Agru’s Agru’s Agru’s ! How I miss thee ! Just a mention of the name brings on wholesale nostalgia !! There’s some kind of special bond between all Agruiites... ’cause the moment you get know that the other chap attended agru’s too, all reservations left behind, you burst into conversation about each others’ experiences with this Prof and imitating some Profs, discussing the best Profs in your batch, and I could go on forever !
Anyhew, Agru’s has the best professors in town, all teaching under one roof for about 1/3rd of the price you’d have to pay if you went to them for private tuitions. And, unlike Govt. institutions, the only category for admission (as far as I know) is Merit. I mean, can you imagine? They have a 1st, 2nd, 3rd merit list, and I’m talking admissions here ! :)
They are so systematic, well organised, everything runs as smoothly and with such precise regularity as though cut in stone... For eg., towards the end of your 12th standard, they give a t-shirt to every student. So, this lady and a peon comes into class with a huge stack of t-shirts and starts distributing them (in 3 sizes too !), and by the end, not a single t-shirt remains. Precisely the same number of t-shirts as that of students... they dont keep any room for over/underestimation ! Oh, and each class gets it’s own different colour (that’s only for girls though... guys only get whites).
As for the professors... I can sing their praises till the world comes to an end ! They actually teach better than in their own privates, and go into more details than required for the idiotic HSC board exams, which is really very good...
Your fundas get strengthened by Dheer(who is quite uniformly despised and equally enthusiastically imitated by students), Kasi (who is the bestEST physics prof in the whole universe), etc. As for Maths, you just cant do without Vengsarkar’s fabulous teaching and Prasanna Pandit’s mischievous (and wrongly thought of as sadistic/egoistic) smiles and methods for solving ’’Limits and Continuity’’ and ’’Integration’’ sums (ofcourse, these sums are of a much higher level than the HSC exams). And in chemistry (my least favourite subject), Kadalli and Sivaraman take the cake, with the ’’definitely definite’’ Awatramani (that’s how he talks, incase you havent guessed) coming in a close second.
Now we come to the part which strikes terror as well as a merry chord in the heart of every true-blue (and average... no child prodigies please !) agruiite... TESTS !
Terror is the emotion that overtakes when your classes have just begun and this is your 2nd/3rd test. Humour eventually takes over, when reality settles in, that expecting to get 40/40 in an Agru’s test (the difficult ones.. i.e., the ones around the middle... the ones in the beginning and the end get simpler, to restore our self confidence a little !) is a downright hilarious dream ! So you just learn to accept that and ask for eachothers marks with a carefree smile on your lips, occasionally venturing a giggle !
Jokes apart, their tests really are tough ones most often than not... Tough by the HSC standard that is... for the tests, it didnt matter whether you studied (read ’’mugged up’’ for most students) or not, cause so long as your basics were good, you’d end up with better marks too !
Call me mad/fanatical/downright maniacal, but Agru’s is, and I restate, is the BESTEST and most FANTASTIC class ! I dont mean it from the HSC level... ofcourse, they’re great from that viewpoint too, but so are a handful of other classes, if all you want to do is score well in the HSC, which is pretty much a piece of cake... The kind of teaching.. no the lEvEl of teaching, is so different from other classes... it’s on a totally different dImEnSiOn ! (there he goes babbling again ! haha... par kya kare, control nahi hota !)
And by the way, all hopeful Agruiites... the admissions begin as soon as your 10th standard (SSC) result is declared and go on for a fortnight or so on... so you better hurry! And for quite a few years now, they only have vacation batches for HSC and regular batches for MH-CET (which, I hear from my friends, is equally great)...
For all those ex-Agruiites, who’re confused by the so-called Santacruz and Bandra branches, there arent any ! They still (2002-2003) proudly say ’’We have no branch’’.. so dont get fooled ! They only have a centre at Dadar TT. And while you’re at it, also try out the samosas, etc you get in the recess at Damodar’s ! ;)