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...
5/27/09
5/17/09
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 … :)
4/22/09
Przepraszam, jestem za późno!
Ladies, gentlemen and gentle men,
I dedicate this post to say sorry, be repentant, show regret & offer my apologies towards my sudden disappearing act. Having done that, I would now like to touch upon the cause of my absence.
To tell you the truth, the last few weeks have been, as I may put it, an out-of-suitcase experience for me. Days of scheming, loads of buttering, a few threatening emails and one hostage scenario later, my boss finally agreed to send me to a much awaited trip to Poland.
The trip was in many ways a memorable experience and unlike my other business trips, for some good reasons as well.
Apart from the fact that my luggage or I wasn't lost in transit, the hotel which I was put in was kind of classy and 4 starish. To give you an idea, it was one of those places where you could easily get intimidated by the housekeeping staff. My room in particular had perhaps the best view of all, as its windows gave way to a high definition view of the swimming pool and the sauna room.
Such was the charm of the place that I couldn’t help but pick a few travel souvenirs which mainly consisted of half a dozen shampoo bottles, a pair of bathroom slippers, the tv remote, some silverware and the hair dryer by the time I checked out.
Things turned out to be very bright and productive on the work front as well. Though the office floor starkly reminded of the one here in Mumbai, the people were of a pleasing nature and most spoke good Pinglish (Polish + English) as well. Prior to a minor accident at the pantry involving me and some of the equipment, which ultimately rendered the coffee vending machine useless, my presence on the floor usually attracted welcoming smiles and an occasional 'Namasthey!' as well.
My escort, who also happened to be my counterpart at work and a die hard Bollywood fan, was kind enough to show me some interesting places in & around Krakow. Thanks to some vicious rumours doing rounds in emails across the Indo-Polish borders, Marcin insisted that I must sing a Bollywood song and mimic Shahrukh Khan. It was only when I actually relented to his demands did he learn that I wasn't really known for such talents.
Otherwise, our guys day out together was largely enjoyable and fun. Perhaps, if I only hadn't got carried away by his 'Krakow looks best on foot!' advice, I would have saved myself a walking marathon and my legs from cramping under the coach class seat on my return flight. Now I am counting days before he gets to visit Mumbai and I put forth a 'Mumbai looks best in local trains, at peak hours!' offer before him. Ha! 8-)
To put it in a nut shell, my maiden trip to the land of vodkas, chocolates and vodka filled chocolate was a memorable experience by all possible means. Now since that I am pretty much back to where I truly belong, I promise to pick from where I had left and continue posting my blogs with no major leakages.
Till the next blog... take care and god bless! :)
PS: For those wondering what caused me to use something that resembles a phrase from a Harry Potter book as the title for this post... 'Przepraszam, jestem za późno!' means 'I am sorry, I am late!' in Polish. :)
I dedicate this post to say sorry, be repentant, show regret & offer my apologies towards my sudden disappearing act. Having done that, I would now like to touch upon the cause of my absence.
To tell you the truth, the last few weeks have been, as I may put it, an out-of-suitcase experience for me. Days of scheming, loads of buttering, a few threatening emails and one hostage scenario later, my boss finally agreed to send me to a much awaited trip to Poland.
The trip was in many ways a memorable experience and unlike my other business trips, for some good reasons as well.
Apart from the fact that my luggage or I wasn't lost in transit, the hotel which I was put in was kind of classy and 4 starish. To give you an idea, it was one of those places where you could easily get intimidated by the housekeeping staff. My room in particular had perhaps the best view of all, as its windows gave way to a high definition view of the swimming pool and the sauna room.
Such was the charm of the place that I couldn’t help but pick a few travel souvenirs which mainly consisted of half a dozen shampoo bottles, a pair of bathroom slippers, the tv remote, some silverware and the hair dryer by the time I checked out.
Things turned out to be very bright and productive on the work front as well. Though the office floor starkly reminded of the one here in Mumbai, the people were of a pleasing nature and most spoke good Pinglish (Polish + English) as well. Prior to a minor accident at the pantry involving me and some of the equipment, which ultimately rendered the coffee vending machine useless, my presence on the floor usually attracted welcoming smiles and an occasional 'Namasthey!' as well.
