Project Partnership of Best Friends
Sunil and Anil were best friends albeit different. Sunil was very organized, methodical, and punctual whereas Anil was rather whimsical and king of his own whims most of the time. This is a short story about them when they were in third year 2nd semester B. Tech. Computer Science at IIT Bombay years ago.
Sunil was good at Theory of Computation (ToC) while Anil was strong at Programming Languages (PL). Hence when the group projects were announced for these subjects during the semester, it was a no brainer that Sunil and Anil partnered together with Sunil picking up ToC project while Anil taking on PL project. They could single handedly handle the project of their respective subjects during the semester. They decided to complete the work two weeks before the end of semester so that they could hand it over to the project partner to study it for the viva.
Sunil was systematically chugging along at the ToC project whereas Anil was procrastinating being the lazy programmer he was though the project was shaping up in his head without any tangible results on paper. Knowing Anil very well, Sunil would remind him from time to time : “How is the PL project coming along? Will you be on time?”. To that Anil would say: “Sab ho jayega.” Sunil would taunt: “Sale tu dekh. Agar do hapte pahile tu mujhe project nahi dega to mai dekh lunga.” And Anil would reply with a rather murky smile: “tu chhod na yaar. Tension mat le.”. This would go on throughout the semester.
As fate would have it, exactly two weeks before the finals, Sunil showed up in Anil’s room with a copy of the project report in his hands. “ye le mera project tere liye. Mere liye kidhar hai?”. With these words realization dawned on Anil and the only thing he could do was to try to avoid Sunil’s prying eyes. Knowing what had transpired Sunil fumed: “tune project nahi complete kiya na time pe?” and with these words he stormed out of Anil’s room taking his project report along still fuming: “We are not friends anymore” and rushed back to his room.
Anil felt very bad and went up to his table. He started penning down every single word that had already shaped up in his mind and slowly the PL project started shaping up on the paper in front of Anil. Before the clock struck 12 that night, Anil completed the report, rushed to Sunil’s room and slid it under his closed door as Sunil was fast asleep as per his meticulous schedule.
Sunil woke up the next day to a copy of Anil’s project work slid under the door. He walked up to the door, bent down to pick up the work as tears rolled down his cheeks thinking about the hard work Anil must have put in last night. He changed, went down to the mess for breakfast. Eventually during the day, Sunil handed over his project work to Anil and hugged him as tears rolled down the best friends’ cheeks.
Though worse projects have transpired in between the two, Sunil and Anil are best friends till date!
