I used to fancy becoming an Engineer, when I was in 8th standard. That `day dream` came true when in June 2000, I took admission in Computer Engineering in Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar. In our first year, we were not allotted hostels due to lesser number of rooms being available for first year students. So we had to look accommodation outside. In mid of first year, we got a room in the hostel and moved there. This was for the first time that I was having the experience of hostel life (one should at least once enjoy hostel life, as they say). Those were the best times. Our room was popularly known as dharamshala where in the evening there will be some things happening for sure: cards, music and tea & samosa. Everybody who wanted to enjoy all this would come to our room 🙂

(I am skipping the names here, due to the fear of missing someone 🙂

After completion of second year we decided to leave the hostel and go for rented accommodation. We were four people Bhagwant, Me, Pavneet & Vaibhav (in alphabetical order :). We rented a 3 room accommodation and started living there. Finally we brought our PCs from home. And then started that little technology network. We went out to computer market to buy all the technical equipment required to setup a network of 4 PCs. We got a 8 port hub, LAN cards and cables. Then started the mission to setup everything & making all PCs ready for sharing music and playing games. It took a lot as everybody was almost doing it for the first time. Finally after 2 days of fight or so everything was `on the rocks`. We used to have those never ending muliplayer sessions of NeedForSpeed (one of my favorite games when it comes to racing). After sometime we got another game from somewhere called Project IGI. Then started the real hard work to complete it. It was a FPS & strategy game having 14 levels. Now we two (me & Vaibhav) were crazy about IGI and wanted to go upto last level. I remember, we spending hours (during exams :P) and doing real hard work to complete it (the problem with this game was that there were no intermediate saves, it will save the whole level only, when you cleared it 🙁 Finally we finished it up to 13th level but could never clear the 14th level or finish the game, in other words 🙁

More than half of the classmates used to come to our room and have all those multiplayer games sessions (only we know, sometimes how we had to listen to those lectures from Auntie 🙂

Another interesting, unforgettable thing was our breakfast. We used to take 1 hour to get ready for University and before University we used to go to have breakfast. I still remember, at least half of the days (if not more 😉 after having 2-3 gobhi paranthas and then Roohafza milk we used to start feeling sleepy. So come back in the room, play some ghazals and sleep 🙂

And I can never forget to talk about mine & Vaibhav’s technical discussions and habits of screwing up ours PCs every new day. At times we used to go so deep that people around were in trouble that what the heck they were talking about 🙂 We still discuss every kinda technology, new happs on WWW and everything else. But on gtalk, not face to face.

Those days will never come back. Now we 4 are far away from each other. I am in Delhi, Bhagwant is in Bangalore, Pavneet in Hyderabad and Vaibhav in Dehradun. One good thing is that Bhagwant is coming to Noida. So once again after 3 years, we will be staying together 🙂

Sidhu