My escort, who also happened to be my counterpart at work and a die hard Bollywood fan, was kind enough to show me some interesting places in & around Krakow. Thanks to some vicious rumours doing rounds in emails across the Indo-Polish borders, Marcin insisted that I must sing a Bollywood song and mimic Shahrukh Khan. It was only when I actually relented to his demands did he learn that I wasn't really known for such talents.
Otherwise, our guys day out together was largely enjoyable and fun. Perhaps, if I only hadn't got carried away by his 'Krakow looks best on foot!' advice, I would have saved myself a walking marathon and my legs from cramping under the coach class seat on my return flight. Now I am counting days before he gets to visit Mumbai and I put forth a 'Mumbai looks best in local trains, at peak hours!' offer before him. Ha! 8-)
To put it in a nut shell, my maiden trip to the land of vodkas, chocolates and vodka filled chocolate was a memorable experience by all possible means. Now since that I am pretty much back to where I truly belong, I promise to pick from where I had left and continue posting my blogs with no major leakages.
Till the next blog... take care and god bless! :)
PS: For those wondering what caused me to use something that resembles a phrase from a Harry Potter book as the title for this post... 'Przepraszam, jestem za późno!' means 'I am sorry, I am late!' in Polish. :)
4/14/09
1996
Standard Seven, in my opinion (Also proven by a kick-ass scientific study. Sacchi, meine padha hain), is the most challenging year in a student’s life. The reasons, as I will soon put forth, are a handful. Let’s start by looking at what happens on the ‘educational’ front.
Normally, anyone who has ever bothered to check the syllabus when s/he entered standard seven must have at least for once played with the thought of exterminating the author and his next five generations. If you ask me, I think such a thought process comes pretty naturally to anyone who 1) happens to share my levels of interest in anything remotely scholastic, 2) hero worships the Chainsaw Massacre guy and owns a pet python or 3) both.
Thus, unless you were immune to all forms of pain or happened to drool over things like empirical formulae and the Pythagoras Theorem, you too will probably recollect going "Photo what frigging synthesis?!!" when you first turned the pages of your syllabi, seventh standard and every standard.
The second and perhaps the most important point is the fact that by the time you reach standard seven and happen to be a guy, the world seems to be a lot lesser nice place to live in.
Apart from the thing with the hormones that is constantly playing havoc with your age old beliefs about girls being a source of unbridled nuisance, you suddenly find yourself uncomfortably placed in a 'semi-kid' kind of a state, a lawless territory where its residents are labeled by the degree of confusedness on their sparsely moustached faces.
Contrarily, this does a world of wonders to the female population, especially for someone on M34I26S34’s growth path. Thanks to the hormonal thing (which works totally in their favor) that I briefly touched upon in the paragraph above, they are suddenly inundated with buying-your-bus- ticket and helping- you-with-your-homework offers.
Hence considering the fact that I carried fairly normal tendencies and was as hormonized as anyone else, it shouldn’t go against me if I told you that I happened to be one of the guys in the class who steered their attention towards the door, when they stepped into our classroom… the exchange students... from a formerly alien part of the world called Canada.
Pink looks hot on girls. This is probably the other thing to learn by the time you hit standard seven. I learnt this when I saw her wearing the color, partially eclipsed by our class teacher and the other girl she was accompanied with.
Standing amidst her escorts, she looked visibly shy and mildly perturbed by the hustle she had generated. Perhaps, she had planned to coolly walk into the class and hope no one would give two hoots about it. So much for wishful thinking, ha!
This is India, young ladies. You come from anyplace minutely foreign and you WILL be stared at!
“Hello children! Please join me in welcoming S14X17C and E12X17C! They have come from Canada and will be studying with us. I hope you will make them feel at home!” the teacher announced to our largely awestricken class.
Her wish seemed to have been heard rather instantly, as some of us dived into the task of wiping the dust and our partners off their seats, making place for the Canadian goddesses. While others, including me, restricted by the lack of courage than anything else, only managed to construct inviting expressions which bordered on the risk of appearing lecherous if overdone and pray earnestly that they might sit in the adjacent row or perhaps the row adjacent to the next two rows.
