The Paaaaarrttyyy

The entire auditorium was full of people talking at various decibel levels. I had a déjà vu moment taking in the scenario-ah... it’s just like how they show on TV, the LokSabha TV that is. Everyone was talking & no one was listening, the CR’s were fighting over the mike & trying to calm down the MCA-BCA crowd. Surprising how these very students showed no signs of life or consciousness in the DBMS or Networking class! Why there even broke out a fight between 2 guys…with the age-old Bihari-Bengali enmity. I was left wondering… isn’t this Odisha dude? The Odia crowd was busy gossiping in some corner oblivious to their surroundings. Everything calmed down with the appearance of the Dean & Asst.Dean at the scene. This was day1 of our freshers’ party meeting!

Due to last year’s tiff between the juniors & seniors( we being the juniors who’d missed out freshers’ party), it’d been decided by the powers that be-no interaction with juniors! I mean we couldn’t even go invite them for the party let alone have any games/competitions planned for them. That was what created the ruckus in the audi that day. We girls were dying for an opportunity to dress up & show off while the guys were dying to ‘interact’ with the apparently prettier ladies on the 2^nd floor. With the interference of the Dean, everything was settled in a minute-yes there will be a party with everything being approved by the faculty before being implemented. This rule made things rather difficult for us. Example: a question on the bio form for the juniors read: Who is your latest crush?- a rather lame slambook style question that was met with a raised eyebrow & a smirk by a teacher.

I was one of the poor souls given the task of preparing 150 puzzles/silly questions that the juniors would be answering on stage during intro. But imagine my plight when questions like-“what does a woman wear under a saree? “ were suggested to me. (The answer by the way is sandals, bless your dirty mind!) And then came the anchoring part. Now this is one thing that creates maximum excitement. I mean who’d notice if you slog hard making posters all night? On stage even if you are making a perfect fool of yourself was the place to be. I’d already had my dreams of anchoring built months before the juniors even stepped into the college. But there were surprisingly 20+ students more than happy to share the stage. Our CR pulled a leaf out of politicians’ please-all book & so we had 6 pairs of anchors for the 5 hour show!

The theme was another point to be mulled over. I suggested the easiest to decorate-Halloween theme. It was vetoed by the supreme power. Reason? Oh well, its September lady, there’s no Halloween in September! Yeah okay so let’s have a monsoon theme instead, the kids can bring along umbrellas too!

The D-day arrived & our guests of honour too arrived fashionably late. This gave me time to practise with my co-anchor again changing my script innumerable times until I actually threw it away & decided to go impromptu. All went well thankfully & my batch mates even managed to scare a junior into proposing to me onstage with a rose! We even had our college band play songs, one of them being Sutta! But what stood out most was the willingness of our juniors to be ragged. Maybe they had lost their minds given the strict security to the first-years, but almost everyone was more than willing to dance/sing on stage. Even girls!

Last heard the teachers were all praising our batch for the wonderful preparations. Meanwhile all of us were fuming over the faculty involvement which made it appear more like a graduation ceremony than a fun filled freshers’ party. Still.. as they say, something is better than nothing!