IdIoT

According to almost all the doctors that I know who could afford to go and see the movie, the most unrealistic part of 3 Idiots was the child-birth scene. Needless to say affordability was more temporal than financial. I for once thought that was perfectly okay. Every second day you read about child birth stories on a table tennis board at a major engineering college. The part that appeared most unrealistic to me was the fact that someone could not be traced for six years in these days of internet connectivity. These guys had to just open a Facebook account and the next day Facebook would have suggested, “Your friend Rancho is living happily in Ladakh. Do you want his phone number?” Then I thought of Misti….

If you are thinking that I was fortunate enough to come within 6 inches of the fairer sex in IIT – Thank you for thinking so highly of me! Unfortunately Misti was a guy. In spite of his name the only happy and gay quality he had was his ability to enter other students’ rooms from the back door in order to reconfigure the geography of their room, an act whose technical name was ‘CG change’ in IIT lingo.
After getting into IIT the worst thing to do was not to get a failing grade in fluid mechanics but to be branded as a guy who was “Vague”. Vagueness is a virtue in the real word especially for married men and women and software salesmen. When are you coming home honey? - Around Five-ish; How much does your software cost? - Anywhere between a hundred thousand dollars and a million. You are never wrong when you are vague. But in IIT being vague was more ignominious than being a non virgin in a nun’s convention.

I was neither good at sports nor good at soc & cult. I was scared that soon someone would come with a big rubber stamp that said “100% Pure Vague” and stamp that on me. I needed a strategy to get out of the doldrums.

“You should hang around with guys like Supratim Gupta,” said a senior. That was the only time when someone called Misti by his actual name. The next day he got baptized as Misti by a senior based on his cuteness factor.

I realized that hanging out with people like Misti was my escape route from the world of Vagueness. He was the combination of Michael Jordon and Jhumpa Lahiri. (Not physically! That’s an eerie picture). He was the basketball hall captain in the second year and was the governor of Alankar, the IIT magazine in his third year. Everyone in the hall knew him and they knew me because I was always in the radar screen along with him. At that time I did not realize that I could have had a potential TV career by being Ed MacMohan in the Johny Carson Show or the other guy who used to suck up to Conan in Late Night With Conan.

Misti, to quote Scar from The Lion King was “at the shallow end of the gene pool” or the funda (knowledge) pool. He studied Agricultural Engineering, the department that was lovingly called ‘Ghasi’ (the closest translation would be ‘someone who cuts grass’). Based on Misti’s technical knowledge I was sure that the only thing they studied was how to cut grass with different types of sickles. Calculus to him was a character from Tintin. We developed a symbiotic relationship. I helped him with his math while I got my “fifteen minutes of fame” by moving around the campus in Misti’s official IIT track suit and from the acknowledgement I received in Alankar for carrying loads of paper from one end of the campus to the other end.

My room was next to his for three consecutive years and we became very good friends, in fact best friends. We never told this to each other. I think it’s easier to say, “I love you” to a girl than to say, “You are my best friend” to a guy. Misti did consider me his best friend, something that took me years to realize, because he trusted me with his secrets.

Over the years I have made a lot of acquaintances. Some stayed at that level, some turned into friendship and a handful of them became great friends. It is just a random coincidence that all my ‘great friends’ are women. I guess when you grow old it’s easier to tell a woman that she is your best friend than to tell her anything else. There was one common trait in these friendships. They all trusted me with their secrets. Secrets about their ex boyfriends; present boyfriends; family concerns; their likes and dislikes. (Accepting me as a true friend might have been their way of telling me that I shouldn’t even dream about seeing them sans clothes!). Like all my great friends, Misti trusted me with his secrets.
It was not about what he did with his girlfriend. When you are a teenager you announce your acrobatics with a female over the loudspeaker. He trusted me with something terribly embarrassing for a teenager: letters from his mom.

In those days when there was no cell phone and internet, the only communication we had with our parents was through hand written letters. Misti had one problem. He could not read Bengali and his mom did not know how to express herself in a foreign language. Misti’s mom would write to him about embarrassing topics like he should not do drugs, how she wanted him to stay with them after he graduated instead of settling in the US; he should make sure that he didn’t catch a cold and he shouldn’t skip breakfast. (She didn’t talk about safe sex because AIDS still meant scholarship from universities. Current generation Misti-moms should definitely add that to their list.) I would read him her letters and watch the somber expression on his face, a fact that I hid from him. Otherwise he would have killed me.

Misti broke all the commandments imposed by his mother, including the one about not going to the US. One day he called me in the US to celebrate the fact that he had lost something. I was extremely jealous. In spite of the fact that all odds were against me I was hoping to beat him in this department. It was heartbreaking to lose to him by a few seconds (157,680,000 seconds to be precise). That was the last time I heard from him!

I kept wondering what happened to him. I could only speculate. Almost every IIT-ian had an upbringing where we were supposed to meet expectations and excel in all areas. This thought stayed in hibernation but resurfaced as soon as you graduated. You were supposed to be the Perfect son, the Perfect husband, the Perfect dad, the Perfect neighbor, the Perfect employee and even the Perfect kisser. I failed in all these subjects except the last one. If I have to guess what made him a recluse I would think it was his inability to meet one of these expectations.

I have seen the movie 3 Idiots thrice. And every time my mind has wandered off to a scene where I was out searching for a friend; Misti in this case. The only difference was that I was driving a BMW X5 with a few crates of Corona in the trunk and a new song composed by Shantanu Moitra being played in the background (a song where the word ‘Ma’ appeared at least 3.5 times).

I would eventually find him, not in the Ladakh valley but in San Francisco, working for Farmville (Hey! He was an agricultural engineer). Instead of giving him the salute by taking off my pants, I would end up telling him the following:
“You moron! You still suck in Math. In Life, you may get failing grades in almost all subjects but when you add them up the sum is greater than the parts. Because in this case, you make the rules!”