One of the inevitable things for a girl in IT is having a banda as a lab partner, because unlike girls, they occur in copious quantities in IT. The comp'c department offered a wide range of those potential LPs. There were SHNs, UTPs, UBIs, NON-UBIs to choose from.

The first of my ordeals was with a guy who was determined to scale all heights but alas! he was already stepping into the 21^st century and I was a way behind i.e. I had just entered the comp'c department.

But soon enough the sets changed. Although he sad no close encounters with fundoo BMWs and pretty babes this guy does posses the talent for sentimental telephonic conversations. And despite being twice the bad luck, he wasn't unlucky after all, as I learnt a lot from him and it was a pleasure working with him.

Next semester when the MOON shone in the sky, my luck was eclipsed. This guy too taught me something - "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil."

When the MOON was on one side of the sky, the other side had the MILKY WAY. Beneath such a sky did I meet another of my LPs. A pensive man he is, with a philosophic frame of mind, who likes to meditate and contemplate, free from humanity's maddening human noise.

But there was something incomplete about this lab group, so there he was again, a re-entry in a line of almost half a dozen LPs :- He would visit the lab almost as frequently as the full moon visits the skies. The haste in his manner suggested as if he always had something more important to do. For example, there were drinks and girls all over Kashi and he had to track them down in just 2 more hours

I told u about the MOON and the MILKY WAY in the sky, but there were times when the sky was just a NOTHINGNESS. In those hours of Nothingness, I chose to remain alone. It was during the same time that I got the opportunity to work with the Beauty and the ...... Till this day I did not believed in MPDs but now I did. This night had been too long and the time had come for a sunrise. Thank god for small mercies, that I was given the chance to face the truth and this truth was most enlightening.

So, here I am in the last of 8 sems, but I will be leaving with a regret that I did not get an opportunity to work with a particular 2. The first of the 2 is a born rebel. If the world would be coming to an end in an hour, and the whole of mankind was going to be destroyed, you would probably find this friend of ours at Raman corner reading his horoscope for the next week, over a cup of tea. So guys, commonsense says - "Leave this 'kid' alone". And you know why I want him as an LP... because this guy is of the view that he would die of boredom if he has to talk to any girl for more than half an hour.

The other guy is a very gentle soul, even tempered and of good nature, the sort who never could, never would, let an insulting remark escape his lips. They say that company does play an important role to groom an individual. So, if this guy was my LP, my programs would have been conditioned to be slightly more well-behaved and thus show lesser errors. To give a clue about who this guy is, a few of the girls in GH think that this guy faintly resemble Omar Sharif.

Juanita Nidhindra