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Going down the memory lane to see what I did at college makes me laugh, smile and cry. I started our journey with dreams of becoming a Chemical engineer and make it big in the Gulf. There seemed to seven other guys with similar dreams joining the journey with me. As every journey has its own twists and turns, ours too had many. Did we complete the journey? What happened after the journey?
Here it is…..
1. I was proud to be a part of a gang of chemical engineers (8 of us) and we called the gang the Royal Chemical Ruffians
. I still don’t remember who coined up this name. But in a way, it was really fun and cool. (Looking back at the words cool and uncool now, makes me laugh 
).
2. The first thing we did in the first day of every academic year was to carve this beautiful gang name in the benches we occupied. We thought that we were always privileged to occupy the last benches and as no one dared to question us. But the truth was that no one in the class never bothered about the last bench.
3. We used to pee on all the walls we found in and around college campus. There was a silly Atlas competition
while peeing. The competition was to draw maps of all continents and countries on the walls (while peeing) and rating whose map was the best.
4. We used to love the same girl and there was a unsaid agreement that the others will leave if any one of us gets going with the girl. The second thing never happened (I thought Cupid loved Chemistry and chemical engineers) and we vowed to concentrate hard in studies.
5. All our study holidays were filled with sessions of playing The Rummy
, the most popular card game of our times. On the day of the exam, one among us who had studied for couple of hours straight together (!@$#%%) became the hero and made the rest believe that exams can be cleared if we studied what he said.
6. On the day of results, one who cleared all the subjects becomes the villain of the gang. He becomes friends with others after spending Rs.20 for Tea, Bajji, Samosa, Cigarettes in the adjacent tea shop in the name of Treat
.
7. Unsaid rules
a. Bunk the class as a bunch.
b. No one does the assignment or submits the lab records in time.
c. No one clears a paper which others have failed to clear.
d. Everyone watches the movie together.
If someone evades these rules, he becomes a traitor and needs to buy others a Treat to become friends again.
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8. We laughed for all little gestures and cracked jokes to disturb the class. If someone outside the group cracked a joke, we looked at each other and decided whether to laugh or not.
9. All our economics classes were filled with last bench sessions on how to go to Dubai and become a millionaire. We thought every chemical engineer in the planet will land up in Dubai by default. No one ever told us about the grades though. 
10. The lab sessions were filled with Dumbcharades and Antaksharis. We used to mingle around with others in the class as these games needed more people. We were always the winners as we were up to date with all the old and new movies, songs etc; The fruits or the pazhams (the ones who study well in the class) used to wonder on the knowledge we possessed on the movies and songs. !!@#$!!
11. We made a point to be present on all college Annual days with balloons tied in heads, playing drums, whistle etc; All in our gang were good at Dappankuththu
and one was really good at playing oththai adi
with drums. None of us took liquor during Annual day as the college management used to take strict actions agains students who did that. Instead, we enjoyed much by dancing in front of all the lecturers and cornering them on the labs and respective departments. We always knew that this will have a great impact on our lab and project work grades. But we never bothered to care much about those as bothering much was uncool.
12. Never cared about exams till they arrived and never had exam fears as one needs to go through a dozen exams per semester to get a engineering degree. All our weekly cycle test notebooks were empty all the time as we thought it was uncool to take up those weekly tests. At times, bunked those tests and went to movies.
13. The lecturers and Heads who asked questions seemed lunatics to us and were our first enemies. When questioned about the number of arrears we had, we lamented that theoritical knowledge is never gonna land us up in good jobs and only learning the concepts mattered more. We never were good in concepts. No one knew this because we never wrote any tests or absconded from question and answer sessions.
14. The adjacent tea shop owner bacame our instant friend when he agreed to give us tea, eateries and stuff on credit. We used to settle accounts at the end of every semester and we spent a lot of bunked days in tea shop reading the local dailies. Politics and Cinema news were the only topics that divided us.
15. Our post lunch session games in class were duet singing, Raja – Raani (all Chennai college and school students will know this game) etc;
After all these things for four years I never believed that everyone from our gang completed the journey on time and passed out as a chemical engineer. It is difficult now to get in touch again with everyone and only the memories like these bind us together. All these trivial and silly things taught me more about life and people. Now looking back on those mistakes, I feel that I never learnt anything related to chemical engineering.
Then why is this post titled Proud to be a Chemical Engineer
. Beacuse it is uncool to degrade the degree one studied.
P.S. :- One of our friends from the gang is in Gulf now and we hope he will make it big as a chemical engineer. 
Here is the transcript of my conversation with him. The original conversation was in Tamil.
