This is just a reminiscence to what our life was once like...hope you guys enjoy it...!!!
Reckless little monsters running haywire, teachers shouting madly in vain, creaking little benches, the irritating sound of a chalk making deep impressions on the ‘green’ ‘black-board’, the chatter of kids playing cricket, kho-kho, kabaddi, or the rather pointless pakda-pakdi in the neglected derelict of a fully functional zila parishad school…It had a barbed fence running in half a rectangle around it…some green grass…some ‘malkhamb(s)’ in the mud…a non-functional water cooler and a cluster of classrooms which could be counted on fingers…
It was the epicenter of chaos, confusion and careers…We had the honor of being the distinguished students who got admission in the very famous “Homi Bhaha classes” for tuitions of std 12...These classes were conducted at the school mentioned above. It always annoyed me to get up in the afternoon to attend the awfully long and boring lectures in the twilight…but the fact that our class was comprised of a variety of idiots (including me and my friends) who never for one second couldn’t abstain themselves from exhibiting their natural panache of nerd ness used to pump me up from within to attend the same….
On the very first day of the tuition we had an encounter with a sluggish, grouchy and a nostalgically comic human being who was supposed to be our math teacher…His name was AK Singh (as in AK 57)…On that day he doodled time by asking us our names and marks in std 10 math paper...Mandar was an instant hit from that day onwards as he was always referred to as “98 wale log” (‘coz he had mistakenly scored 98 marks in std 10) and the rest of us became “aam junta”.....Playing cursorily with a piece of chalk in his hand, he appeared too shy to face us as he talked to us looking lazily at the chalk piece glancing up sometimes to observe pranab grinning madly at everybody, too happy to be a part of this collective boredom….The extraordinarily zappy relationship that pranab and apna Armageddon (AK Singh sir) developed over the year is beyond my scope of description.
The next character happened to be a slender, zealous and graceful man with deep poring eyes that were highlighted by his thick eyebrows and square glasses…The most peculiar and distinguished fixation of this man was his manner of cleaning his glasses.
He would remove his specs and turning them over placed them on his stomach and then…would move his ‘kamariya’ left right left with a wide smile flickering on his face.
He taught us chemistry!! Physics was taught by a person whose anger can be compared with “He-who-must-not-be-named”…Committed deeply to the cause of ‘booodies in dee state of rest or of motion’ he would move his entire body along the length of blackboard lifting his thin and frail frame on his tiny toes while drawing a vertical line and then again attain his position of normalcy while coming down (on the blackboard you dumb heads).
Of the very clear memories that I can recollect is the one when were supposed to study and appear for the unit tests…..bah! Well nerds that we were, we DID study for such kind of tests and to be frank and modest (that is to say flamboyantly frank & menacingly modest) we tormented sudipto who used to flash his super white Colgate smile while copying the entire length of answers from the texts and notes. Now that we are on the threshold of completing engineering, we realize that wasting time preparing for an exam months away is just plain stupidity. Just for the sheer fun and nostalgia of securing pass marks, studying exactly on the last moment of exams make us a natural expert in tackling crunch situations. I still pity sudipto…Why to take all the pain of copying all the way to exams when you can fail now and blissfully sit in peace while your peers (read: me and my gang) achieve an iconic ‘moron’ status….!!
We loved it when the rains used to unleash hell in the town. It so happened that Armageddon was always late and when he finally showed up, removing his gigantic black helmet to reveal the frustration on his face we could hardly suppress our laughter….On being late, he always had the same excuse….”Halemate pe paani girta hai…iss wajah se saamne kaa kuch dikhayi nahi deta…” Bravo dude…!!!It so happened once that the rain gods decided to add more fun to our already whacky day of nonsense humor. It was raining hell then as our apna pranab came riding on a 1970s ki bike which made hell of a noise turning all the heads passing by...fumes being unleashed in a wicked manner from the silencer...and add to that the weird attire sported by the rider (A yellow sleeveless tee, some weird shorts which are usually worn by footballers and as usual a silly stupid and sweet grin advertising the white of his teeth). Bechara dude had come to enquire if the tuition would take place or not! As he approached the gate of the school, he saw the fantabulous awesome twosome on a scooty moving in his direction with awe and amazement on their face. As if caught in an act of treachery, he was confused as to whether he should blush with shame or should he keep grinning madly. Whatever the case, he turned the bike 180 degrees as fast as he could…momentarily stopping the awesome twosome in their path to view the moronic kid running away like a robber, spreading smiles and generating giggles all over….!
