"Them Academic Suckers"

Them Academic Suckers. I never really liked them in the first place. For me, school was a place I ran away to from home everyday for a blissful six hours of pure fun and expression. Not that that was the original purpose of school. Duh, yeah.

And then those ASs. They'd always be wanting to get the highest marks in all the exams, assignments, even those goddamned class-tests... everything requiring pedagogic evaluation. At least two months before these exams were to take place, they'd be all over the place, creeping up to the teachers with their innocuous little doubts . It was all BS anyway, the rest of us knew perfectly well they knew everything and would go around asking only to impress the teachers. Teachers do get impressed if you ask them specific doubts. It means that you've read through the text thoroughly. Sheesh, I have to admit, they were smart on this one.

They would look down on the rest of us from the rims of their glasses, as if we were lesser mortals, born to shrivel up like plastic wrappers when near fire. Just before the exams, when the rest of us would be busy cramming and splitting our hair on those complicated diagrams, which used to look like the London Underground map and reassuring ourselves and others that it's just another test, we'll do it like we've done all the others, I used to see them flitting from one AS to the other, asking each other in hushed whispers. Once I actually eavesdropped on them, and I regretted doing it sorely. They were discussing something which was 178 pages after the last chapter specified. I was sorely tempted to scream, "Okay!! So you're smart. Can't you talk like normal human beings for sometime? Have the Martians got to us already??"

Once I was graciously invited to these post-examination discussions by a friend who was an AS himself, but not so severely so. I went along for the experience. Usually I would be found in the school-grounds experimenting with methods to dispose off chewed gum, or singing at the top of my voice "Born freeee...as freee as the wind blows...as freeee as the grass grows..." but that day I thought hell, let's see what exactly it is that goes on here. I was in for the most nerve-bending boring times I have ever been subjected to. The ASs had occupied a deserted classroom (and here I was thinking that deserted classrooms were meant for first kisses) and were sitting with the question papers sprawled out in front of their benches. They were all locked in a battle of who could shriek the loudest, and who could bonk the other with those irritating test-questions I had already blissfully forgotten, the hardest. There were some superior ASs who answered the last, and their answers would be the most complicated and long, and would invariably include everything the other ASs had written, and more.

A typical discussion went like this.

AS 1: "So what did you write for the sixth part of the twenty-second question?"

AS 2: "Well, I'm not sure I exactly remember.."

AS 1: "No no, come on, I too am not sure....I just want to confirm..."

AS 2: "Oh well, I wrote that a particle moving along one dimension, like the particle between two walls, is described by a wave function that depends on one spatial coordinate. A particle moving in three dimensions, like a single electron moving around a nucleus, is described by a wave function that depends on three spatial coordinates, x, y and z. It's for three marks, and I think she'll cut one mark because I didn't mention that the wave function gives the probability amplitude for finding the electron at the coordinates (x,y,z), and the square of the wave function gives the probability. What did you write?"

AS 1: "Something similar, only I also included an example that Helium has two electrons, so the stationary states of the electrons...."

For obvious reasons, I cannot for the life of me continue to enlighten you about this extremely engaging discussion on the answer to the sixth part of the twenty-second question.

When a week or two would pass by since the exams had finished, the rest of us would be evidently uneasy. This week would be the week when our papers would come after correction. Which meant either toppling off the cliff, or just hanging by the thread. The rest of us would be happy just to scramble over the cliff and be off. Our ASs, however, would be satisfied with nothing else less than scaling the cliff, standing tall and proud, and gleefully watching others scream and submit to painful gravity. Ouch. I know.

My friend and I would be standing near the classroom door, watching out with hawk-eyed precision for any suspicious-looking packages or papers our teachers would be carrying in their arms. As soon as we'd spot something dreadfully familiar, we'd announce it to our class. This announcement would evoke three kinds of responses. One kind would be a collective sigh. This would be from the people who were expecting to just make it. The other would be a deep-throated groan, accompanied with loud forehead slaps from those who knew they were not going to make it. And then, there would be wide "Look at my pearlies, will ya!" grins and ecstatic rubbing of hands from our ASs.

