Day 9 - The day I thought on my feet (Keyboard chronicles continued)

Continued from here.

Back in school, I participated in every competition in school. Be it music, art, writing, debate, sport, I was there, entering my name. The only competition I didn't sign up was classical instrumental music, because I didn't know how to play any instrument.

One day, when I was in the ninth standard, the instrumental music competition was on at school, and we were allowed to go to the auditorium and watch. We sat there watching the eighth standard students play their violins and flutes and veenas. And then, the next participant came on to stage with a keyboard. I froze. Keyboards? Seriously, do keyboards count? I had never thought of it. I could have participated! I was so angry and frustrated that I could scream.

Just then, the boy finished playing and stepped down from the stage. Before I knew what I was doing, I got up and went out, and caught hold of him.

"Hey," I said. "My name is Shruthi. What's yours?"

"D," he said.

"Hey, D, can I borrow your keyboard today for the competition?"

"Sure," said D.

So I took the keyboard from him (it was a mini-keyboard) and went to the teachers and asked them to enter my name (the event for our class was to follow.)

But what would I play? I hadn't ever consciously played any classical composition on the keyboard. Yes, I knew quite a few compositions, having learnt to sing them. Yes, I was familiar with the keys on the keyboard, but I had no practice. What do I do? 

But I think, at the back of my mind, I already knew what I would do, even before I went up to D and asked him for the keyboard. Because I knew a little secret. The black keys on the keyboard constitute the notes of the raaga Mohana (called Bhupali in Hindustani). So if I played a composition in Raaga Mohana, using only the black keys, then there would not be a very great chance of my playing the wrong keys.

I took the keyboard a little away from the auditorium, and at a low volume, tried it out. I played a Mohana Varna. It worked. I made next to no mistakes. I was ready.

When they called my name out, I went on to stage and played. And guess what, I got the second prize.

For someone who is not very street smart, and doesn't think too quickly on her feet, this incident stands out, and I'm ridiculously proud of it.

Geometry

For some reason, I remembered Geometry yesterday. I realized with a start that it had been one of my favourite subjects in school. I wonder why I liked it so much. Perhaps it was because it was "different", a break from the monotony. You had to draw, and I liked drawing. Perhaps it was because we got to use a lovely, shiny Geometry Box, and the fascinating instruments inside. Or perhaps, the subject simply appealed to me - who knows?

I remember my first (and only!) Geometry box so well. It was an orange Omega pencil box, with a blurred cherubic kid smiling on it. Inside, sitting prettily in an orangish-red frame, were the shiny divider (the purpose of which is still vague to me), and the compass (the instrument most misused). Below these were the two set squares, a protractor, and a small 6 inch ruler. I loved to take all the instruments out, and arrange them neatly by the side of my book while I drew.

Geometry for me goes nearly synonymously with our first Geometry teacher. She was extremely particular about everything - what we had in our boxes, and how we drew.

Other than the little pencil that we affixed to the compass, there had to be two extra little pencils in your box, all sharpened to perfection. There had to be three long pencils at least, which protruted high above your hand when you clasped it. Again, they had to be very sharp. Other than this, you had to have a sharpener (or mender, as we called it back then) handy, for emergencies. Clutch pencils (or pen pencils, as we called them), though enjoying a lot of snob value otherwise, were explicitly taboo in Geometry class.

Our drawings had to be perfect. A double line, or a vague arc, or worse, a point that was too huge, would bring out the volcano in the teacher. "Look at this point!" She would roar. "It is as big as my bindi!" She would then proceed to cross out the entire diagram with the dreaded red pen. She has also been known to throw particularly untidy books right across the classroom, and throw unsharpened pencils directly into the dustbin.

We would draw our diagrams with painful care, keeping our erasers handy. (We called erasers "rubbers" then. Oh well.) "Scent" rubbers smelt good and looked pretty, but left dark grey marks when erased with them. So it had to be good old Natraj or Camlin erasers. After finishing the diagram, we would take it to the teacher, and stand before her, trembling. In other classes, we could look forward to "Good" or "Neat" remarks. But in Geometry class, all we hoped for was just the teacher's initials. But more often then not, we came back holding pages full of deep red gashes, and stinging rebukes ringing in our ears.

But I must say this for us, towards the end of the year, most of us escaped without red marks in our books - we were finally perfect.

And I must say this for the teacher, her training lasted for years. Many, many years later, during Engineering Graphics, or Electrical Drawing, if I happened to make a smudged line, or a double point, a voice would boom from the deep recesses of my mind.. ".... AS BIG AS MY BINDI.... " and I would hurriedly fish out my eraser and make amends.

Even when Geometry graduated to theorems and postulates, with more theory and less drawing, more lenient teachers and less red marks, it still remained a favourite subject for me.

Did you like Geometry?