It was a hot May summer. The season is famous for its succulent mangoes, and the sweltering heat. It is famous for another reason- the disappearance of the children of the age group of 14 to 16 years from the open spaces / playgrounds.
Dahiya, the local Indian writer was enjoying his afternoon siesta. The fan provided no respite from the heat, other than help in circulating the hot air. From the background, in a staccato fashion, resembling firing AK-47s, came the sounds, ‘sine theta’, ‘cos theta’, ‘tan theta’, and its variants.
Little Ramu, not so little now, a strapping lad of 16 years, was perched on the floor, preparing for the multitude of exams, for entry into the Medical and Engineering colleges of India.
The whole family -father, mother and company had relocated, bag and baggage to the coaching institutes in Bandigarh, to avail the ‘best coaching’ facilities in the country. This would help Ramu secure a ‘meritorious seat’ and a ‘secure’ and a ‘stable life’.
Ramu’s father sat up suddenly from his now disturbed sleep. “Ramu! I will spank you. I did not hear your ‘thetas’ loud enough. Don’t you want to pass the exams? In my field, that is SEO writing, they talk about ‘keyword density’. It is the number of times a word has to appear in my writing, to be noticed by the ‘search engines’. I will coin a term for you, ‘study density/theta density’, that is the number of times your ‘sine thetas’ and ‘cos thetas’ appear when you study loudly, during my one hour siesta. If it doesn’t appear adequately enough, your effort will be rejected; that is you won’t be selected by the colleges. But before that happens, another search engine, that is my hand, would have made a resounding thump on your rosy cheeks. Your cheeks would then turn into Mussoorie apple like red variants. “
“But papa,” replied Ramu, “this engineering and medical thing doesn’t interest me. I want to become an actor.” “You want to be a what!” said popa, “what will people say? They will look down on me with disdain.”
“But papa, I want to become famous, you know like… Battu Khan! I would like the world to kiss the floor on which I walk, to honour the space I occupy, and… sigh when I give them a longing look.”
“Sure” replied papa, “for now, you will rub your nose against the pages that lie before you, romanticize with the formulae in front of you, and sigh with pleasure upon the completion of a chapter -get it? Your ‘theta density’ should be so dense and jarring, that it wakes up a sleeping gorilla from its deep slumber. You know Ramu, if you get into one of these colleges, you are ‘settled for life’ and you ‘become stable’.”
“Ah!”said Ramu, “you mean papa, you perch yourself on a sticky chair from 9 to 5 everyday, till you cause the pits in them, or till you reach retirement age, whichever is earlier. You then produce more your own in peace, and come back like the homing pigeons with your progeny, to the coaching mills of Bandigarh. Correct? I get it now. But this part of ‘being stable’, I don’t get that. Does it mean, all the others who do not get into a college of their choice are ‘unstable’; that is they need to go to an Institute for the Mentally ill for treatment? “
Papa said, “Stop it now! Stop arguing with me, and get on with what the others in your family have been doing for generations, before I spank you!”
Ramu then went ‘on and on’… ‘sine theta’, ‘cos theta’, ‘tan theta’… till the cows came home, the likes of him fuelling the engines of the ‘Coaching Mills of Bandigarh’.
black t shirt
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write by Jerrick Layland