Capital of Canada

Sometimes, life puts us in situations which demand quick answers to questions that are commonly believed to hold no particular significance in the real world. Questions which have long surpassed the boundaries of human interest and can now be found languishing in the forgotten pages of a forgotten encyclopedia or a yesteryear notebook of a yesteryear’s quizmaster.

Questions which were perhaps intriguing when invented but slowly lost its trivial content due to the lack of appropriate answers. Questions, to state a few would be like Andrew Symonds’s mental being, Michael Jackson’s physical being, the natural vegetation in the Kalahari Desert, the GDP of Mozambique or say, the capital of Canada.

Though I can’t deny my mood was on par with that of a fully fed infant when our class teacher implemented the ‘Buddy’ system in our batch, it brought along a different kind of a problem that I could have lived without… Okay, flash back time.

Before we delve any deeper into the reason of my happiness and the immediate problem, let me give you a background of what exactly happened.

Standard Seven saw the advent of a path breaking concept in the field of school teaching. Buddy System, as it was called, revolved around the idea of clubbing an academically weak student with an unreasonably bright one and then hoping that the former learns something from the former and not vice versa.

Basically, it was like one of those scientific experiments where you mate a donkey and a mare, hoping to get a smart looking donkey that could run fast rather than a dumb looking horse that kicks and acts retarded. Thus, keeping a similar motive in mind, our teacher began announcing the new set of pairs that would be sharing a desk for the next eight months or so.

By the time my number came (it always came pretty late) I could see I was left with only a couple of options. If my calculations were correct (they normally never were), I was seconds away from being told to sit next to C2H3O8 (the bomb guy) or… S14, the girl in pink (who had now become ‘the girl in brownish off-white’, thanks to our uniform).

Although I expertly maintained a very calm and unaffected composure on the exterior, my interiors were hopping mad with anticipation. Like a pendulum with suicidal tendencies, my heart oscillated precariously from one side of the ribcage to another, or at least it felt like it did.

It had all boiled down to the final seconds. I was heart beats away from knowing the outcome – Canadian bombshell or nerdy, Indian bomb maker.

“And, S14 will now sit with…,” our teacher announced, causing me to crack the pencil I had held on to.

What followed next was this - Class Seven, Division B, row Second and bench Four – an uninteresting piece of school realty suddenly transformed into perhaps the hottest property on Earth.

The primary reason behind this miraculous act was the fact that this address, formerly owned by me… now co-belonged to S14, for a healthy part of that academic year.

So, there was I… with S14 sitting next to me and the whole class watching us like one might watch a special screening of ‘Beauty and the Beast’.

To add some more icing on the heavily iced cake, our teacher announced that our Hindi professor had met a bicycle accident and will be absent for the day. This news was worth celebrating twice – because 1) the professor was way due from meeting a well deserved accident and 2) we now had the next lecture off.

"Hi, I am Vishal," I said, welcoming her to the desk.

“Teacher says that you very weak in Math,” S14 said, choosing the sentence as her opening line.

“Uh, did she?” I asked, reacting like a Bollywood composer being accused of lifting music from English numbers.

“Yeah, she said that you had problems with other subjects too, but Math was something else,” she added matter-of-factly.

“Looks like we have the Hindi lecture off!” I said, feeling a desperate need to change the topic.

“Yeah, sir has met an accident,” she said with a confusingly saddened face.

“So, do you wanna… play a game or something?” I suggested hesitantly, cautioned by her reaction.

“Yeah, let’s play a game!” she declared, her face brightening instantly. "Let’s play Naming the Capitals!"

"Naming the what?" I asked, not sure if there was a game by that name.

"Naming the Capitals! Its very simple,” she assured, preparing to explain the rules. “Look, I will give you a country and you need to name its capital. If you name it correctly, you get a point. Then on my turn, you give a country and I try to name it, simple!”

That can’t be tough, I thought. How many countries were on this planet anyways?

“Okay, so let me begin with an easy one,” she said, taking charge of the situation. “Name the capital of… Canada!”

“Capital of Canada?” I asked, sounding worried. “Like the one where you’ve come from?”

"Yeah! Let me give you a hint," she offered, understanding my plight. "It falls in the south eastern part of the country!"

Now what kind of a hint was that? She could have just given me the latitudes and longitudes instead, or perhaps just hand me an altas.

"Ah, the south eastern part?" I said with an enlightened look on my face. "You mean the real south eastern part or the one which kind of lies in the… north?”

“The real south eastern part!” she said with a cute little chuckle, apparently finding my query exceptionally comical. “Okay, you don’t have the whole day for this, do you say pass?”

I passed.

