The two weeks following Goonj has had many ups and downs. The end of Goonj meant the beginning of studies and back to a normal student life. Our first sessional exams took place the very next week. Our subjects in this semester are extremely tough and we anticipated a very difficult sessional (although we were not prepared for it), but to our relief the questionnaires were pretty simple. The evening of the final sessional a live concert of one of my favorite bands took place. Jal & Aryans live at Leisure Valley. Obviously Jal is one of my favorite bands. I had already purchased general tickets of the concert two days in advance. Some of my other friends who were as enthusiastic as me had also purchased their tickets beforehand. Everyone in the crowd was there to listen to Jal. Although Jal was supposed to perform before Aryans, this order was reversed at the very last moment as the whole audience was interested only in Jal. This step was taken in order to hold the crowd till the very end of the show (same reason as to why we held the important competitions just before the prize distribution ceremony in Exun). The performance by Aryans was pathetic. This was the first time I saw a professional band being booed out of the concert. They had to make way for Jal, all embarrassed and humiliated. The band of Jal was excellent. Their drummer, guitarist and the vocalist, all of them were excellent in their respective fields. The section closest to the stage was VIP section, followed by the guest section and finally the general section. Each of the sections was separated by chest-high steel barriers. Only the first two sections had seating arrangement. As soon as Jal started their performance, many people started jumping over the barriers and had to be controlled by the policemen put on duty. Also all the audience in the guest section stood up on their chairs and cheered the band. We decided not to jump over and stay back as there were lots of us in a group. The band played almost all my favorites except one. We all had an excellent time at the show, most of us were dancing, head-banging and enjoying as much as we can. But the entire crowd in the guest section remained standing still on the chair, apparently most of them did not know about the other hits of Jal apart from Lamhay and Aadat. They also played a song from one of their upcoming albums. Paying Rs.100/- for a concert of this kind was more that worth it.
The final jam session of Jal and Aryans was very good and it was a truly entertaining night.

The following night about 5 of us went out for dinner. We decided to try out the new Yo China! that had opened up in Chandigarh. That was the first time so many of us were going out on a proper pre-planned dinner at a multi-chain outlet. Unfortunately this Yo China! is a franchisee and its menu is quite different from the ones offered at Delhi. Obviously where-ever we go as a group we do things that people normally won’t do. That is the advantage you have as a college student. I still remember the day when we went to a Chinese restaurant ‘The Dragon Chinese’ at sec-15, we all occupied seats, drank water, looked at the menu which appeared to be costly and then simply walk out. But this time we had to eat. The meal was excellent not because the food was tasty, but because we made it even more enjoyable. We had ordered dim sums and in Yo China! they are served in cane basket-like containers (I don’t know what it is called). One of my friends started asked them if we could take them home. This conversation with the waiter extended very long and the subject changed to the no of things we can do with the basket. The only thing that they could do with it was serve momos, but we insisted that we could put it to a better use by growing plants in it or to store things etc etc. This was followed by demanding more and more dim sum sauce which tasted extremely good along with the momos. Finally we decided to carry tiffin boxes the next time to take dim sum sauce back home. Another friend of mine started eating the cabbage used for decoration of the dim sums. In fact he ate each piece of cabbage he could extract out of the container. He even used a knife kept in the spoon-stand of our table to scratch out some burnt pieces of the cabbage and then replaced it back in the same stand along with the fresh cutlery. Finally he returned the basket with few microscopic pieces of cabbage and apologized for not being able to finish it. As we were about to end our meal, we made a plan to escape the restaurant without paying for the food. One by one we would walk up to the gate and run out and away from the restaurant as fast as we could and not turn back at all. This whole conversation was done pretty loudly in order to humor ourselves. Finally after paying the bill we demanded for Sauf & Chini as mouth refreshment. But the manager apologized and explained that they do not have that as it was a Chinese Restaurant. We asked them whether Chinese people have Sauf or not. He had no answer to that question. Just a smile. In our language we call such acts “Chod Machana”.

The sessional exams were followed by two working days and then three holidays. Most of the hostellers use such short holidays to go home and so they even bunk the two working days and enjoy a nice long 5 day break. On the other hand the students who are left behind, both hostellers and day scholars use the fact that most of the hostellers are at home and they go on a mass bunk. The same thing happened this weekend. By Friday morning every friend of mine living in my hostel went back home. Two others did not go back home but spent most of their time with their local friends. I was left all alone. But thankfully I did not get bored because of PecFest. PecFest is the college fest of Punjab Engineering College. I spent most of my time there, but hardly participated in any event as I did not have any one else to form a team. Their fest was pretty good. They have more sponsorship but I have no idea where all their sponsorship money has gone, as there was nothing extraordinary there. Apart from the star-nite, the other two nights were not at all entertaining. Goonj was a lot better in this regard. There were only two things that I liked in PecFest- The Quiz and The Star-nite. The quiz was conducted by a professional quizmaster. He had a huge database of questions in his mind. It seemed that he was plucking questions straight out of thin air. Two of the rounds were extremely interesting. In one of them he gave out newspapers to each of the teams and asked them to choose a page of their choice. He will then look at the page for about half a minute and then make a question out of the contents of the page. The answers will also be there in the page itself. A very good and innovative round but only one team was able to answer their question. In another round he gave each of the teams to choose any state of India and a corresponding topic on which he would ask a question. I must say that the performance of this quizmaster was the best I have ever seen till now. Euphoria was invited to perform on star-nite. Initially I was all alone, but soon I found some of my friends out there. The performance of this band was superb, far superlative than most other bands I had seen. Dr Palash Sen the lead singer of this band sang some of the famous Hindi and English numbers and obviously all the famous Euphoria tracks. The most important part of his performance was his interaction with the crowd. He has a knack of involving people in his music. Definitely PecFest ended with a bang and so did my days of loneliness as all the hostellers returned back the next day. Back for another session of fun, masti and Chod Machana.