Teachers say the darnest things

"Both of you three, leave the class!"
A modified and funnier version of that is, "Both of you three stand in a corner and form a circle!"
No one knows where they originated, though everyone claims that it was a teacher from their school who said that. Another popular quip is, "Why are you looking at the monkeys outside when I am here?"
So what compels a teacher to say such things to their students? Who cares, it's funny! Let them go ahead, it provides us with a distraction from their droning, and a distraction that we can't be blamed for.

We had a bio teacher who responded to the name Mrs.Madhusudan. She was actually a kannada teacher and had no knowledge of biology. But because of a lack of authentic bio teachers (authentic teachers in fact), and the abundance of learn-bio-in-30days books, she doubled as our bio teacher. And every day we would wait for someone in class to slip up, so that we could bare witness to her tirade of scintillating vituperation.
"Mrs. Madhusudan, I forgot my sharpener, could I please borrow one?"
"You want a sharpener?! How dare you forget your own. Who are you to take someone else's? Come and put your bloody pencil in my mouth, because my tongue is as sharp as a sharpener!"
No doubt the child found out how sharp it was.
There were times where she would go on for 15 mins, half a class, to the sadistic joy of everyone except the kid who committed the crime.

We had a chem teacher who would keep saying 'OK' after every second word. A friend once counted 58 'OKs in one speech.
"OK this is OK how you OK hold OK a test-tube OK. You OK use a OK test-tube OK holder OK and you OK clamp it OK over here OK." He clamped it to the mouth of the test-tube and held it for the class to see. CRASH! The test-tube slipped right out and splintered on impact with the ground.
"That's OK exactly OK what you OK are OK not supposed OK to do OK," he said, promptly.

It's better if the teacher's name sounds funny. Like Pakianathan, who kept telling us that he wanted a healthy relationship with us. We didn't want any sort of relationship with him. We were quite content with interbreeding within our class. Or Kulkarni, who never really taught anything. In fact, he wasn't even meant to teach something, though he could solve the rubix cube pretty quick. He presided over our study hours in the JEE concentration camp. Legend has it that Kulkarni used to be part of a menagerie, and taught monkeys how to speak English. He left that job because the monkeys indeed started speaking English, which freaked him out.
"You know, before this job i used to teach monkeys," he would tell us, snickering, with one eye squinted. "Now I still teach monkeys, heh heh heh."
He used to conduct these 'aptitude' tests, which had absolutely nothing to do with anything. There were questions like -
Q: Do you know how to fix a VCR?
Options: a) yes, b) no, c) what's a vcr?, d) don't know/ can't say or
Q:Do you plan your day?
Options: a) yes, b) no, c) all of the above, d) don't know/ can't say
Q: How many hours do you sleep in a day?
Options: a) 4, b) 5, c) I don't need sleep, I study all night for IIT-JEE, d) don't know/ can't say
Where the hell is the option for 10 hours?! He even went on to evaluate the paper! Apparently the correct answers for the above questions were - b, a and c respectively. My answers were a, c and b (which i ticked twice). I failed that test.
Kulkarni had an acid tongue as well. There was a Gopalkrishna once who was talking during class. Kukarni didn't like that. "Dei Krishna, get out of class I say. And take your flute and goats with you."

Physical Educations teachers take the cake. It's their actions as well as words that do the trick. We had one who kept his pants in his front pockets, and continuosly scratched his 'regions'. "In football you have to be mean and poor! You have to be cheap and grab the ball. Don't be nice. Be poor! Poor!" And everytime he said poor, he would stop scratching, and would grip and shake vigorously instead. We had one who came with us for a tournament. He used to be the world kho kho champion, or so he claimed. He walked up to the opponent coach and said, "Oy Sujata. I'll open my pants to you i say!"

