Enthu &c

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Saswat writes:


"...One of the first words one learns of when one joins the IITs is "enthu". Starting from the time when we joined the halls till we graduated, we were always asked by the seniors to keep our "enthu" high and then, in turn, we asked our juniors to do the same. Except, during those 4-5 years, what this "enthu" exactly entailed and implied was never very clear. Did it just mean helping out the seniors with hall activities, or did it mean participating actively in the OP rituals, or did it mean keeping our CGPAs high, or did it mean mandatory participation in inter-Hall competitions? Or did it mean all of these?

Later, many years after I had left IIT, when I met a firm's CEO (an ex-IITKGPian) in 2008, he kept associating the panIIT event with the word "enthu" a lot. Even though he was obviously a very busy person, running the firm in the US and its subsidiary in Chennai (and, in the process, employing hundreds of people), he was very excited about meeting an IIT-junior and gave me "funda" and asked me that I should attend the next panIIT. And he told me that we (as in the IITians) must keep our "enthu" high. It was sort of funny, it had been a while since I had heard the word.

And the last two days at the panIIT were all about this "enthu". We all get busy with our lives, doing whatever it is that we do. And in the process the intensity of the "enthu" loses a bit of its sharpness. The panIIT conference was all about resharpening the enthu...."

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Coming from a Village School where we were taught condensed Shakespeare by Charles Lamb, the only new English word I learned at my University was: "bore". And we used it almost daily, many times over.

And the first two words I overheard from students at IIT KGP were the ones mentioned by Saswat:

"enthu" and "funda"

I must admit I use these words in my blogs fairly regularly.

"Enthu" is of course doing the same thing but with a "lusty oomph"

I guess the opposite of "enthu" is my University's: "bore". And KGP, without its students and their "enthu" is a veritable bore.

"Funda" is of course the short for "fundamentals". But it comes with adjectives:

"nil-funda" and high-funda"

"Fundoo!!!" is altogether different (note the exclamation marks)

The other word I learned soon after joining KGP was "tempo"; not to be confused with the luggage carrier in AP. As a newcomer, I used to watch Inter-Hall Football and the one constant feature was what we now call "cheerleaders"... bunches of Hallmates banging drums and tins shouting: "RK ka tampo high high!" and then going round the Campus beating bigger and more noisy drums dressed or undressed suitably.

Saswat, a couple of years junior to Indra, was in my Room one day when I was e-chatting with Indra at Princeton who was asking nervously who got the "Illu" award and dancing when I told him it was his good old Azad Hall. Saswat was mystified how a chap who left KGP should be so attached to his old Hall at IIT. Today of course Saswat is talking proudly about, "one of my Lalloo hallmates". I guess that is part of Hall Tempo.

Soon after joining KGP, I learned that students there are sharply divided into two incongruous groups: "guys" and "ghoonks". I had heard about guys but not the other variety and had to ask. Apparently guys are typically dressed in jeans and T-shirts (a new term to me) and the attitude that went with that sort of attire. Ghoonks are bespectacled bookworms having no interest in anything else and had to be helped out in social occasions like Hall Days (another new term to me). Ghoonks were probably akin to what nowadays are called: "nerds"

It was received wisdom that the B C Roy Gold Medal went to a guy while the PGM went to a ghoonk. There were of course a couple of "schizo-cases" when both were bagged by the same guy (ghoonk). They were exceptions rather than the rule. I taught one of them in his First Year (Siddharth Chatterjee) and it was a pleasure.

Any "funda" on the etymology of "ghoonk"? Is it a corruption of "goon"?

One day I was bewildered to hear someone speak of a Professor as DOSA. The only dosa I knew being the South Indian hot-cake. I was told it was the abbreviation of the newly created Dean of Students Affairs.

My son taught me what a SODA is. I thought of the welcome dilution drink, but he said it referred to the: "Son of DOSA"

During the 1960s there were very few diversions for the students and so they used to attend their classes. And when they didn't like their Teacher, they didn't "mass-cut" but made the Teacher miserable by catcalls, whistles, jumping on benches and booing; especially if they were Second Years...a notoriously rowdy crowd...just out of the first Year "OP" and on the right end now.

Later on, into the 1980s, there were no "mass-cuts" but "solo-cuts"...I guess the culture changed dramatically with the invention of "segregation" of the freshers. I am sure Arjun Malhotra and his incoming batchmates of 1965 would have been scandalized by this notion of segregation...I do not know if it served the intended purpose but surely they lost one year of residing in the same Hall right from the start...perhaps the "Hall Tempo" was that much diluted...but no!...there were street fights with hockey sticks as recently as 2001 over which tree belonged to which Hall during Gymkhana Elections (Saswat! Ask your junior Columbia KGPian {;-} privately).

There were also a couple of abiding nicknames for teachers:

Chota-Mota...no one knew his real name...

Bomchat (of chemistry) was the younger brother of our Ram-da (physics). He had a booming voice and was universally liked by First Years as the Best Chemistry Teacher...Dharam Vir mentioned him in his Tribune article:

http://www.tribuneindia.com/2003/20030322/windows/main3.htm

O tempora! O mores!!


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