From: paulchem@anchor.cs.colorado.edu (Paul C. Chemmanoor  )
Newsgroups: soc.culture.indian
Subject: Kaduk's Revenge -- [ Story ] -- Icarus.
Date: 22 Aug 92 08:26:30 GMT
Organization: University of Colorado, Boulder

1] A sketch of undergrad engg. college life.
  Comments by e-mail.

2] 

I first met Kaduk while I was walking down the college corridor trying
to keep my  mind on the answers I would give to the prof who checked
our homework, since I had none to show him, as usual.

Kaduk, was deep in conversation with his partner in crime, whom for want 
of a better name I will call Pepperoni, speaking in a rapid mixture of 
english, malayalam, kannada and hindi which in later years I would expand
to include such gems as 

Dichaque -- to spoil, to destroy, to emasculate, to devalue, to revenge,
			to punish, to humiliate etc -- a word designed to absorb meaning
			from its context rather than the other way around.

Micro-Kid -- genderless paragon of immaturity.

Rotate   -- To obfuscate, to obscure, to confuse, to brain-wash,
			to convince.

DOPLER effect -- Domination Of Psyche through Lowering of Emotional
				 Resistance.

And by the way you can call me Goblu.

Coming back to this conversation I overheard before I knew either
Kaduk or pepperoni, Kaduk was explaining to Pepperoni how he would
capture this or the other miscreants and punish them by "Thulping" 
them and breaking their bones, every time a new girl would pass them
kaduk, would whip out his Casio-Fx-80 and go into technical overdrive
telling Pepperoni in all seriousness why the tan of fx would be impossible
to integrate under hijek's calculus boundary conditions and why Ramanujams
hypergeometric series would only provide a partial answer. I suppose in
these godless times Kaduk would have been in danger of being called a 
nerd, but remember kind reader this was India  and engineering college
without any arts majors to distract and confuse. We are then faced with
the question that begs to be answered, namely: Did kaduk score in these
attempts to seduce the female neophytes at engineering ?

I wish there was a simple answer to that.
All I can say now is that getting female attention was not a serious
problem for Kaduk. 


The story that made Kaduk into a legend on campus involved 
exploding beedies or was it cigarettes, I dont remember.

Kaduk had a certain genius for things mechanical and his fame soon 
spread among the faithful, among the freshmen and among ancestors
as those who had seen more than six years on campus were called.

There were a group of people from South Kanara who shared a walkman
among themselves and treated it as it were the lost ark itself.
They derived their entertainment from that one source and shared
the cost of buying batteries in a most careful fashion. Some
even called that group of people "walkmen". One fateful day
a rumour emanated from that part of the hostel that housed these
walkmen, that the walkman had stopped doing its duty of belting
out kannada film songs and only groaned when the play button was
pressed. Kaduk was intrigued and set out to their den and demanded
to see the offending device. After much reluctance the head of the
walkmen condescended to allow him to try his hand at it.

Now Kaduk was a chain-smoker of incredible capacity and sadly of
insatiable dependence. Soon, he was absorbed in the repair of the
walkman, and demanded a cigarette, the head of the walkmen gave one
to him after he himself had taken one from the corner of the freshly 
opened box. Kaduk lit up.

After a few manipulations with a screwdriver he plugged the walkman into
the power socket. There was an explosion, and Kaduk rapidly jerked the
plug out and went back to his manipulations, he pretended that nothing
had happened and hoped no one else had heard. He couldnt elicit any
response from the rest of the walkmen who had crowded into the room to
see the genius at work. The walkmen were hysterical with laughter and
wiping tears from their eyes. Eventually Kaduks short temper got the 
better of him and he came back to our room and told us:

"I dont know whats wrong with those guys, their walkman exploded
and they are laughing like jackals !, I feel like thulping them."

We had to tell him about his still burning mustache.

The great thing about Kaduk was that he would never revenge himself
on anyone who played a trick on him, he would instead select ten other
innocents and do it to them.
In keeping with this pattern we had to stifle our laughter while he
invited his classmates for intricate discussions in fluid dynamics
and casually gave them cigarettes or beedies to smoke while we waited
for the cigarette to burn down to the part where it hid a 5 paise 
cracker inside the tobacco, in the meantime Kaduk carried on a learned
conversation about tensors and vectors and viscosity. The moment would
come and we would laugh till our bellies ached, the stunned visitor 
unable to believe that a cigarette could explode.



Kaduk taught me not to be afraid of being humiliated.
There was life after that he said.
Yesterday I managed to carry on a conversation with a woman at a nearby
table while getting drenched from the Sprite that I had spilt in the
heat of an animated conversation.

Why Kaduk was called kaduk and I Goblu is another story.

3] Stay Cool.
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