Finally the teacher would enter the class. The tension inside the four walls would be enough to crack open anyone's skull. Paper-distribution would be done according to roll-call. The teacher would call out the roll numbers, and the respective students would go up and take the answer-papers. The walk from the bench to that table would be the longest for us, and the shortest for them. It's another thing that we would always be sitting on the last benches, but it was still one hell of a walk anyway. The teacher would either give a smart nod, if it were an AS, or a drooling, evil smile were it one of us. And then, horror of horrors, the teacher would ANNOUNCE the marks. In. Front. Of. The. Entire. Class. I still don't understand what kind of twisted sadistic pleasure they would get out of this whole calling-out-the-marks ritual. There would be whimpers of protests, cruelly pillowed by the teacher's ominous voice.

After this, we would open our fates and read the red-inked reckoning, still glistening on our papers. But usually this would not last too long. At least it was behind us. Now the ASs would be in their form. There would be some sitting in a corner, with a oh-what-a-good-boy-am-I kind of grins, and we would immediately realize these were the ASs who'd got full marks. The ASs who didn't, however, would be in a frenzy indescribable. They'd crowd up in the space available between the teacher's desk and the first bench, their arms flailing around with their papers, fighting for....oh no, not their torn or lost map-sheet, but half a mark. Or even more catastrophic, one mark. "If she got it on that question, how come I didn't get it too?". I would almost shout, "coz they did it by the inky-pinky-ponky, and you got left out, dunkhead!!" I mean, honestly. They'd fight like the way kindergarten kids fight over whose glass is filled with more orange juice.

I used to look at these people, eyeing them from a mental distance, thinking, damn, why? Why the whole charade? It was bigtime basic knowledge that they were cosmically shining bright material. Then why the fretting over who wrote what, who wrote more, who drew more, who made what?

Another thing I couldn't digest about ASs was the whole thing about not showing off. If I'd ask them something as simple as, "So how many lessons are coming this time?" they'd never have a clear answer. And if I'd ask them something simpler like, "So have you done this chapter?" the answer would be "Oh no..I've not even reached there!". Yeah, I'm going to believe that. The OTT modesty show was something that really put me off.

AS 1: "You're MUCH better than me, look at how much you got on that one."

AS 2: "Oh no, just a fluke answer, man."

Cut the ribbon, and get done with it.

I think I'm done talking about them now. It's time for the others. It's time for the rest of us to come out from our closets. So maybe we won't make it to the top Universities or Colleges. So maybe we won't get the pat-on-my-head and goofy smiles from the teachers. So maybe we won't have normal parent-teacher "interactions". We have fun. In fact, that's an understatement. We have the time of our lives. We have a life, inside AND outside the school. We probably know the school better than the janitors. We will be remembered by the teachers as students who gave them a laugh, once in a while. And...we have (and are making) some of the craziest, zaniest and most beautiful memories ever worth telling our grandchildren. So there.

(This was a piece I came across in one of my drafts. I'd written this in a fit of righteous indignation while in class 9. The ferocity of the descriptions draws a temperate smile across my face now, but I love the spunk in this girl.)

Forgotten

It's half past seven in the morning, and Wre has to go for a bath. She opens the tap and lets the water rush in. The flow's impatience is duly noted. The water flows like a bunch of thick velvet ribbons, not uniform but leaping here and there, within a vertical essence. "Around twenty-seven days ago, a year came to a close at college," she says. "A year of swinging between the depths of despair, the heights of happiness and everything in between. After the hysterical euphoria associated with finishing the Final Exams, the autumn leaves of after-thought started rustling about in your mind. A year. An entire range of three hundred and sixty-five days. It was as if time had been sitting quietly in a classroom and you had skidded to a stop outside it, exclaiming in shocked silence to yourself, "You're over .. already?!"

