To truly understand my experience at D.School, you must consider three things: love, terror, and the hillarious outcomes of Indians trying to communicate across linguistic divides.

Let’s start at the beginning. I had dreamt of D.School from the far-off Tamil Nadu for a two-and-half years before the life-changing phone call on July 27, 1997. Not knowing Hindi, I asked my father to call the office and confirm my admission. “I am calling from South India…”, my father started and Shukla ji responded with, “Oh, Mr. Vivek, congradulations”. To keep my seat, I had to pay the tuition by July 29, giving two hours to pack and bid farewell and embark on the 2,500-kilometer journey by road and rail.

Love on Day 1

On July 30, my first morning at D.School, I arrived at the Lecture Theater two hours early. It was empty except for a few birds, some squirrels, and me. After dreaming of this place for so long, I needed a quiet moment to soak it all in. Love was in the air, but I won’t bore you with my adoration for D.School. Instead, let me tell you about the person I met next.

A figure ambled in. If memory serves me right, cigarette in hand, a jhola bag slung over his shoulder, and an unhurried stride that seemed to say, “I’ve seen it all, and I’m not impressed.” That was Souvik, my first Bengali acquaintance, who was full of love—for Calcutta. Bengali food, Bengali industriousness, movies, music, the city itself—he was a proud ambassador of all things Bengali.

More than half of my class hailed from Calcutta, and 97% of them were besotted with the city. Hearing them wax poetic, I too fell in love with Calcutta—for seven whole years, in fact—until the day I climbed into an Ambassador taxi and hurtled down the city’s chaotic roads at speeds that felt impossibly slow and terrifyingly fast, with horns blaring with horns blaring like an unending orchestra of chaos.

But that isn’t the terror I want to share. Let’s rewind to D.School. Our first class was Microeconomics with Prof. Badal Mukherji, who began by saying, “Please don’t wait for things to speed up. They’ve already sped up.” The day ended with Prof. O.P., who delivered a lecture on the roots of the Great Depression, making me fall in love with history for the first time.

Trysts with language

We all struggled with the academic rigor of D.School and with life in Delhi. Stories of us “outsiders” grappling with the Hindi heartland came thick and fast. Bengali, sharing some roots with Hindi, gave my friends from the East a slight advantage. Still, language can be a great equalizer: if you think my struggles were unique, let me share a Bengali mother’s quest for soap. In Bengali, ‘ga’ means body and ‘shabun’ means soap, so she asked for ‘gai ka shabun’—literally “soap for cows.” The shopkeeper replied, “Gai ka shabun nahi milega, par kutte ka shabun milega” (“We don’t have soap for cows, but we do have dog soap”). She stormed out, furious that he would dare offer dog soap for her daughter!

Another time, a curious chowkidar asked a Bengali girl about her favorite food. She proudly declared her love for “magarmach,” thinking she was referring to magur machh, or walking catfish in Bengali. In Hindi, however, magarmach means crocodile. Perplexed, the chowkidar wanted to know what they did with all the “dent” (teeth). Mistaking dent for whiskers, she explained how that, too, was a delicacy.

The students from North had no trysts with language, that is until Samir decided to prank Prashant from Geography. He copied an English poem that and painstakingly switched many of its words with made-up words. He edited to ensure that these nonsense words were not found in the dictionary, then printed, framed, and hung it in his room waiting for Prashant. Rajeev, not Prashant, walked in, examined the poem, and declared it wonderful. Samir, pretending confusion, asked if Rajeev could explain it. Unwilling to admit ignorance, Rajeev proceeded to expound upon the poem word by ridiculous word!

For us Tamilians, our language was distinct from Hindi, so there were fewer mishaps—though not none. A senior, who had studied Hindi but never practiced it, once found a bat hanging from her ceiling. She asked the same chowkidar for help, but instead of saying chamkadar (bat), she said “chamatkar” (miracle). There was a “miracle” in her room, she insisted—would he please come chase it away?

From Innocent Greeting to Accidental Proposal

I, on the other hand, was steeped in the anti-Hindi politics of my state and had refused to learn the language. Ignorance was bliss, until it wasn’t. My roommate decided to teach me some Bengali. He told me that “Ami tumako bhalobashi” was just like saying “Kaise hain aap?” (“How are you?”). The morning before our first Macroeconomics exam, as I was leaving the Lecture Theater, I ran into Rukma. Without hesitation, I greeted her with an enthusiastic “Ami tumako bhalobashi!”

“What did you say?” she asked.

“Ami tumako bhalobashi.”

“Do you know what it means?”

“Of course I do,” I replied, before heading off to the main building for the test.

That afternoon, I began noticing people giving me odd looks. After my usual chai at JP’s, I went to the Ratan Tata Library. As I sat amidst the dusty red volumes in the dimly lit Journal Room, four women walked in. In a tone that would not accept no for an answer, Aparna asked me to come out with them. By then, it was past 3 pm, the U-Special buses had left, and the campus felt deserted. They marched me to the Lecture Theater, its silent corridors heavy with tension. Their eyes gleamed with determination. Mine? Pure panic. ‘What did you mean by ami tumako bhalobashi?’.

“What did you mean by ‘Ami tumako bhalobashi’?” one of them demanded.

They grilled me mercilessly. At times I said it meant “How are you?” and at others “Good morning.” They caught every slip. It turned out “Ami tumako bhalobashi” is Bengali for “I love you.”

Never before or since has a man been interrogated so fiercely in the empty corridors of the Lecture Theater. I was just a simple South Indian boy, besieged by four bright women representing the North, East, and West of India.

Scarred by that experience, I vowed never again to face all four simultaneously. Doctors coined a term for my condition: “Char-gorio-o-phobia”—the fear of four women.

And there you have it: my most defining story of D.School—of love, language, and abject terror. Even now, twenty-seven years later, the memory remains vivid—a testament to the power of language, the strength of friendships, and the peculiar kind of terror only four fiercely intelligent women can conjure.