Oh Those Ten! - 3

CHILLOUT!

When this year's Verve aka Chillout did not see any major participation from my own department juniors,I was flabbergasted.Chillout is the annual fun fest conducted exclusively for first year students by English Literary Society.It's name,nature and venue have undergone considerable changes of late but I still envisage it with the same fervour.So,it really saddened me that my juniors could not relate to the event.

One of my classmates rued, "Dai!We should have scolded them badly so that they would have participated in the events with fear".I felt otherwise.We should have narrated them the brilliant history of how we Rocked (note the capital) in our edition of Chillout.We should have taken them on a nostalgia trip to our first year when Chillout was thiruvizha.We should have turned our heads slowly,put a S.A.Rajkumar styled "la-la" chorus in the background,asked them "Oru kaalathula epdi irundha department theriyuma da?" and went for a Vikraman-like flashback.

It was February 2008.That time when we were bragging to every other guy about all the work at Kriya.When Jimmy Wales took his return flight home,we were as exhausted as Inigo (Chairman)himself.Final year guys were talking about further work for Renaissance.Only then,the news came that Chillout was happening in the first week of March.We never cared about it.Instead,we were talking about having a Renaissance balloon in college.

An evening,our second year seniors barged into our class (with the ever-present Samani,of course).They started scolding us straightaway for not taking Chillout seriously.They gave their own flashbacks of how they Rocked their edition.Vivek (A senior from the environs of Steel Plant,Salem who looked otherwise) asked one of our guys some basic info about Chillout.When he kept mum,an angry Vivek asked "Evan da class rep?".When I stood up,a barrage of bad words flowed asking me why I had not passed on such vital info to other class guys.This went on for two more questions.I realised that they were in a mood to scold me even if a guy did not know that "Kuruvi" was horrible cinema.

But those words of seniors (which cannot be reproduced as such in this space) had their desired effect.We conducted over-night meetings to decide our batch name.The rule to name a batch from ECE was :Start with B,end with Z and have anything that sounds nice in between.It applied to all departments except that the first letter changed.We seriously fought over the names "Byxtroczarz" and "Byxtrodonz".Finally,it came to the toss of a coin by my class's Ashwin to seal it as Czarz.Three years on,I find it silly that we argued over equally bizarre names but those were some times.

The two main events of Chillout were Chartfest and Adzap.In the former,we had to present a chart to prove that our department was Gethu while in the latter,we had to enact a skit to prove the same once again.("Gethu" is quite simply the most gethu word I learned in college life).While work for Chartfest started off really well thanks to the Innovator within Chandru and the Ravivarma within Karthik & co,Adzap never really took off.Myself,Shivkumar,Mahadevan and Sudharsanam burnt the midnight oil (For Shiv Kumar alone,10 PM oil) waiting to get that simple spark of an idea before retiring to beds.We even scolded Shivkumar for sleeping so early.

Fittingly,it was Shiv Kumar who got that spark at the end.While all other departments wrote scripts to explain what their department means to the world,we worked on what will happen to the world without ECE.The script developed over arguments,major and minor.We somehow brought in disparate phenomenons into the script:Lord Shiva and Naradhar(The Shiv Kumar effect),A.R.Rahman (The Umesh Effect),Jimmy Wales (The Kriya effect) and an ambulance failing to save a dying patient (For some dramatic effect).

The day arrived.Chartfest was in the morning.Ashwin Kumar (When I realised that we had a lot similar between us,college life was over) and Sriram Reddy (His effervescence was missed big time when I was chairman) presented the chart in their typical styles.We got the first slot in Adzap.Myself and Bala were the narrators.That moment when the screen opened to reveal Sudharsanam as Lord Shiva and a loud cheer emanated from our guys was an Absolute Goosebumps moment.

That a guy who became MJ in the final year acted as Naradhar in the skit is a remarkable sidestory by itself.The questioning session after the skit was funny with Yours Truly giving all ridiculous answers possible ("We Byxtroczars funded the travel of Jimmy Wales" and such nonsense).When the skit got over,we ran all the way to our section of the crowd hugging each other.We assumed that we would win the first place in Adzap only to see the Mechanical juggernaut display an exemplary show of grandeur.But all hopes were not lost.

When Paul Franklin announced the results,I was sitting with Jeyavel.We were holding each other's hands tight.Those words "Chartfest-Ist place" and "Adzap-IInd place" took some time to register.When they sank in,our entire gang went wild.Jeyavel started throwing chairs into the air.We kept getting louder and louder entering into the hostel.We straightaway entered into our seniors' room showing them the Victory Shield.

Thus,those moments remain very close to heart.Because we had a dismal Intrams in the second year.Because it remains the only time throughout when our entire batch of ECE guys came together for the purpose of glory.Because it showed us for the first time that all those stories of ragging we read in newspapers were apocryphal and there is none like seniors to care for our success.