Suraj was facing a problem he could not solve.
As a physics student in an engineering college, this was not new to him. He regularly faced mystical riddles about relativity and quantum mechanics which he could not fathom, let alone answer. He often said that the things he did not understand in those two-hour physics sessions could fill the Library of Alexandria many times over. But it was palatable. He was not the only one, after all. The baffling and complex strings of physics had trapped many a poor student in its 12 dimensional web.
The issue facing Suraj was how to get to the physics class on time. The class occupied the much-loathed 8 a.m. time slot. But Suraj was a nocturnal fellow. All kinds of productive ideas as well as fun ways to waste time would ferment in his head after the sun went down. It went against his raison d'etre to get out of bed before noon at the earliest. So Suraj did the only thing he knew.
He did not get out of bed before noon at the earliest. And missed four classes in a row. He skipped the 5th one in order to wake up early enough to catch the 6th, but missed that due to the mountain of laziness triggered by the greasy pizzas he devoured at a birthday treat that night. His alarm malfunctioned and the 7th class went down. He decided to take a break from the stressful pursuit of waking up on time and gave up classes 8 and 9 to recuperate. Class 10 was the one. He was fresh, eager and guilty enough to do it. But would he?
Well, he didn't. The guilty party in this case was caffeine. Suraj developed a strong liking for this drug during his recuperation period. The repeated pumping of sweet coffee into his blood stream made him overflow with excitement. To satiate this intense excitement, he pursued and finished a lot of strenuous tasks which exerted his brain and got him tired and made him sleep even more.
Unfortunately, his absence in ten classes had not gone unnoticed by the eagle-eyed physics professor, Mr. Verma. He was a reasonable man who had been in the profession of teaching long enough not to take things personally.
"At the time of the birth of the universe, there was only a single point. A singularity which exploded and gave rise to everything we see and beyond."
Rajeev was Suraj's best friend. He was sitting in the last row of the Physics of the Universe class taught by Mr. Verma. He was enthusiastic about many things but cosmology was not one of them. At present, he was pondering about the beautiful motion and the delicious violence of the action sequences in a superhero movie he had watched last night in a slightly inebriated state. There was some physics involved in those fight scenes, so any diligent lawyer could argue that he wasn't slacking off in class entirely.
"And what name do we give to this explosion? You, on the last bench."
In Rajeev's mind, Batman was about to deploy his batarang to end a long, stylish fight when a sudden shake of his shoulder by the boy sitting next to him dissolved the entire scene, and brought up another one, that of a class, with fifty students and a bemused professor looking straight at him. The tension in the room told him that the question had already been asked, and he had not heard it.
"The Big Bang." Someone whispered next to him.
"The Big Bang."
"Yes, that's right."
"Thank you so much." Someone whispered again. Experience told Rajeev to trust this voice.
"Thank you so much."
"Right, OK. Don't get too excited. It would be an embarrassment if you didn't know that, so knowing it doesn't exactly deserve a medal."
Rajeev was too sleepy to taste the snipe. Also, he was groggy and the professor was a soft talker so he didn't exactly hear him on the last bench. One could say that he just heard some mumbling.
"Right, of course. The medal I deserve but do not need right now. Wait, what?" he muttered incoherently.
Fortunately for him, the professor returned to the story of our universe's grand birth. Five minutes later he stopped to take attendance.
"Suraj". He liked to start the roll call with the students he had never seen.
A very long but completely expected silence greeted him.
"Does anyone here know him?"
Several heads turned in the direction of Rajeev, tacitly revealing to the professor the identity of the truant's friend. Unfortunately, in the five minutes that elapsed since his last eventful conversation with Mr. Verma, Rajeev's mind went back to its usual thespian business. It was now in the middle of a tense confrontation between Batman and The Joker.
"Rajeev, is it?" asked the professor loudly.
"Could you tell Suraj to come to class and see me once in a while?"
"Yes, of course, Sir. I will tell him about the...um...the thing you said."
"Right," the professor said, looking amused and perplexed in equal measure.
Rajeev remembered to relay this message to Suraj later that day.
"Mr. Verma asked about you today in class."
"Dammit, that's the one at 8 in the morning, isn't it? I've lost count of the number of classes I've missed."
"You've missed enough to get yourself to the top of the roll call."
"He starts attendance with me every day? Damn, there goes any hope of a proxy."
"Why have you not come to class?"
"Look, I've been trying, OK? Nothing is working."
"A loud alarm?"
"Snooze button."
"Coffee?"
"Overcompensation."
