The Secret of Clinking Ruler

The melancholy of the Management Accounting class was broken by a clinking metallic sound. Everybody’s heads turned towards the source of the sound and their stares came to rest in my vicinity. They looked at the stainless-steel scale which had fallen on the floor and then at the offender who had broken their peaceful trance, which unfortunately was me. That was the third day of our two-year long journey of MBA. I sheepishly grinned and picked up my scale, the heads returned to their normal position and soon the class was back to their business of dozing. The class did not realize that this clinking sound was soon to become an integral part Corporate Finance class of section B taken by Ms. Chhavi Mehta.
Criminology, the study of criminals and crime, says that to understand the reason of crime it is necessary to understand the mindset of criminals. The readers should take a cue from this branch of science and ask ‘What made Vinay Pandey drop the metallic scale in each class of Management Accounting?’ and then, as per criminology, the readers should allow the offender to present his point.
The point goes thus, that on the very first day we were asked by Ms. Mehta to reshuffle ourselves and sit according to roll numbers – I was impressed because the seats were neatly labelled with roll numbers and I went in quest of seat marked with roll number ‘99’, the classroom was bustling with activity as everyone was gradually occupying a chair, at the end I was the lone person standing because I could not find the chair with marked roll number. It was amidst the unfriendly stares and amused giggling that it occurred to me that those roll numbers were fake, they were marked earlier and then our lethargic college administration had forgotten to remove them. I was furious, and then I pledged that I will not let those arrantly confusing stickers fool me or any other person again and therefore, ladies and gentleman, I started removing those obnoxious stickers from our desks. I tried doing it by my hands, but my nails were all chewed up, so I could not do it quite efficiently which is why I started using the metallic scale I carried in my pencil-box.
I hadn’t acquired the dexterity to handle scale as a tool for removing stickers because of my newness to the profession of ‘sticker-removing’; this made me drop my tool often. As to the reason why it fell only in Ms. Mehta’s class, it is because it was only in that class that students’ minds left the classroom. As concentrating in that class was tough, so I utilized my time in fulfilling my pledge instead.
I say with some pride that I became extremely capable in the task of removing stickers and frequency of dropping the scaler came down to zero by the end of the first trimester; by the end of first year I could remove any kind of sticker with my bare hands without any tool at all.

Rang De Basanti – Colour it, for no reason at all

The general observation made by a certain gentleman, who called himself a philosopher while others called him a lunatic, is that in life you very often encounter people whom you don’t want to meet but seldom someone whom you really want to meet. It may or may not hold true for people but it holds true for cinemas – at least for me.
I was Mehsana where cinema halls are so primitive that they consider showing colour pictures a major achievement. I was happy that I am away from hustle and bustle of city especially promos of Rang De Basanti, and hardly watched television. It was on a one such hot and lazy evening that my uncle popped into his house with a brand new DVD player and asked me to set it up. Glad I was, because I had been trying hard not to be a parasite in their house, I immediately started on the work. Once the system was set up I grinned in anticipation and said we need some new DVD to “check if the system is all right”, I could see myself in that fancy video store I saw yesterday in the market and choosing my favourite title but my mausaji grinned back and whipped out a copy of Rang De Basanti. The last thing I saw was the wall clock showing 6:10 PM.
When I regained my senses the same wall clock showed 6:30 PM but the date had changed from 20th to 21st of April. They were still keen on “testing” their newly set up DVD player – not wanting to spoil their enthusiasm I put the DVD into the player with shaking hands and pressed the play button as if I am signing my own death warrant but the worst was yet to come, my cousin insisted on me sitting with her and endure that torture.
I thought that it may not be as hard as it was for the first time but this was worse. For, when I watched this cinema for the first time, the excitement of watching a new cinema along with the hype surrounding it had kept me awake till interval but this time I knew that it’s a bad cinema therefore each and every dialogue equal pouring molten lava in my ears. There are few places where director has somehow mistakenly given good scenes but those scenes can be counted on my finger tips of right hand – that too, without including thumb, fore finger, ring finger and small finger.
I give full marks to producer for inventing something which can be used by police and military as a substitute to third-degree torture. I do pity the hardened criminals who will be made to watch this cinema over and over again.