College and Fraandship..

So, what was the first thing you noticed when you entered college? To me, it has to be the underground concept of trading a girl's phone number.

In the very 1st day of college, every fresher needs to have a new cellphone number - Airtel, Aircel, Vodafone, Idea making the most here, in VIT. And somehow along those process, the number, exclusively that of the girl's, always get transferred to the most comical people I've ever spoken to, or heard of, in my life.

Its been four years now, but girls from my class still get messages and phone calls from pure idiots. Today evening, I called Arpita to come to the lab, to continue with our project, and a weird grainy male voice answered back..

'Alla?' and that was supposed to be a 'Hello?'

After I recovered from the initial shock, 'Hello, umm.. Arpita's there?'

'Who is this?' in a v. threatening manner.

'Umm.. I would be Deep?' name sounds familiar? You don't, however, sound familiar to me at all!

Thankfully then, the typically feminine and saccharine-voice answered back, 'Yes Deep! I'll be there in a jiff!' ..and she hung up quick, after the brief show of courtesy and grace.. (she was with her boyfriend, spending time on the phone was not much of an option..)

I was, however, still recoiled at the thought of her producing that grainy male voice. It almost felt as if I'm talking to some serial-murderer, trying to reason the release of my friend Arpita from his evil yellow clutches.. It was quite a feat.. I was reminded, for a quick while, of Nancy Cartwright, the 'girl' who lends voice to the 'boy' character from The Simpsons - Bart Simpson. (I remember random facts, an old side-effect of being a quizzer! Bear with me..)

Arpita later explained, that she didn't have my number and thus thought this might be another pervert calling to 'do fraandship' and hence the weird (but innovative!) precaution.. Doing fraandship took me back to my first year days, the fun days.. (and then came the lack of enough Credits!)

I surprised myself with the kind of aptitude I developed in college for learning all the most nasty, filthy and lousy words in the process of fending off possible eve-teasers and molesters.. The girls used to pass numbers to us, 'This fellow calls me at 3 in the night and wants to talk to me!' And we would use all our verbal forces of pure filth to get that guy to stop calling. It was almost like a social service..

This went on for quite a few days and that's how I know all the 'bad words' I could use now. It was good exercise, really..

My friends say I have the Martyr's Syndrome, but I think it's my name - Deeptiman (which becomes Deep-the-Man! or even Deepti-Man or again, Deepti-ka-Man!) that, I guess, plays the main factor for me to get calls from the same pure idiots.

Somehow, everyone thinks I'm a girl named Deepti. To them, the 'man' in my name is just as vestigial as is the human tail or my appendix.

I go online and find 8 new Friend Requests, all supposed hunks, looking for some fraandship to do, with me.. Then I used to get the 'Hello beautiful, I'm going to be your best friend!' messages. Once I got this amazingly weird message and fell off the bed laughing..

'Baby Doll, I want to meat you!'

HOW THE HELL WILL YOU 'MEAT' ME, PERV!! I perfected my foul-mouthing skills on that particular guy for the next 3 months.. It was so much fun, he became my best pen-fraand!