Monday, March 20, 2017

Day 20 - Twenty years ago

Do you also get all those gleeful Facebook posts that almost seem to be chuckling evilly when they say "These songs turn 20 this year"? I see them all the time on my timeline and I listen to/watch the video and all I can think of is "But that movie came out, like, just 4-5 years ago! How can it be 20 years? I remember this song and I wasn't even born 20 years ago!"

Well, the truth is that I was already an adult 20 years ago.

Besides, what makes these 20-year-old-songs more unbearable is that 20 years back is when I joined engineering college. So most of these songs are inextricably linked to memories of my college life (which, as you can by now guess, happened just 4-5 years ago ;))

For example, the songs from the movie Gupt remind me that I wasn't able to watch Gupt due to the king-size ego of a new computer science teacher.

It was a Saturday and our classmates had made plans to take the college bus right up to Cauvery theatre in Sadashivanagar to watch the afternoon show of Gupt. As we finished class, and were packing up, someone told me that this lecturer (whose name I can't recall) wanted to see me immediately. I couldn't think why, but rushed to his room. He was one of those new recruits, fresh out of college, in a lecturer's job before he had the confidence for it.

As soon as I went in, he started lambasting me about my arrogance in computer science lab. I had no idea what he was talking about, and kept asking him repeatedly what it was. He said something garbled, and what I could understand from his words was that during lab, I had asked the lab assistant a query, and had not asked him, the lecturer. How could I ask the assistant for help when a lecturer was present? Did I think he didn't know anything? I tried to tell him that not only did I not have a query, and hadn't asked anybody anything, but that he wasn't even the assigned teacher for my lab class (he just took regular theory classes for us). But he went on and on, and I could feel the seconds ticking away.

He demanded that I apologize, and I refused on the grounds that I hadn't done anything. "I won't let you go until you apologize!" he said. But I didn't, though I knew that the college buses would be leaving any moment now. He cursed me for my arrogance again, but he didn't dare follow up on his threat to not let me go, because his own staff bus would leave 5 minutes after the students' buses left. So he left, still saying, "You're going to regret this."

I ran to the bus stop, but the buses had already left. And taking a city bus would mean changing three buses and no way would I get to the movie on time. So I just took another bus (the staff bus) and went home.

That afternoon, I got a call from a girl called Shruthi from another class. I don't know how she had found out what happened, and I don't know how she got my number, but she called to tell me that it was her this man was after, and he had got the wrong Shruthi to go to the staff room. She apologized profusely, but well, it wasn't her fault!

The next Monday, it seemed like everybody had gotten to know about it (by the way, I still don't know why it was such a big deal for it to buzz around the classroom at such speed.) And when this man came into our classroom to take his regular class, he looked around, spotted me, came close to me, not meeting my stare, and mumbled an apology.

I said, "Sir, I won't let you go until you apologize loud enough for the whole class to hear."

And guess what, he did! :D

I've heard that Gupt is not worth watching, and I haven't watched it since, but I'll never forget it as the movie I couldn't go out to watch with my friends, because of a silly man's ego.

And see? I remember such tiny details of this incident. It can't have happened 20 years ago.




3 comments:

Radhika said...

Brave girl you Shruthi! I like that :-)

Shruthi said...

heehee :)

Unknown said...

Gupt is totally worth watching! Please do it as soon as you can.

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