Will She Be Mine Read Online Free PDF

find the right girl. But disappointment was in store for me there too.
    Gradually I came to the conclusion that lookers perhaps didn't have enough gray matter to make it to an MSIT. Maybe that was an overstatement. I felt I shouldn't generalize since I’d not seen all the girls in all batches. But it was true of my batch.
    I did see a few pretty girls on the campus though and wondered. On chasing them I discovered them to be the daughters of some of our college professors. It was a dampener. I was already having trouble getting pass grades. This wasn’t the time to jeopardize them further by standing in different professors' offices explaining what I was doing chasing their daughters.
    If two such professors got together to discuss my amorous activities, I might be thrown right out of college! As a respite I turned my attention to sports. I and some of my friends launched ourselves into badminton. We played badminton on abandoned tennis courts, sprinkled with shrubs that had found their way out of the ground through cracks in the cemented surface- till one of us noticed that the adjacent badminton hall’s door seemed unlocked one day. Cautiously we sneaked in.
    Wow! What an alluring sight the hall presented, with its sprawling courts. The gallery meant for the spectators was decked with rows of seats arranged on ascending layers of wide steps on one side of the courts. I shouted at the high ceiling to hear my voice's echo. I fancied it sounded somewhat like Kishore Kumar’s, who sang many of R. D. Burman’s famous compositions. A couple of my friends followed suit, but their voices sounded gawky and awkward in comparison, I was sure.
    Despite our find, we seldom got to play to our heart’s content on those courts. The inter college players often barged in and showed us the door. To our discomfiture we later learned that those indoor badminton courts and some of the better tennis courts outside were reserved for the institute players during certain time slots.
    We were the orphaned general category for whom nothing was reserved or easy in life, in college, outside in society, in jobs or anywhere else. We were the ones with shrinking rights and nowhere to go. We were the classless, faceless category, shameful of our very existence- yet too dignified to unite and protest for equality or fight for what was rightfully ours.
    We couldn't even unite during elections to vote political parties out of power who insisted on enacting the English colonial power's policy of dividing and ruling the nation on the basis of caste, creed and religion. It seemed like some of the nation's present crop of divide-and-rule politicians had inspired policymakers within the precincts of pedigreed colleges like the MSITs as well, to orchestrate reservation policies to percolate down to mundane things like who played on which badminton or tennis courts.

    At MSIT we were the undergraduates and called the postgraduate PhD students 'phuddaas'. A couple of separate hostels were allotted to them. Halls 4 and 5 were the PG hostels during our time. As it was difficult to discern from external appearances as to which student was pursuing a PhD degree and who an M.Tech, we ended up calling all postgraduate students heading towards the PG hostels as phuddaas .
    One day in the hall 4 canteen, we came across a phuddaa doing his PhD. He claimed his ambition was to use his degree and stamp of being an MSITian to find a wealthy father-in-law who’d let his educated son-in-law live in his own house, termed ghar jamai in the local lingo , with the added license to squander his hard earned wealth. PS and I glanced at each other and hid our smiles as the guy ranted seriously about his dubious parasitic ambition.
    Another wanted a heavy dowry from his in-laws when he married. He planned to qualify in the civil services exams and spend time at Mussorie to up his ante. I felt ashamed to think that people obtained admission to premier colleges like MSITs with such weird