Sometimes the teacher doesn't know what he/she is doing. They will take an entire class to solve a problem and they still won't finish it in the end. And then they have the cheek to say, "Such problems won't come in your exams." Or when a student asks them something that they don't know, they will either say, "That's not in your syllabus" or "How many times do you want me to explain this chapter. It's not my fault if you don't listen in class."
We had a teacher who was like that. She used to read from her notes and couldn't answer anything else. And we students would ask her the craziest questions. She was explaining the setup for an experiment one day, and telling us how we should place the metal inside the beaker, and then slowly pour acid. A classmate raised his hand, with a look on his face that he had found the most confounding question ever. The entire class waited with bated breath, and the teacher took a deep gulp. "Ma'am! I have found a major flaw in your experiment. What happens if we don't pour the acid in?" That was one time I don't blame the teacher for being speechless.

And recently we had a teacher tell us not to look into our text books while he was teaching. His reason, "Jesus wrote the Bible. When he preaches, do his followers look into it?"
Amen to that.

Smoke on the water, and Fire in the sky

This happened a few years ago, back in the day when we were young and reckless. It's a hilarious story worth telling a hundred times over, legendary. To this very day, my friends and I sit by the fire, with ale in our hands and a fair maiden on our laps, and recite the story. And this is how it runs-


