The only thing we hoped was the new guys (guy professors are always tough to mess with, you can't flatter them-bad news for all the boys in our department) were not so strict, but it was inevitable that our reign of terror in the department of commerce had to end one day. First sir came he was one of those guys no student would want a problem with, but he did teach well enough (barring the minutes of awkward silence when he goes through the text book to clear a doubt, which he finally agrees to clear some other time..... when that time would come -no one knows!)
And after bearing with every one of our tortures for one and a half year, two professors were being sent off. And our class planed a send off program for them, complete with mementos, draping of shawls, cake cutting,( One of the organiser kept saying "we need to cut a cake" , maybe he confused a send off with a birthday party but still some of the other organisers agreed and it was included)speech in both malayalam and english, and last and more importantly snow spray and confetti. I was given charge of the speech in english and part responsibility for an poem my friend was writing for the occasion.(more like the poem writer from whom he could steal the credit from) This program like every other program planned in our college had a lot of problems, we had to conduct the program after the last hour(much to anxiety of the students, I mean don't get me wrong we love those professors but any thing that means staying an extra minute at the college is always a sore subject among students) and also the principal didn't want us to decorate the class and make it messy, but he finally agreed to it after we promised to clean the class on our own. (yeah right!)
On the D-day I was talking with my friend, and second before the bell signalling the end of lunch hour, my friend asked me if I wrote the speech. That set of an alarm clock in my head, like one of those red alert sirens you hear in action movies. I had two hours to write a send off speech that was supposed to last 5 minutes,and not two free hours but one hour with the new sir and the second hour where I was to help the guys decorate the class! But thankfully the new sir was just teaching the computer application lesson -powerpoint. Why is that good you ask me, you see even though I sit in the second bench and even though the sir can see what I am writing if he looked carefully, I had a skill in which I have excelled so much so that I am ashamed of it.
I can pretend to be the most attentive guy in the class and still play tic tac toe with my friend. My skill is "the attentive face", as long as the sir doesn't ask me any questions I was safe. So after one hour of "the attentive face" and scribbling and scratching out of grammatically wrong lines. I had written the speech. I had no time to memorize it, I was busy with the decorating and final organising of the program. And the program finally began after every one else at the college were out.
The plan went well, we had a few students sing songs. (the ones who took a little long were given signals to shut up and complete the song) Of the people going off was a miss whom we forced to sing a song (she sang 2 lines and sat down. just like we hoped she would do.) next we asked the sir who was leaving, to sing. ( this guy was in our choir and he sang a classical song, for god knows how long we were getting edgy, we all wanted to get that program over with and go home. So we started to clap when he hit a low note in the song, hoping that he would understand and sit down; but no! he thought we liked the song and he was singing the song longer that it really was, repeating lines and stuff) Finally the song that never seemed to end, ended. And it was my turn to bore the students with my english speech,the already agitated guys clapped and some even booed me for every single one of my lines, not because I was a good/terrible speaker but because they wanted the program to end. I cut short the speech so much that at one point it looked like I was reading random lines off a paper. I had written three jokes in the whole speech where I would pause for the guys to laugh ( what I failed to consider was that, most of my classmates came from malayalam medium schools and even write their exam in malayalam. they didn't understand a word I said) only the two professors laughed. And with that the program ended, the snow spray foam was all over the cake, and When I ate a large chunk of the cake with "snow" al over it, I found out that "snow" spray was originally soap water.(not that I didn't know that before but when the students sprayed the teachers with the spray it fell on the cake, and the part they gave me had the foam all over it.) So when the program was over and I missed the last bus before nightfall I thought to myself the day couldn't get more worse after that. But then a classmate walks up to cheer me up, he says
" Man your poem was good, they were booing you off because they didn't understand it, and also they wanted the program to end soon, it not because your poem was bad"
