I read Five Point Someone a while back. I’m an RECian myself, and it was very surprising to see the similarities and differences between life at KREC and IIT Delhi. A few interesting things to note:
1) We never ever needed to study four hours a day. I have never studied four hours a day, constantly, in my entire life. Even during PL (Preparatory Leave) we used to sit at a table, and concentrate hard on Andrew Tananbaum’s Networking book for 10 full minutes, and then immediately lose it when someone walked in to our room and asked, ’’Sutta hai kya?’’ IITians on the other hand, seem to study every day - even during the beginning of a semester. In my college, this would have resulted in the dunking of one’s head into one’s block ka fountain (if there was water there)
2) No one had any idea where they were going. No one. I mean even the top rankers were clueless, though they put up a brave face most of the time. People still don’t know, of course, much after we graduated. But that, I think, is because the real world is a lemon.
2.5) Everyone was ’’insane’’ - one way or the other; Each person I knew had his or her eccentricities. IIT doesn’t seem to be very different. Today, it’s those idiosynchracies (sp?) that bring us together - it’s all I remember. From doing the planchet drunk, to pushups on the highway, walking down the haunted beach road, playing teen patti till 3 in the morning and ending up owing 23 paise to someone who still wants it back 10 years later. It’s all we had - yeah, there was the education thing too - but today, 10 years later, it’s all I have.
3) The food was bad. It’s always bad. We got bulletproof idlis and high tension chapathis. We got ’’tomato pachix’’, which noone ever wants the ingredients of. We got stuff that was hard enough for use as those clay pigeons that those olympic shooters shoot at. Just that these things would probably reflect the darn bullets.
4) The friendships last forever. It’s just unbelieveable, but they do. They may fade away, but one reunion of sorts and you’re out there, talking about those days, forgetting we have spouses and other paraphernalia, forgetting our mundane lives for a while through those insignificant but very real moments .
5) RGs are bad. Relative Grading simply sucks - we never had it while I was in my college.
In all, the book was fascinating - not as much about the content, which I believe was fairly mediocre. Chetan’ll do better in his second book (*), I think - because there are those times when he runs away to some distant land where there’s a surreal element that us non-IITians can’t grasp. You had to be there types.
And the whole Neha element - it’s disconnected, disjoint and left me feeling like she was schizophrenic. Not very nice, yes.
What I found amazing was where it took me back 10 years. Those were good days - and the book triggered the collapse of a wall I’d built around me since. And that, in my humble opinion, is always a good thing.