Shri Gurubhyo Namaha

After reading harshas post about his teachers, I was inspired to write about some of the people who shaped my life. Some molded me and some left dents. For obvious reasons I will not mention names.

"Finish the problems I have assigned to you fast ma ... I will tell you a nice joke."

We wiped the sweat off our foreheads and did our best to take all the time we had left. However sheer brilliance took over and we all managed to finish the problem. She stood there with a very satisfied look on our face. Her complete conviction that we were actually interested in her joke was interesting to see. She began the joke. 

"See ma, one lady came to buy some toys ma and then she realised ma that she did not have money in her purse. Then ma the shop owner maybe he was doing mouna vradam* or something he did not want to speak to her so he picked up some blocks to ask her R U M T (are you empty)"

end of joke.

If you think the silence in the class was deafening, you are highly mistaken. Yours truly and some cooperative friends let out hideous and inhuman guffaws of laughter. The same teacher liked to torture us with her poetic experiments. She had a particular affection for acrostics. 

Creating new organics

Resultant of yesterday

Abhorrent fumes arise

Please close your nose.

Something like this. Ofcourse she used some very inspiring words like LIGHT and SHINE. Moving on. I soon realised that this lady was very low on the rung of people who are crazy. 

The next person who comes to mind is an english teacher who took his classes very seriously. We would sit around in awe as he shifted between heavily accented colloquial english and a heavy british accent with clipped words and all. I still remember on a hot day after a heavy lunch, he was pacing up and down reeling out paragraphs from a non detailed prose text book. He walked up to a window and leaned on the bars while reading something out. We all slowly looked up as his words died out. He had fallen asleep on the grill. We slowly started snickering and I think it disturbed him. He woke up. The breeze near the window had flipped a few pages in the book. He simply continued reading from the page that was before him completely oblivious to the fact that it was a different lesson. None of us dared correct him!

Hello college. With great tension in our hearts we sat down to listen to some lectures. Those of you who have done pure sciences and physics in particular, will know that a lot of the theory we learn involves lengthy derivations. One particular derivation lasted 30 mins. The professor went on explaining concept upon concept that was involved in each step. He made very clear the physical phenomena that translated into numbers. At the end of the derivation he satisfactorily concluded

v = g;

meaning the velocity is the same as the gravitational pull of the earth. We had frantically noted down each step and now sat back to crack our fingers and take a quick look at the whole thing. One of the brighter students slowly raised his hand and said, "Velocity should oppose gravity so where is the minus sign" we all realised then that the result of the derivation was supposed to be 

v = - g;

The whole class went silent and the next few words will remain with me forever. The professor walked up to the board, turned around to look at us and said, "What is there, you can always put it." and scratched a little minus sign before the g in the  equation. I know, very profound.

* abstinence from speech.