The Average Tam-Bram - Episode Two - The First Journey

...or "Durgamba 2+1 semi-sleeper".

Episode One is here.

In this episode we present, as promised, an insightful insight (is there any other reasonable way?) into the psyche of the ATB. And, to this end, we propose to address (no, there is no DMA or indirection involved) a small, but significant part of this by way of examining his thoughts over the journey to his second home for the next four years. Yet again, the authors' make the assumption based on their first-hand experience as well as deep examination of experiences of slightly different situations that their first-hand experience, without loss of information, motive or generality, provides a succinct treatment of the ATB's thoughts. The authors choose a bus trip to a engineering institute located on the shore of the Arabian Sea - touted to be the only other college in the world that boasts of a private beach (the other one being in California, which if the reader remembers is an adapted habitat of the ATB). Further, for reasons of simplifying the discussion, we assume that the bus ride begins from Bangalore (another stronghold of the ATB) and approximately lasts eight hours - 2300hrs to 0700hrs the following day.

At this point we must present to the reader a very important trait of the ATB - a trait that shall be evident in the ATB's behaviour throughout life and to a large extent determines the ATB's course. To sum up in a single line - 'Always do your homework'. This is programmed into the ATB since playschool, where homework consisted of scrawling a few lines through school and high-school and coaching classes where homework usually consisted of solving a JEE question paper in half the allotted time while eating dinner. Academics apart, the ATB always does a background check and gathers as much information as he can before embarking on any significant task - right from buying pirated music CDs from National Market or selecting a college for his engineering degree. Like how his parents grilled all and sundry about the educational avenues, the ATB, too, diligently asks questions about which shops are to be avoided and how many pairs of underwear are needed for a semester of study (for the curious reader, we have done a survey and determined that 4 pairs are sufficient for a week assuming the subject is not averse and understands the concept reversing - much like audio tapes). The ATB goes one step further - he uses the awesome power of the Internet to gather arcane and seemingly pertinent but usually irrelevant information. He trawls the deep regions of the Internet reading forums on EduRite, WhichCollege, SantaBanta and NextDoorCollegeGirls (for 'pertinent' visual representations of certain facts).

The bus ride to his future college is no less important than getting the best deal on all ten seasons of 'F.R.I.E.N.D.S' (DVD-rips...mind you) and the ATB collates all the information that he has gathered from seniors who are already at the same college or at similar colleges. At this juncture, we present the checklist (reproduced with permission) below and direct the reader to either mentally note down the same, or jot it down (one never know how useful it might be for oneself).

1. Always get a seat in the front of the bus.

2. Always book a seat in a bus that goes to the next college.

3. Turn up early at the departure point and look around.

4. Make friends with your co-passengers (wink, wink).

5. Do not wear that yellow T-Shirt from the 'Rajajinagar Bhajan Samaj' which says 'Volunteer' at the back.

The first thing the ATB does, after replying to the SMS ('I am fine. Will call when I reach.') is take stock of the co-passengers. All female co-passengers are marked mentally on the seat-map and then the ATB proceeds to compare notes with his other friends who are traveling on other buses. A typical conversation would read something like this:

ATB: Macha, six in mine. Yours?

Another ATB(AATB): Dude, sad life. Only two. One with mother.

ATB: Chance only da. Put fight and impress the mom.

AATB: Yeah right! Put message when you hit Kamath. Will catch up if we can.

ATB: Yo!

The reader must, at this point, be wondering about something being different about the conversation presented above. A closer examination, followed by a second reading will reveal that in fact, it is in proper English with complete words. This is another trait of the ATB - using T9 to generate full words is faster and at the same time more refined, besides inculcating in the ATB the habit of expressing ideas lucidly without excessive verbosity. Undeniably, this is quite necessary for scoring high percentiles in exams like the GRE/GMAT/TOEFL which the ATB will one day write.