I can perfectly understand his state of confusion as days later even I was trying to hide behind shrikant while on my way to play football… (not to mention the fact that I was wearing shorts and rachana came zooming by on her scooty to leer at me…plus the fact that the very next day she loudly mocked the first thing in the morning in front of a significant few “Kal baarish me half pant pehne shrikant ke peeche kaun chup raha tha yaar? ” )…..Arrrrh! Girls are evil !! Gorgeous evils!! Of the other memories, when the lectures (after joining engineering I was informed contemptuously that lectures are way different from ‘periods’…ouch!) used to get awfully boring, mandar used to design new fonts or write the names of the latest feature films in that very font and style which was imprinted on the poster or would sketch the caricatures of the teachers…..This was usually done on the last pages of his notebooks…Man! Those pages would be an inspiration for all the hopeless artists and cartoonists like me...One fine day, we saw mandar making deep impressions on the bench where he was sitting with what is known as a compass. On further probing this paranormal phenomenon, it was discovered that he had written 2+3 on the bench..!! WHAT? I mean…we initially thought that he was out of his mind…then shrikant suggested that excessive passion for numbers and scoring 98 again was making him retarded…pranab jumped in as usual enquiring “kya hua? Kya hua? Mujhe bhi batao naa yaar…” Vaibhav ignored this thing, albeit he did bat his eyelids at mandar…raised his eyebrows…shook his head in rejection and continued being the perfectionist…I (also nearing retardation) looked cursorily at the etching and complimented mandar on the font style…”JERKS!” lamented shrikant looking disgustingly at us. To leave someone or something as it is is not the usual gesture that we indulge in… Make a complete mess of the situation, find some non-present links in it, manipulate the person’s mind involved in it, torture him to frustration, build a story centering the events and annoy the fellow who committed the felony of doing something which even he can’t explain…This makes normal fellows like us satisfied… Mandar was no exception to it…A story was quickly formed that the 2+3 was actually 23 and that it was roll no 23 that mandar intended to write (God knows whether even mandar thought of it or not!). So the story was further built up saying that poor mandar had a crush (Ah! his first crush..!) on the girl who had the misfortune of being allotted roll no 23 in tuition classes. The girl in question happened to be a short cute and simple one with a dimpled smile. On the limited number of times that mandar went to her asking any whimsical things, either she yelled, gave him a filthy look, smiled and politely refused or just ignored him.(It usually happened during the times when we were in the process of making ‘blossoms-the school cd!’). Rather than consoling mandar, we usually re-energised his stupidity to repeat the blunder again and again.
For the very obvious reason that I am the one writing this memoir, I won’t elaborate how these same guys used to torture me repeatedly chanting someone else’s name in my head. Till date, mandar and me are the best competitors for attaining the supreme position of FOSLA (Frustoo One Sided Lover’s Association) group…
Amongst the other things I do recollect, is the one where some of the so called self proclaimed “DUDES” (….bah!) used to engage themselves into a kind of competition as to who gets to sit besides the bench adjacent to the one where awesome twosome used to sit!....bah again! As the month of December approached, guys got real serious and began studying for the board exams. During one such time, pranab got into some kind of deep discussion with his neighbor about some problem that was being solved by the Armageddon. On hearing the hustle of sound behind his back, Armageddon turned in a filmy style (He was always filmy but funny and caring too) and queried in a very sardonic voice “ Ab kya baat ho gayi PARNAB?” Delightful on being noticed, pranab put forward his little piece of doubt to him to which Armageddon (Now in the mood to joke) said “PARNAB ki baaton ko seeeriyaslly nahi lena chahiye” and gave one of his faint smiles. The entire class erupted into a roar of laughter, pranab got agitated, gave a look of utter impatience, mouth opened into a wide ”O” , he couldn’t believe that the only doubt that he had asked would be subjected to total mockery…Well can’t really blame the poor thing….
