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 … :)