One Afternoon at the Seminar

To escape the monster's black jamun mood , I rushed into joining a 15 day seminar, but this was truly a case of running out of the frying pan and into the fire. Its a miracle I managed to come out with my sanity intact, (ok, whatever little i had in the first place). There were 42 sessions, and each was a serious contender for the most boring two hours of my life. Boring as in desk-crashingly, fist-eatingly, murder-inducingly BORING!

But it had its moments too...

One sleepy post lunch session, the faculty, who was a very learned man in his owned field (please don't ask what, I dozed through all the introductions), a young balding, unsmiling goat, literally shot into the hall and without any opening words, any greetings, any acknowledgment that the 34 of us were there, he began to bark out of his notes. We stared at him in mute horror, his focused energy so completely at odds with our state of stupor, Finally after a quarter hour of this horror, someone's prayers must have payed off, because the faculty, Mr. Sipani, suddenly shot out his seat (he tended to move like a ricocheting bullet) and shot towards the white-board.

The white-board happened to hidden by the projector screen, the roller being just above the board. So, in a blast of energy Mr. Sipani released the projector screen, which rolled up so fast that the roller was knocked out of its fixing at one end. The unfixed end happily oscillated a full 180 degrees and hit the switchboard on the wall, next to the white board. A blinding flash of sparks,and off went all the tube-lights in the hall.


We held our breaths in stunned semi-darkness, but the roller wasn't done in its path of destruction. It pendulummed right back and hit the white board this time, smashing its frame and blowing it off fixture at one end.

Both the roller and the board had finished oscillating by the time we figured out what had happened, and once we did, most of us fell to the floor laughing, tears streaming down our faces... Mr. Sipani was taken aback for an instant, but he springed back and barked at us "ENOUGH!". Then, to our unanimous surprise, he began writing on the ruinied and hanging whiteboard. But that aura of seriousness and terror had fled the class. Mr. Sipani had lost his audience.

He had his revenge though... At the end of the class, the big freak asked to see the attendance sheet that had been passed around for our signatures, read out all our names, and promised to block the certificates of the 9 people who had taken proxy, and all those who had helped them with it.

Do tell me if you liked the diagrams.

Amritorupa Kanjilal also writes at Rivers I Have Known: Books, Reviews, and More. Please visit her there!