Feel at home? Hell yeah!
PS: Thanks to my teacher's rather vague form of introduction, it didn't strike me at first which one of X17C sisters was the girl in pink. I, of course, did manage to figure that out eventually.
4/8/09
Present Ma'am!
Back in school, the second strongest reason - the first being the natural lack of focus and motivation - to help me find solace as an underperforming flag-bearer of the underperformers, was a distinct team of faculty members.
Akin to a baton-wielding jail superintendent, working zealously towards making life as difficult and regretful for its resident inmates, these ‘givers of education’ strived to achieve a similar result.
To mention a few… there was that slap-happy Hindi professor, who had the tendency to whack the living daylights of anyone caught half-yawning during his awe-inspiring, post-lunch lectures. One neatly landed blow from this guy and you had the germs residing in your dental cavities dive into coma. Man, this guy could make a full-fledged Sunny paaji’s water-pump uprooting ‘Dhai kilo ka Haath’ assault feel like a peacock feather caressing your butt cheeks in comparison. Believe me, I speak from experience.
Then, we had Miss P58T67S - our PT instructor. This lady could make Hitler laugh his moustache off with her grammar-no-bare usage of the English language. I distinctly remember her telling us once, rather fondly, that she had ‘two daughters and both were girls’. I tell you, nothing was more daunting than conversing with her and yet maintaining a straight face. (Now you know whom to blame if you find something funny with my writing… Undesirably funny that is.)
Last, but not even remotely the least, was the Biology professor, who perhaps out of sheer affection for her subject, always found striking similarities between the animal kingdom and her class. Thus, on a given day, you could hear her calling someone a ‘dim-witted buffoon’, an ‘undernourished flea parasite’, a ‘super-sized amoeba’ or when highly agitated, a ‘bottom-of-the-food-chain dwelling, filter-feeding zooplankton’.
However, amidst and in spite of these wonderful reasons to get up every morning and head to school, there were few people who helped me sustain my belief in the Indian educational system.
The first being our librarian Miss L33I66B, who also doubled up as an invigilator during our exams – a favor which I will never forget. Apart from being a very kind and a gentle lady by nature, she was a deeply religious person as well. This, probably, prompted her to do nothing but softly announce “God is watching!” when she managed to find someone cheating in class. Undoubtedly, I owe her a lot to help me wade through most of my math papers.
And then of course was Miss S22H25L … my English and class teacher for standard six. She was easily the only person who deserved the title of ‘Miss’ as the rest were either married or even appeared to have married off their grand-children.
Ah, Miss S22H25L… She was way not married and was way not like the rest of them! She was, as I fondly recollect, my inspiration to take a bath before I left for school. She was, amidst the jaw-rattling, language-murdering and animal-comparing teachers, my inspiration to learn. She was the reason why I waited impatiently, one roll number at a time and all forty of them, to watch her look into the attendance registry and call out my number with that pleasing smile on her face.
“Present Ma’am!” I would scream, raising my hand with sheer delight.
Much to the horror of my fellow classmates, I began participating in debates, elocution competitions, roll playing activities, debates, quizzes and absolutely anything that had to with English and Miss S22H25L. I began answering ad-hoc questions; some which had even left the chronic toppers staring at the blackboard with gaping stupor.
(Now is perhaps a good time to reiterate to the post where I had spoken a bit about my roll number and my English marks. You probably must have realized by now why these two could have been the possible exemptions. Okay, back to this post.)
Yes, things were changing and they were changing fast. My perplexed twelve year old heart was finding it increasingly difficult to come in terms with this new and totally uncharted feeling. A feeling which by any sixth grader standards was as good as unlimited access to video games and toffee bars minus the need go to school or eat veggies for like a month.
But, as it happens with all earnest, one-sided love stories, the girl is fled away by a moustache-sporting, car-driving, MBA-holding, bank-managing guy… While the secret admirer (read me), the one who has tones of silent adoration for her in his bespectacled eyes (Okay, I had a number. Who doesn’t?) is left with well, just all by his self.