She steps outside the steamy warmth of the bathroom and walks around to find her towel and clothes. She checks the store-room for a new bottle of shampoo, and finally steps back in with everything she needs. She hangs her clothes and continues. "Time seems to have played hide-and-seek, showing itself in leisure, seeking action from you when you would wait with impatience for a boring teacher's lectures to finish. Hiding itself with quietude when you would sit with a friend in contented silence, after a thought-provoking conversation. Time is a slippery reality. The present seems like moving in a cloud, the past is like footsteps you can't get back and the future like walking with an umbrella open in front of your face - you can see only so much far ahead."

She wants to keep talking, and the familiarity of warm water helps her. "An elastic concept of time seems biologically irrational," she says. "What it would be like for people with Alzheimer's or Parkinson's? How would it feel to be trapped in - "

The telephone rings. Wre hangs her head and sighs. Putting a little foam on the tap's top like a conversational bookmark, she wraps herself in premature dryness and goes to pick it up. She's tired of communication and doesn't want to make conversation right now. Her shoulders sag a little more when she sees the number. There are a number of social repercussions if she doesn't pick up this call. On the other line is Opa, a self-imposed friend. Suddenly, Wre gets a bright idea. She picks the phone slowly and hearing a high-pitched "Hello??" from the receiver's head, breathes slowly into the receiver's mouth. The indignant hello is shocked into silence and curiosity takes over her friend, enough to shut her up. Wre breathes again, this time making it sound sinister by flicking her tongue against her upper teeth. Opa promptly disconnects the call. Wre breathes - to herself. She goes back into the bathroom, stares hard at the foam on the top and successfully picks up from where she'd left.


" - your memories? If being walled in between your memories is terrifying, imagine what it would be like to consciously lose them. You remember the opening scenes of the movie, The Pianist, where a Jewish family in Warsaw is preparing to flee the city during the Nazi invasion on Poland? The family members are packing frantically and in pathetic absence of mind, the old husband asks his wife, "Do you think I should take this picture along? I bought it a long time ago, do you think I should pack it? Do you think I should take it?" His wife, interrupted in her nervous urgency tells him to do whatever he wants. This was one of the many scenes in this terrifying movie which hit you and got stuck in your head, disturbing you like an ant crawling across your scalp. What would you do if you had to pack all your things and just - leave? A critical element in dementia is ignorance - you just don't know. But what if you knew what you were leaving behind forever?"


Wre shuddered. The shampoo was supposed to comfort her with its lathering softness but the comfort was too dermal to reach her. She took a breath and went on.

"Something equally disturbing is short-term memory loss. Forgetting a past which consisted of recent seconds is like invisible sand slipping through your fingers. You know something has gone by, but your mind is like vacuum - the emptiness is too solid. There is nothing which reminds you of anything, not even a wisp of a recollection. It's like an absolute whiteness."

Wre stops. She finally realises she can't escape anymore. She hates the word 'maybe' and wants to try actually talking and remembering at the same time. Some conversations, like the ones she has with Opa make her drag her full-stops all the way to the end of her sentences, because Opa doesn't have a conversation, she just talks and expects a response. She doesn't understand reluctance. So you have to keep ploughing on with your sentence till you reach the end of Opa's patience.

Wre had tried talking to another girl at her college, but she realised it exposed the freckles on her memory retention abilities too barely. In school, she had heard her Biology teacher tell her class the story of two goldfishes in a bowl. They would introduce themselves every time they swam around the bowl and met each other, because goldfishes have three-second memories. She was the only one in her class who had not laughed. When she was twenty-one years old her parents decided to send her to a mental institution, because Wre was incapable of having a proper conversation with anyone, let alone live her life. Give her three minutes, and she would forget what and where she'd started, whatever she'd started. Her only friend, Opa, stuck with her because nobody had Wre's endurance abilities, and nobody else would talk with Wre so consistently, despite her mind mumbling off into the land of no recall more often than not.

She gets up, dries herself and continues. "I hope the medication helps you. As far as I remember, I think you're beginning to get better. You remembered the supervisor's name and reached ninety-seven in counting class. It'll be fine, you just need to give yourself some time."

Feeling sunnier, she puts her clothes on and dries her towel outside. The nurse announces that it is lunch-time, and Wre walks towards the Main Hall, singing a self-composed song to herself,

"An itch in an unreachable patch
Of my head, in my head .. "