As the VC stood up there, addressing the students and reminding of them when they had first joined BRAC University, I was taken back to that very first day. It was a Sunday, the 15th of September, 2002. Of course, going to university was a big and novel experience for all of us, and it should perhaps be attributed to my thick brain that it never occured to me as being a major turning point in my small life.
What I do remember of the day is an odd sense of disorientation as I walked up to the 2nd floor of the University Building, where the Information Desk used to be back then. In laer years, the building would become UB to us, and we would forever refer to that particular floor as “UB Information Desk”, even when the desk was shifted and the much more prominent ECE lab set up in that same floor.
As I walked in, I was rather taken aback at the sight of some fifty students pushing and elbowing their way to the wall in the far corner, where the coveted class routine hung, waiting for people to come up to it and get their class schedule down pat. Now that I look back with the benefit of hindsight, I am guessing there must have been at least one other routine somewhere and we all did not need to fight over this one like it was The Lost Ark. Ah well, at least I will know better the next time, if there is one.
It took me almost two hours, and a whole lot of pushing and shoving, to get my routine. But it was still not time to rest, for one look at it told me that I have a class in less than half an hour. So we rushed for the class. At this point, Ishtiyaq and Saikat were probably the only people I knew well enough to talk casually with, and naturally we spent most of our time together. I gradually made more friends, of course, but more on that later.
The day sort of went by running from one class to another, not so much tired as oiverwhelmed. To make things even better (or worse), my newly acquired cellphone decided to die on me. Sometime around the afternoon, I was done with classes, terribly tired and horribly sweaty. I am sure I must have fallen asleep on my way back home, but I cannot be sure. All of the rest of the day is rather hazy. Sad but true, some four years later I cannot even recall whether my first day at BRAC U ended on a happy or sad note…