I learnt about Miss S22H25L’s engagement when she gleefully broke the news to the class and even resorted to distributing éclairs like it was an occasion worth celebrating. Citing an incessant pain in my tooth, I plainly declined from picking the sweet when she turned at my desk. For a moment or two, I felt she might have smelled the rat. Perhaps she must have noticed me munching a toffee bar right out of my tiffin box during the recess break. Nonetheless, she never made any fuss about it and walked on. And, so did I…
Slowly but steadily, I began to trudge back into my original self. The painful process of self-recuperation had begun. Questions were answered, but only when asked to. Hand was raised, but only to seek permission to attend a nature’s call. Bath was taken, but only when mum threatened.
By the time I entered standard seven, Miss S22H25L was honeymooning in Shimla. We had a new English teacher at our disposal. But, post Miss S22H25L, things never remained the same with English teachers. Thanks to my first and what could have been my last female-liking experience, I was months away turning into a hard-wired, tin-hearted, lifeless robot. Things would have pretty much headed in that direction, if life hadn’t met an abrupt diversion.
The year was 1996 and mathematics had just become stratospherically tougher. But it wasn’t something that had exactly caught my attention. It was something or rather someone else.
Akin to a baton-wielding jail superintendent, working zealously towards making life as difficult and regretful for its resident inmates, these ‘givers of education’ strived to achieve a similar result.
To mention a few… there was that slap-happy Hindi professor, who had the tendency to whack the living daylights of anyone caught half-yawning during his awe-inspiring, post-lunch lectures. One neatly landed blow from this guy and you had the germs residing in your dental cavities dive into coma. Man, this guy could make a full-fledged Sunny paaji’s water-pump uprooting ‘Dhai kilo ka Haath’ assault feel like a peacock feather caressing your butt cheeks in comparison. Believe me, I speak from experience.
Then, we had Miss P58T67S - our PT instructor. This lady could make Hitler laugh his moustache off with her grammar-no-bare usage of the English language. I distinctly remember her telling us once, rather fondly, that she had ‘two daughters and both were girls’. I tell you, nothing was more daunting than conversing with her and yet maintaining a straight face. (Now you know whom to blame if you find something funny with my writing… Undesirably funny that is.)
Last, but not even remotely the least, was the Biology professor, who perhaps out of sheer affection for her subject, always found striking similarities between the animal kingdom and her class. Thus, on a given day, you could hear her calling someone a ‘dim-witted buffoon’, an ‘undernourished flea parasite’, a ‘super-sized amoeba’ or when highly agitated, a ‘bottom-of-the-food-chain dwelling, filter-feeding zooplankton’.
However, amidst and in spite of these wonderful reasons to get up every morning and head to school, there were few people who helped me sustain my belief in the Indian educational system.
The first being our librarian Miss L33I66B, who also doubled up as an invigilator during our exams – a favor which I will never forget. Apart from being a very kind and a gentle lady by nature, she was a deeply religious person as well. This, probably, prompted her to do nothing but softly announce “God is watching!” when she managed to find someone cheating in class. Undoubtedly, I owe her a lot to help me wade through most of my math papers.
And then of course was Miss S22H25L … my English and class teacher for standard six. She was easily the only person who deserved the title of ‘Miss’ as the rest were either married or even appeared to have married off their grand-children.
Ah, Miss S22H25L… She was way not married and was way not like the rest of them! She was, as I fondly recollect, my inspiration to take a bath before I left for school. She was, amidst the jaw-rattling, language-murdering and animal-comparing teachers, my inspiration to learn. She was the reason why I waited impatiently, one roll number at a time and all forty of them, to watch her look into the attendance registry and call out my number with that pleasing smile on her face.
“Present Ma’am!” I would scream, raising my hand with sheer delight.
Much to the horror of my fellow classmates, I began participating in debates, elocution competitions, roll playing activities, debates, quizzes and absolutely anything that had to with English and Miss S22H25L. I began answering ad-hoc questions; some which had even left the chronic toppers staring at the blackboard with gaping stupor.
(Now is perhaps a good time to reiterate to the post where I had spoken a bit about my roll number and my English marks. You probably must have realized by now why these two could have been the possible exemptions. Okay, back to this post.)
Yes, things were changing and they were changing fast. My perplexed twelve year old heart was finding it increasingly difficult to come in terms with this new and totally uncharted feeling. A feeling which by any sixth grader standards was as good as unlimited access to video games and toffee bars minus the need go to school or eat veggies for like a month.
