I'll be quite honest, I first looked at the tutorial and then made the console from scratch without really looking at it (Once or twice did I have a look at it in between). Now, that I am trying to apply 'Auto Smooth' to my mesh it goes haywire. I am trying to mark sharp the edges but it seems that its only making it worse rather than fixing it. Please suggest how to fix this and avoid such situations in future as well?
There might be a couple of thing going on. I think first thing you can try is to lower the angle on the smooth modifier, maybe set it to 27 or 25? It'll possibly start to fix things as you lower it from the default 30.
Also check for the usual double vertices, flipped normals and misaligned vertices in the Z axis. There might be some that are slightly higher or lower, so scale them to zero in the Z axis.
In addition to what Omar said, you can also have a look at this question and its answers:
https://cgcookie.com/community/20171-very-bad-shading
Thank you so so much, both Omar and Martin !! I was finally able to resolve the problem