#2 - The Geek Camp

I am scared of my cell-phone’s alarm. Absolutely terrified. Every morning, when it rings, I jump off my bed with my heart racing, my throat dry, and my mind wondering what exam I am about to miss. Guess this is one of the less-documented side-effects of being a geek.

So the boards had ended, and I was looking at three odd months of holidays. Awesome. I had been looking forward to them for months. Summers were pretty awesome, despite the heat and the sweat. The long days, the cool swimming pool near the park, the parking place where we played cricket, the bench where we could sit and stare at girls taking their power walks... summers were a time for fun and friends. So I earnestly began to pore over all those fat books sitting invitingly in my cupboard, preparing for the NTSE thing I had told you about. As you all know, I had just finished tenth grade, and as I knew, each and every one of those fat books were filled with 11^th grade stuff. I also knew that there was no chance of any of that stuff actually being asked in the exam, it just didn’t seem right in a sane universe to ask 11^th grade stuff in an exam for 10^th grade kids. But did any of this make me stop reading any of those books? No. Why? Cause everyone else was reading them. That’s how things work in Indian schools. And colleges, at least the ‘good’ ones. So, by the end of April, I knew the difference between the reproductive systems of C. elegans and T. Soleum¹ by heart, though I couldn’t tell you what either of those was if you smacked me in the face with it.

The honourable government of Haryana had organized a special week-long training camp for the brilliant scholars who had cleared the first round of NTSE. I was in pretty jolly company: one of about three kids from government schools in a room full of insanely pseudo-intellectual public school chipmunks (to be honest the other two guys from a government schools weren’t much better, they spent half their time giggling over how ‘secC’² was the only good thing in trigonometry. But I don’t blame them. I myself was the epitome of brilliance and maturity.). They came to the camp in their school uniforms, carried by their school buses, with frequent visits from their school teachers. My school didn’t have a bus, exactly one of my teachers even knew that a kid from the school had cleared the first round (and probably a dozen or so knew what the NTSE was), and there was no way in hell I was going to wear my white and blue uniform to that place. How I hated all those blue-shirts and their grammatically incorrect English chatter. They reminded me of all the officer kids from my childhood.

Ah, officer kids! My father used to work in the Indian Navy as a non-commissioned officer, which is basically no officer at all, and so he and other NCOs like him were called sailors. The real officers had their own allotted flats, servants, servant-quarters attached to their flats, and big fat salaries to send their children to public schools. So, most officer kids went to public schools. They also had bicycles and skateboards, and were plump, almost white skinned, and arrogant to a degree that my five-six year brain refused to understand. Of course, some were unfortunate enough to be stuck in a government school; maybe their parents had followed the same logic my parents sometimes used when I asked them why I couldn’t go to a public schools: frequent transfers (Of course that wasn’t true, we were flat broke almost all the time. The navy doesn’t pay NCOs enough money to buy peanuts for their kids, at least not without giving up on ever eating peanuts themselves, which is what my parents did. I wonder why I keep mentioning peanuts...). Anyway, the sole mission of all my academic endeavours was simply this: score more marks than all of the officer kids, speak better English than all of the officer kids. I’ll save the English story for later, but this was how an innocent life with potential started sliding downhill. To be honest it wasn’t tough; the navy doesn’t select its officers for intelligence, so genetics was pretty much on my side. And you have plenty of time to study hard when you are waiting for the 1^st of the next month to buy a rubber ball.

Coming back to the geek camp... on the first day, we had a sort of an introduction: marching to the front of the room and telling our name, school, and our ambition in life to fifty people who didn’t give a crap. I went along with my “I wanna be a scientist when I grow up” line. I had expected everyone to sit back and take notice, maybe gawk a bit, or at least chatter among themselves about my amazing strength of conviction. Nothing. I had been using that line since...well, since before I knew what a scientist was. My fascination with the scientific profession had risen from the simple observation that scientists didn’t have to get haircuts, or shave. I guess I had watched too many lame bollywood³ movie scientists. I imagined they didn’t have to bathe all that much either. To me, that was the very definition of an ideal career (you must be starting to see why there’s precious little romance in these posts).

Anyway, a few minutes after me, this weird looking girl from Faridabad⁴ went up to the front and said “My ambition is to become an IITian⁵.” I couldn’t believe it. There she was, a supposedly intelligent girl, and her sole ambition in life was to study at a certain college. And she had announced it with pride, as if she was going to be the first Indian on the moon, or find the cure for AIDS, or be the first rational girl in the world or something. I waited for the chuckles, the girlish giggling, the disgustingly perverted criticism from the guys. Nothing. There was a murmur of agreement among the seated masses. And all afternoon, several others presented the same ambition, the others going for the slightly better, if equally clichéd, ambition of getting into a medical college. There we were, 50 odd of the best students of one of the most progressive states of India. And our greatest ambitions were our college degrees. I love my country...

1. C. elegans is a roundworm that is used as a study model in labs. T. Solium is a flatworm that lives in intestines. For more information, wiki them.

2. secC: read as sec-C, refers to a trigonometric function that all of you must have studied.

3. Bollywood: The most cliché-loving, unoriginal, and stagnant collection of artists, a.k.a the Indian film industry.

4. Faridabad: Another of the many cities that sprouted around Delhi. It was the next big thing for quite a few years but never took off.

5. IITian: What every Indian geek aspires to be, at least every Indian geek who doesn’t have a phobia of maths. Don’t worry, there’ll be plenty of explaining that term later.