To Sir,with love......16th February 2019

                       The air of expectancy was tantalisingly numbing to the knuckleheads seated around the table. It was past midnight and the hostel mess dinner had all but digested ,and ending up as nervous farts in an invisible firework display reserved for the Gods. The cards in our hands kept spiralling in and out across the table as orphaned children searching for a loving foster parent. The future engineers of this country were caught up in a game of rummy which opened to them the nuance of taking calculated risks in their future professional life. A false show of cards was termed ‘crank show’ which ultimately drains the lot of the money you bought to the table. I had painstakingly earned the sobriquet ‘Crankan’ which even now sticks with me. The money which I could earn at the table could earn me nirvana at the 'thattu dosa' outlet bordering our campus. I was hungry.
                     My class representative, lovingly called Reppai peered through the door into the smoke filled room and enquired whether I was ready with the submission material for the Fine arts collage presentation. There was a poignant pause after we shooed him away  ..... I soon started salivating over the dosas waiting for me in a vain attempt to hide the agony of doing the classwork. I coaxed my other ‘card’inals to follow me and engage in a gastronomical orgy of dosa and chutney to our hearts content. Burp.....
                  The motley crew with their colourful lungies ,dispersed one by one as it was high time to hit the sack . I was left standing alone in the card room thinking about what holy collage I should be weaving to appease my teacher . My eyes strayed on to the piled up ashtray and in a sudden epiphanous spurt of energy I got working as I read the caption of an empty cigarette packet. Scissors was a popular brand which was pocket friendly those days.
All my classmates had religiously kept justice to what a collage should look like in a conservative way. I too was going to graze the subject of ‘sticking’ in my own rambunctious way. A cardboard,the size of an A4 was stuck on with black craft paper borrowed from a benevolent classmate. A white strip of paper was stuck diagonally across and the smoked out butts from the ashtray was stuck on either side of the divide. I cut out the name of the cigarette from the empty packet and pasted it along the diagonal with a slogan which finally read “ SCISSORS your way through life”.
                     The next day confident about my brainwave , I approached the angelic Balagopalan sir with my work. He looked at it and didn’t know what blinded him, the genius in me or the thunderous laughter coming across the room from my classmates who had seen my work the previous night. He adjusted himself and said this is not what was expected in the most apologetic manner. I advocated my cause stating that it was indeed a collage with a lot of ‘sticking’ involved. Like a pastor I started preaching that the work represents scissoring away through the darkness amid the vices you find all around.
OR
                 It can be a poster ad for the SCISSORS company extolling the virtues of living like a rebel.I knew my ship was sinking and looked at him with my best puppy dog eyes. The poor soul almost caved in as he might have thought there was some strange method to my madness. The class laughed again and the curtains fell. I was given a week to produce it again. I am now an architect just because Reppai made a collage out of straw in the shape of a deer, or is it a frog. Beats me.
                 Today I heard the news of our teacher’s demise and want to cherish the memories of one of the most humble and erudite teachers that I have ever known. He would have shattered the glass ceiling in my books if not for that roar of laughter. Free from all compunctions ,he would be painting pretty pictures in the sky for all eternity. My pranam, guru!

My Archie classmates, with our gurus