"Sleeping pills?"
"Woke up 14 hours later with purple pimples all over my face."
"Make a friend wake you up."
"I once slept though a magnitude 8 earthquake, so a mate shaking my shoulder will not be enough."
The issue facing Suraj was how to get to the physics class on time. The class occupied the much-loathed 8 a.m. time slot. But Suraj was a nocturnal fellow. All kinds of productive ideas as well as fun ways to waste time would ferment in his head after the sun went down. It went against his raison d'etre to get out of bed before noon at the earliest. So Suraj did the only thing he knew.
He did not get out of bed before noon at the earliest. And missed four classes in a row. He skipped the 5th one in order to wake up early enough to catch the 6th, but missed that due to the mountain of laziness triggered by the greasy pizzas he devoured at a birthday treat that night. His alarm malfunctioned and the 7th class went down. He decided to take a break from the stressful pursuit of waking up on time and gave up classes 8 and 9 to recuperate. Class 10 was the one. He was fresh, eager and guilty enough to do it. But would he?
Well, he didn't. The guilty party in this case was caffeine. Suraj developed a strong liking for this drug during his recuperation period. The repeated pumping of sweet coffee into his blood stream made him overflow with excitement. To satiate this intense excitement, he pursued and finished a lot of strenuous tasks which exerted his brain and got him tired and made him sleep even more.
Unfortunately, his absence in ten classes had not gone unnoticed by the eagle-eyed physics professor, Mr. Verma. He was a reasonable man who had been in the profession of teaching long enough not to take things personally.
"At the time of the birth of the universe, there was only a single point. A singularity which exploded and gave rise to everything we see and beyond."
Rajeev was Suraj's best friend. He was sitting in the last row of the Physics of the Universe class taught by Mr. Verma. He was enthusiastic about many things but cosmology was not one of them. At present, he was pondering about the beautiful motion and the delicious violence of the action sequences in a superhero movie he had watched last night in a slightly inebriated state. There was some physics involved in those fight scenes, so any diligent lawyer could argue that he wasn't slacking off in class entirely.
"And what name do we give to this explosion? You, on the last bench."
In Rajeev's mind, Batman was about to deploy his batarang to end a long, stylish fight when a sudden shake of his shoulder by the boy sitting next to him dissolved the entire scene, and brought up another one, that of a class, with fifty students and a bemused professor looking straight at him. The tension in the room told him that the question had already been asked, and he had not heard it.
"The Big Bang." Someone whispered next to him.
"The Big Bang."
"Yes, that's right."
"Thank you so much." Someone whispered again. Experience told Rajeev to trust this voice.
"Thank you so much."
"Right, OK. Don't get too excited. It would be an embarrassment if you didn't know that, so knowing it doesn't exactly deserve a medal."
Rajeev was too sleepy to taste the snipe. Also, he was groggy and the professor was a soft talker so he didn't exactly hear him on the last bench. One could say that he just heard some mumbling.
"Right, of course. The medal I deserve but do not need right now. Wait, what?" he muttered incoherently.
Fortunately for him, the professor returned to the story of our universe's grand birth. Five minutes later he stopped to take attendance.
"Suraj". He liked to start the roll call with the students he had never seen.
A very long but completely expected silence greeted him.
"Does anyone here know him?"
Several heads turned in the direction of Rajeev, tacitly revealing to the professor the identity of the truant's friend. Unfortunately, in the five minutes that elapsed since his last eventful conversation with Mr. Verma, Rajeev's mind went back to its usual thespian business. It was now in the middle of a tense confrontation between Batman and The Joker.
"Rajeev, is it?" asked the professor loudly.
It's quite amazing how the human brain works. You could be musing about marshmallows and mulled wine in the middle of the Amazon rainforest, but a single sound of a growling predator will be enough for the brain to pump up the heartbeat, focus your attention on the threat and get some of that sweet adrenaline flowing. The sound of his name had a similar effect on Rajeev. It launched a rocket into his hypothalamus, which made him sit upright, suddenly realising where he was again.
"Could you tell Suraj to come to class and see me once in a while?"
"Yes, of course, Sir. I will tell him about the...um...the thing you said."
"Right," the professor said, looking amused and perplexed in equal measure.
Rajeev remembered to relay this message to Suraj later that day.
"Mr. Verma asked about you today in class."
"Dammit, that's the one at 8 in the morning, isn't it? I've lost count of the number of classes I've missed."
"You've missed enough to get yourself to the top of the roll call."
