Eccentric Teachers I have met - Part II

This post is a rather insipid continuation of the post I'd begun ten days ago - I write it to draw things out to a logical conclusion. In the meanwhile, I've managed to secure myself entry into the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (no wonder they prefer calling themselves the UK), and will be moving home and hearth to Scotland on the 9th of September. So, for the next coupla years at least, don't be surprised to hear me belt out an inspired rendition of 'Rule Britannia' - though with my voice being as it were, that would probably be deemed sufficient grounds to eject me from the UK.

Year: 2001

Lunatic under the microscope: Jinnu Bonny, Physics lecturer

Ms. Bonny was not just a lunatic, but also a sadist. To look at her, one wouldn’t by a long shot call her a sadist. One (if one’s a straight male or lesbian, that is) would be too busy goggling at her to delve into such minor details as her latent sadism.

Wodehouse, being the politically correct bastard he is, would have called her a pippin and the kind that would elicit a whistle from the least susceptible of America’s armed forces.

I, being the politically incorrect bastard I am, choose to describe her as hot, with the right amounts in the right places.

But, beauty is but skin-deep and often hides a heart black enough to put George W to shame. Her sadism was not of the Kamasutran mould; she did not routinely try to cleave heads into two with a carving knife. But in her own way, she was crazy enough to compete with luminaries like Kamini Mannan and Kamasutran.

Jinnu Bonny was never a forgiving woman. Legend goes that she flunked a young man on suspicion of his eyes having been a few inches below where his eyes should have been. The young man’s repeated pleas that he had a squint, he was colour blind, and that he was gay, fell on deaf ears.

Since then, Ms. Bonny has been exceedingly cautious of allegedly straying eyes. This has spelt doom for several classroom cartoonists, including yours truly. I was executing a particularly fine recreation of Ahmed Shah Masood fighting a President Musharaff dressed as a drag queen when she called out loudly.

‘Siddhu Warrier, are you drowing the figure awn the board or are you drowing my figure?’, and struck a pose, which seemed to convince me that the latter wouldn’t be a bad idea at all.

Stumbling to my feet, I answered in the negative and tried to shove the notebook under my desk.

But Jinnu Bonny, apart from being a lunatic who saw people drawing her nude in every corner, was also an accomplished sprinter. Before I could react, the book was in Ms. Bonny’s hands.

‘You are drowing me wearing belly dancing costume. You come to vice-principal!’

I spent the next half an hour trying to convince her that it wasn’t a picture of her belly dancing, but Pervez Musharaff dressed in drag expressly for fighting Hamid Karzai. I even pointed the moustache out to her, but all to no avail…

Year: 2001 – 2005

Lunatic under the microscope: ******

***** is what one could term the eccentric to end all eccentrics. Since his eccentricities are too great in number to document using an anecdote or two, as I have done while documenting the eccentrics who preceded him in this series.

• Mr. *****’s preferred mode of traversing college corridors was to march with feet straight up to an angle of 75 degrees and down again, while keeping his hands pinned behind his back.
• Mr. ***** also had the same weakness as Mr. Joludhu – women. Though lusting for a college-going chick is understandable (considering 90% of us lusted for one of them or the other), doing so at the age of 70 is not. Unlike Mr. Joludhu whose greatest ambition was to have his point caught, Mr. ***** liked to do the catching, grabbing and pinching himself (as several people I know have discovered to their utter dismay as they nursed sore bottoms.)
• Mr. ***** is a marksman who could teach Indian Olympians a trick or two, if only chalk throwing was added into the list of Olympic events. Most lecturers are adept at throwing chalks at young men and women in the last bench who display a propensity towards yawning with their mouths wide open. But Mr. ***** proved that he can, from a distance of fifteen feet, throw a chalk right into gaping mouths. Ask a perpetually sleepy friend of mine with a small three-letter name! If he’s not too busy washing the Calcium Carbonate out of his mouth, that is…
• Mr. *****, apart from providing first benchers with the gentle shower that cleanses the soul and infects the skin, also had the inexplicable habit of shoving papers into the faces of unsuspecting first benchers. And mouldy, thirty year old papers in the mouth tastes rotten!
• Visiting Mr. ***** in his office was always fraught with danger, for he loved throwing paperweights (and anything else he could get hold of) onto incoming arrivals. Why, you may ask? Well, ours is not to reason why…