But, as it happens with all earnest, one-sided love stories, the girl is fled away by a moustache-sporting, car-driving, MBA-holding, bank-managing guy… While the secret admirer (read me), the one who has tones of silent adoration for her in his bespectacled eyes (Okay, I had a number. Who doesn’t?) is left with well, just all by his self.
I learnt about Miss S22H25L’s engagement when she gleefully broke the news to the class and even resorted to distributing éclairs like it was an occasion worth celebrating. Citing an incessant pain in my tooth, I plainly declined from picking the sweet when she turned at my desk. For a moment or two, I felt she might have smelled the rat. Perhaps she must have noticed me munching a toffee bar right out of my tiffin box during the recess break. Nonetheless, she never made any fuss about it and walked on. And, so did I…
Slowly but steadily, I began to trudge back into my original self. The painful process of self-recuperation had begun. Questions were answered, but only when asked to. Hand was raised, but only to seek permission to attend a nature’s call. Bath was taken, but only when mum threatened.
By the time I entered standard seven, Miss S22H25L was honeymooning in Shimla. We had a new English teacher at our disposal. But, post Miss S22H25L, things never remained the same with English teachers. Thanks to my first and what could have been my last female-liking experience, I was months away turning into a hard-wired, tin-hearted, lifeless robot. Things would have pretty much headed in that direction, if life hadn’t met an abrupt diversion.
The year was 1996 and mathematics had just become stratospherically tougher. But it wasn’t something that had exactly caught my attention. It was something or rather someone else.
4/4/09
50 percent of 50
I wasn’t, as you must have gathered from my last post, the most popular guy in school. Definitely not as popular as T78O89P (the chronic topper), M34I26S34 (the girl who had grown quickly & how!) or C2H3O8 (the science wiz kid… Man, that guy could devise a fully-functional bomb from the contents of a make-up kit, seriously)… And evidently, not as someone whose name a girl might remember when tapped in a local bus after a decade or so.
To put things in the right perspective, let’s say I was comfortably average. Like someone who found bliss in passing his subjects rather than scoring in them. Someone who was friends with most in his class but no one in particular belonged to his ‘circle’… maybe because he never had a circle… not even a triangle … not even a segment. Someone, whom most found was a nice guy to know but perhaps not nice enough to know for good…
Ha! Got you, didn’t I? Jyada senti hogaya kya? Aare boss, aisa kuch hota to kya mein yahan full-on Valmiki style mein apna school-puran likh raha hota?!!
To be true to you, the first line fits my scholastic personality bill like how those hot pants fitted Rimi Sen in the opening song of Dhoom 1 (Yeah, you know what I am talking about… ;) … or perhaps the first two lines, the second being only partially true.
You see the need to score 35 percent or the golden minimum was limited to 5 or perhaps 6 of the 9 subjects I had in a year. The number would have been far lesser if something as lovable as ‘Science’ had not mutated into an ugly three-headed monster namely, Biology, Chemistry and Physics by the time Phoolan Devi became an MP or I reached the seventh standard.
However, thanks to my extraordinarily developed mugging skills, I somehow saw the end of these subjects by the time I wrote my final exam. But, how do you deal with a subject that can’t be mugged? How do you deal with a subject that doesn’t award you five marks for filling a page or two with meaningless crap? How do you deal with something like… mathematics?
Yes, I hated Maths. I hated every percentage of it, it’s every permutation and combination, it’s every angle and it’s every side. I hated it as much as Rakhi Sawant hates to leave her house without make-up or with donning clothes more than ten inches in length. Okay, maybe not that much. Nonetheless, exam times with Maths were always difficult. The lack of scope for mugging always left me staring blankly into mine and then intently into the papers of those around me.
Of all frightful exam memories that still manage to wake me up in the middle of an office meeting, there is this one instance… one question that I might have stared so hard that it now appears to be photocopied in my mind. The question was something like:
Section 2. Solve the following (3 Marks each)
01. 50% of 50 is ___
Yeah… fifty percent of fifty. Two identical numbers separated by one confusing symbol and you’ve got the kid. Pure evil.