'Twas the thirty-first of October, Halloween, Diwali, and more importantly to this story, my birthday (and also the day where many a man has died a gruesome death, as my cousins tell me with sarcastic smiles). Tar, Chai, Moony, RS, Ra and I had just finished lunch. Moony doesn't do much anyway, in any situation, so I'm not going to be mentioning him anywhere, because he doesn't make a difference to the story. The Scooby Doo movie we were scheduled to see was still a few hours off. I suggested we go back to my place and burn away time there. I still had a cache of firecrackers. So we all hopped into Ra's car and drove back.
I live in an apartment, 3 floors, 1 house on each floor. We have a long driveway, and there is a house on either side of the driveway, separated by a short wall, waist-high. So if you are standing outside my building and facing the gate, on your left will be a two storied house, squat and square, with an old temperamental man living inside. On the right is a single story house, with a shed right next to the wall, and the house beyond the shed. What's more, the roof of the house and the shed are adjoining. The roof of the shed was actually a wire gauze. And there are dried leaves everywhere. Inside the house is an old lady, who is usually sleeping.
It didn't take us very long to run out of the bombs and rockets. Much as it is fun to place Laxmi bombs under buckets and watch them take off, or bury hydrogen bombs in a pile of sand and shower the entire place with it, we were still hungry for more. All we were left with were sparklers, those little, innocent sticks that crackle when you light them. We thought it would be thoroughly enjoyable to fling them in the air and watch their trails of fire. After we had exhausted those as well, we went out onto the streets to see if we could find other ways to destroy public property. It was then that one of us noticed that RS had not come outside with us.
"I notice that RS has not come outside with us," said one of us. So we ran back in to find RS stand facing the single story house with a hand raised, pointing towards the shed, and laughing uncontrollably. That was when we noticed the fire. It was small, but while we were standing there joining RS at staring at it, it soon grew into an inferno, consuming the entire shed.
"This is not good guys," I warned the others.
"We need to put this thing out, before someone sees it," said Tar.
"Got it!" exclaimed Ra, who looked like he had come up with a fantastic solution. "We need to somehow get water up there." He looked around at us, pleased at his genius.
The old man from the other house was outside by then. He decided that our time would be better spent getting shouted at by him. So he started to shout at us. We weren't sure why he was so upset. It wasn't his house that was on fire after all. "What do you boys think you are doing? Look at what you have done! Do you think this is a game?"
"Actually, that's preci-" started Chai, trying to carefully explain the situation.
"There are people living in that house! They could die you know!" Martin didn't seem to want to listen to us.
"Actually there's only one person in that house. And she is old, so she's going to die anyway," I put in, thinking that it might help.
He ignored me. "Look how big it is! If it spreads to the roof, the whole house will be ruined!"
"You know, Ra here had a fantastic solution to that problem," pointed Tar. Ra was nodding his head vigorously.
I ran upstairs to fetch a bucket. Just as I was leaving the house with it, the phone rang.
"Hello," I said.
"Yes, Mr.Bharath. This is Martin speaking. Your son and his destructive gang have set your neighbor's house on fire," said Martin, the old man who seemed to be very angry for some reason.
"But aren't you my neighbor? Why are you referring to yourself in third person?" I asked.
"Eh? No, I'm talking about your other neighbor. Mrs. Jayprasad. Your son set her house on fire."
"Ah, well, you know kids these days," I said. "They tend to experiment a lot. But thanks for informing me. I shall make sure nothing happens to the old lady." And with that I hung up and ran back down. Martin was back again, and had resumed shouting at Tar, Chai and Ra. RS was still pointing and laughing at the fire. He tends to behave that way when something fascinates him. It takes him quite a while for the novelty to fade away. Ra, who later admitted to starting the fire, and who was never one to stand up for anyone, decided to help me out with the bucket. There was a little pond in the old lady's house, filled with fish and plants.
"Fish," cried out Ra when he saw them. Ra was in the business of fish trafficking. He would bring plastic bags to school, and steal fish from the aquariums in the biology labs. He would then sell them in the black market as exotic species after adding pigments to them to make them look exotic.
"No time for that now man. You can steal them all later," I said dipping the bucket in and filling it with water and fish. It came out heavy, even with both of us lifting it. We made our way slowly to the shed, splashing water and fish out onto the ground. Ra had a pained expression on him every time a fish fell out.
"Dude, they are going to die! How can you be so cruel?" he complained.
"There's an old lady in that house who will get burnt if we don't stop that fire," I countered.
"What's more important? The old woman, or my busi- i mean fish. My fish."
"Ah well, you know what they say, all fish must die." We stood under the fire, with the bucket in our hands. RS was still standing on the other side, laughing. He had stopped pointing though.
"Ready?" I called. "On three. One, two, three, HEAVE." And we heaved. The water went up a foot in the air and came crashing back down, missing the fire by miles. There were fish flopping on the floor and the fire still raged above us.
"Oh my poor little things!" Ra was on his knees, picking up the dying fish and putting them in plastic bags that he procured from his self. "It's business man," he said.
All hope was lost. I was actually thinking of jumping the country, lest Martin put us in a juvenile correction facility. Then help came, from the unlikely source of Ra's driver. He had managed to obtain a pipe from somewhere. Chai took one end of it and attached it to the tap in Martin's compound. Martin was still shouting at whoever was left to shout at, which by that time was only Tar. RS had stopped laughing by then, but the fire still held his attention. Soon the flames were smothered, and all that was left was a gaping hole in the roof of the shed.
The old lady came out of her house in the end, oblivious to what was happening. She was happy to see so many kids though. Martin decided to spoil the fun by coming and complaining to her. He was bent on convincing her that we were psychopathic criminals out to destroy all her property. The old woman, senile as she was, didn't really care. She gave us sweets for being such nice boys and visiting her. Martin didn't get any. Neither did RS, who was still staring at the shed. He started to scratch his head after a while, slowly realizing that there was no fire anymore.
But the sour man wasn't done with us yet. He managed to get in touch with my parents, and told them all about our dastardly acts. My father rushed back and slapped me when he came home. My mother came home a few minutes later, smiling, and reminded us that we had a movie.
"I guess we learnt something today," I said as we left. "Sparklers are the most dangerous crackers!"
"Ya," agreed Chai. "So anyone up for aiming rockets at the xerox shop across my house next Diwali?"

