we endorse the Old Man, who made us learn the hard way.

More to follow.