Who is the man behind Hariteman ... And I don't mean Khalap

Who is Hariteman? Where does he come from? Why does his face always have a frown, as if he suspects someone is going to releasSSse a particularly noxious batch of wind on him?

It all began on a cold wintry day 6 years ago, in the winter of 2001, when there was a college called as SFIT, a subject called as BEE, and a new professor called as Harite.

He had been in the industry for more than 10 years honing his skills and perfecting his sour-puss expression. But the industry had disillusioned him. The people who entered into the industry after completing their engineering were extremely pathetic when it came to practical knowledge and more often than not floundered miserably initially and the companies had to spend a bomb on training these retards.

But Harite knew that it wasn't really the fault of the students. It was the fault of that evil sinister entity better known to the general public as Mumbai University, which had designed engineering courses to teach students everything but how to actually engineer stuff.

Harite was an idealist, a pragmatist and a masochist.

He believed that he would change the system, he would educate the youngsters of today and make them the engineers of tomorrow, the real ones that India Inc so desperately desired. His intentions were noble, his teaching methods were honed to perfection.

But as history has duly recorded, his choice was f***ed up!

He chose to start with SFIT.

Some people have sworn under oath that the very first day that Harite entered FE-EXTC to teach BEE (Basics in Electrical and Electronics) in winter 2001, he had a smile on his face. The very same people have also sworn under oath (and under their breath) that he never smiled again in his life after that.

Soon all his illusions about the potential in the youth of today were blown away.
He soon saw them in their true colours. Noisy, chattering, obnoxious monkeys wearing colourful clothes and torn jeans and dancing with gay abandon in the corridors.

The students never left him in peace - in the parking lots where they surrounded him like a bunch of beggars begging for marks which they never deserved, which they couldn't even begin to deserve. Even in his sleep he could hear their chants "Gimme the Marks! Gimme the Marks!" rising into a crescendo eventually drowning out all sound from his brain.
He found them invading every inch of his life be it in the staff toilet where they weren't supposed to drink or the nearby Majestic Bar where they weren't supposed to piss. Or vice versa.

Every time he valiantly tried to chastise them, to show them the error of their ways, they simply jeered at him, booed him behind his back. His expression grew grimmer, his physique grew slimmer, his bald pate started to shimmer. He tried to torture them, bribe them, seduce them but ultimately failed to help them evolve from their primitive ape-like state.

Eventually he realized the hopelessness of his cause, renounced engineering and SFIT and Mumbai University and returned back to the warm, comfortable bosom of the industry where he spent the rest of his days happily listening to the rhythmic sounds of humming machinery.

But little did Harite know, how big an impact, how big an imprint he had left in the mind of a young impressionable monkey known as Santosh Bhat. Little did he know that he had been elevated to the status of a super-human in the weird little tales penned down by this grotesque chimpanzee.

Little did he know about Hariteman (and his pansy sidekick)