Engineering second semester, in the classroom
Time: Around 6 pm
I still clearly remember every moment of that discussion
about 7 years back. Fond memories of after college talks with people who were
in no rush to reach home; had many such days, this one a little more special.
First semester had just ended. Engineering had bestowed many brutal realities upon us. Clearly, we had to find a path beyond the regular to make it a bit more interesting for us. 9 to 5 was not the time to get the best out of the system. By getting the best, I do not mean transforming our scores from the lower 60's to the 70's. In the long run, that did not have much utility.
So that day, a select few in that room were brainstorming
about what can we do to make our journey more enjoyable. I walked up to the
blackboard and drew a square with 4 quadrants. I still don’t know why I did
that. I did not even know what I was going to write in that. Some of the best
marketing ideas have come out of such 4 quadrant analysis. I was not sure that this was going to
live up to that, but knew that we had a starting point.
Someone in front of me said, let’s write down the 4 most
important things that we want from engineering. Brilliant idea! Let’s do it!
First quadrant, we all agreed that we would want to stay
afloat in our courses, and sail through it, if not cruise through, to land up a decent
job, admission to a good higher education school. Aiming to be in the top 5 of
the class and other such thrills which you typically feel when you begin your
engineering had slowly started to fade.
Second quadrant was geared up towards personal development.
We wanted to continue honing our skills to do something beyond regular classes.
Be it drawing pictures, photography, making a wired/ wireless robot (lots of
engineers have craze I this) and calling him 'Shantaram', writing blogs, playing
cricket, football. These were the things you would remember out of college; the
26 runs in one over was more important than calculating the gain of a CE
amplifier (FYI: I do not know what that is, just remembered that we were
troubled by a 20 marks problem in some semester on it).
Third quadrant was being amongst the most active people in
class. Being involved in every major activity, having good after college
discussions, good group activities, some in the social front. We thought of
giving these discussions a fancy name. Let’s call it ‘Beer Barricade’ one of us said. I don’t
know why we agreed on that, perhaps we couldn't think of something better that
day. Besides, that name could have meant two things, we drink so much beer that
we form a barricade from the empty bottles. Or it could mean forming a
barricade between the beer and us, that we do all the things, but never drink
beer. I frankly don’t know what the founder of this group intended, he may
someday tell me. Later a much sophisticated version of this rolled out, called
the ‘chai club’. I think it is still a part of SP college, maybe not by the
same name, but something different, same intentions, have a healthy discussion about topics important to us. We lived up to our expectation in this
quadrant far more than the others.
The fourth quadrant, we gave a lot of thought into what will
go into it. It was going to be the missing part of the puzzle. After deep
thought, we all agreed that fourth part is going to find a girl and get hooked
up at the end of 4 years. Need not be from our college, from our city; it was a
step that would complete the journey! We called this 4 point / 4 quadrant theory as Últimate
Goal Theory’ or (UGT).
If I look back down the years, maybe it was not the best of
theories. But it laid the foundation of many such great theories down the path.
For all those interested, none of the people involved in the
conversation that day got hooked up in the four year timeframe. Some came very
close to it, some kept knocking the wrong door but nobody completed the last part
of the puzzle. We all can claim credit for the other three quadrants though!
