Ar 5 Min

"Ar 5 Min" — Just 5 more minutes. On friendships, Friday nights, and a trip to Munnar that none of us knew was a goodbye.

Getting into one of the top institutes in India after JAM was not a small achievement. But I wanted IIT Bombay. My rank had other plans.

I ended up choosing between IIT Delhi, IIT Madras, and IIT Kharagpur. My BSc professor at RKMRC Narendrapur, someone I trusted without question, suggested IIT Madras. A balanced MSc program, he said. Two years to figure out what you actually want. I took his advice and boarded a train south.

Such a huge, green campus. Monkeys and us. Enough to make any IITM alumni nostalgic.

First year I shared a room with two others in Tapti hostel. I struggled. My Hindi was shaky, my English worse, and conversations that should have taken seconds took minutes while I searched for the right word. One of my roommates never made me feel that. He would just wait — genuinely wait — while I found what I was trying to say. He also taught me Python, Linux, most of the technical foundations I still use today.

All the M.Sc. students allotted Mahanadhi hostel spent hours on the staircase talking about politics, culture, physics, sports, movies. Those conversations were the only escape from the relentless assignment pressure. We made it through anyway.

Then second year happened. Time for choosing electives. I was pretty sure about ultrafast optics, so I chose courses related to that.

By then, I had a small group of five people with whom I spent most Friday nights. Saturdays were off, so we could afford to sleep in. The addas would routinely stretch till 3 or 4 in the morning because someone would always say, “Ar 5 min”—just five more minutes in Bengali—and keep the conversation going. From heartbreaks to competitive-exam strategies, we discussed everything. We even went on a trip to Munnar together—the only trip where all five of us were present.

The funny thing about endings is that you rarely recognize them when they happen.

One Friday night was the last adda on campus. None of us knew it at the time.

Then COVID happened.

We packed some luggage, left some behind in the hostel, and went home. Some of us thought we’d be back in a few weeks and continue where we had left off. I wasn’t so sure. For reasons I couldn’t explain, I felt we wouldn’t be coming back.

That feeling turned out to be right.

We completed our MSc thesis virtually. The hostel rooms, the staircase conversations, the campus routines—all of it ended without a proper goodbye. The adda moved online instead. Somehow, that survived. What began as late-night conversations evolved into a kind of informal colloquium that continues even today, six years after graduation.

Sometimes I feel these people set the friendship bar so high that I ended up judging friendships later in my PhD against them.

And perhaps that is the real gift IIT Madras gave me—not ultrafast optics, not Python, not Linux, but five people who still haven’t stopped talking.