My First Crush (Part II): The Bitch

What a typical first crush story is like? A banal story of a boy seeing a doe eyed beauty. Spending restless nights mulling over ways to broach a conversation with her. Conferring the planned tactics with his friend. Being teased by ogles and smiles by the peers whenever she passes by. Her instantly being named bhabhi among the group. Then finally one day taking the valiant step of approaching her and more often than not being reprimanded by her or her well wishers. Being heartbroken. The end. But this is not my anecdote.

 There was this girl in my class, her name was Chhaya. It still is. She was everything that you can imagine a crush can’t be- a repulsive face with harry potter like spects and fencing in her mouth to prevent her teeth from trespassing outside the boundaries of lips and a vixen like attitude. There are people you don’t like, then there are people you hate and there are those whom you want to clobber down with mace, disembowel, shoot in the head and then feed the dead body to the hungry wolf. She was the only person in my last list. It was not because she was almost at par with me in studies and always tried thwarting my journey to be numero uno in class, neither it was because of the fact that she always performed better than me in co curricular activities, nor it was because she always sat at the bench near window where I always wanted to sit. The only reason why I hated her was because she was two faced, garrulous, gossip monger girl with a rather cute but cunning face which she used to fool the teachers. When the teachers used to be in the class, she would purport to be a perfect student, jotting down notes, laughing on teacher’s silly jokes, always completing home work on time and above all buttering the teacher. And just when the teacher was gone, she was the agent of chaos. She would create the loudest cacophony in the class, gossiped about anything and everything, stole people’s lunch, especially mine, never gave her copies to others to complete the home work; in short, she was a total bitch. And to make the conditions worse, she had the most beautiful writing. Now there is this never ending animosity that I have with people having good handwriting, and it started all because of her. Whenever I scored less than her, teachers would blame my hand writing and praise her. Yes, I use an illegible font to write.

I used to be so much obsessed by her, that the only purpose I used to study for exam was to beat her. I wanted to score more than her, rest all aspects of education were secondary. She used to be every teacher’s darling, good in studies as well as in dance. For her age, she was an adroit dancer, highly dexterous in bharatnatyam. Whereas I used to be an impish child who was good in studies but was haughty and belligerent and almost every day in the recess ended up picking up fight with someone or the other. More often than not, the person with whom I dueled in recess used to be her. Every time she used to start the brawl by snatching away my lunch. Now, food is something which is very dear to me, and if someone messes with it, I become a bellicose beast who didn’t care if the person in front is a boy or girl, a man or an alien or even batman. So I would lose my rag and retaliated by pulling her ponytail which was very dear to her, then she would ruffle up my hairs, then I would untie her ponytail and tousle her hairs, then she would throw my bottle and this would continue. During whole recess, she used to be like catwoman, scratching, kicking, swearing, punching and as soon as the recess would get over and the teacher would enter, big drops of tears would roll down her cheeks and within seconds she would become the damsel in distress and I the cause of apocalypse. This was a normal routine that we followed, after some time, even teachers stopped paying heed to our street fights.

Then one day, she didn’t turn up in the class. I was elated because I got my favorite window seat that day. The same happened the next day, and continued for about a week. I was so much happy at first for obvious reasons. Then after two or three days, it became boring. There was no fun in sitting near the window without snatching it from her. The recess also became monotonous; there was no one on whom I could practice my new WWE moves which I had recently mastered. Earlier I used to be irritated by her presence and now she was annoying me in her absence also. The classes also became lifeless; there was no thrill in solving the mathematics problems without that adrenaline rush to give answer before her.

I shared my feelings with Anish. He was the mr. know-it-all of our class. Don’t know what his sources were, but he knew everything, why undertaker always returned after death, which teacher was cavorting with whom, what will happen if you masturbate a lot, when a girl starts having periods, where can you get those blue films, cheat codes of road rash, how to complete final level in super Mario, are there aliens on mars; this guy had the answer for everything. “Dude, you miss her,” he said plainly without batting an eye as if he had dealt with such a situation a million of times. “Huh….this isn’t possible,” I snapped. How can I miss such a hell cat? I wanted her dead. There was no pragmatic reason that why I would miss her? “You do. Believe me, I am always right. I know everything about missing someone. Don’t you see bollywood movies,” he said putting his hand on his chin like an old gipsy man.

I had missed things before- my old cricket bat when it got broken, my first remote controlled racing car after it was dilapidated beyond repair, my old house, old tees which my mother used to give to maid’s child- I had a pretty good lore of missing things. But people!! Missing a person was El Dorado for me. A lucrative place but an unfound one.

