20 November,2010 06:37 AM IST | | Fiona Fernandez
Madhouse is a chuckle-a-minute-account of the life and times inside Hostel 4 at IIT Bombay through five to seven (mostly life-altering) years on campus. Clearly, one of India's most prestigious and sought after institutions alternatively emerges as the staging area for some very questionable behaviour
This book could easily stake its claim as loosely bound inspiration for every prank you guffawed over, in Raju Hirani's 3 Idiots. Set in the simpler, black & white era, Madhouse unabashedly looks at hostel life through the minds of young engineers in the making.
The Wonder Years
In the last paragraph of the 'Fourword', contributing editor Bakul Desai speaks on the debate over the extent of profanity in the book. The verdict was unanimously in favour of revealing every detail. After all, this was a collection of true stories of Hostel 4 IITB's (IIT Bombay, for the uninitiated) inmates. Rightly so, as one pores over this delightful read, it is obvious that no facet has been tampered with.
Editor Urmilla Deshpande, who had a taste of the IITian psyche, courtesy her husband, father, stepfather, boyfriends and friends, believes that this collection of accounts are stronger memories for its narrators, listeners and readers, compared to regular lectures, methods understood, or the degrees earned. From riding horseback to a lecture and starting a magazine of 'romance', to driving a local train during the 1974 All India Railway Strike, there's enough to keep the reader entertained, irrespective of the page or section.
EXTRACTS FROM MADHOUSE
Page 2 (How the bus stop moved)
The bus stop was a mighty pole with a metal sign plate. All passengers disgorged here. The students of H3, H2 and H1 continued on foot in the same direction that the bus took to turn and exit from the loop. The students of H5 and H6 walked back and walked long to get to their respective hostels.
This is where the ingenuity and the audacity of the elite engineer in the making comes in. Unfettered by parental control, basking in the glory of new-found freedom, endowed with teenage rebelliousness and an alarming willingness to take risks, the long-suffering, long-walking, bus stop-less-non H4 students decided to take the law and the bus stop in their own hands. In an overnight commando operation, they borrowed shovels and spades from the gardening kit of their hostel stores and uprooted the entire bus stop with its pole and its sign and installed it in front of H5. This guerrilla tactic did yield its dividends, much to the delight of students from H5, 6 and 7. A bus driver tended to stop at a bus stop, instantly forgetting where he had stopped countless times before. The end result of the operation is still being debated but there are reasons to believe that the H4 guys, under cover of another dark night, did restore the bus stop to its rightful place where it belonged. In front of Hostel 4.
Page 95 (Crossing Vihar Lake)
Sandeep Bhise had this urge to follow in the footsteps of famous seafarers Columbus and Vasco da Gama, and circumnavigate the globe. But for starters he set a more modest goal: cross Vihar lake on a vessel made by his very own hands.
Many a night and drawing paper was consumed making ever more sophisticated designs of all manners of craft, which would float on water. It was soon realized that acquiring the raw materials needed to convert these designs into reality would wipe out Bhise's net worth (at that time) several times over. But the intrepid adventurer in his heart found a way. He befriended the then Mess Secy and collected all the empty kerosene cans that were lying around the kitchen. There were about twenty. The next few days were spent gathering the construction materials -- wires to tie the cans, beeswax to plug their openings to make them water proof and so on.
After a few weeks the raft was ready and was christened SS H4Whore. Bhise, in a cap and undies - he didn't want to risk his clothes getting wet in case the raft sank -- and a bunch of guys from H4 took the raft to Vihar lake. A makeshift oar was hastily fashioned out of a piece of wood -- everybody had forgotten we would need one to steer the raft.
Bhise mounted the H4Whore and off he went, surrounded by the bunch of guys swimming alongside. Wonder of wonders, the raft did not sink, and Bhise actually made it to the opposite end of the lake. The entourage made it too, in spite of the crocodiles of Vihar.
Page 317 (How Campus Call Girl was born)
Members of our informal committee were soon writing material for the 'Campus Call Girl' or CCG as it came to be known. The original plan was to take potshots at the commies. But soon we were creating a document with smutty and ribald jokes and affectionately ribbing well-known faces in IIT, particularly girls. Freshy Rohan Menezes was bullied to add cartoons of Playboy bunnies to Campus Call's unimaginative logo to make it appealing. CCG would be produced using now prehistoric cyclostyling technology. For this four stencils were stolen from the Chem Engineering department. A ream (500 sheets) of foolscap papers was obtained from DOSA Isaac's office by seducing his secretary Shanta. Sanjoy Gupta typed out the matter on the stencil in the Warden's office at H4 on Hall Manager Pillai's typewriter. In those days preceding MS Word, typing was done without a spell checker, without pagination and without alignments, indents and copy/paste functions. Only the exceptionally gifted could type a magazine in one shot without using expensive erasing fluid. Matter had to be altered and added as one typed in order to fit within a page. When it overflowed into the next page, an imaginative line had to be concocted to keep the flow intact.
But my best memory of this episode is that fact that some girls who would not read the original CCG (since many copies were destroyed by the commies) asked us secretly for a copy.
The day I left IIT, I ordered a reprint of fifty, and handed out autographed copies to the girls who wanted them. That was my crowning moment.
Page 328 (Driving a local train)
The day that picture came out, our home phone started ringing non-stop from 6 in the morning and all of my Mom's friends and my Dad's friends telling them that since I was now identified my life would be in danger, and that they should not let me go drive trains again, and that if I insisted, I should shave off my beard so that they would not recognize me. Much to my mother's consternation, I refused to either stay home or shave. From that day on the railways gave us an armed police escort. The picture in the paper embarrassed my parents. I was on the front page of The Times of India in chappals. The next day I wore sneakers in case I needed to run fast.u00a0
Madhouse: True Stories of the Inmates of Hostel4, IIT-B, by Urmilla Deshpande (editor) and Bakul Desai (contributing editor), Westland, Rs 295. Available at leading bookstores.
