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Memoirs | Share This Page | |||
Do IITs Produce only Billionaires? |
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by Ashok Dongre |
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If you are a regular Boloji.com reader, you would have seen many of my cartoons on the Home Page. Believe it on not, I learned the art of cartooning while studying at one of the IITs. If you have the inclination, IITs can provide a very fertile ground for budding cartoonists. With so many funny guys, crazy guys and jokers around, who wouldn't get some great cartoon ideas? The funniest character I met on the campus during my years at the IIT was a watchman at the main building. There is a big well-maintained lawn in front of the main building, which provides a short cut for students between the main building and some of the engineering department buildings. Crossing the lawn was strictly prohibited (By Order!) and the watchman was very serious about doing his duty. He would patiently watch students crossing the lawn from the other corner, stop them at the corner where he was posted and send them back, again crossing the lawn all the way back to the corner from where they came. He was a great believer in discipline.
Then there was this funny guy in our hostel who went to the class in a baniyan and pajamas to win 20 bucks (Indian Rupees, not Dollars!). Another character used to roam around in the hostel at night wearing only a white kurta. Those who couldn't stand this scene were requested to kindly stay inside their respective rooms. If you want to list out all the funny guys in the hostels, it would be a much longer list than the 'Roll of Honor' at each hostel. The roll of honor reminds me of two boys with innocent baby faces. We found it very funny to have such baby faces at the age of 20. Now, of course, approaching 60 myself I feel it's ok because now I think 20 year old boys are just small babies. Both these baby faces reached the top posts in their companies later in life. I don't exactly recollect, but I must have drawn the caricatures of their faces for the hostel magazine. I used to be the chief (and sole) cartoonist of the hostel magazine and got to practice the art of caricature drawing for a long time. My reference used to be the I-Card photos and if you know how funny the I-Card photos used to be those days, you can imagine how easy it would have been to draw caricatures based on those photos. We also had budding union leaders who tried their hand at forming a mess servants’ union and even arranged to force a short lived strike of the mess servants. They were called Commies but were quite friendly otherwise. Some of them did give up shaving and bathing just to build a brand image. One guy later became a full time activist. Two of them got into social work for a few years, got married, got back into engineering and management and made big bucks. Crazy guys.
Towards the end of my last year at the IIT, one of my professors predicted that if I didn't take things seriously, I would be earning not more than 400 rupees a month. Though he was not accurate about the figure, he did prove to be right about the point he wanted to make and the IIT lost an opportunity to produce one more billionaire! |
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30-Dec-2006 | ||||
More by : Ashok Dongre | ||||
Views: 4709 Comments: 1 | ||||
Comments on this Article
Abir 02/11/2012 06:28 AM |
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