Five Point Someone Read online

  He took out a chalk from his pocket with a flourish celluloid-terrorists reserved for hand-grenades and underlined the word ‘machine’ approximately six times. Then he turned to us. “Machine, the basic reason for existence of any mechanical engineer. Everything you learn finds application in machines. Now, can anyone tell me what a machine is?”

  The class fell even more silent. That’s the first lesson: various degrees of silence.

  “Anyone?” the professor asked again as he started walking through the rows of students. As the students on the aisles felt even more stalked and avoided eye contact, I turned around to study my new classmates. There must have been seventy of us in this class, three hundred of us in a batch. I noticed a boy in front of me staring at the instructor intently, his head moving to and fro, mouth ajar; a timid sort, whom Baku could polish off for snack any given day.

  “You,” Prof Dubey chose me as his first casualty.

  It was the first time the condition struck me, where tongue cleaves unto dental roof, body freezes, blood vessels rupture and sweat bursts out in buckets.

  “You, I am talking to you,” the professor clarified.

  “Hari, Hari..” somebody inside me called but could only get my answering machine. I could have attempted an answer, or at least a silly ‘I don’t know’ but it was as if my mouth was AWOL.

  “Strange,” surmised Prof Dubey dubiously as he moved to another student.

  “You in the check shirt. What do you think?”

  Check Shirt had hitherto been pretending to take notes to escape the professor’s glance. “Sir, Machine sir…is a device…like big parts…sir like big gears and all…”

  “What?” Prof Dubey’s disgust fell like spit on Check Shirt. “See, the standard just keeps falling every year. Our admission criteria are just not strict enough.” He shook his oiled skull, the one that contained all the information in this planet, including the definition of machines.

  “Yeah, right. Busted my butt for two years for this damn place. One in hundred is not good enough for them,” Ryan whispered to me.

  “Shshh,” ordered Prof Dubey, looking at the three of us, “anyway, the definition of a machine is simple. It is anything that reduces human effort. Anything. So, see the world around you and it is full of machines.”

  Anything that reduces human effort, I repeated in my head. Well, that sounded simple enough.

  “So, from huge steel mills, to simple brooms, man has invented so much to reduce human effort,” the professor continued, as he noticed the class was mesmerized by his simple clarification.

  “Airplane?” said one student in the front row.

  “Machine,” instructor said.

  “Stapler,” suggested another.

  “Machine.”

  It really was amazing. A spoon, car, blender, knife, chair – students threw examples at the professor and there was only one answer – machine.

  “Fall in love with the world around you,” Prof Dubey smiled for the first time, “for you will become the masters of machines.”

  A feeling of collective joy darted through the class for having managed to convert Prof Dubey’s sour expression into smiles.

  “Sir, what about a gym machine, like a bench press or something?” Ryan interrupted the bonhomie.

  “What about it?” Prof Dubey stopped beaming.

  “That doesn’t reduce human effort. In fact, it increases it.”

  The class fell silent again.

  “Well, I mean…” Prof Dubey said as he scouted for arguments.

  Boy, did Ryan really have a point?

  “Perhaps it is too simple a definition then?” Ryan said in a pseudo-helpful voice.

  “What are you trying to do?” the professor asked tight-lipped as he came close to us again, “Are you saying that I am wrong?”

  “No sir, I’m just…”

  “Watch it son. In my class, just watch it,” was all Prof Dubey said as he moved to the front.

  “Okay, enough fun. Now, let us focus on ManPro,” he said as he rubbed off the word ‘machine’ from the blackboard and the six underlines below it, “my course is very important. I am sure many professors will tell you about their courses. But I care about ManPro. So, don’t miss class, finish your assignments and be prepared, a surprise quiz can drop from the sky at any time.”

  He went on to tackle casting, one of the oldest methods of working with metal. After an hour on how iron melts and foundry workers pour it into sand moulds, he ended the session.

  “That is it for today. Best of luck once again for your stay here. Remember, as your head of department Prof Cherian says, the tough workload is by design, to keep you on your toes. And respect the grading system. You get bad grades, and I assure you – you get no job, no school and no future. If you do well, the world is your oyster. So, don’t slip, not even once, or there will be no oyster, just slush.”

  A shiver ran through all of us as with that quote the professor slammed the duster on the desk and walked away in a cloud of chalk.

  2

  —

  Terminator

  THEY SAY TIME FLIES WHEN YOU ARE HAVING FUN. IN THE first semester alone, with six courses, four of them with practical classes, time dragged so slow and comatose, fun was conspicuous by its absence. Every day, from eight to five, we were locked in the eight-storey insti-building with lectures, tutorials and labs. The next few hours of the evening were spent in the library or in our rooms as we prepared reports and finished assignments. And this did not even include the tests! Each subject had two minor tests, one major and three surprise quizzes; seven tests for six courses meant forty-two tests per semester, mathematically speaking. Luckily, the professors spared us surprise quizzes in the first month, citing ragging season and the settling-in period of course; but the ragging season ended soon and it meant a quiz could happen any time. In ever y class we had to look out for instructor’s subtle hints about a possible quiz in the next class.

  Meanwhile, I got better acquainted with Ryan and Alok. Ryan’s dad had this handicraft business that was essentially a sweatshop for potters that made vases for the European market. Ryan’s father and mother were both intimately involved in the business and their regular travel meant Ryan stayed in boarding school, a plush colonial one in hill-town Mussoorie.

  Alok’s family, I guess, was of limited means, which is just a polite way of saying he was poor. His mother was the only earning member, and last I heard, schoolteachers didn’t exactly hit dirt on pay-day. Besides, half her salary regularly went to support her husband’s medical treatment. At the same time, Alok’s elder sister was getting near what he mournfully called ‘marriageable age’, another cause of major worry for his household. Going by Alok’s looks I guess she wasn’t breathtakingly beautiful either.

  I also got familiar with Kumaon and other wing-mates. I won’t go into all of them, but in one corner there was Sukhwinder or the ‘Happy Surd’ since his face broke into sunny smiles at proximity with anything remotely human. Next to him was the studious Venkat, who coated his windows with thick black paper and stayed locked inside alone. There was ‘Itchy’ Rajesh whose hands were always scratching some part of his body, sometimes in objectionable places. On the other side of the hallway were seniors’ rooms, including Baku, Anurag and other animals.

  Ryan, Alok and I often studied together in the evenings. One month into the first semester, we were sitting in my room chasing a quanto-physics assignment deadline.

  “Damn,” Ryan said as he got up his easy chair to stretch his spectacular spine. “What a crazy week; classes, assignments, more classes, assignments and not to mention the coming-attraction quizzes. You call this a life?”

  Alok sat on the study desk, focused on the physics assignment, head bent down and sideways, just two inches above his sheet. He always writes this way, head near the sheet, pen pressed tight between his fingers, his white worksheets reflected on his thick glasses.

  “Wha...” Alok looked up, sounding retar