Entering Kharagpur...

The next morning, I was disturbed by the snores of my co-passenger who had boarded the train close to midnight, at Vizag. I woke up and he followed me very shortly. Deep down in my heart, I cursed him for having woken me up so early. Talking to him, I learnt that he stayed in Kolkata and had been to Vizag on an official errand. He asked me about my work experience. I said that we manufactured valves. Snap came the question from the Bengali, “ Oh! ‘Balbes’ !!” I felt like laughing my wits out, but diverted the topic and showed some decency for the first time in life.
The train crawled into the Kharagpur station, which boasts of being home to the longest railway platform in the world – a massive 1072.5m in length. I thought that the place had been deprived of another credit – the most malodorous station in the world. I took an autorickshaw to the institute. Again, here was an engineering marvel – an automobile chassis with a body held together by not more than two pairs of rivets. The ride in that vehicle reminded me of a fun ride in a good theme park. The jolting was so high that for sometime, I thought it was an earthquake simulator. The roads of that place have no dividing line, neither does the traffic. There are no cops and no signals. No proper hospitals to attend to the sick either. I spotted only a couple of pubs and a few other shops selling liquor, besides some paan shops and tea and snack bars.
I had entered the IIT campus. The very feeling that I was inside a premier institute in the country nullified all my bad experiences during the travel. The campus was entirely different from its ambience. There were huge buildings, neatly laid roads, well maintained stadia, lush green trees on either side of the roads and what not. It seemed to me like I had entered an oasis in a desert. Here started my real journey...