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.

love a wierd one- flings, affairs, explanations and answers.. part two

     There was a professor, that I once knew, who took one of his students out on a `lunch date’ and the affectionate relationship he shared with this student was a hot topic of discussion across the department. Now, once the student confessed to the professor, that she couldn’t define what she felt for him, but whatever it was- was a very special feeling…  The married, gentleman-rogue professor, in his turn, hugged the girl and told her that some relationships needn’t be named or defined.  Now there would be those, who would abuse the professor and pass him off for a lecher, for playing around with someone half his age and a student, at it… and there would be others who would appreciate the mutual affection, maturity and the platonic nature of the relationship…( I personally can do neither…)

    

     On another such occasion, I tried to dig into another such intelligent mind, who was a publicly signed off philander and he came up with a very interesting thought process, rather long but very simply put,” there is love in degrees…relative love,” he said to me, “I may love the A more than B… so when a girl asks, how can you love her if you love me or vice versa… I may be tongue tied for the wont of the ability to explain this fundamental of `relativity of love’ but it exists none the less…”…” then there is the burden of ethical loyalty involved in goings on like these…”, he went on, as if he’d never gotten a chance to explain his point of view, before, “ a burden imposed, probably not unreasonably by the society and the culture that has evolved there in… when, you love someone, you have to be loyal to her, they say… I agree to this in effect that, even though I may love A, B and many more so, I can never love another, the way I love A, my love for A is very unique and unmatched for, I can never emote for another, the way I emote for her… and such is the case for the B and everyone else that I love… in fact there is no scope for being dis-loyal… You can’t love two individuals the very same way… for the simple reason that they are two different individuals… and if the argument for loving only one person held any sense, then no one would go beyond loving their own mothers, who is the first person, I believe, one loves in all his/her life, though that is love in a different flavour completely, but it is love, none the less… “…. Now that was such a long soliloquy that I didn’t want to add any further sentence breaks in that one…  now, whether you call it just an excuse to clear his own conscience off his shenanigans or a honest expression of an understanding of thought process break down, is for every individual to analyse…

Cont..d in part three...