Tales From the Crypt: Academic Success , Rigorous endeavours in college and other Fairy Stories

 

As a child , growing up in a family where academic  success and learning were considered extremely important it was common to constantly hearing of cousins who just finished their post-doc work from MIT or uncles who casually were doing doctoral dissertations at Princeton etc.

it was fairly well understood (at home!! )the path I would take.  IIT or some such graduate program followed by  a masters from an IVY league school and then of course a doctorate etc etc.

Showing a strong streak of individualism however I choose a somewhat different path. While my academic um experience was conceptually similar to obtaining an Phd.  from an Ivy league school it should be pointed out I was never able to explain that concept to anyone else , even my dog seems amused and suspicious when I tell him about “conceptually similar” and my grandfather when he heard OF IIPS ( my college ) responded with telling his friends Don’t Ask Don't Tell.

In a league of their own. QUITE SO !

Anyway IIPS well um er quite so was six years of interesting times including the super-heroic efforts me and my friends made to keep getting a passing grade, Without further ado I  proudly present

“Scenes From a classroom 2 Vignettes ”

1) United we Stand :  Differential equations or some such ghastly paper, Messrs Shailesh and Anurag come with a truly brilliant idea to combat the forces of Evil ( that would be Dr Saxena our math teacher ) As part of IIPS’ commitment to continuous hahahaahahahaha excellence the entire term consisted of mini tests what have you  and for this paper we were set a syllabus involving  two  chapters.

I had managed to study none of them  another classmate Prashant would not come right out and say it but there was suspicion that he actually enjoyed this shit and might even have prepared for this exam.

The other two clowns in this story ( see above )  had decided to split up the load and study one chapter each  thus each would solve one question each and er ahem help the other person with the other question ( there is a technical term for this sort of on the spot helping during an exam but I forget what we call it ).

Cometh the hour cometh the man , as I am sure the intelligent reader has guessed by now nether of our intrepid duo was able to solve the problem in the area they had agreed to tackle.  It was a treat to watch them furiously yell and scream about each others sheer incompetence. Of course since  no actual talking was allowed all the yelling and screaming had to be done using eyebrow gestures only . You have no idea how much contempt and anger you can exchange via eyebrow wriggling till you sayw these guys go at it. Oh Prashi did well in the test, we all kicked his ass later. It was good.    

Moral :    They key to happiness is low expectations

 

2) Mnemonics, buttocks and high political Office :  Last Day prior to an end sem. No one has any clue as what the syllabus was or even what damn paper was about. Only thing to do then yup parrtyyyy. Drinks at my place so on and so forth.

 

At sometime early in the evening Prashi finally decides its to study ( side note: he did well in the paper as we would later learn yup we had to kick his ass again ). In time immemorial form we resorted to mnemonic shortcuts to try and memorize Stuff.

At this point we need to make a brief diversion to talk about a young lady ( one of our juniors ) who used to study in our college , for reason involving whatever I’ll just say that her initials were VJ and well she had an ass that was um not  easily  forgotten and so of course it seemed totally natural that I came up with NPVJSJPM as an answer to some god forsaken list of things to remember ( Nangi Pungi VJ Shailesh Joshi Prime Minister )So far so good so , much more drinking cursing yelling and finally next day arriveth and we’re off to the races  and yeah wouldn't you know it that question shows up and we are all thrilled that we know one at least.

Except Shailu …. You see Showing a rare degree of honesty his subconscious mid simply refused to accept him as a PM and so Shailu of course remembered the mnemonic as ( Nangi Pungi VJ Shailesh Joshi CHIEF Minister ) and that boys and girls screwed things up somewhat

Moral: I like big butts and I cannot lie