(In a few months from now, my first year at college will end. After so many horrendous years at school, this sure was bracingly different, while rather overrated if you ask me. The mediocrity of this entire year at college is the only thing that stood out, and of course, the sudden appearance of the Females, who had been sorely lacking from school. Understandably, since it wasn’t a co-ed school. But anyway, college too had its share of funny and sometimes laugh-out-loud hilarious events, and I shall treat you with three of the best of these events here. Admittedly, none of these compare to my school experiences, but here there are anyway.)
#1
I hate to pick on the one now know as the “Melde’s Experiment Girl’ yet again, but it’s not my fault that she is literally a treasure trove of some weird, funny crap. It was one of those days when you’re bored and pissed in the Chemistry Laboratory, with no place to sit. No place to sit because there were no chairs. Why? Now that’s because, in the words of one Chemistry professor, ‘even in Cambridge they don’t have chairs in their Chemistry labs.’ It so happened that one hot, smelly day, these people gave us a helluva lot of work to do, all while standing. After an hour of rigorous standing, several of us were beginning to show signs of distress, especially the girl under question, whose ‘place’ was exactly halfway across the lab. She suddenly decided that she could take it no longer. Not bothering to actually approach the lecturer, she said, from where she was standing, “Sir?” Except that she said it in a lengthened, mournful way to make it sound like this: “sssssiiiiiiiiiiirrrrrrrrr.”
He didn’t hear her, so again, turning up the volume, she moaned like a little child whose puppy just got run over by a jumbo-truck, “Sssssssssiiiiiiiiiiiirrrrrrrrrrrrr!” This the entire laboratory was able to hear, including the bald lecturer. He immediately widened his eyes in horror and jumped from his chair. Then, he ran as fast as his bulky frame could accommodate, literally screaming, “Yes, yes, I’m coming, don’t worry! Manwadkar!” he shouted, calling out to the lab assistant. “Manwadkar, come quick! Someone’s fainting, someone’s sick, get water and come! Fast!!” By then he had reached the part of the room from where the sound came, and all he got was shocked, wide eyes staring at him. And well deserved stares those were, because if this guy had any hair on his head, it would have been standing on an end. He grabbed a boy by his shoulders and shook him. “Don’t just stand there, tell me! Who fainted? Where is she? Where is she??” No one said a word. “Why won’t anyone tell me where she is?!?”
It was only then that she, the girl, with a face stained with guilt, came forward.
“Er…Sir?” she said softly. He looked at her, puzzled. “Sir, I wanted to know if we could go, since our work here is over.”
“OK, fine, but where is the girl who fainted?”
By then the class was roaring with laughter. Everyone, except the girl who wanted to leave, was yakking like insane laughing goats. She explained to him slowly that it was she who called out. The Bald man then let out a sigh. He tried to shout at the girl, but was too exhausted to do so, and went back to his chair.
A minute later, Manwadkar came huffing and puffing, holding a glass of water. “Yes, I am here! What happened?”
#2
There are always those lectures that no one likes attending, but they attend anyway, just for the extra thrill of doing so. This was one of those lectures. The class was making a racket, and the Lecturer was desperately trying to keep things in order. Trying, and failing repeatedly.
So he thought he would try a more drastic approach, by throwing one of the noisier pigs out of the class. He looked around the class, and found one whom he particularly despised. He pointed at him, and squeaked something out, but his high pitched voice wasn’t able to quell the noise. He tried again, getting the same non-response. Then he blew it: he grabbed the duster, and hit it hard against the table, making a bang loud enough to prickle the student’s minds just enough to make them shut up for a tiny while. Pleased with what he had achieved, he resumed his pointing, and said to the boy, “You. Yes, you. Take your class and get out of the bag!”
Now people began to snigger, and the lecturer didn’t know just why, and this pissed him off to an even greater extent. “What happened?” he squeaked again. “I told you to take your class and get out of the bag!!” Saying it the second time, things got a little clearer for him, while the sniggers had by now progressed into full-bodied laughs. To make matters worse, the boy just stood there, unsure as to what he was being asked to do. Finally, he took a wild guess, and decided to take his bag and leave the class, all while guffaws were steadily increasing. The lecturer then got desperate. Not only was he making a complete and utter fool of himself, but the darned boy was in fact disobeying him! What to do, he thought, just what the hell do I do now? Then, it struck him, the answer! He saw his way out of the sticky situation. He again pointed to the boy, this time saying with a slight smug smile, “Ah, yes. Why are you taking your bag and getting out of the class? I told you to take your class and get out of the bag, didn’t I?” He started laughing, obviously taken up by his own perceived cleverness, and not too astonishingly, he was the only one laughing. That was his great solution, to make like it was a joke he had been planning for years. The boy looked at him, saw a mad glint in his eye, and grabbed his opportunity to leave the class and got the hell out, saving himself from witnessing any greater stupidity than what he just did.
#3
As I said aat the beginning, one of the most conspicuous features about college was the sudden appearance of these ‘girls’ who invaded our lives by the dozens. Now, everywhere we looked, there was a girl! Here a girl, there a girl, everywhere a girl-girl. Not knowing what to do, some of us took to staring at them, while others resolved to ‘having the hots’ for the unlucky few.
Suddenly, the entire school curriculum–which had repeatedly tried to show us that girls didn’t exist in the real world, and so why not separate them from the boys at the earliest stage possible??came crumbling down. Everything that we had been doing in school, we weren’t sure if we could do in the presence of these ‘girls’. Like, say, cracking the occasional crude and vulgar joke. It so happened that our senses of humour took on a smoother edge, thereby letting what we had learnt in our schools go to waste.
Until that day when we had our Zoology practicals. The resurgence of obscenity. What better obscenity than innocent, unintentional obscenity? The lecturer was teaching us about earthworms and crap like that, when he raised the question of the nerve column or something which had to do with the nerves and the brain. The question was, in humans, i.e., in you and I, where does the nerve column start from? Everyone kept quiet, so he threw a hint at us. In Flatworms, he said, one finds this nerve column starting from the anterior, so in humans we find it in the…?
Now we began to think! The entire class began look at each other, not entirely sure what ‘anterior’ meant. But one girl really believed that she was on to something, that she had found the answer….in flatworms, it’s found in the anterior…so in humans, it has to be the…
She raised her hand up high, stood up tall and proud, and cried out, “Posterior sir, we find it in the posterior of humans, in the posteriors of you and I we find the nerve column!”
Boy, this professor was positively stumped. All he could say was, “Are you sure?” only to get a resounding “yes!” from this girl.
For those of you who like things to be spelt out for you, I will. What she said was akin to saying that we humans, you and I, have our brains up our backsides. Which, when you think about it, isn’t really that far from the truth. I mean, how else can one explain the pathetic condition of humans today? Or the fact that most of us would rather pick petty fights with each other, instead of just being happy with whatever we have? Brains, that’s the reason. In fact, it’s gotten so bad, that the only thing left for us to do is to start thinking out of our backsides also. That way, people might start speaking a lot more sense. As long as the talking would still continue from the mouths, and not from the backsides. Now that would just be disgusting.