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.

After 12 Years

Here comes yet another post which wasn’t what I wanted to write when I started. As for the murder mystery of the previous post, it would remain unsolved as even with whatever little knowledge they had, no one from my neighbourhood was willing to testify before the police though it was a funny scene seeing all those aunties heading off to the police station for the first time when summoned by the SHO in scope of clues. The victim maintained a low profile which came to the rescue of the killers as no one bothered about who came to visit her. I had a healthy interaction with the 'post graduate' Head Constable Sita Ram who surprisingly knew what NSIT stood for and discussed with me the various leads which unfortunately weren't leading anywhere. I was naive enough to think of giving a police statement though it couldn't have been of any value addition to the case but the untimely entrance of my father and his stories of how X, Y, Z got entrapped in such cases and were turned into suspects by the police made me change my mind. Personally, I feel that we should have more faith in the Police because they can't prove anything without our help and its our responsibility also to get people justice.

Taking the clock back 2 years, with college starting, came the idea of dabbling into all those things which were avoided in school time. Dramatics was one of them. At the intra college fest Resonanz 2007, I volunteered to be a part of the COE team for Rangmanch, the drama competition (not too sure of the name). My horrendously written saas bahu script which was full of double meaning jokes was rejected and we were given a new one. Thankfully enough people turned up for it, including 2 girls otherwise some one amongst us would have had to undergo the metamorphism into a girl using the techniques shown in movies like Style, Aunty No.1 etc.

All this started just the day before the play. The last time I had been a part of a play was in class 1, with the role of a wood cutter who is stopped from cutting a tree by an angel (my first crush). So this next opportunity which came after 12 years promised something special. Neither of us knew any one by then and we also let that day go by with none apart from me having the complete script (as if that mattered as I too read it completely for the first time the next day in the metro only). So the next day, we started practicing and I soon realized that not me only, but all of us were rookies. The seniors were nowhere to be seen until the time the competition started and they realized what a mess we would make so the only help we got from them was that our slot was shifted so as to give us more time but that too flew by very quickly.

We knew that the hooting from the crowd would be incessant and unsurprisingly, it started from someone in the first row even before the play started.

Things started off on a decent note but it all got mixed up at the time of the scene change. My role was of someone who is unperturbed by what goes around him and the play was to revolve around the servant played by my friend Manish Malik who had to show more emotions ( he must have called me Malik (Boss) atleast a dozen times in the play). His costume was a baniyan (calling it a vest would take away the fun) and shorts. I would rather kill myself than commit to such a role. My anger over him is over the sky right now as today he gave me 4 horrible movies which in total I couldn’t tolerate for 1 hour. Coming back to the play, at one juncture, he had to usher in the next character and as the hooting reached its optimum level of ‘ek do teen char band karo ye atyaachar’, I frantically searched for him on the stage and was horrified on seeing him read the script in one corner of the stage. In panic mode we drifted way off the script never to come back. Thankfully everyone on the stage realized this and didn’t come upto me to tell me that this wasn’t a part of the script. To make things better I bought a more aggressive tone to my character but to no avail. The last blunder I did was to cry more than the person who came to me with the news of his grandfather’s death. So this is how we wrapped up a 15 min script in 5 minutes.

Thanks to inflation, no one can afford to hurl down tomatoes/eggs these days otherwise we would have collected enough for a month’s ration. The audience loved to hate it. Even students from our branch were against us and I feel they were fully justified in doing so. A couple of them came up to me later to tell me that thanks to us, none of them could now say with pride that they are from COE branch. But, we still stood 4^th out of 6 teams. Imagine the performance of those behind us. When we reached backstage, the blame game started with everybody blaming everybody else for the fiasco. The performance was so bad that even KRK would have felt proud of us. But still we had tried and made up with whatever time we had to make this possible though we always had the option of backing out. It didn’t really hurt much cause there were other factors to blame (no help from seniors, less time, weak script; always finding someone to blame for their own fault is an essential part of the Indian genome).

Inspite of all this, it is a happy memory for me though I would rather watch Rakhi/Rahul/Chunnu/Pappu ka Swayamwaar than do this again.

PJ:
Give me some sunshine, give me some rain…. I wanna grow up once again.

This song from 3 idiots is pretty good but it seems as if the lyricist’s growth hormones are stimulated through Photosynthesis. He forgot to add carbon dioxide though it is not his fault as it is available in plenty these days and the Copenhagen summit doesn’t seem to hold much promise for the future with the developed nations hiding under the veil of the now over recession to avoid making emission cuts.