DMAIC

hile news about my sexual preference was spreading in Auntydom, word about our hoodies and tees was also spreading like wildfire. Cottonians had started calling us from everywhere asking us where they could buy our products from. Purshottam was going to take at least a month to finish up the order and therefore we couldn’t take any new orders. But we knew that the idea had definitely hit. Now, we had to really get our website going and try and add as many schools to our list as possible.

In every city you have two rival schools or colleges just like Oxford and Cambridge, Harvard and Yale, Hindu and St. Stephens, and many more. In Bangalore, it’s Bishop Cotton and St. Joseph’s. The two have been the oldest and the best schools in this country for a long time and they have always had a love-hate relationship. The rivalry between the Cottonians and Josephites gets particularly intense during the Cottonian Shield which is an annual cricket tournament organized by Cotton and the matches are played the same fervour as an Indo-Pak cricket match. More often than not, the matches end in a fight.

Some of my really close friends are Josephites and when they came to know about the Cottonian stuff, they just had one question.‘Dude, where are the hoodies for the Josephites?’ We knew, if we had done this for the Cottonians, we had to do this for the Josephites as well. Luckily for us, the Josephites were having their Old Boys’ day a month later so it was perfect timing.

We repeated our ritual again and got some Josephite samples made. Then, as before, we met the principal of St. Joseph’s and showed him the samples and told him about the company. With his blessings and with permission from the OBA (St. Joseph’s Old Boys’

Association) we were now ready for our second event in less than a month. This time around we pre-ordered the ready hoodies and tees from our manufacturer, Purshottam, to the tune of five hundred pieces each.

He was getting more impressed with us by the day. Not only had we lived up to our promise and placed a huge order for Bishop Cotton, we were now ready with the second school too. In fact, he was so happy that he agreed to give us a credit line. This meant we could now take forty-five days to pay him, which was a lot, and that really helped us later on. We were expanding. Slowly, yet surely.

My mum was still completely unaware of what was going on. Had she found out at that time, that would have been the last we heard of Alma Mater. I was still due to see the counsellor very soon and Anu Aunty was still scheming with Biju Uncle to get me a job. Mom kept dumping more work on me. But the toughest job was that of cleaning up

my room. There are two things you should never do—ask a girl her age and ask a guy to clean his room. However, I was left with little choice because if I didn’t do this, then I would have to buy frickin’ groceries.

Now cleaning a room that hasn’t been touched for years was a monumental task. I couldn’t even figure out where to start. I opened my old dusty cupboard and empty packets of Phantom cigarettes fell out. The strangest thing was that my long-forgotten cupboard kept yielding one memory after another. I ran into a lot of my stuff from school that had got lost in the decade gone by. I started thinking of all those wonderful days.

And that is when it hit me. That is what Alma Mater was about! It was about bringing those good ol’ days back. It was about taking you down that memory lane that leads to the wonderful times of school and college.

I still remember how Y2K was all the rage then. Only a handful of us had computers, yet everyone was worried how the virus would affect the machines. Nostradamus had apparently predicted that the world would end; but thankfully neither did Y2K cause a stir nor was Nostradamus right. (Thank god for that).

We didn’t have Facebook then but we did have ICQ. One line none of us from that

‘era’ can ever forget is ‘ASL (age/sex/location) please,’ when meeting someone new on ICQ. We had atrociously funny-sounding email ids—[email protected], [email protected] and the like and even funnier names in the ‘chat rooms’. You couldn’t Google but had to go to altavista.com or approach Mr Jeeves for any queries and clarifications.

You still had to call a girl on her landline and muster all the courage to ask for her.

The only place you could hang out at was Wimpy’s or McD and one still stayed away from the solitary Coffee Day on Brigade Road. Galaxy was where all the movies played and one had to stand in a long queue to buy tickets for Mission Impossible 2.

TV still played The Wonder Years and The Crystal Maze and the world seemed far smarter minus the Saas-Bahu soaps and the reality shows.

You could still find the time to read a book in the evenings and play cricket in your

‘gully’ on Sundays. ‘Canada Dry’ was the only source to get high and sweet, candy cigarettes were puffed at most of the times.

VSNL ensured porn still loaded one byte at a time and VCDs were all the rage. Hulk Hogan was perpetually rank one on all the ‘ Trump Cards’ and Cameron Diaz from The Mask was in every puberty-hitting youngsters’ dreams. The only operating system we knew of was Windows 98.

Anyone with a printer was treated with respect and the World Book Encyclopedia was the only source of information for projects. Hero Pen with the original Chinese nib was still preferred over the brash new ‘Pilot’ pen.

Azharuddin was still our captain and Jadeja and Robin Singh were our pinch hitters.

Venkatesh Prasad was the only one with the balls to mess with the Pakis and we still lost all the test matches.

And I definitely cannot miss out wearing a ‘colour’ dress to school on your birthday and distributing Eclairs to everyone.

I could go on and on. But I guess you get the drift.

As I cleaned my room, I ran into my long forgotten collection of Tinkle. Gosh, how I

used to love those comics.

I distinctively remember the first time I was ever caught by a teacher in class. She caught me because I wasn’t looking at the blackboard. I was looking down. This was in the first standard. I was caught because I was reading a Tinkle.

I guess some of us might hate to admit it now but every one of us have read a Tinkle at some point or the other in our childhood. Even though it would be really un-cool to talk about ‘Suppandi’ now, he was the coolest character we knew in junior school.

Before there was cartoon network, before Swat Cats took over, there was Uncle Scrooge on Doordarshan and there was Tinkle.

I remember how summer holidays would be the time when mum would pack us all in a train and take us to visit granny far, far away. The best part would be the train journey where one would spend hours reading Tinkle and waiting excitedly for the next big station to buy the latest series of the same. You’d be lost in the magical world of Suppandi, Kalia the Crow, Shikari Shambu and Tantri the Mantri.

I guess Tinkle comics have long been forgotten but they will always remain with us in our memories and will always remind us of times when things were simpler, when Bangalore was greener, when one would get up at 7a.m. on Sundays to catch Talespin on DD, when Phantom cigarettes ruled and chakra was more than just wheels. When we wouldn’t worry about deadlines, meetings, Facebook and everything else that our lives have become today. We would only worry about when the next Tinkle comic would be out. Sadly, Uncle Pai, the creator of the series passed away recently. RIP Uncle Pai and thanks for the memories. We owe you way more than one.

So you see, Alma Mater was not just about starting another company. It was about starting a whole new subculture. Of making you feel like you were in school or college again—that wonderfully delicious feeling.

... I Love you Rachu ...

Dear Frnds pls spread this msg until its reach to my rachu I thinks see knows my name

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