"He starts attendance with me every day? Damn, there goes any hope of a proxy."
"Why have you not come to class?"
"Look, I've been trying, OK? Nothing is working."
"A loud alarm?"
"Snooze button."
"Coffee?"
"Overcompensation."
"Sleeping pills?"
"Woke up 14 hours later with purple pimples all over my face."
"Make a friend wake you up."
"I once slept though a magnitude 8 earthquake, so a mate shaking my shoulder will not be enough."
"Shaking your shoulder? How about a pail of cold water to the face?"
"That's a bit too dramatic for me. Maybe I'm not cut out to do it. I feel that getting up early is against my raison d'etre."
"Why the &%$( are you using French you pretentious sloth? Have you been reading Voltaire's philosophy again?"
Only Rajeev was nice enough to insult someone in a manner that made him look good.
"I'm using it because it means "purpose of existence" which is the meaning I want to convey."
"Then why not use "purpose of existence" itself?"
"Because...umm...OK, well, anyway, how do I get up at 8 and still be nocturnal?"
"I'm sure a battery of sleep scientists are working overtime figuring that out."
The sarcasm missed its intended target as the target was lost in thought.
"Wait, I've been going about it the wrong way," the target finally said. "I've tried a dozen ways to wake up early. But what I should just do is stay up all night."
"That idea may just be stupid enough to work."
Indeed, it was. With a combination of caffeine (in moderate doses to prevent the recuperation catastrophe) and combo-heavy video games, Suraj kept himself completely conscious and comparatively chirpy till the chime of his cuckoo clock announced the cosmology class.
"Today we will look inside of a black hole."
Suraj felt like a black hole had taken residence inside his brain. He had been awake for 22 hours now, and a tedious thrumming inside his head clamored his eyes to pull the curtains down. He fought it, second by second, minute by minute.
The end of the class loomed near. The professor stopped for roll call.
"Suraj," he called out, expecting the usual silence.
"Here!" Suraj replied, shattering that silence.
Dr. Verma's curious eyes scanned the room to find the source of the shattering.
"Good morning Suraj, it's nice of you to finally decide to join us."
"Er...yes."
"I can only wonder what calamitous circumstances prevented you from coming to any of my earlier classes."
Fortunately, Suraj had a long and undistinguished history of fabricating petty falsehoods. As a teenager, he once got out of detention by convincing his teacher that a stray cat sneaked into his room, attracted by the smell of his non-existing pet hamster, and ate his homework. ("I tried to catch the cat burglar, but you know how agile those felines are, professor.")
"I had to visit my relatives for a wedding."
"Where was it?"
"Mumbai," Suraj replied immediately.
"What was the name of the bride?"
"Erm...Pooja," said Suraj after a bit of hesitation. Hesitation implied guilt.
"It took you rather long to come up with that."
Unfortunately for Suraj, Mr. Verma had a longer and more undistinguished history of running into fibbing truants. His bullshit detector was in prime lie-catching and truth-probability-detecting form, enhanced by years of practice on nocturnal equivocators.
"Well, they're only distant relatives. I don't know them that well."
"I see. And the wedding took 2 months?"
"Well, no...see, there was also period of recovery..."
"Recovery? So you had to endure a lot of physical hardship during the wedding? Did you take part in the nuptial triathlon?"
"No, I meant the recovery from the nasty cold I got just after the wedding."
"Right. And of course, you visited the Health Center for a certificate right? You know the rules."
"Well, by the time I was feeling fit enough to step outside, the cold has already dissipated..."
Mr. Verma sighed at this shockingly unoriginal fabrication. The students were losing their mojo. They weren't the Frank Abagnale-esque yarn-spinners he had encountered in his salad days. Wrecking their house of lies wasn't even a challenge anymore.
"All right, Suraj. I'll give you one last chance. If you miss one more class, you have to come to my office with some proof of the wedding and your infirmity. Otherwise, I will be forced to send your name to the Dean. Are we in agreement?"
"Yes Sir."
"That was a close shave, what?" Suraj uttered right after attendance.
"I thought for a second that he saw through the whole thing." Rajeev replied as they started walking back home.
"See, that's the thing. I think he knows I was making it all up. I think he just gave me a chance out of kindness. But you know, I've learnt something today. Everyone is unique. We should explore and understand our body clocks and circadian rhythms and be in sync with them. We owe it to ourselves to live our lives to the fullest."
"Aren't you trying to justify all the classes you've bunked by lazily slapping a cliched moral to your sad adventures?"
"I guess that's the advantage of telling your own story."
