How I Killed Time During Boring Lectures

It is amazing how we tend to forget things about ourselves that others remember. Today in the morning, I was chatting to an old friend, and "baaton baaton mein" he reminded me of the silly poems I used to write while attending boring lectures when in the first year of my MBA education. Ctrl+F and a couple of minutes later, I was able to open the long forgotten folder. Read through the twenty-five odd document files, and to say that the feeling of nostalgia was overwhelming would be an understatement. The topic ranged from campus gossip, professors, philosophy and everything else that can be categorised as crap. Wanna share a couple of them. These really are silly poems and have the ability to make Wordsworth and Keats turn in their graves. Please don't hate me for wasting your time. To be on the safer side, I will just post a couple of them.

This one was written in an Human Resource Management class. The very name of the subject still makes me yawn.

HRM

The class began right at the stroke of eleven
I sullenly opened my notebook and picked up my pen
The attendance got over, and she clicked on an icon
And the slides started rolling, on and on and on...

Five minutes later, I had lost track of the topic
So I laid my head on the desk and pretended to be sick
But I guess I had played this trick too often in the term
Coz I was woken up quite early with a rebuke too firm

I had to sit straight now with my eyes open wide
Coz Ms. Snigdha Patnaik's order, I just had to abide
But little did she know that I’d learnt something new
To sleep with open eyelids, an art mastered by few

Thus that's how HRM went for me, the entire term one
Often I tried to stay awake, but it could never be done
So now I wait for end term with fear in my heart
Coz, an F in HRM would really set me apart


This one is about Prof. P. K. Mishra, who had a thick growth of facial hair, was technologically challenged, and would frown upon any interaction between a boy and a girl.

P K Mishra

P.K Mishra, P.K Mishra, Why don't you shave?
You yourself are so funny, and you expect us to behave!!
You're so clumsy with the keyboard when its in your hand
It’s the most boring subject, but we're forced to attend

Who gave you the idea to separate a boy from a girl?
Don’t you know it just adds to make the class more dull??
With your senseless garble, you put us all to sleep
But the fear of been caught prevents it from being deep

But we love you PK Mishra, because the way you teach
The way you choose your words, they sting us like a leech
But wish you spoke more softly, so that I could sleep
Then your sweet memory, forever I’ll keep

Disclaimer: Nothing personal against anyone and all that shit.

Dream On

I see a lot of dreams. Not that I wish and hope for all of them to come true, but yea, it does give me immense joy in just pretending that the dream is going to come true after a long hard day at office like today. Suddenly, I am in a different world, like I used to be in when my Dad used to tell me how Ganesha got an elephant’s head. Sitting wide eyed and in rapt attention, I would hang on to each and every word of the tale, even though I was listening to it for the nth time.
I was a naughty kid. Mom swears that I was naughtier than my neighbour’s young son whom I consider the reincarnation of the devil herself (prove me that it’s a He), and my Dad’s silent assent gives me no option but to believe her. But thank God I was, else my parents would have never told me so many fables and stories to keep me away from mischief on hot Sunday afternoons and cold winter nights, and I would have never developed the habit of reading.
The first book I was read from was a Bengali translation of Jim Corbett’s Man-eaters of Kumaon. Listening with my knees to my chin, I would soon be on top of a tree, lying on one of the branches and keeping a watch on the little goat tied to the tree as bait. I would keep my ears open for the calls of the hyena that would indicate the tiger’s presence, and I would shake with excitement as I saw the Royal Bengal female approach slowly with the gait that did justice to the first part of its name.
Many such “read out from” books and folklore later, I got my first story book, a hard bound edition of Russian fables that had amazing shiny pages and expressive drawings. I learnt about witches and their brooms, the infamous Baba Yaga and saw my first picture of a nude woman (The Russians were quite liberal even then you see, no censorship even in children books. No wonder they went on to have channels like TB6 and RenTV).
I can go on and on about how my bookshelf then started filling up with Enid Blyton, Frederick Forsyth, McLean, Hailey, Mario Puzo, James Clavell, Grisham, Dostoevsky, Rushdie, Coelho and quite a few other august names, Drucker being the latest.
These books have been my friends, my companions during hot and dusty afternoon when I was forced to stay in, or during nights when sleep was hard to come by. And during the times when sleep did decide to pay a visit, I would be lost in a dream world, rubbing shoulders with the very characters of my novels, or being just a silent spectator to them, ala R.K Laxman’s common man.
So today, as I stand at the crossroads of life, when I am being given a lesson on the practicalities of life, when I am starting to realize that the pot at the end of the rainbow might actually be a shit-pot and that nothing might be forever no matter how hard you try, that you may be misunderstood by the very same people you trusted your life with, and that the harsh reality of life teaches you that you are actually alone in all this commotion, I remember the characters from my books and my dreams, and a draw strength from them. The same characters also tell me to keep on dreaming, because a chapter might end, but the story continues. And thus I dream on of a perfect tomorrow. Ending this post with this quote from Dead Poet’s Society:

I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life! To put to rest all that was not life. And not when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.