Sunday Evening at IIT

It's a moderate Sunday and I am trying to immerse myself into "Blue Horizon"(incidentally, the first novel I bought out of my own money) which I had already finished earlier. Out of the blue, my phone rings and it is nandhi. Surprised to see his name displayed on the caller ID. Atlast, my Airtel service has been properly restored! Nandhi says he's gonna meet dopan and asks if I would join too. I said I'd be glad to....coz I am desperately starved of friends!!
Dopan informed that he is at IIT attending "Shastra 2004". Myself and nandhi set off for IIT with the "unlicensed and uninsured" nandhi driving. Very surprised to see the "usually cluttered" madhya kailash junction being devoid of traffic on a Sunday afternoon.
The moment we entered IIT campus, the temperature visibly dropped 3-4 Celsius. To help matters, the roads were wet due to rain. Interestingly, there was no rain outside IIT campus as evidenced by dry roads. It was a very sylvan setting, with deers and lot of green shrubs and vegetation. Kinda like college, but with a lot more greenery. We met Dopan at the auditorium. There was a documentary on Prof. Feynman(A Nobel prize winner in Quantum Physics and one of the inventors of Atom bomb) running. It was very informative one. He gives few anecdotes that are witty and interesting coz it made a lot of sense. He keeps talking of his father's positive influence on his life.
At the end of Feynman's documentary, the the much-awaited quiz finals began. Surprised to see that even in the hallowed institute such as IITM, our guys don't keep their time. The programme finally took off, about 45mins behind schedule. There were about 8 teams, mostly from IITM, IIMB and one from Anna University. Surprised to see the quiz participants lying spreadeagled on the dais. No chairs, tables or anything. As expected from a technical institute, most of the questions were technical stuff....ranging from physics, chemistry etc. In the entire quiz, I knew answers only to 2 questions - one about FedEx and the other abt Google. The quiz programme seemed to go on endlessly. After 2 hours, we thought enough was enough and we needed a breath of fresh air. We hit the stalls to satiate our hunger. I don't know about Dopan, but myself and srini were really relieved to take this break. We discussed mundane matters, while we munched on the snacks.
I had reason to believe that the quiz programme would have ended, by the time we stepped in to the auditorium, a good 45 minutes since we left for the stalls. Alas, that was not to be! And we sat through the quiz programme for another 45 mins or so. It was not my day. I had high hopes of doing some bird-watching....thinking it would be something like the ex-Mardi Gras or Saarang(as it is called now). Unfortunately for me, it turned out to be a damp squib. Other than those in the trees, I could find absolutely no birds.
Finally, it was time to say good-bye to Dopan and his wife and in-laws(who had come to pick him up). I thought that was the end of our IIT experience. But, old Nandhi dog had more tricks up his sleeve... showing off his stunts with his bike, whenever we encountered the speed breakers(and believe it, there were a lot of them) The bike was flying in the air on these speed-breakers. On one of these speed breakers, I got a feeling that I was flying in the air....a.k.a Kate Winslett in the movie Titanic!!