I am positive I hadn’t got it right back then. Now of course if you ask me, I can tell you right away the answer is … yes, it is… (Ah, now where is a frigging calculator when you need one?) … Ha! Yes, 25… I would have told you the answer is 25. But, I couldn’t back then. Going by the intellectual composition of my class, I can say for sure that 50% of the 50 odd students never got either. I was one of them. One of the 50%. And that’s how it remained for most of my initial schooling years. I was always trailed by 50% of the best. To make it sound better, I always managed to lead the 50% worst performing students… Comfortably average.
However, scoring consistently low wasn't all that bad afterall, as it soon turned out to be… The year was 1996 and we had a new student joining our class…
4/1/09
A Himeshious Encounter
The other day I spotted one of my long lost school acquaintances aboard a local bus (recession hain bhai) on my way home. She was seated a few rows ahead from where I stood, playing audience to a guy who was either insanely in love with or was under a legally binding contract to play Himesh numbers in public, as the speaker of his phone kept dishing out one melodic gem after another.
Now, I am not that kind of a guy who would barge into the ladies section of a BEST bus and strike a conversation with a girl I hadn’t seen for like a decade. But, considering the dangers associated with prolonged exposure to H-rays, I did just that. Well, almost that.
For the good part of the story, I did manage to leave the musical carnage a few seats behind. Snaking past a few bystanders who seemed to have either been zombiefied or were ardent fans of 'something, something more, something more... statue!' game, I reached the ‘ladies reserved’ section of the bus and stood right behind her seat. From the top view, I could see that she was engrossed in some heavy duty texting whilst listening to what I hoped was not Himesh on her iPod. Thus, after spending a minute or two trying to recollect her name, I finally called it out.
“Hi X29C56D…” (You probably must have noticed it by yourself, but I have change the name to protect her identity)
X29C65D gave no reaction. Not a turn of head or a swing of the bag or a fling of the sandal or any such act that might suggest that she heard me call her name. However, it was not that I hadn’t attracted any response at all. Everyone else seated in the perimeter of 4 chairs or so, stared at me like a young kid would stare at a captive monkey before his acrobatic performance – anticipating some form of entertainment. A large part of my audience which unfortunately consisted of rather hefty looking aunties had already labeled me as a regular ruffian, some staring hard enough to indicate they were trying to find resemblances with their neighborhood goon.
Must be the iPod, I reasoned.
Allowing me to believe that the music player had shunned her from all forms of worldly sounds apart from the ones it was playing, I decided to adopt a somewhat ‘physical’ form of gesticulation. Thus, breathing courage into my perplexed self, I tapped her shoulder using the icebergish tip of my index finger.
The trick worked. X29C56D looked up, looking as freaked out as any girl might be when tapped out of nowhere in a public mode of transport. The aunties looked up too. They had perhaps made their mind to pound me into a pulp if she made any signs of protest or annoyance. Much to their disappointment, she recognized me in an instant.
“Hey you… you were that guy from school, right?” She asked with a smile.
Okay, almost recognized me. But, good enough to save me from featuring as the ‘Breaking News: Bespectacled pervert gets lynched in a public bus!!!’ guy in the evening show of a local news channel.
“Yeah true, from school,” I replied, nodding my head. “I had a name too, it’s Vishal.”
“Oh yes! Vishal… Vishal V, follower of girls!” She announced with a chuckle.
Now, before you take cues from this story and assume that am a habitual female stalker, let me tell you that the term ‘follower of girls’ is spoken in a completely different context. The thing is, thanks to my initials, which is V followed by another… yes, you’ve guessed it, another V; I usually ended up getting the last of the ‘boy roll numbers’… thus making way for the girls in the class, starting with one of had AA as her initials. The only possible way to break the jinx was to get a minus vowel naming Chinese or a Polish exchange student in my class, but sadly, that never happened. (Speaking of exchange students… Well, more on that later)
“Yeah, the one who had the last of boy roll number and was preceded by the girls in the class,” I replied, detailing the point for the benefit of my blood-thirsty audience. “By the way, how are you doing?”
