How I Met Your College: Laptops

Kids, the first few days of your college life will be perhaps the memorable ones.. Dealing with over-excited roommates( “roomies 4eva!”), sleeping in class and forgetting to answer attendance, cursing FC food and eating out with your new(read: wealthy) friends, late night talks and stupidity, et cetera fun things. I still remember the independence day parade inside our hostels, going around shouting things like “tum mujhe wifi do main tumhe azadi dunga” Man, those few days were perhaps the best ones ever.

But all of these are, unfortunately, temporary activities that will end when that someone special walks into your life. They’ll be like a plague, eating all your group activities out from the inside, directing all your attention to them and them only.

I’m talking, of course, about laptops.

You could perhaps mount a resistance, or shake people to raise them from the stupor; but alas, an engineer’s entire life revolves around his laptops. One can never hope to conquer Charlie Sheen at his prime, or put a bullet into Counterstrike. Once you get your laptop around the month of september (hopefully before your sessionals, or you shall not pass!) and a stable net connection (looks at ion and cries internally) nothing else will really matter. There is a calm serenity in succumbing to the virus, to be seduced by the allure of your friend’s hard-drive.

First and foremost, Gaming. In college, there’s nothing better than ending the day with an hour of CS or FIFA. Just had a bad break-up? Shout “plot twist” and pick up that controller. Got screwed over in the sessionals? Allow a DOTA 2 marathon to soothe your nerves. It’s as therapeutic as having a long conversation with your best friend. Perhaps even more.

The next most important use, is of course, actually studying. The night before your exam won’t be spent poring over your textbooks (if you bought any) or notes taken in class (what notes?). It will be spent on your laptop, poring over presentation slides and lecture notes while trying to ignore the lure of Dota. Though taking notes in class is the best way to prepare for exams, there shall be times when your need for sleep (undercover, of course) outweighs that zeal, so it comes very handy to know which professor is going to give you the slides, and which isn’t.

Your parents will also be ecstatic when you get your laptop. Now, their precious Raja beta can Skype with them! The Skype sessions usually start off with your parents pointing the webcam at everything but themselves and complaining that it’s not working and end with iON disconnecting you just as you’ve managed to get everything in place. If a Skype session does start without technical glitches, expect it to be interrupted by your roommate(s) saying or doing something inappropriate (“hey bro, pass me the daaru” “darling, come back to bed!”) . A fuming you will then be interrogated by your parents afterwards (over the old-fashioned, voice only, phone call) about the same inappropriateness.

There are various other uses too, like shopping online for those glorious laptop covers that we all love, or using photoshop to put your friend’s face on a bikini-clad wonder, etc etc. I could go on at length about the different needs of writers, designers and programmers, but that’s beside the point.

Truth is, we all know there’s only one thing we regularly use our laptops for. Or even ion, in that sense. And of that, we shall neither speak, nor give direction. Not that any of you need it.

Co-authored by: Shriya Atmakuri