“It’s Ottawa!” she divulged, “you get a zero and I get one point!”

For a moment or two, I thought I was missing something from the rules. When was I told that she would get a point if I passed? However, considering the fact that I was that wired to lose this game and it seemed to have brought S14 in a cheery mood, I decided not to make any fuss about it.

“Ah, okay… so, my turn to ask now?” I asked.

“No! We need to record the scores before we proceed,” she said, stating the point with all the seriousness it deserved. “Do you have a rough page? I don’t like tearing pages from my rough book.”

I nodded and handed a piece of paper, tearing it from appeared to be my Composition notebook.

“Okay, so S gets one and V gets a zero!” she proclaimed, jotting down the score. “Now, your turn…”

The break soon ended and so did our game. Our final scorecard read ‘S – 5 / V- 0’, leaving me with the capitals of Uruguay, Swaziland, Romania and Philippines in addition to that of Canada.

However, as I stared at the peice of paper on my way back home, it wasn't this abysmal score or the names of the places that occupied my mind, but it was the smile on S14's face, that appeared everytime I passed my turn...

Joining the Dots

Survival, as most of you would agree, is by far the strongest instinct of any human being… and for who haven’t had the opportunity to test their instinct to survive, I recommend you enrol yourself to my school lectures for a year.

Lectures, as self-explanatory as the word is, were a matter of enduring rather than attending in school, with of course a few possible exceptions like the times spent with S22H25L. Going by the aesthetical appeal of my classroom and the people who ran the show, one needn’t be an Einstein to figure out that seconds spent outside the classroom felt like light-years when spent inside it, especially if it had to be done in a full bladder situation.

Things only graduated from bad to worse by the time we trudged into the post-lunch sessions. Ask any normal school-going chap and he will tell you that food and lectures is easily the most screwed up combination ever invented.

It was during these difficult hours when lectures got the better of our tolerance levels and dozing off was not a sensible thing to do (especially if it happened to be the Hindi lecture), we engaged ourselves into some ingeniously devised ‘activities’ that promised maximum output with minimum input. These games, though not Olympics material, were good enough to kill a good amount of lecture time with little or no consequences.

A fitting example of which would be Pen Fight which was very popular amongst all divisions. Developed on the grounds of a cock fight, this one had all the intensity and excitement of the real version, with the minor replacement of a live cock with an ink pen.

For those who couldn’t bear the sight of their pens being trashed around the desk or wished to have fun and yet appear to be insanely engrossed in his or her text book, we had the game of Book Cricket. A work of pure genius, this one basically involved choosing a team of 11 players and scoring as many runs in an innings using nothing but a considerably large sized textbook. The ‘shot’ here was turning the pages of the book and the ‘runs’ were the digits that appeared in the unit’s place for each shot. On occasions when that turned out to be a zero, you had your man walking back to the pavilion.

I have many fond memories associated with this game... but the one that deserves a mention in this post is that eventful History inning when my Venkatapathy Raju thumped 5 sixes in an Alan Donald over, before my opponent realised that I had marked the pages which ended with the digit 6. Some things always look fishy, even in Book Cricket.

However, despite all these and a dozen more, the one that was my personal favourite was called as Joining the Dots. This game had the excitement of the Pen Fight minus the damages and the safety of Book Cricket minus the scope for cheating.

The rules of play were fairly simple as well. As a prerequisite, you had to fill a page with uniformly spaced dots that ran from top to bottom and left to right. You then took alternate turns in connecting two dots with a segment. When one managed to create a box by closing the 4th side of it, he would score a point and take another turn. The one who gets the highest number of boxes wins. Easy pleasey!

As I now look back at those days, I realise that life is after all, an exaggerated game of Joining the Dots. Each event that we are a part of is nothing but a segment drawn towards making a box – hitting a target, achieving a goal, being successful, realising a dream. The arrival of the Canadian sisters into my class only strengthens this notion.

Back in the summer of 1996, it had only been a calendar month since the Canadian sisters had joined our class but to me, it felt like it was a connection that was made long time ago. Like segments waiting to be joined… like a box waiting to be made.

Consider this - Of all countries in the world, their family had to move to India. Of all cities in India, they had to come to Bombay. Of all schools in Bombay, the two had to get admission in the one I happened to study. Of all classes in my school, they had to turn up in my class. Each segment drawn with the intention of achieving the target…

But was them just ending up in my class good enough? Was that the ultimate goal?

Perhaps not… perhaps fate had another turn to be taken… another segment waiting to be drawn.

This wait seemed to have ended the day our teacher introduced the ‘Buddy System’ to us… Well, more on that in the next post … :)