Further complication arises, when one of the unimaginative lecturers himself had authored the prescribed text-book also.
This episode occurred decades ago .The hapless victims were Muser and a class of thirty five students. The driest & frozen subjects were handled by unimaginative lecturers.
The lecture hall had a stadium like seating arrangement ensuring the back benchers with a balcony view. Attendance was mandatory and that preempted the students from doing a vanishing act.
Forced to sit through the drone, the class endured the punishment – many enjoyed even that, counting the minutes and developing the art of doodling!
A nearby burial ground paved way to the joke - that they could experience the ‘life after death’, then & there.
The harried class held a snap poll and voted the Physics lecturer as the “Atacama Man” They cursed him for having authored the prescribed text-book and pitied the proof reader – probably a research scholar availing the lecturer’s favors?
Force, Friction, Heat, Light, Sound, Magnetism - the indexed chapters gave them a fright. However hard they tried, they could not stay focused with the lecture or the lecturer.
That bred ennui and some of the “go-lucky” students decided to enliven the proceedings. On a particular day, they got together during break and seriously discussed the strategy. It was truly amazing to the rest of the students that these fellow students could come up with so many ideas for a single act of playing a prank.
They chose the first lecture on Sound as the D-day. They entered the hall and occupied their seats well in advance. Later it came out through the Lab Attendant that these pranksters had brought a jute bag in to the hall.
The “Atacama Man” started the lecture on sound propagation and went head long into corpuscular & wave theories. The focused wish of the students must have made him to go to the black board to elaborate on the theories, as they were waiting for such a signal to stage their act.
One of them, noiselessly, untied the jute bag and set that on the floor at a distance. Students in the nearby desks saw a dizzy puppy – a mongrel looking like a Dachshund with a Bull dog’s face lazily opening its eyes to take in the surroundings.
It might have been woozy due to a heavy breakfast (a treat) or a mild sedation in the glass of milk it slurped before being packed in the jute bag.
The sound of a dry lecture might have aided it to get proper bearings and started to slowly amble down the amphitheater.
Unaware of these happenings, the lecturer was straining himself to lead the students, who were listening and unaware of the puppy’s presence, to understand the characteristics of sound.
Getting enough of it, the puppy decided to take further matters in its hand. Playing the gallery to the hilt, the mongrel misjudged the steps, stumbled, regained balance and continued its’ journey towards the podium.
The swagger of the puppy evoked a mixed response. Some of the dogo-phobic students lifted their feet off the ground. Others reacted by tightly sealing their lips to avoid giggles/laughter from escaping. The pranksters maintained their cherubic faces in masked innocence.
It was like watching a Laurel-Hardy act, in pin drop silence. The mongrel, coolly, approached the podium and squatted right in front (at that moment the back) of the lecturer.
Gathering its vocal cords, the mongrel started to whimper, yap, whine and yelp in that order. Probably it was communicating its’ disagreement with the content of the lecture.
The mongrel’s concerto of cacophony taught the students all that the lecturer was trying to teach – pitch vibration, sympathetic vibration, frequency and modulation et al.
The lecturer was startled out of his wits (?) and rushed down from the dais. He misjudged the step, stumbled and somehow held on to his balance - to stay upright. At that very same instant, the mongrel also ambled towards the steps, as if to meet the lecturer, halfway, probably to discuss its theory on SOUND!
The whole class erupted into a thunderous roar of laughter. It took him a few seconds to understand what had happened. Livid with anger, he let loose a barrage of verbal bullets and marked the entire class as absent, threatening them with dire consequences.
Few students noticed that the lecturer also sounded like the mongrel – whimper and all.
The matter went to the Principal and he tried his best to get the names of the pranksters. None opened their mouth and all pleaded that the mongrel might have come, inside the class, on its own.
Getting nowhere, the Principal chided misbehavior and warned the mischief mongers. Mainly that sermon was delivered to placate the agitated lecturer, who happened to be an influential and senior faculty.
The Lab Attendant cashed in on the opportunity to avail small comforts at frequent intervals. The pranksters had no choice but to part with their pocket money, by rotation.
University exam time - the class held its collective breath and waited, at the office of “Atacama Man”, HOD of Physics to collect the Hall Tickets. The college had that practice of issuing the hall tickets through the offices of the most teased lecturer.
Students were milling around, mornings and evenings. “Atacama Man” ignored them and went about his works.
The meek students (read studious students) started murmuring and separated from the main body. One of them suggested that they alone could meet the lecturer and request him not to keep them on tenterhooks, at that time when the next step in a student’s life might begin.
Taking help of other lecturers of the department, they somehow managed a grudging audience, a verbal cleansing and the Hall tickets. The fate of the other students was hanging in the balance.
The principal finally intervened and called the rest of them for a few harsh words. Initially he insisted that they come with one of the parent or a guardian. Relenting later on, slapped a hefty fine for indiscipline and disbursed the Hall tickets.
Those who had undergone the agony of wait heaved a sigh of relief. Little did they know that the “Atacama Man” had the last laugh – the question paper had been set by him.
They got the shock of their life when they started reading it in the examination hall. As if to rub salt in their wounds, each question carried sub-questions covering all the chapters in the syllabus. Pranksters and topic-skippers were swept under tsunami waves of confusion and consternation.
A question mark hung over them all - “how many of us would be reappearing for that examination?”
the mongrel also ambled towards the steps, as if to meet the lecturer, halfway, probably to discuss its theory on SOUND!
ReplyDeleteThe mutated mongrel itself was interesting.
The sound whelps on the theory of sound was fine indeed.
A different way of looking at our college days. Atacama type was not restricted to but encompassed even vernacular subjects. I suffered one such for prose & poetry What a vernacular pundit would have been called...