#4 - Froggie Style

My biggest fear, for the first 14-15 years of my life as a slowly maturing geek, was the frog in the well story. I am not sure I remember it correctly, and I guess most of you must have heard it, but it went something like this: A frog lived at the bottom of a dried well, his own dark and deliciously damp corner of the world. He lived a princely life, the insects and worms that inhabited the well being fairly easy prey. It was a neat arrangement, and the frog pretty much considered himself to be the king of the world. Anyway, one day the well was flooded with rain water, and the frog had to swim up and jump out. I don’t remember what happened next, but I think the frog saw a huge bird or something and wet his pants, metaphorically of course.

Of course it’s a nice story, and the brainier ones of you probably know what it is leading to. The interesting thing is that this story wasn’t told to me by my grandma, or grandpa, or anyone even remotely related. My first version of this story can be ascribed to aunty S, the wife of one of my father’s colleagues. We had just moved to Kochi¹ from Mumbai, well Bombay actually. This is a long time back. Now aunty S was the strict kind, and kept her little boy(s) on a very short leash (I actually remember one of them wetting his pants when she looked at him with a hint of anger, and then promptly getting on with cleaning it up). Consequently, they studied hard, and she was fairly proud of them. My reputation as a rising star of geekdom had preceded me to Kochi and my mom wasn’t that good at hiding her pride when she talked about me, and aunty S couldn’t help feeling a bit competitive about the whole thing. I think her exact words went something like: “Yeah, it’s easy to score well there you know. The system down here is much tougher; we have seen many children who topped their classes up there struggle to rise above the average here.” Well, the standard of education in South India is certainly better, the teachers more sincere, and the students more hardworking. I didn’t know all this at that time, but I had heard rumours, pretty scary ones. Anyway, I did OK, and aunty S spent the next three years narrating different versions of this story: the government-school-public-school version, the junior classes-senior-classes version, the rot-learning-real-learning version and a few more. To be honest I used the reverse corollary of the up-there-down-here version during my shift from Kochi to Gurgaon to justify not working hard, guess I owe aunty S a thank you.

Anyway, as I have repeated ad painfulum², I was shifting to a big-shot public school in Delhi after the tenth standard. I was quite excited on the first day of school. I had seen the huge campus, replete with comparatively good looking buildings, the well-maintained playing ground (with actual growing grass on it!), the shiny over-priced uniforms that I had had to buy from the school uniform store (a uniform store on campus, wow!), the two-three food kiosks, the huge library (well, at least from the outside)...in short, it was everything I had dreamed of all those years when half our classes were held in the shade of a tree because there was no power in the classrooms. It was amazing. I had asked one of the guys I had met at the geek camp to give me a lift to the school on the first day; he had changed schools too and his dad was dropping him. The school started really early, a few minutes before seven I think. We reached the school just in time and I stepped in through the gates. And then I realized that I had no idea where to go. No idea where my class was, and no idea how to find out. I had a scrap of paper that said XI E. I started looking around, confident that I would be able to find the classroom in no time, the confidence stemming from the assumption that I could figure out the system according to which the classrooms had been assigned. Stupid assumption. Firstly, the school was too damned big for such an approach to work. Secondly, there really was no apparent logic behind the system. In the ten minutes it took me to figure this out, I was already late for class. Finally I gathered all my reserves of courage and asked a helpful looking guy who was standing around (doesn’t make sense for a guy to be standing around at that time...maybe it was a teacher; the memory is pretty blurred). Well, he/she wasn’t much help. Somehow someone told me the way.

On reaching there I realised the class was being held in a seminar room of sorts. I had come there earlier and ignored it as it was so obviously a seminar room. I stepped in, introduced myself to the stern looking teacher (she turned out to be fairly malleable) who asked me why I was late. I stammered something like I couldn’t find the classroom, all the while, aware that my backside was facing the class, hoping that my trouser bottoms weren’t wrinkled or stained horribly. The teacher was obviously feeding something important to the class, and everyone was taking notes. I opened my bag and realized I did not have a pen with me. Great way to start, I mentally kicked myself and proceeded to stammer to the girl behind me to give me a pen. I also took the opportunity to turn back and survey the class. Stupid, stupid, faker, bookworm, rich bitch, stupid, faker, stupid faker, Casanova, gay, poor thing, obviously stupid, rich bitch, overzealous misfit, nervous wreck, rich Casanova, dumb blonde, fake blonde, stupid, fake stupid....I went on and on till I felt my confidence rising. Bring it on, I mentally spat at everyone. Then we had a short round of introductions: names, where we came from, and how much we scored in Science in the boards (the class teacher was also our physics teacher). I smiled a little, I knew almost everyone in the room had totalled excellent marks but I had always believed most people who scored well in boards were idiots who had memorized all the history chapters. I, on the other hand, being the brainy guy, had scored well in Science (93) and Maths (99). Stupid assumption. The dumb blonde had scored 96 in Science, the fake blonde had 98, the rich Casanova had 94, the nervous wreck had actually scored hundred...I think you see the pattern. As my newly rebuilt confidence melted like a glacier in a global warming documentary, it dawned upon me that I was pretty much at the bottom of the class in this little race. It was a big world indeed. At least I didn’t wet my pants.

1. Kochi: A beautiful port city in the state of Kerala. An amazing place to visit, not that good to live in.
2. Ad painfulum: till it became painful. Ripped off from ad infinitum. Yes, this is my idea of clever word play.