So, I am on the other side of the fence now, back once again to college but in a different avatar. No longer can I afford to bunk classes, no longer can I afford to sit on the last bench and sleep through the screening of a ‘film’ which was made by a mad maniac much before my great - grandfather could say ‘film’.
This idiot of a person apparently created history by filming himself hogging ham and bacon. More importantly, stranger was the fact that my teachers and some of the front benchers said that this mad man revolutionised cinema through this piece of ‘art’ (my reply often, obviously in the college canteen, would be, if that was art then my maid is better than Picasso).
Anyways, let bygones and stupid teachers/students be what they are, nothing but bygones and stupid teachers/students.
It’s time to talk about the new experience.
This stint seems to have changed me as a person, I seem to have become more mature (somehow I now realise the need to shave rather than avoid it till the time it starts to itch), I am more disciplined (these days I’m only late by half an hour for work) and certainly more organised/presentable (I wear only formals now, so what if I often forget to wash them).
But other than these flimsy materialistic things, there are a few other things which have changed.
It was only today while invigilating I realised that I was walking like a wooden caricature with a stiff upper/lower lip. I was peeping into every ones answer sheet as if it was my birth right to see who was writing what. Imagine, a few years back I tried doing the same and they labelled it as ‘cheating’. For the first time in my life I talk about the importance of grades in a class (personally, I still don’t believe in ‘grading’ and ‘marking’ students) and how important it is to the development of a human being.
A teacher is generally christened twice, once by his parents and the second time by his students. Parents do it for the sake of calling the tiny little wobbly thing something or he might end up being called a chunnu or munnu for the rest of his life. The students do it for various reasons - sometimes they do it out of disgust, sometimes out of anger, sometimes out of fun, sometimes out of love and sometimes just for the sake of doing it.
My creative best to this day is calling our Visual Communication teacher a ‘Polar bear’, I say creative best because not only was it supremely innovative but also had a definite and very sound logic to it. There are many (few of them my very good friends) who worshipped him but not me, maybe because I was never able to catch his ‘balloons’ (in the man’s own words he didn’t teach, he just threw balloons at us which we were suppose to catch).
For the uninitiated who are wondering why would I call somebody a Polar bear (somehow I love writing this paragraph), that guy not only looked like one – he was fat (and that is an understatement), and as white as snow but was as ferocious as the animal itself.
I remember in the final viva, the guy literally raped me in front of an external examiner (as I was not able to comprehend the Osho gyaan, he was trying to give at that time). At the time of final internal assessments, I don’t know for what joy the sadistic Bear took my trip (and he took one hell of a trip) in front of the whole class.
That was about him. I am sure, Polar bear would be busy hunting more innocent lambs like me and there would be many christening him with other creative names, just to vent out the frustration of not being able to reciprocate his wrath.
I did it to him and I am sure somebody right now would be thinking about my new name in this old business of throwing and catching balloons.
So, life seems to be taking a full circle now, it has gone back to where it started from. Many would agree with me, that there is no time better than the one you have had in college (even though you deal with people like Polar Bear). I seem to have been given another chance to be there once again, let’s see if this side of the fence is as interesting as the one gone by.