Checkout rest of the story in my next post.

      

The Missile to Heaven

The evening news brought today the extremely somber news of the demise of The People’s President. Fortune bereaved India of his Bharat Ratna son, The Missile man of India. The incident that I was narrating in my previous post took place in 2007. Till yesterday, I had little memories of that brief seminar that I attended in the same year; but today, suddenly a box of memory clumps spilled in my mind. A wrinkled man with average height and greasy hair held an audience of about thousand school brats mesmerized for about one and a half hour. The school authorities were stunned to realize that their students could be so civilized! Such was the aura of APJ Abdul Kalam.

Without any ambiguity, he is the most popular president in india’s history. Despite being the quintessential scientist, he was a common man at heart. That was also the reason why people connected with him so easily. When I was a kid i.e when I was in first or second standard, I used to say that I want to become the president of india, but after 2005, I became a bit more particular-I wanted to become Mr. Kalam. More than a president, he was symbol of hope and hard work. His entire life articulated that success can be achieved by hard work. I was so much intrigued by his life story, particularly the fact that he belonged to a family of less means but still he climbed the rungs of educational achievements and pioneered the ballistic missile project of India. In the aforementioned seminar, he spurred the students to take scientific research to new level. He talked about his experience at DRDO, he literally talked about rocket science but wits such simplicity that it appeared to us like some walk in the park. He liked to spent most of his time with students, inspiring them to join the rail of scientific development. When he breathed his last, even then he was at the seminar IIM Shillong. May his soul rest in peace.

“Dream is not what you see in sleep, it is the thing that doesn’t let you sleep”

P.S. I will continue my story in the next post. This was something which I couldn’t refrain myself from writing. It was a real shock and a matter of dismay to hear such a sad news.

My First Crush (Part I): Memories of the long forgotten era

 Recently I celebrated my 19^th birthday, but my story does not start 19 years back. The person I am today has little to do with the mewling and puking that I did in first two years of my life. The time that followed, that of a blithe boy whose whole world revolved around the new Hercules cycle, playing with a cosco ball and waiting for 5^th grade so that he could start writing with pen also didn’t mould me much; infact that part of my life has been lost in oblivion in my mind. The part of life that is clearly etched in my memory makes my life. Have you ever thought that why we don’t tend to remember those years of our life? I think because that part is the most trifling part of our lives. The things we learn at that time are like names on sand, they are easily washed away by tides or wind. My mother has been asking me to wake up at 6 am since eons, somewhere in the past I used to wake up also but do I practice it now? Surely not.

The oldest incident that I can clearly remember with all its vivid details is that of how I came to know what a crush is. It was the pre facebook era and it was ruled by orkut. It was the time when internet used to be super slow, mostly found only in cafes but I was fortunate enough to have a working internet connection at home. Infact, it was a matter of pride, I used to boast about it in school. And yes, it was also a period when I used to boast about something else in school too. Ahem! That was something which I used to download and then hide and open only when I was alone or everyone else was asleep and immediately after that I used to go to bathroom. Even in classroom we used to talk about it in hushed voices so that our conversations remain inaudible even to the benches on which we sat and then the person who did the stunt would chuckle and others would look and praise him in awe. Yes, anything related to sex has been and even today remains a taboo. This is India.

While we boys have come a long way from being naughty and admiring America to admiring naughty America, girls have more or less remained unchanged. In that pre facebook era, they used to discuss the new Barbie pencil box they bought, now they discuss the new pink Gucci top that they recently saw on flipkart. Anyways, that is not the part of story. We were talking about the pre facebook era. So before facebook, there was this site orkut which was hugely popular. I even remember telling a guy at that time that facebook is crap and orkut is good so sign up on orkut. As I said, internet was not very popular those days, it used to be a matter of luxury rather than necessity, so everyone was not familiar with social networking. Having a account on orkut was enough to make you the talk of the class. And I was one of the few guys who enjoyed such attention. That was also the time when sms packs used to be the only way by which we communicated after class, as Brian Acton had till then not thought of whatsapp. Oh I forgot to tell you that this incident is of 2007 when I was in 7^th grade and we had just overcome that phase when boys were made to sit next to girls if they created too much nuisance and boys actually used to hate that punitive measure. But in 7^th grade it had started to dawn upon us that sitting next to a girl was not a thing to hate. I think, this much of framework is enough to comprehend my situation and in my next post I will write the complete story of how I realized what a crush is.