At this point, most people on the bus are asleep and the ATB uses this opportunity to stretch his legs and takes a walk up and down the aisle. But, that alone is not the motive - he slows down ever so imperceptibly when he passes a seat occupied by a girl and quickly evaluates whether the person next to her is her best-friend/sister/cousin/mother (if female) or friend/boy-friend/boy-toy/father/brother (if male). Any conversation in which any of the aforementioned women are involved is eavesdropped upon but, with no malicious intent - most ATBs only think about thing long term. And at any rate, this particular exercise is undertaken to determine how many of the women are going to be batchmates/seniors/assistant-lecturers. The interaction with current and former students of the college gives the ATB a sketchy knowledge of the terms and lingo that is used and he looks for these keywords.

God forbid, if any of the women make eye-contact, for at this time the ATB has still not learnt the necessary skills to interact with women. Even a passing glance causes the ATB to conspicuously pretend to look at the floor in deep thought as if trying to solve a particularly hard programming problem - with vague hand gestures and head-scratching thrown in for effect. After the lights in the bus are switched off (the ATB usually hides under the cover of his blanket/shawl/jacket hood when the lights are on and shares intelligence with other ATBs on the other buses), the ATB slowly emerges from under the cover and surreptiously looks around at the women. Most of them are sleeping, and the ATB imprints their faces in his peta-byte capacity internal database for future reference. With this done the ATB mutters his nightly prayers and tries to sleep.

As soon as the night halt for coffee arrives, the ATB unlike others does not run to the door to be the first out. The ATB will wait, mostly for the women to get off and then will himself slip out of his seat and try to alight. This behaviour is for two reasons - one is quite obviously to avoid any form of contact - visual or otherwise - and the other is out of sheer chivalry. This is often misunderstood by the women as a negative trait of staring and almost the entire scientific community is bamboozled by this. There has been only one attempt to substantiate this behaviour by a group of questionable researchers who tried to prove using Freudian theories that this was infact a latent and hitherto unknown ATB fetish. The rest of the scientific community labeled this as an attempt to garner publicity by use of fraud assumptions - in fact there were several other papers published in response to this that proved beyond doubt that this rabble of so-called-researchers were infact mentally unstable uncivilized uncultured 'jungles'.

The first thing that the ATB does after alighting is to relieve himself in the restroom. This too, is a scientific response - having relieved himself once, he can afford to consume enough liquids and still have time to make another visit before the bus leaves. After locating his fellow tribe members (most often on the way in or out of the loo), the group proceeds to exchange notes. By this time, surprisingly enough, code-names have been assigned to the various women based on mannerisms or college. The method of determining these names is separately examined in another study. The other major agenda that the ATBs discuss is when the bus will reach and what rooms each one has been assigned in the hostels. Several crib about the heavy influx of North-Indians. This is primarily because of the physical attributes of North-Indians (tall, fair, good-looking) and other miscellaneous attributes such as knowledge of Bollywood, the ability to speak Hindi and having names (Raj, Rahul etc etc.) that fit into most application forms (a massive study on this topic has be done by Sidin Vadukut and may be found on his blog). This is, of course, just a defence mechanism against insecurity (another defence mechanism includes listening to unheard of metal bands, good old classic rock, reading off-beat but popular cult literature, gathering obscure trivia and in general being a nerd). Little does the ATB know that a few months in a hostel does wonders and the ATB will be eating sambar-rice with his North-Indian neighbour while watching "Kuch Kuch Hota Hai". We shall deal with this as we proceed further in our study.

After boarding the bus, the ATB sit and spends next few hours alternating between thoughts of his future and resisting the urge to throw up last night's dinner. Eventually, the ATB tires out, fantasizes about Trisha/Asin/JenniferKotwal and drifts off to sleep with one of them dancing to either Sheela/Munni in Tamil with English sub-titles. The next morning the ATB wakes up before everyone else, panics for a moment about his surrounding and then starts noting down which woman gets off at which point - not to stalk, but to just verify if his theory and his classification from last night was right. It is soon time for the ATB to get off himself and the bus vomits him and his 6 pieces of luggage including mattress on to the shoulder of National Highway-17 right beside a board that reads "Goa 351KM". That more than makes up for the lousy ride, the smell of rotting fish, the clammy salty air (all things he will soon learn to love) and a smile appears on his face - a sly trip to the land of sunshine, sand and bikini-clad women - reason enough to stay the four years here.

To be continued...