Screw acads, bring on the booze and the babes

Let's start outside of India, in one of those western countries, say America. "God bless America," as all Americans say, though i wonder why no one else uses it for their own country. Maybe the Americans need the blessings. But that's beside the point. Take the average American kid. He has a beautiful 2-story house, with a basement or garage, a lawn, 2 cars, a swimming pool perhaps, a sister, a PlayStation, two gameboys, of which one doesn't work, hence the other, and one parent preferably divorced. He has blond hair, blue eyes, and for simplicity's sake we shall refer to him as Little Johnny. Little Johnny goes to the local public school, plays football well, and does average when it comes to academics (because he is an average boy, and because they have relative grading there). But there has to be a reason why Little Johnny never does above average, or why he can't count till he is in the sixth grade. And that's because Little Johnny isn't as little as people thought he was. He has been getting some action behind the scenes, even though he isn't old enough to produce his own sperm. So Little Johnny is now Johnny. At the unripe, premature age of twelve, Johnny has been indulging in activities that the average Indian still dreams of at twenty, when their cobras are of no use and have started to wrinkle up due to lack of exercise. Of course, Johnny gets caught violating a classmate of his, sometimes of the same sex depending on how sloshed he is, but life still goes on for him. After all, what can the parent do, he/she doesn't really care about Johnny. The parent is not capable of handling situations like this, that's why the divorce. Plus Johnny owns a knife by now, and it's never a good idea to provoke someone who has a knife. So there goes Johnny scot-free trying out booze, dope and new girls every night. By the time he is in the 10th grade, he is capable of seducing a random hot girl; most of them are hot over there, into letting him use them to satisfy his regular spikes of testosterone and excitement. The time it takes for him to accomplish this varies directly with the proximity of the nearest toilet. He bunks school, drops out of college, or sometimes doesn't even make it, shoots someone, usually his teacher, manages to get a job that most Indians would envy, gets married, has more sex, not with his wife, and then gets himself killed in a war or some terrorist attack.
Compare that with the average Indian kid. He lives in an apartment, in a crowded noisy city, has one car, seven siblings, two parents, three grandparents (one's dead by now), twenty aunts and uncles, and possibly a hundred cousins, though since there are so many, nobody bothered to count. He is brown, or if he is from the south, black, and his name is Ram in the north, or Senthilnathavamsirangarajappathy in the south. Let's stick with Ram because obviously it's shorter and has one syllable, compared to the ten in the other name. Ram wants to go to IIT ever since his parents gave birth to him and tried to make him pronounce Indian Institute of Technology after they named him. He goes to a boys' school, and tuition on top of that, thinks girls have cooties, and studies very hard till the sixth grade. This is about the time Johnny is humping his hind of and wasting himself. Meanwhile Ram takes up IIT training in special concentration camps dedicated to help you memorize 6.84 million pages of science so that you can pass the JEE. He comes across girls and might actually start talking to one for the first time, even though they are smart (and hence not pretty). But for the most part, Ram stays at home or in school and studies till his head aches or till the electricity goes off and he can't find the candles, whichever comes first. He starts playing outdated computer games, because his computer is outdated and can't support high-end games, by the time he reaches 10th grade. Meanwhile Johnny is actually living out Grand Theft Auto, one of the games that won't run on Ram's computer, for the uninitiated. Ram starts watching porn, or what he thinks is porn, in the 11th and 12th grade, and Johnny has already done it so many times, if he hadn't used rubber, his offspring could have taken over Sri Lanka. He watches Britney Spears videos in mute, so that his parents don't catch him, and fast-forwards American teen movies to the part where the hot girl is about to take off her shirt, except that she doesn't really because it's censored, and keeps playing it over and over again. Finally, the D-day for Ram arrives, the day of the IIT-JEE. As mentioned before, he is the average Indian kid, and the average Indian kid doesn't get into IIT, because if he did IIT wouldn't be such a great place after all. Only people who can read and memorize formulae even after the lights go off and there are no candles, and know the value of pi till 27 decimal places, get through. So poor Ram ends up in the local engineering college. His seniors rag him and force him to drink liquor. Soon Ram gets hooked onto it, and starts wasting himself pretty regularly. The porn still happens though, because he can't satisfy himself otherwise, unless he is willing to become homo. He doesn't do all that well in exams, and gets a job in a call centre. His parents get him married when he's 24 to a 14 year old girl. He waits till she is old enough to make babies, and then, being celibate for his entire life, screws her every night till he ends up with seven kids. Then he gets cancer, or diabetes, or any other such disease that proliferates in India, and dies slowly and painfully.
Now the question is, which life is more exciting, and which life are you living? Why study your whole life and end up like Ram, when you can waste yourself and enjoy like Johnny. Assuming you're an Indian reading this, I'm pretty sure you know exactly what Ram feels like and that you dream of a life like Johnny's. And the worst thing is Johnny doesn't dream of a life like Ram because he doesn't even know that India exists. If only there weren't IITs and Indian girls were less conservative.

