Nishant(h) Betgeri TM

My earliest memory of Nishant is from Chemistry laboratory class during the first year of engineering involving a particularly large jar of HCL and a rather tiny test tube. Apparently it was fashionable to use HCL in whatever experiment it was that you were performing because all bottles were soon depleted owing to which the prof. in charge instructed Mr. Nishant Betgeri to go to the adjoining room to get a refill. Nishant picks up a tiny test tube(a really tiny one mind you) and returns with the largest bell jar you would have ever seen (filled to the brim with HCL) and then attempts to pour the contents of the bell jar into the teeny little test tube, much to the prof’s chagrin. All that the prof. could do was throw his hands up in the air and sigh – “Yellinda barthare !”. That’s when we all knew that we’d be seeing a lot more of this ‘graying’ zit faced little kid in the days and months to come.

Nishanth … oops … Nishant has had to live with the fact that no matter how many times he told the folks at the college office, they’d never get his name right on his mark sheets. This led him to contemplate the decision once, to change his name to ‘Nishanth’ to match his mark sheets (a more cost effective and less tedious alternative).

The only person in college who used to start studying for an exam after even yours truly did, was Mr. Nishant Betgeri. People have often wondered how this dude could manage to pull off the amazing feat of studying for an engineering paper in a mere 6 hours. It all came to light only a couple of terms into the course, when somebody saw his hands before he entered the exam hall. I swear to God, the dude had managed to micro-scribe the entire contents of ‘Microprocessors’ by Brey on his left hand with select programming examples on his right hand.

A slightly more hilarious incident concerns the C programming lab paper. Our lad got the ‘check if a given string is a palindrome’ program. Easy one right? Not for Mr. Betgeri who had failed to micro-scribe this one program on some body part. So he gets the code written by a neighbour and even manages to key it in without getting caught. He then ‘summons’ the prof to his seat and proudly shows his program off. His joy is short lived though, as most of you who have taken computer lab exams before would guess. He was asked by the prof to demonstrate his program by keying in a palindrome on execution of the code. The source code compiles without a glitch. He executes the program and when he’s prompted to enter a palindrome, our lad enters ‘4’. Obviously, having heard the word palindrome for the first time in his life that day, the bloke hadn’t the foggiest about what to do and it’s a good thing somebody caught the prof. as she swooned and fell to the ground fainting in disgust.

Nishant telling a joke would always be something that drew large crowds. It’s not the jokes themselves but his technique or rather the lack of It that made him our favourite comedian (clown). He’d somehow manage to grab our attention, build suspense and just as the joke was drawing near its conclusion and the atmosphere was palpably tense in anticipation of the final punch, Nishant would forget how the joke ended but have the crowd in a split anyway … sigh ...

He was one of the first of in our motley crew to buy a bike and I could partially attribute my being stuck with a Splendor for the duration of my Engineering degree to him. My Mom: “Nishant is such a nice boy (wonder where she gets these ideas) and even he has a four stroke bike”. Well, one had to see it to believe the ridiculous mileage the dude could squeeze out of his bike. Far off from the ‘under ideal test conditions’ mileage that the company promised, Nishant normally rode with a thin layer of petrol in his fuel tank and knew how to make even that last (ride at 45 kmph even if there’s a killer T-Rex chasing you and act like the energy crisis is going to blow out of control in a day or two). I’ll also never forget the time we’re trying to save Sharath’s posterior by calling his dad and telling him that we were seniors who planted the porn cd in his bag as part of our ragging him. On being asked who and what his dad was, Nishant ever the quick witted one, says – “My father’s name is Ram Gopal Verma and he’s a building contractor”. Nice thinking buddy. Wonder why Sharath’s dad didn’t buy any of it …

Come third semester and our young lad finally becomes a man and falls hopelessly in love and his idea of impressing his love interest is to learn her mother tongue. Then begins the most hilarious time for most of us in college when Nishant would try to learn Marathi from any arbit person who’d even had his flight stop over at Bombay for a couple of hours on a multi-hop route. He walks over to Ulu and innocently enquires “kasa kai?” to which Ulu replies – “Hoga lo, Innu mensin kai season agglilla … bandhidhane !!”

All these anecdotes aside, Nishant’s been a best friend and a brother (literally … my mom used to treat this bunch of dudes from college like her own sons and kick her own son’s ass all the time) and one of the nicest, humblest and most decent people I’ve ever known. His determination knows no bounds for once he sets his sight on something he’ll strive till he gets whatever it is that he aimed for and so he was also inspiring company to ‘work’ with during our preparation for CAT at career forum. Well, an account of those days could fill an entire book by itself. Nishant was also part of my engineering project group, one of the four stooges who a did a project for a CSIR sitting at Manipal Hospital’s canteen. There’s actually an aircraft flying in Indian skies today with the code we wrote ‘running’ on board! I think we even might have included Nishant’s palindrome code just for kicks ... :)

How is it buddy, that the two of us who hated studying the most finally were the only ones who ended up doing a post graduation in business administration? Wonders will never cease to happen, I guess …

Rock on bro … really miss you …