On the other hand Armageddon was standing there, chalk in one of his hands, head tilted to the left, a wicked smile on his face, his gigantic tummy tucked out graciously…he seemed happy to enjoy his moment of humor. I distinctly remember the times when Armageddon used to arrive 5-10 mins before his lecture. The first ongoing lecture would usually be of chemistry when a shallow noise of a motorcycle’s rut-tut used to awaken our senses. There he would be…. riding his comfort, wearing a jeetendra style black goggles, stopping by the porch to alight from his flight of fantasy. Feet firmly on ground, balancing his bike in style, he would remove the black sunglasses, rub them gently on his shirt with both hands, he would look through them raising them to light with one eye closed. The specialty of all this was the sluggish, leisurely and gradual pace with which he accomplished each of these tasks. After repeating this itinerary n number of times till he was satisfied, he would place the goggles in the shirt pocket and out of the back pocket came the tiny red colored comb. Adjusting the bike’s mirror, he would style his hair before the showdown in front of us. Finally when the chemistry tutor would finish with his frustratingly foolish covalent and ionic bondings, Armageddon would walk in the classroom carrying his eloquent piece of plastic bag containing books and notes. To say that we were his biggest fans would be an understatement.
During our actual board exams, he had come to the college as an invigilator. The amount of hope and happiness it generated for pranab was just insurmountable. Well, we did score decent marks in all the subjects and passed blissfully in 12th std. The nicest part about being in homi bhabha tuitions was that we had an enormously large and fantabulous part of fun while studying unlike the scholars who were grilled into nostalgia by Mr. YK Pandey. Even during these days when me mandar and shrikant walk by our erstwhile coaching centre (YES WE STILL WALK…We can’t ride bicycles now….motorbikes and scooters are already in a depressingly degraded condition and if WE ride them, the remaining last few years of the machine would diminish at a rate faster than your mobile’s balance!), we do look through the barbed fences…into the classroom where we once used to sit…where mandar once wrote 2+3…where pranab used to bring packaged food items to eat…where tests were fun…where we were together for what seemed like eternity! Seasons changed, years passed by in silence and times are different now…Unlike us, now the folks of std 12 roam around in the colonies riding their swanky bikes, they have girlfriends/boyfriends….(?), hang out a lot in some evening spots and enjoy a lot….!!! About the tuition classes I don’t know as to whether they are still functional or not….Whatever!!
Reckless little monsters running haywire, teachers shouting madly in vain, creaking little benches, the irritating sound of a chalk making deep impressions on the ‘green’ ‘black-board’, the chatter of kids playing cricket, kho-kho, kabaddi, or the rather pointless pakda-pakdi in the neglected derelict of a fully functional zila parishad school…It had a barbed fence running in half a rectangle around it…some green grass…some ‘malkhamb(s)’ in the mud…a non-functional water cooler and a cluster of classrooms which could be counted on fingers…
It was the epicenter of chaos, confusion and careers…We had the honor of being the distinguished students who got admission in the very famous “Homi Bhaha classes” for tuitions of std 12...These classes were conducted at the school mentioned above. It always annoyed me to get up in the afternoon to attend the awfully long and boring lectures in the twilight…but the fact that our class was comprised of a variety of idiots (including me and my friends) who never for one second couldn’t abstain themselves from exhibiting their natural panache of nerd ness used to pump me up from within to attend the same….
On the very first day of the tuition we had an encounter with a sluggish, grouchy and a nostalgically comic human being who was supposed to be our math teacher…His name was AK Singh (as in AK 57)…On that day he doodled time by asking us our names and marks in std 10 math paper...Mandar was an instant hit from that day onwards as he was always referred to as “98 wale log” (‘coz he had mistakenly scored 98 marks in std 10) and the rest of us became “aam junta”.....Playing cursorily with a piece of chalk in his hand, he appeared too shy to face us as he talked to us looking lazily at the chalk piece glancing up sometimes to observe pranab grinning madly at everybody, too happy to be a part of this collective boredom….The extraordinarily zappy relationship that pranab and apna Armageddon (AK Singh sir) developed over the year is beyond my scope of description.
The next character happened to be a slender, zealous and graceful man with deep poring eyes that were highlighted by his thick eyebrows and square glasses…The most peculiar and distinguished fixation of this man was his manner of cleaning his glasses.
He would remove his specs and turning them over placed them on his stomach and then…would move his ‘kamariya’ left right left with a wide smile flickering on his face.