Star Words episode IV - A new blog

BLOG UPDATED
www. rangarajuscoolspace. blospot. com

And suddenly there's an explosion of new blogs on the Internet. It's summer, college is off, and what better to do than sit and post articles on the Internet? If you're in America, your not smart enough to write something comprehensible, and if you're in school, you have better things to do like study for IIT-JEE. And so after a year in engineering college, you inevitably find yourself exploring new frontiers, like writing, because you know that with the country producing more engineering graduates in a year than the entire population of Sri Lanka, it's not going to take you anywhere.
So people sit and write, more often than not, about their lives on blogs, as if anyone cares. Apparently people do care! There are blogs like online diaries, giving us hour by hour details of that person's day, and just when you think, does anyone seriously read this?, you find 20 comments at the bottom saying, 'wow i love the way you make your boring insignificant life sound so exciting. I was holding my breath at every word'. Is that a compliment or a subtle, sarcastic insult? But there are some written very well, though i don't know anyone personally who puts up their diaries online.
Then there are blogs describing random flashes of memory that the author has. Maybe he has a mental illness, who knows. The posts are completely incomprehensible, after all it's the authors muddled mind you're delving into, but that doesn't stop, 'it's so vivid dude, it's like I can feel you thinking about it. I can feel your pain man. I can feel your pain!!' or 'hey, i like flash number so and so (the author actually numbered his flashes of memory). I think it's cool that you had such a flash. I wish i could have flashes like that. I want to be just like you!'
But seriously, there's nothing wrong in posting blogs like that, just like there's nothing wrong in me posting my take on random blogs. After all it's a free country, and if someone wants to post articles about how tea factories work, so be it. There has to be someone in this world who is interested in the delicate art of plucking leaves, crushing them, boiling them and then consuming them. Maybe the blog caters to those people. There are pictures of leaves up there as well, for those of you who haven't seen leaves, this could be your lucky chance. God bless the author of that blog, imparting to the world invaluable knowledge about the subtle mysteries of tea. 'Dude i think it's cool that you actually saw a tea factory. I've heard that only like one out of every 100000 people in this world get to experience this. I want to know more about it. I want to be just like you!!'
If some college girl wants to write about herself, let her go ahead. In fact there's at least one college guy reading about her complaining how boring and, at the same time, fun her boring and fun life is, going by his posts on the same college girl. So the girl writes about her life, the guy writes about her life, and they live happily ever after, where's the harm. The guy comments on the girl's blog telling her how much he loves her life, the girl comments on the guy's blog telling him how much she loves what he has written about her life. There does seem to be a slight inconsistency in those comments though- the guy writes, 'wow, the way you describe it, it's almost like you're right next to me whispering it into my ear!' The girl on the other hand is content with a simple, 'interesting stuff, keep writing.' But as they say, blogs well that ends well.
Sometimes, what's more interesting than the posts are the profiles of the respective blog owners. 'About me- This space is too small for me to write anything about myself. I am too cool to be restricted to this. My blog will elucidate on that.' Or how about, 'Well, i'm da coolest dude u'll get ta kno. My seksy body matches ma sesky humor. So gals, look into my heart and u wil c, ders nuttin left 2 hide. Search above, search my blog, and wen u find me der ul search no more. Dont tel me its not worth readin for. I cant help it ders notin i want more. Everything i write, i write it for you.' But by far the most accurate description of one's self has to be, 'I'm ME!!'
I would rather leave the 'about me' space blank. I just don't feel the need to share stuff about me publicly. So this blog isn't going to be about my daily schedule, or how many text books i can read in a day, or even random unrelated memories. It's going to be about the real life, and how there are things funny enough to be shared with everyone. Totally opposite to my other blog, http://www.myriadofmirrors.blogspot.com/, which involves a lot of blood, gore and more blood. I'll try to make this as humorous as possible, forgive me if i fall short of the mark. There are a lot of hilarious situations in this world, after all, the gods must be drunk!

DISCLAIMER- The events depicted in this post are fictitious. Any similarity to any person living or dead is merely coincidental.