Mornings after

Can't tell you how it feels the morning after a drinking session like that. I'm feeling bleary and haggard.

Takes me back automatically to first year on the old campus at IIMK, where we would get smashed 2-3 times a week, out of sheer terror ("there's a MANAC quiz tomorrow, but nothing I can do will help me now, I'm doomed anyway, so I may as well drink" or out of despair ("There was a MANAC quiz today, in which my marks will go all the way down to the absolute zero, but there's no point in thinking about it now, so I may as well drink").

On each of these occasions, the drinking would happen at the main hostel (called, for some strange reason, the International Hostel), in Amit and Akalp's room. At some point in the wee hours of the morning, those of us who lived in other hostels would somehow wind our way out, carefully negotiating the steps and quadrangle we had to pass by hanging on to the wall for dear life (yes, this meant that we would go into rooms through doors that we passed, go all the way around the room, and come back out again, hanging on to the walls right through, but we took those as part of the obstacle course). Eventually, we would find our way out of IH, locate our bike keys somewhere in the recesses of our pockets, and (yes, I kid you not) clamber on to our respective bikes.

Then, a benevolent fate would intervene and ensure that we made it back to our own hostels in one piece, without killing each other or other people / animals on the road (not that there were many of these at those hours of the morning). The key thing to remember here is that the old campus was built just off a state highway, and a narrow road but with insanely fast traffic used to connect the various hostels - this is the road we would ride down in a sozzled state, without helmets and often without headlights. (I even remember getting a ride with someone whose headlights didn't work, and whose key kept falling out of the ignition, forcing us to go round and roung on a narrow road, looking for it.) Without brains is a given, I needn't even mention it.

Sometimes, just for fun, we would ride all the way to the CC (a good 3 KM), instead of going back to hostel. The only reason could have been fun, because we were certainly in no position to check our mail (I doubt we would have remembered our passwords, and if we did, we would have told them to each other, just for kicks).

Anyways, after a night like this, if god had been kind and the next day was a Sunday (no classes), there was of course no question of making it to breakfast. Typically, I would collapse in my room at 4 or 5 in the a.m., drunk beyond belief, and neither man nor beast could have woken me up before about 2:00 p.m., when I would wake up STARVING, and run to the mess before lunch finished... then back to sleep for the entire afternoon, and up, fit and fine, at 4.30 for 2 hours of sweaty, rigorous badminton, tea and conversations!

The point of this rambling post being that the morning after, I got up and came to work at normal time, and I wish I wish I wish I'd been back on campus, teleported back in time and space to those days when nothing really mattered (except that crazy OR case that had driven me to drink in the first place) and life was simple and easy.

Perhaps it's time to start thinking of doing an FPM, or some esoteric course from some random University in the US.