He taught us chemistry!! Physics was taught by a person whose anger can be compared with “He-who-must-not-be-named”…Committed deeply to the cause of ‘booodies in dee state of rest or of motion’ he would move his entire body along the length of blackboard lifting his thin and frail frame on his tiny toes while drawing a vertical line and then again attain his position of normalcy while coming down (on the blackboard you dumb heads).
Of the very clear memories that I can recollect is the one when were supposed to study and appear for the unit tests…..bah! Well nerds that we were, we DID study for such kind of tests and to be frank and modest (that is to say flamboyantly frank & menacingly modest) we tormented sudipto who used to flash his super white Colgate smile while copying the entire length of answers from the texts and notes. Now that we are on the threshold of completing engineering, we realize that wasting time preparing for an exam months away is just plain stupidity. Just for the sheer fun and nostalgia of securing pass marks, studying exactly on the last moment of exams make us a natural expert in tackling crunch situations. I still pity sudipto…Why to take all the pain of copying all the way to exams when you can fail now and blissfully sit in peace while your peers (read: me and my gang) achieve an iconic ‘moron’ status….!!
We loved it when the rains used to unleash hell in the town. It so happened that Armageddon was always late and when he finally showed up, removing his gigantic black helmet to reveal the frustration on his face we could hardly suppress our laughter….On being late, he always had the same excuse….”Halemate pe paani girta hai…iss wajah se saamne kaa kuch dikhayi nahi deta…” Bravo dude…!!!It so happened once that the rain gods decided to add more fun to our already whacky day of nonsense humor. It was raining hell then as our apna pranab came riding on a 1970s ki bike which made hell of a noise turning all the heads passing by...fumes being unleashed in a wicked manner from the silencer...and add to that the weird attire sported by the rider (A yellow sleeveless tee, some weird shorts which are usually worn by footballers and as usual a silly stupid and sweet grin advertising the white of his teeth). Bechara dude had come to enquire if the tuition would take place or not! As he approached the gate of the school, he saw the fantabulous awesome twosome on a scooty moving in his direction with awe and amazement on their face. As if caught in an act of treachery, he was confused as to whether he should blush with shame or should he keep grinning madly. Whatever the case, he turned the bike 180 degrees as fast as he could…momentarily stopping the awesome twosome in their path to view the moronic kid running away like a robber, spreading smiles and generating giggles all over….!
I can perfectly understand his state of confusion as days later even I was trying to hide behind shrikant while on my way to play football… (not to mention the fact that I was wearing shorts and rachana came zooming by on her scooty to leer at me…plus the fact that the very next day she loudly mocked the first thing in the morning in front of a significant few “Kal baarish me half pant pehne shrikant ke peeche kaun chup raha tha yaar? ” )…..Arrrrh! Girls are evil !! Gorgeous evils!! Of the other memories, when the lectures (after joining engineering I was informed contemptuously that lectures are way different from ‘periods’…ouch!) used to get awfully boring, mandar used to design new fonts or write the names of the latest feature films in that very font and style which was imprinted on the poster or would sketch the caricatures of the teachers…..This was usually done on the last pages of his notebooks…Man! Those pages would be an inspiration for all the hopeless artists and cartoonists like me...One fine day, we saw mandar making deep impressions on the bench where he was sitting with what is known as a compass. On further probing this paranormal phenomenon, it was discovered that he had written 2+3 on the bench..!! WHAT? I mean…we initially thought that he was out of his mind…then shrikant suggested that excessive passion for numbers and scoring 98 again was making him retarded…pranab jumped in as usual enquiring “kya hua? Kya hua? Mujhe bhi batao naa yaar…” Vaibhav ignored this thing, albeit he did bat his eyelids at mandar…raised his eyebrows…shook his head in rejection and continued being the perfectionist…I (also nearing retardation) looked cursorily at the etching and complimented mandar on the font style…”JERKS!” lamented shrikant looking disgustingly at us. To leave someone or something as it is is not the usual gesture that we indulge in… Make a complete mess of the situation, find some non-present links in it, manipulate the person’s mind involved in it, torture him to frustration, build a story centering the events and annoy the fellow who committed the felony of doing something which even he can’t explain…This makes normal fellows like us satisfied… Mandar was no exception to it…A story was quickly formed that the 2+3 was actually 23 and that it was roll no 23 that mandar intended to write (God knows whether even mandar thought of it or not!). So the story was further built up saying that poor mandar had a crush (Ah! his first crush..!) on the girl who had the misfortune of being allotted roll no 23 in tuition classes. The girl in question happened to be a short cute and simple one with a dimpled smile. On the limited number of times that mandar went to her asking any whimsical things, either she yelled, gave him a filthy look, smiled and politely refused or just ignored him.(It usually happened during the times when we were in the process of making ‘blossoms-the school cd!’). Rather than consoling mandar, we usually re-energised his stupidity to repeat the blunder again and again.
