A confident lie

School memories have a way of flashing back. I was never really a big fan of school, but I think some days were better than others. Like the day we counted 27 bikes on the road. Here’s what happened:

There was this class once a week called SUPW where you painted and sewed and sketched. For me, being artistically challenged, it was a good distraction that helped me take my mind away from Math, Science and EVS. Mrs. Ratna Patwardan took the class from the time I was in Class 1 till the day I left school in class 10. Only recently, I went back to visit my alma mater. She still teaches SUPW to this day. This was a teacher who had a great sense of humour and a way with handling pesky brats (and the girls too, but more on that some other day).

One day in class 4, Jesu and I sat in the last bench with the window behind us. It was SUPW class, and the Mrs. Ratna had stepped out of the class briefly. The two of stopped our work mid-way (painting a piper, maybe) and started looking outside the window and talking. A minute went by, and the teacher came into the class. And she was not very pleased to see Jesu and me gazing at nature (well, peak hour traffic on Bellary road is about as close to Nature as you can get to in Bangalore). We got our punishment: for the next 10 minutes, we were to count the number of cars, buses, bikes, cycles and birds that we could see from outside the window and go back and report the numbers to her.

I felt smug and self-assured looking out of the window. The rest of the class was painting away. I told Jesu, “We’ll just go and tell her some random numbers. She won’t know it.” I mean, I had read the story where Birbal confidently says that there are one thousand four hundred and thirty three crows in the city.

10 minutes went by in mindless chatting; and then we were summoned to the teacher’s desk.

“So, how many crows did you see?”

“17.”

“Bikes?”

“27. 5 red ones.”

“Maruti cars?”

“11.”

“Buses?”

“6.”

“How many bees did you see?”

I looked confused, and I could see from the corner of my eye, that Jesu was just as perplexed.

“I said “How many bees did you see?””, she said trying to look annoyed. I could see this woman was having fun.

“None, Maam.”

“None?”

“Yes. We didn’t see even one.”

She stood up from her chair, and told us to follow her to the window at the back of the class. The other kids stopped painting and became the audience. We walked to the window.

“So, are you sure that you didn’t see even a single bee.”

I’m a believer in confidence. “Yes, Maam. Not even one.”

And she pointed at the bee hive hanging from the ceiling of the building across the road.

Sluts for superlatives

Is the human race done with inventing all that needs to be invented? Marconi, Bell, Wilbur and Orville.. you know where this is headed, right? When was the last time that someone invented something that changed the very DNA of a society? The computer was one. You could say software and internet, but I’m not so sure. Radio, TV, airplanes; when was it last that some one invented something so basic that you could say it was created out of thin air. My friend reckons that everything this society needs has already been invented. We are just working on improvising existing platforms (the mobile phone was a step up from the landline).

Have we well and truly laid the foundations for all the requirements of a social animal? If the answer is a ‘YES’, then the 21st century will turn out to be quite a boring one. We’ll just move from alpha to beta to gama to zeta before the sun eats up the earth (or the Mayan calendar comes true; my money is not here). If the answer to the question is a ‘NO’, then whatever exits around us is one big joke compared to what’s in store. Imagine Rama’s wooden footwear placed alongside Nike’s latest shock absorbing nitro boosting cosmonaut sneakers.

It’s a fair thing to consider. Technology breeds itself and sooner or later we'll be beaming people around the world instead of flying them around in stupid airplanes. But again, that’s a case of extending the frontiers of science. My question is whether there’ll be another Galileo or Copernicus (in this century) who will pull another rabbit out of the hat and not just feed carrots to the ones that are already scurrying around.

Onde usiranthe innu naanu

I’ve been listening to this song at least ten times a day since Thursday.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-f2mRaBRl54

It’s from a Kannada movie called Snehaloka (Universe of Love), starring RamKumar and Anu Prabhakar. For those who don’t understand the language, let me add here that this is a love song (like duh!, who else dances in a forest for no reason?).

My van driver played this song each morning while going to school and I remember enjoying it, humming along from day 4. I was in class 8 then and I didn’t know the name of the song or the movie that it was a part of. And after I stopped going in my Van Driver’s van (no, he wasn’t Dutch), the tune continued to play in my head. It was one of those songs: you know its tune and nothing else. No lyrics, no artist, no movie, no album name. You love the tune and hope that someday someway you’ll get to hear it again.

Yep, this is that song.

There was recession in Heaven

Let the scientists figure out how and why dreams occur. I am here to experience them; some will be good, most will not make sense and the odd one or two will send me looking for the water bottle at 3 am. It’s the dreams that have absolutely no logic to the sequence in which they unfold that are the most interesting ones; and I’m sure it’s the same with most people.

I had this one particular dream, back in 2003, which I found so hilarious I began laughing in my sleep and consequentially woke up. It was one of those no-brainer nonsense jokes, but I guess the punch line at the end of the dream was too good that even today, 6 years hence I can recount every detail as it unfolded.

The scene is set in the prayer hall of my school. There isn’t much lighting around in the hall but for what’s filtering through the windows on a cloudy December morning. There’s a stage and I’m standing on it. The hall is empty and spacious with the big wooden door on my far right. There are framed photos of freedom fighters on the walls on my left hand side. At the entrance to the hall near this door is a tripod stand supporting a black coloured board with holes (the kind you would find at the entrances of reception halls with yellow and white letters stuck in it announcing the event details). I see my Head Mistress and my two best friends Satya and Anoop standing in front of the board reading what’s displayed on it. Curious to see it for myself, I get off the stage and walk towards them. As I get around to facing the board, I call out to my friends. They can’t hear me, for they aren’t responding.

Here’s what I see on the board – in big white letters is the word ‘Prayer’. Following this, in smaller letters are four lines of English poetry; the first three ending with commas and the last one with a full stop. I don’t remember what the lines were, but interestingly after the four lines, I see something else. In tiny yellow it says ‘Rs 81’. That’s right, Rupees Eighty One. Anoop is reading out the lines on the board with my Head Mistress and my other friend Satya nodding along approvingly. I’m a mute spectator to all of this. All the while, I’m standing there thinking “What is the ‘Rs 81’ doing there at the bottom? What does it mean?” Soon enough, Anoop completes reading the ‘Prayer’ and looks towards the teacher. She asks him in her bossy commanding voice “What do you think of this prayer?” Without a moment’s hesitation, he replies “It’s good. But why did you have to pay 81 Rupees for this English prayer? You could have bought a cheaper Hindi Prayer for 25 bucks.”

I woke up with spurts of laughter that morning. I’m still trying to figure out what the 81 Rupees was for. Maybe even God wasn’t spared of the 2003 market downturn, and He had to resort to selling copyrights of His prayers to lesser mortals like us. For the record, my school prayer was Gajananam, bhoothaganadhi sevitham ....