Chitradeep seemed rather tensed as he walked into class that day. He is usually a very cheerful person, to the point of being annoyingly cheerful, so if he was feeling down, it usually meant something was wrong. He came down and sat next to me. It was still the first class of the morning, and the teacher had not walked in to the classroom yet.

Chitradeep: “Man, aren’t you nervous?”
Me: “No, not really. Should I be nervous?”
Chitradeep: “Yeah, the results are going to be put up on the notice board today.”

I’ve never seen Chitradeep nervous of results before. He’s a really smart guy in an unconventional sort of way, and has always managed to keep his head well above the water of the academic ocean, and as far as I know, he’s never drowned in it before.

Me: “Don’t worry man, you’ll pass.”
Chitradeep: “I’m afraid I might have made a miscalculation. And that miscalculation is going to cost me my 75%.”
Me: “You’re going to flunk the whole exam because of ONE miscalculation? Dude! Did you write the same answer for all the questions?”
Chirtadeep: “Exam? I’m talking about the attendance man! They’re going to put up the yearly attendance aggregates today. If you haven’t attended 75% of the classes, you’re going to FAIL THE YEAR!”

Holy crap! Attendance. I hadn’t thought about that. In many aspects, attendance was more important than the marks of the final exam. The final exam marks would help us get a good education in the future or some vague thing like that, but attendance could fail us NOW! Besides, calculating attendance percentages, and making them right out to 75% was a skill we proudly claimed we had. Besides, calculating attendances was a mathematically intensive operation. Formally, it can be stated as the following problem:

“Under various external constraints like playing snooker 2 times a week, going out to birthday treat-lunches and watching movies first-day-first show, optimize the number of classes needed to be attended in every subject so that the percentage of classes attended is as close to 75% as possible. This is also a dynamic system, subject to externalities such as proxies, profs-not-showing-up and mass bunks.”

This kind of optimization is called “Operations Research (OR)” these days, but I’m pretty sure the techniques were invented by college students looking to maximize the classes they could bunk without getting into trouble.

Anyway, the prospect that we had an attendance shortage scared the crap out of me. A shortage meant severe implications, socially and academically. From the college’s perspective, if we had less than 75% attendance, we were required to pay a fine, a rather hefty one, to get the exam hall ticket. That was the best case scenario. The worst case, of course, was that the principal would invite our parents over for tea and ask them to explain their son’s apparently inexplicable lack of interest in academic life. Inexplicable, that is, to the principal, not to our parents, who were already suspicious that something fishy was going on. If news reached our parents that we were loafing around instead of attending college, it meant dramatic cuts in pocket money.

The social implications were even worse. The attendance percentage was somewhat of a status symbol in our college. On one end were the 99% attendance students, the nerds and social outcasts, and the other end were the below-75% folks that were so incompetent that they couldn’t even plan their attendance properly. The golden number was 75% – The person with that kind of attendance was THE popular kid in college. He got the respect of everyone – from the chics to the local bhel-puri guy.

And so, because of the high stakes involved, I was very nervous. I’d appointed Chitradeep has my “Chief Attendance Officer” (CAO) for this year, meaning he was taking care of all my attendance requirements. If he had made a miscalculation, it also meant that I was in trouble. We waited (and prayed) desperately, and as soon as the class got over, we rushed over to the notice board. By the time we got there, there was already a very large crowd there. People went in, saw their attendance and returned pleased. Conversations were generally cheerful:

Dude #1: “How much did you get, man?”
Dude #2: “75.45%. You?”
Dude #1: “Congratulations, man. I got 75.21%.”
Dude #2: “Arree wah! Party! Party!”

But I had a bad feeling going in. My sub conscience could sense that something was wrong. And sure, enough, proudly standing on the list, was my name and Chitrdeep Chetty’s highlighted in Red!

02 - Aditya Kulkarni   - Maths - 75.5% Physics - 75.11% Chemistry - 75.21%
   - Computer Science 74.1%

14 - Chitradeep Chetty  - Maths - 75.2% Physics - 75.57% Chemistry - 75.62%
   - Computer Science 74.1%

I felt like I was watching Devdas again – That inevitable sinking feeling of doom. Oh, it was unmistakable. My whole life suddenly flashed by me, including the Computer Science classes, which I had so badly flunked in! This was the end…

[Update: Part 2 is here]

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