Mother Slumber n Professor Em

 

     I was never a “topper” in my class when I saw through my Post Graduates session, but I managed to scrape through… The four seasons that it had me tied down, were interesting for sure, at times happy at others sad… eventful to say the least, but there were times when mother slumber took over at the weirdest of times… in one such session, I badly wanted to sleep through the lecture of one of the most senior lecturers of not just our department but of the university, I fondly call him Professor Em ( short for Emeritus), over 76 (then) if I rightly remember him  telling us, and he had been teaching for over 26 years then…he was cute as a grand dad, had he been that to me, I would have probably adored him, but, he still kept teaching, a talent he had long lost…

     However to give him due credit, he made some excellent transparencies and  just one transparency slide with excellent drawings would explain the most complicated of cellular mechanisms or molecular interactions with great ease and lucidity… If we were to weigh the information in each transparency vis- a- vis the marks it would fetch, I could swear that there were some that were sufficient to answer a complete 12  marks question… The transparencies were so informative that we sometimes felt, that if he would just put up a transparency on the projector, wait for ten odd minutes and then put the next one, we would be better off, than actually listening to his explanation…but it was what we felt, not what could be worked out... He had taught the Director of our School and probably, our Director took special pride n pleasure in seeing every batch in our department through the same torture…

The following is a prosaic  poem of sorts, I penned while, I was battling sleep in an early morning lecture of his, ( a look around the class, told me that so were most others) in fact this was all I could do to keep my eye lids from drooping completely…  I hope you can see the session un-fold through my half open eyes, in this thingy, that I would like to call a poem…

    

Again the lecture draws into a bore,

and the best of them, Sir Emeritus;

with his loud mouthed drawl,

knocks us in and out of a sleepy stroll…

 

Mother Slumber Beckons one more time,

But, Respected Sir, doesn’t give her beckoning a dime;

(And) on he goes and on and on…

with his sermon on plasma membrane

and the molecules that go up and down the drain…

 

“Something”, he says, “is mighty rare”

and the other one, is what, you’ll really find there…

For all this crap, the hell do I care,

But that is what is today’s fare…

and side step it!!! I dare not dare…

 

Thanks to God, he looks at his watch…

and there goes the transparency of the visible notch,,,

But my joy is too premature for it to last,

as another one is put up to watch…

as he goes into more confusing hotch potch…

 

“Another Mechanism”, words that I randomly catch,

as my eye-lids at a fast tempo bat…

“The last part”…such sweet chimes do ring at last…

much abated, my heart skips a beat fast…

 

“Details later”, he says in the end,

Exactly at the moment, my mind is no more ready to bend…

We must congratulate Sir Em, for one thing, after all,

Perfect timing, which is missing in most who teach  for so long…

 

The_Word.