The 80s Venky gang and Sul's numeric system for boys

On the train home today I spotted a bunch of college girls in their late teens and was quite struck by the similarity of one among them to my college friend Sulekha Lal.
Sulekha aka Suls has a lot to do with the way I perceived boys in college and men in later life. Suls was different from other girls. A petite Himachali with sharp features, she had a piercing gaze and a perpetually serious demeanour. The first words she uttered to me were “ I have acidity” like it was a serious, infectious, unmentionable disease. At 18, I’d never met anyone with ‘acidity’ and ‘stress’ and was quite impressed. The hottest senior in college was in love with her but all he gave her was ‘acidity’! He was an army hopeful and had all the girls in a flutter except for old Suls. Whenever I told her of a guy I fancied she would grab a paper and draw a table with two columns on it. One she named Pluses and the other Minuses. Don’t be taken in by romance, she’d tell me. Jot down the guy’s pluses and minuses and see how he scores first. Guys who wore glasses were a minus, so were those who got anything below first division. Those without ambition (she called them drifters), no special talents like sports, those with a lopsided face and even a bad haircut scored zits. She didn’t give them a chance. The pluses were those who were toppers (read bookworms), who sat in the front row (read chamchas and bores) who had their future mapped out and were no fun at all. The hottie who entered the Indian Military Academy and pursued her relentlessly never had a chance because he wanted to be a soldier in the infantry and according to Suls was ‘too risky’ a prospect. My own crushes got a pathetic minus two and minus four in her calculations. Foolishly I gave them up on her advice. Sulekha, I’ll never forgive you for the lost chances back then! Oh, what might have been!

By the time we were in final year, we were a gang of six and Suls was managing all our love lives. We also had three boys in our gang- Param, a dashing mona sikh and nephew of a Cabinet minister, Babloo Mukherji, a tall jumpy fellow of Bengali-Punjabi parentage and Sushanto Chatterji, son of a veteran armyman. It beats me even today why none of us in the group dated each other. I suspect, Suls and her screwed up numeric system had something to do with it. Param she said was spoilt beyond redemption, Babloo was really a kid and Sushanto she dismissed on some other silly pretext. The boys were however oblivious of the calculations going on at the back of our minds. They happily escorted us everywhere from the movies to picnics and outings. Sulekha’s brain washing would have been flawless and complete had I not flipped for a guy before leaving college. Inspite of the fact that he came up a disastrous minus six in her log, I fell head over heels in love. Suls never forgave me for the treachery. What on earth did you see in him? She cried in horror. I said the first thing that came to my head. Er...He has a beautiful pancreas and a liver!
We were studying zoology that day.