The Start

It all started 11 years ago - there were seven of us just out of school heading in different directions wanting to make the most of life struggling to find out what we wanted from life but all of us knew one thing - we all wanted to go on Roadtrip - a trip to anywhere - the destination didn't matter, it had to be a Roadtrip. The ideas started small - Jaipur, Jodhpur, Ahemdabad, Agra - cities within 4 -5 hours drive but that's all they remained ideas tossed around after basketball over a Pepsi at Nickys (a rather run down excuse for a cafeteria in the neighbourhood). We all started some sort of college in DU - most of us joined to bide time while we looked for a proffession to join at the earliest or as a stepping stone to a better institute and the stories changed to days in the college, the girls on the buses, the girls in college, the girls in the neighborhood, the girls on TV and the girls in our lives - basically the roadtrip was soon forgotten but ofcourse, "we'll do it next year". I was the first to leave, causing much heart ache at home I joined the Merchant Navy, actually how I joined is also rather amusing - Akhil's dad pointed out an advertisement in the paper and both of us applied after he made out our CVs, the calls duly cam for interviews but Akhil by then had decided to immerse himself into being a certified geek (a computer something of some sort) so I headed to Bombay alone more to see the city than to get selected as I had never seen Bombay. I was an arrogant kid and thought myself selected before I applied (till today I strive for that fearlessness but have failed to recapture it) anyway I did get selected and in the meantime I got a call to join the NDA (National Defense Academy) as well - I thought about it and then in true movie style tossed a coin - a normal person would probably use a better tool to decide his future but an arrogant 18 year old who thought he was god's gift to the people said,"heads it is" so I became the first one out of our "gang" of seven to leave Delhi for training. Robert in the meantime had gone way ahead of the rest of us - he used to spend his days hunting in forests around Lucknow and nights as a paying guest in a Girls Hostel - how he managed that I am not quite certain but it seemed very cool at the time but the "do something with your life" worm caught up with him as well and he too joined the Merchant Navy. Rohan and Vaibhav joined colleges in Delhi and Gurgaon but Abhishek followed his dreams - as always (till today) - and tried almost every proffession.
That leaves Cassy - he was teh dedicated one - he decided to drop a year to get into IIT and prepared for it in earnest.