Chapter 5

God has an answer to every sincere prayer, and so did he have one for me to. No, do not let your imagination go awry, no ready made projects, nothing of that sort! Then how?? Disease!! You need to lose something to gain another, right? And here, the loss was digestion, and the gain was an extension in Computer project submission date. Yeah, I got jaundice. How?? God knows, out of the blue!! Could have been from Pradeep's neighbour, the aunty who planned to program stuff for us earlier.. But wait, jaundice is non-communicable! So that means I had taken something miraclously disastrous to cause sudden jaundice! I was delighted. The household thought I was crazy, considering I was celebrating having got jaundice. But people don't quite understand your problems, do they? I had immense satisfaction, one of having solved a really tough problem at math, or probably the satisfaction Raghav would have achieved, at proving to someone that he had facial hair too, or probably the satisfaction Rajesh would have achieved at not cried at someone's taunts.. To each one, his own satisfaction. Jaundice satisfied me, like not even Paneer before! It was quite some time before the jaundice wore off. It was more than a week. But was a lot of fun. My jaundice had been diagonised at an early stage, and so my medicine dosage had begun earlier than the average Jaundice patient. So my body was not as weak as the average jaundice patient either. I stayed at home, on pretext of serious jaundice, and spent sometime, if not full, to prepare for JEE. That was the period when I actually started putting in real hard work. And what about the computer project? Hmmm, not much of a worry. Why do you have to worry when you had a partner, even more sincere than your computer science teacher, who did all the dirty work to get the project done. Dirty work?? Yeah, dirty work!! When you have to visit a CompSci lab, full on both the air conditioning and the aroma of pan parag, everyday, and talk to a dirty-mouthed but nice teacher about your project which has not taken off, even past the submission date, you are doing some dirty work. On one of these days, Pradeep came home. He wanted our code ready by that evening. I was like, 'dude, have we even decided what we are going to do?'. He talked about some graphical calculator. I thought we could present our classmate Vishal Raghu's scientific CalC (in case you didn't know, this was the jargon for calculator in PS) as our computer project, as it did have graphs in it too. But he needed code. Then in a flash of brilliance, yours truly typed Calculator Graph Computer Science Project on Google, and guess what, we had hundreds and hundreds of projects, doing what we intended to do. Then our project was easily done. There was this Chemistry teacher in our school called Sundari miss who taught us the policy of 'beg,borrow,steal' when you didn't get your own stuff to school. True to her words, we first begged our CompSci teacher for time, and then we borrowed time, and finally we stole a project. Our innocence was lost! Not that we were innocent anyday!!
The submission of the project was done. Amidst all the confusion, Pradeep did submit our project, or rather Mr.Amit Joshi's project, at school the next morning. He had to deal it out with the CompSci sir one on one. I did not attend my CompSci practicals, thanks to jaundice. It was one hell of a bonus. That weekend we had our first All India Test Series test as part of our JEE preparation. The jaundiced preparation did not go in vain, as I did put up a decent performance, and thus strengthening my resolve to bunk more. Bunk more, study more, else EKS, became the order of the day!! Then followed our half yearly terminals, and this time all eyes were glued on Shashi Narasimhan, a nerd and a flirt of the first order, and the king of Mokka jokes. Why?? Lets find out..
P.S: EKS is PS jargon for Enna Koduma Saravanan, a famous dialogue from the movie Chandramukhi, where a leading actor Prabhu says this dialogue in despair to a very good friend of his Superstar Rajinikanth. Though the movie reached Mega Hit status, the dialogue became notorious, and caught the fancy of many school kids of the time, and hence became one of the most mokka dialogues of our times. Mokka was the PS jargon for jokes, with a tinge of sarcasm and irritablity in them.
P.P.S: P.S above is post script and not the name of the school.