Chotu Singh

My knack of hurting myself foolishly goes on and on. Recently, while running backwards to take a catch, reminding myself of keeping eyes on the ball, I didn’t care of the fact that there was an iron bench behind me and blasted into it with full force which blew the air out of my lungs. Meanwhile I was no where close to the ball which sailed over the ropes.

Not long ago, on the last day of this semester we were engaged in our usual dose of class cricket (read previous posts to know what the hell this is). While fielding at silly point, in the pursuit of running out the batsmen though he was in the crease, I tried a Matrix movie stunt but what I didn’t realize was that in front of me was the window glass and by that time it was too late. With a bang my right shoulder drove into the glass and broke it to shreds. It took me some time to realize what had happened. Mind you beyond that glass was a 3 floor long descent to ground zero. But thankfully my college has provisions for a small balcony beyond the windows.

Does this person in the photograph look ugly? Never mind, cause I have spent considerable time preparing this post on this person so will have to publish it anyway. Starting from the start, his name is Manik Singh Khurana according to him but the whole world knows him as ‘Chotu’. All future references to him will be by this tag only. He doesn’t measure much though, but prefers to call himself 5’5 tall. I am damn sure he is actually 5’2. Now you will think what made me write a post on a useless character like Chotu; so here it begins.

During school time, he was just not considered to be a part of human race. He was the butt of all jokes, the raw material of all experiments mainly meant for rats. He was the only person I knew who got spanked by any teacher who came within 5 feet of him. He had the courage of checking teachers diaries and all such stuff in their absence, shouting “moti aa gayi” when our Maths HOD was right at the door. His scuffles with the legendary Mr. Vikrant (who was later sacked for not being able to maintain discipline) are now part of the folklore. But let me tell you that none of this went noticed and he was suitably punished for that (much to our delight).

I have the knack of missing the most spectacular events to happen in class and during one such incident when I was absent, our Maths H.O.D a kind hearted yet stern person had an upper body internal wardrobe malfunction (can't help if you don't make sense of what exactly happened)which was visible to all and chotu sitting right there on the first seat shamelessly started laughing and tried his level best to break the news to everyone seated around him though none of them were foolish enough to miss it. The only thing he was good was the stunts on his LML scooter. Due to his tiny size, he could never make it to the biker gangs, so instead of studying, he used to follow them everywhere to take tips on how to improve his skills on it.

Most of the pranks he thought of using the tiny brain of his ended up on him only, like the one placing a shoe on top of the door so that the it falls on the one who opens it and guess what he was the only one ever to be hit by one. Our experiments on him were very dangerous like the one in which Sandy took him into the wall at breathtaking speed which left him unconscious for half an hour. The trigger was that he had abused Sandy, who was filling some obscure application form in the newspaper on chotu’s behalf and had added 19 names to the father’s column.

Initially we thought that he was faking it and continued laughing uncontrollably but when he repeatedly fell off the desk on which we made him sit we had our hearts in our mouths as the impact was directly on his spinal cord. There isn’t one body part of his which we hadn’t damaged beyond repair.

But later he regained consciousness at the medical room in typical filmy style with water sprinkled on his face. The icing on the cake was his mother’s visit cause she scolded chotu only for his bad luck of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Yet another funny moment was in his car when some of the guys were betting whether or not he will respond to a XXX CD being played in his DVD player ( I missed this one too).

He takes pride in silly things like appearing offline while chatting and the fact that his mp3 player can also play English songs. My chats with him were full of MC-BC type rants, so much that some who once had access to my account couldn’t go beyond a couple of lines.
Now he is in some college in Dehradun where they still have to wear uniforms.

But things changed. Recently on a ride with a friend on a bullet bike, he met with an accident. The driver somehow emerged unscathed but Chotu was seriously injured. It’s a complete irony that he never really got hurt doing those silly stunts of his in delhi whereas there was no fault of his in this case. He has been bed ridden for 3 months, a rod inserted in his thigh and used a stretcher to walk for god knows how many months.

The time I wrote this post, the motive was to generate some prayers for our chotu, but now that he has recovered well, I have no option but to have fun at his expense. The other planned , half baked blog posts can wait as it is time to smile and have some fun.

HAPPY NEW YEAR.