The conversation went on for the next 4 stops, after which, she had to alight the bus. Between those 4 stops, we spoke at length about each other, about our common friends and some events which involved me in a not so lets-disclose-on-a-public-blog way, while Himesh crooned in the background, declaring some soniye that he loved her unconditionally (Actual lyrics. In English. I swear) for the second consecutive time.
No sooner than later, my stop had arrived and I stepped down of the bus, taking some bits of Himesh and the conversation along with me. As I straddled my way home, my mind began to incline towards that summer of 1996 when the first and possibly the only batch of exchange students stepped into my classroom…
Well, more 0n that later… :)
Now, I am not that kind of a guy who would barge into the ladies section of a BEST bus and strike a conversation with a girl I hadn’t seen for like a decade. But, considering the dangers associated with prolonged exposure to H-rays, I did just that. Well, almost that.
For the good part of the story, I did manage to leave the musical carnage a few seats behind. Snaking past a few bystanders who seemed to have either been zombiefied or were ardent fans of 'something, something more, something more... statue!' game, I reached the ‘ladies reserved’ section of the bus and stood right behind her seat. From the top view, I could see that she was engrossed in some heavy duty texting whilst listening to what I hoped was not Himesh on her iPod. Thus, after spending a minute or two trying to recollect her name, I finally called it out.
“Hi X29C56D…” (You probably must have noticed it by yourself, but I have change the name to protect her identity)
X29C65D gave no reaction. Not a turn of head or a swing of the bag or a fling of the sandal or any such act that might suggest that she heard me call her name. However, it was not that I hadn’t attracted any response at all. Everyone else seated in the perimeter of 4 chairs or so, stared at me like a young kid would stare at a captive monkey before his acrobatic performance – anticipating some form of entertainment. A large part of my audience which unfortunately consisted of rather hefty looking aunties had already labeled me as a regular ruffian, some staring hard enough to indicate they were trying to find resemblances with their neighborhood goon.
Must be the iPod, I reasoned.
Allowing me to believe that the music player had shunned her from all forms of worldly sounds apart from the ones it was playing, I decided to adopt a somewhat ‘physical’ form of gesticulation. Thus, breathing courage into my perplexed self, I tapped her shoulder using the icebergish tip of my index finger.
The trick worked. X29C56D looked up, looking as freaked out as any girl might be when tapped out of nowhere in a public mode of transport. The aunties looked up too. They had perhaps made their mind to pound me into a pulp if she made any signs of protest or annoyance. Much to their disappointment, she recognized me in an instant.
“Hey you… you were that guy from school, right?” She asked with a smile.
Okay, almost recognized me. But, good enough to save me from featuring as the ‘Breaking News: Bespectacled pervert gets lynched in a public bus!!!’ guy in the evening show of a local news channel.
“Yeah true, from school,” I replied, nodding my head. “I had a name too, it’s Vishal.”
“Oh yes! Vishal… Vishal V, follower of girls!” She announced with a chuckle.
Now, before you take cues from this story and assume that am a habitual female stalker, let me tell you that the term ‘follower of girls’ is spoken in a completely different context. The thing is, thanks to my initials, which is V followed by another… yes, you’ve guessed it, another V; I usually ended up getting the last of the ‘boy roll numbers’… thus making way for the girls in the class, starting with one of had AA as her initials. The only possible way to break the jinx was to get a minus vowel naming Chinese or a Polish exchange student in my class, but sadly, that never happened. (Speaking of exchange students… Well, more on that later)
“Yeah, the one who had the last of boy roll number and was preceded by the girls in the class,” I replied, detailing the point for the benefit of my blood-thirsty audience. “By the way, how are you doing?”
The conversation went on for the next 4 stops, after which, she had to alight the bus. Between those 4 stops, we spoke at length about each other, about our common friends and some events which involved me in a not so lets-disclose-on-a-public-blog way, while Himesh crooned in the background, declaring some soniye that he loved her unconditionally (Actual lyrics. In English. I swear) for the second consecutive time.
No sooner than later, my stop had arrived and I stepped down of the bus, taking some bits of Himesh and the conversation along with me. As I straddled my way home, my mind began to incline towards that summer of 1996 when the first and possibly the only batch of exchange students stepped into my classroom…
Well, more 0n that later… :)
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