Electrical Gadgets, some memories of 2000

A sudden urge to write just filled me. Is it because the volume of diethyl ether I have kept under argon will probably take 4-5 hours for evaporation or am I getting bored of trying to fix the conformation of my compound to perform density function theory calculations? I guess it’s because of the Harris Jeyraj music in the background and the fact that I just read a lot of very good blogs (some of my old ones too!).

For the past few minutes I have been staring at my screen deciding on what to write. I know that now, whatever I decide on, is not going to hinder my thought flow and words are going to be typed until my co-worker sitting opposite to me goes mad due to the non stop sound of the keyboard.

Somehow my thoughts stray back to my 10th standard EG classes! Every Friday was a treat for us because the two classes before lunch was EG and typewriting and we had so much of free time and fun. Our EG teacher was a very old yet stylish mallu guy named Balakrishna Nair. I have a very clear picture of how we were seated too! Two parallel rows and boys on one side and girls on the other and the teacher could move in between. I used to sit at the very first and opposite to me was her as usual and always. Besides me was Karthik followed by Vivek. The line further down had no significance since the source of maximum distraction and fun has already been listed.

Our master seldom took classes. Usually the blackboard had some stuff already written with which we had to copy to our record notebooks and then idle away the rest of the time silently. But me, Karthik and Vivek had other plans. We started directing movies with our EG master as the hero! We even used to tell it to him and every time he moves or tells some stuff in the class, we used to pre phrase it by ‘ Movie name – Scene 1 – Take 1 ‘. The hero entry for the movie was like this… Our EG sir comes in, takes a live wire to his head and the shock makes the hair on his head stand straight. Then he takes some styling gels and puts his hair back and then pick up his 1 meter long wooden scale and walks to hit the students, Darpan, Siva Saravanan and Arvind who have been playing sharpener game! Our EG sir for some reason disliked when students played that game in his class: P

I always wondered how he heard the chaos of the sharpener game in the last benches for in the first row; we used to make such a racquet. I always used to sharpen a small knife on a touchstone with Karthik trying to spin the touchstone faster and faster to produce more noise and sparks! Somehow he never scolded us for doing that, though the girls opposite to us complained.

May be he was frustrated with scores of students taking his subject as a fun session or may be he didn’t really mind all this as it reminded him of his younger days. Whatever is was, these are just beautiful memories!