Pick any engineer at a cubicle or desk in any multinational company, startup, B-School, post grad or place of work and ask him/her about the ‘4 years’. It will conjure up memories which will play like those old sepia-toned films.The hostel Bakar with the wing mates stretching to the wee morning hours, late night full course studying on the night before exams, the endless trips to that beach / hill station close to campus, the fests, the clubs and last, but most definitely not the least, the memorable relationships experienced during those years :)

So in true engineer fashion, let me present to you a concise, bullet-formatted, assignment-style analysis of the 5 types of relationships that an average engineering campus almost always has. Note that these may not be collectively exhaustive.

1. The Tota-Maina

The Idli to her Sambar. The Roti to her Saag. The Vodka to her Joint. The Nut to her Bolt (no pun intended). They are the quintessential sweethearts on campus. Joined to the hip and essentially one entity for all practical purposes. You know they are the one couple everybody aspires to be. The gold standard. If your girlfriend (you lucky bastard, you!) laments, “Why can’t we be more like them?”, you can be sure that they are the ‘them’. As frustrating as they are with their perfection, you root for them secretly and really do hope that they do stick it out and drive off into the sunset after the ‘4 years’.

2. The Assignment Paramours

Let’s face it. Professors can be a giant pain in the…umm head. And Shylock will not let you go before you give him a pound of flesh. In this case - a buttload of assignments.That is the cue for that girl / guy to enter your life in slow motion. They walk slowly towards you, take off their shades (#swag) and provide you with a shoulder to cry on, and two arms to share the aforementioned buttload of work.

You have fun together for the course of the assignment. People can see you laughing together in the canteen like long lost friends. You bitch about the professor together and slowly start wondering if the vitriol you share for the professor = love. Yeah, makes sense totally!

Until it doesn’t. As soon as the class is over, the shades come off, their walk is again recalibrated to 1.0x speed and you slowly wean off each other…. Until your paths cross again in another semester. Who knows? ;)

3. We are not really ‘together’ together

Taken with a pinch of salt. Keeps you sweating like crazy. Has the potential to leave a really bad taste after. No reader. I am not talking about the food served in the mess. But some relationships do share many characteristics with the gourmet stuff served there.

He is just not interested in that touchy-feely-senti crap. She too has been there, done that. Bingo. They find each other and make for a heady cocktail.

Plausible deniability. Check.

Cool aloofness in each other's company. Check.

“We are just seeing how it goes”. Check.

They are in no hurry to have a serious talk about the ‘future’ and just like to stay in the moment. Maybe it works. Maybe it does not. Either way, the Bravehearts know what they have gotten into and are ready to move on whenever required.

4. The Friendzone

No introduction needed for this bad boy of a relationship type :P

For the uninitiated, a friendzone is a situation where a person is interested in getting into a relationship with another person, but the feelings aren’t reciprocated by the opposite person, who prefers staying friends, as things were before the first person started developing feelings.

People have spotted the friendzone as early as in the 10th century. Our Maharaja of [generic Indian kingdom]  was enamoured by the princess of [generic kingdom 2]. But princess had just gotten through a tough breakup. So she just wanted said Maharaja to continue being her ‘bestest’ friend. Our Maharaja clearly had no time to indulge in frivolities, so ended up marrying her forcibly anyway because you know… mighty Maharaja, huge army, more patriarchy than blood in veins… you get the drift.

Times are a little more complicated know. Our poor modern day Raju in engineering, after being sentenced to an indefinite period in the friendzone by his princess, only has a few of his wing-mates left for company.

These wing mates are a highly sensitive lot. They let Raju talk about his feelings. They allow him to discover the fact that there are more fish in the sea. They build his confidence back slowly and probably ease him into focusing on other pursuits.

Haha, yeah right, LOL!

Sorry to burst your bubble, but the above elements are nothing but a figment of imagination. Any resemblance to life is purely coincidental.

His wing-mates’ consolation actually just comprises variants of “Chal Daaru Peete Hain” or that timeless classic - “Mard Ban” :-/

If I am being skewed towards a particular gender while analyzing the friendzone, it is only because they account for a 100% of cases, dear reader. At least in engineering colleges.

5. The Best Friend Turned Lovers Paradigm

Cupid hasn’t exactly had a field day with these two.These two are the reason he keeps getting sleepless nights until he finally strikes that arrow.

They start off as friends in the first year. They meet in a Modern Physics lab and literally are on the same wavelength. They get along like a house on fire and no one can seem to fathom the common crazy going on between them. They cackle like hens on their few million inside jokes, can keep a bakar session going on until the wee hours and have the stamina to argue like an old couple. They warn each other of potential people to date on campus and even take some time out for the finer pleasures in life, like checking people out, together.

Common friends know that they are ‘close’ but not ‘together’. Uncommon ones nudge them towards getting together. And people outside this Venn Diagram jump to the obvious conclusion that they are together.

Both have had to face the barrage of cliche questions throughout the 4 years but they stick to the oft-repeated-much-abused “We are just friends”. This continues until one of them decides not to play relationship chicken and has a ‘talk’. From then on, it is either a trip to relationship city or “not-talk-for-a-while” village. But what you can be sure is that these two do manage to find a common wavelength in the long term :)

Which other relationship types have you noticed or experienced on Engineering campus? Class participation ke marks nahi hai, but when did you discuss something this interesting in engineering classes anyway.