For the very obvious reason that I am the one writing this memoir, I won’t elaborate how these same guys used to torture me repeatedly chanting someone else’s name in my head. Till date, mandar and me are the best competitors for attaining the supreme position of FOSLA (Frustoo One Sided Lover’s Association) group…
Amongst the other things I do recollect, is the one where some of the so called self proclaimed “DUDES” (….bah!) used to engage themselves into a kind of competition as to who gets to sit besides the bench adjacent to the one where awesome twosome used to sit!....bah again! As the month of December approached, guys got real serious and began studying for the board exams. During one such time, pranab got into some kind of deep discussion with his neighbor about some problem that was being solved by the Armageddon. On hearing the hustle of sound behind his back, Armageddon turned in a filmy style (He was always filmy but funny and caring too) and queried in a very sardonic voice “ Ab kya baat ho gayi PARNAB?” Delightful on being noticed, pranab put forward his little piece of doubt to him to which Armageddon (Now in the mood to joke) said “PARNAB ki baaton ko seeeriyaslly nahi lena chahiye” and gave one of his faint smiles. The entire class erupted into a roar of laughter, pranab got agitated, gave a look of utter impatience, mouth opened into a wide ”O” , he couldn’t believe that the only doubt that he had asked would be subjected to total mockery…Well can’t really blame the poor thing….
On the other hand Armageddon was standing there, chalk in one of his hands, head tilted to the left, a wicked smile on his face, his gigantic tummy tucked out graciously…he seemed happy to enjoy his moment of humor. I distinctly remember the times when Armageddon used to arrive 5-10 mins before his lecture. The first ongoing lecture would usually be of chemistry when a shallow noise of a motorcycle’s rut-tut used to awaken our senses. There he would be…. riding his comfort, wearing a jeetendra style black goggles, stopping by the porch to alight from his flight of fantasy. Feet firmly on ground, balancing his bike in style, he would remove the black sunglasses, rub them gently on his shirt with both hands, he would look through them raising them to light with one eye closed. The specialty of all this was the sluggish, leisurely and gradual pace with which he accomplished each of these tasks. After repeating this itinerary n number of times till he was satisfied, he would place the goggles in the shirt pocket and out of the back pocket came the tiny red colored comb. Adjusting the bike’s mirror, he would style his hair before the showdown in front of us. Finally when the chemistry tutor would finish with his frustratingly foolish covalent and ionic bondings, Armageddon would walk in the classroom carrying his eloquent piece of plastic bag containing books and notes. To say that we were his biggest fans would be an understatement.
During our actual board exams, he had come to the college as an invigilator. The amount of hope and happiness it generated for pranab was just insurmountable. Well, we did score decent marks in all the subjects and passed blissfully in 12th std. The nicest part about being in homi bhabha tuitions was that we had an enormously large and fantabulous part of fun while studying unlike the scholars who were grilled into nostalgia by Mr. YK Pandey. Even during these days when me mandar and shrikant walk by our erstwhile coaching centre (YES WE STILL WALK…We can’t ride bicycles now….motorbikes and scooters are already in a depressingly degraded condition and if WE ride them, the remaining last few years of the machine would diminish at a rate faster than your mobile’s balance!), we do look through the barbed fences…into the classroom where we once used to sit…where mandar once wrote 2+3…where pranab used to bring packaged food items to eat…where tests were fun…where we were together for what seemed like eternity! Seasons changed, years passed by in silence and times are different now…Unlike us, now the folks of std 12 roam around in the colonies riding their swanky bikes, they have girlfriends/boyfriends….(?), hang out a lot in some evening spots and enjoy a lot….!!! About the tuition classes I don’t know as to whether they are still functional or not….Whatever!!
