A lifetime in law school contd....

Chapter 2: Fitting in

I got by the first month of law school without any major hitches. In fact you’d be quite impressed with what I had done so far. I was the captain of the class football team, the front man of a band in college and a member of the Cultural & Fine Arts Committee of NLS. Academically, I was coping. I had also made quite a few friends within my batch as well as amongst the Fifth Years. All in all, I was managing to hack it, or so I thought.

That’s when it happened. BOOM! Reality had to go and do its bitchy thing.
Captain of the class football team? Well, consider the facts.

There were two seniors in college from my hometown who were the best footballers in college. And so when I landed up in college with football boots and shin guards, the team assumed that I was of the same stock and appointed me captain. It’s a different matter that I had played football only on the bench back home.

I felt good about the farce though. With the inter class football tournament scheduled for the second month of our first trimester, I was of the opinion that it was necessary for the team to wake up early in the morning so as to run laps around the football field while I yelled at them to put some effort into it.

Of course when the tournament actually got underway, things went quite wayward.
In the first match I blamed my lopsided kicks and rapid fatigue on ill health. I got away with it with only a few snide comments voiced about my overall effort from some of the better players in the team.

In the second match, however, I was captaining the team adroitly – from the sidelines. I had been substituted. Mutiny! In a different age I would have had those landlubbers flogged and on a slimming diet of bread and water.

Anyway, it turned out that the team played better without me. And so that pretty much ended my run as captain of the team.

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Musically though, I fared much better.

I had played in a band back home before joining college. Here’s a confession: the only reason I was in that band was because the equipment belonged to me.

Nonetheless, playing in that band helped me learn a decent amount of guitaring, although I didn’t advertise this fact in my initial days in NLS. Being the worst guy in a band has this effect on a person. Besides, I figured that my classmate, the fat Assamese guy with long hair and horn rimmed glasses – Amar Das – had got to be miles better than me.

As things turned out, this wasn’t the case.

In two words – Das sucked. His timing was all off and he knew half a scale. His huge beer belly and long hair masqueraded his ineptness just as my football boots and shin guards inspired confidence in my non-existent soccer skills.

His true talent, however, lay in story telling. The more incredible the story, the greater was Das’s conviction in recounting it. So if he was telling us about the time when a leg landed in his soup in a restaurant after a powerful bomb explosion, Das would be adamant in explaining the minutiae of the incident until we swore we believed him.

Das, who we called Sad-Das (pronounced: sad-ass) because of his perpetual scowl and the inversion of his surname, became a good friend of mine once the band was formed. He was the bassist and I handled lead and rhythm guitars.

On the drums we had Nitesh Modi, a questionable inclusion since he was even less gifted than Sad-Das when it came to timing. Right from the start our drummer and bassist didn’t quite get the harmony going between each other, in all senses of the word. When I asked Sad-Das why he felt the way he did about Nitesh, he told me that he couldn’t trust a pudgy ‘Bong’ from Calcutta. That was when I ought to have pointed out that Nitesh was in fact a Gujarati.

On vocals we had a screecher called Karthik Arun. His ghastly voice got him his stage name – Kroon.

Our band was an amplified disaster.

The only positive to come out of the venture was that my minor talent managed to dazzle the audience in the backdrop of the cacophony the band engendered. I lapped up the mileage.
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And then there was the whole deal with the Cultural and Fine Arts Committee. As a first year member of Cul Comm, I was given all the slave work that went into organizing Committee events in college. True to self, I shirked it.

Somehow, the whole eager-first-year-enthusiasm thingy didn’t feel normal. Instead I was pissed off with all those pseudo do-gooders who were only fooling themselves in their attempts at fooling everyone else. Assholes.

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And academically I was coping, didn’t I already mention that? Well, I lied both times.

This whole deal about submitting research papers, or ‘projects’ in NLS terminology, never settled well with me. Especially when there were submission dates to adhere to.
Mid-term exams, compulsory attendance of classes, end-term exams – it was all one big conspiracy to trip me up along the way.
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It is the friends that I made in law school that made being in Shaggerbhavi worthwhile.

Con artists, all of them. True diamonds in the rough when I first met them. But by the time they did their time in Nags, they were set to dazzle all with their honed skills.

Kabir Singh, ace poker player. “You have a poker face, I can tell that you’ll make a great poker player…” Cabby worked the con on all of us, although he perfected it on B. Sampath.

Roman Banerjee, ace politico. “See, tsk, elect me, tsk, and things will be different…” Romba worked the con on all but us and an angry young Sardarji.

Mahesh Maan, ace arbitrator and our local Marijuana dealer's favorite client. “Arbitration seeks to find a joint solution to all conflicts…” Hash worked the con on himself and the arbitration world beautifully.

The others were characters in their own right. And getting to know all of them got me through the eons I spent in NLS.