revisiting the physics interrogation

Seven years later I still remember the episode with my tenth-grade physics teacher alluded to in this entry from bygone times. Since it was one of those rare moments of glory that seem more valuable than anything that may come your way in adulthood on account of their sheer insignificance, I feel obliged to record any and all details I remember about it, and I mean ANY AND ALL details.

This is going to be like a blog entry unto itself, so sit back and enjoy, and rest assured that the things that follow happened exactly as I remember them, and I mean EXACTLY. I may doubt my ability to remember other things accurately, but not this. My memory in this matter is beyond reproach.

So we're sitting in this temporary classroom in November 2008. I guess they were painting our usual classroom, so all the classes were shuffled around a bit. The physics teacher's transition lenses were somehow always dark. Weird. Anyway, he was dressed in this fake red Lacoste polo that he tucked tightly into his pants over a uniformly rotund belly. If you've ever used the term "pot belly" before, you've obviously never seen this dude's belly. It was so very pot-like that you wouldn't think to use "pot belly" to describe any other belly.

We were doing one of the numerous chapters on electricity we had in physics. Mr. K. was in the habit of questioning students aggressively in order to humiliate them and to make himself appear super smart. He was in the process of humiliating another student who didn't know the answer to some question. I guess it was, How does a battery produce electricity? or words that are more physically accurate. I answered impulsively, even though the question hadn't been directed at me, from behind this unfortunate soul. I gave Mr. K. the answer that was in the textbook, since I believed that would be the least likely to put me in the soup. Mr. K. smiled like a wolf that had cornered its prey.

"[Kaiser]," he said, "Now you're gone."

He sat up on the desk, and began swinging his legs like a mobster.

He went on a little rant about how he knew that I was the best student in the grade or some such thing, and how he was going to put me to the test.

He called me to the front of the classroom, and handed me a piece of chalk.

"What is electromotive force?"

I don't remember what I said.

Then he asked me about electrolytes and things that dissolve in water, and he asked me why NaCl dissolves in water.

I said something about ionic bonds.

He asked me why HCl dissolves in water.

I said because HCl is polar and all that shit.

Then he asked me why CH4 does not dissolve in water.

I said it was because the tetrahedral structure of methane cancels out the forces.

(ALL RIGHT, I LIED EARLIER. I DON'T FUCKING REMEMBER EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENED THAT DAY. I DON'T EVEN REMEMBER MY CHEMISTRY. I'M JUST MAKING UP BULLSHIT AT THIS POINT. BUT TRUST ME, MY ANSWERS TO HIS QUESTIONS AND THE WAY I STOOD UP TO THAT BIG BULLY WERE A LOT MORE IMPRESSIVE THAN I'M MAKING IT OUT TO BE HERE.)

I was nervous, of course, at being interrogated like this, and had been absently supporting my answers with semi-apposite diagrams on the board. I remember drawing the naive 2D structure for CH4. I actually don't think I knew back then that CH4 was tetrahedral, but the 2D structure supported the point I was trying to make about forces canceling out.

Some asshat had wiped the chalkboard with water before that period, and all the pieces of chalk had soaked up the water, and turned into wet sand basically. Pieces of it kept crumbling and breaking off as I wrote on the board. I grinned nervously to myself, because I felt an awful lot like the chalk - sad and falling apart.

Eventually Mr. K asked me why CO2 dissolved, even though it was not polar. (This is recorded in the November 2008 entry.)

I stared at the board deep in thought, feeling several pairs of eyes on my back and Mr. K's eyes on the... I guess the side of my face.

The truth was, CMNR HAD GONE OVER JUST SOME SUCH THING AT FIITJEE THAT WEEK OR THE PREVIOUS WEEK. If I had only paid attention back then, I might have been able to fight off Mr. K's questions a bit longer. (I think I lied in the November 2008 entry about saying "I don't know" only because the GAME HAD TO END SOMEWHERE. The truth was, I really didn't know. Fuck. If only I could remember what CMNR said about CO2 in that strange manner of his that hadn't yet turned into the meme it would become in a year's time.)

"I don't know," I said weakly. I will confess that I never felt so defeated in my life. Mr. K. smiled widely. All of a sudden he seemed to become benevolent. He told me about hydrogen bonds and electrostatic forces of attraction.

"Yes," I said to myself. "That is fucking exactly what I wanted to say."

I was a bit dazed and dizzy when I returned to my seat.

I remember the girl sitting in front of me - I think she was the unfortunate soul who was being questioned before me - looked at me with a mixture of awe and admiration.

OH, DID I FUCKING MENTION THAT ANOTHER CLASSMATE OF MINE - BLESS HER SOUL - ACTUALLY ATTEMPTED TO CURTAIL MY HUMILIATION BY POINTING OUT TO MR. PHYSICS THAT THE PERIOD WAS TECHNICALLY OVER? (I guess the bell wasn't working, and in hindsight, it's far more likely that she just wanted her morning break, but I have never forgotten what she did for me that day.) Mr. Physics, of course, sent her straight to the vice-principal's office for attempting to get between him and his prey (which was me).

Anyway, the whole thing was over, and I returned to my seat. Mr. K. left the classroom with the air of one who had narrowly averted an unpleasant situation caused by a student who KNEW TOO MUCH. He pretended that he had intended to bring out the best in me all along, and that he was using some unorthodox BUDDHIST kung-fu Zen teaching methods to achieve this.

H. (short for "Puff the Puffy H.") said to me in wonderment, "Keep the first rank." Meaning the first rank in our grade. Apparently we had been competing for the rank. If this had been November 2008, I would have said, "AW, HOW CUTE." But the events of March 2009 and the Board Exams proved that I was not as smart as I had thought I was, which is probably a good thing on balance, and precisely what makes moments of glory like this so rare as you get older.

Slabooshi was informed about my triumph against Goliath straightaway. Apparently the account of this episode was exaggerated between retellings. It's difficult to say. A part of me wants to say that the retellings actually toned down my brilliance, but I'm naturally a bit biased. Slabooshi told my mom that afternoon when she came to pick me up from school that Mr. K. had "grilled me for the entire period" (actually the last twenty minutes + purloined time from the morning break) and that I had stood my ground or some such thing.

I felt like a hero for a short while for having stood up to Mr. K like that, and for keeping him from picking on the other students.

And that is how FIITJEE, for the only time in its entire existence, made someone a hero. I wonder how much more of a hero I would have become that day if I had just remembered what CMNR had said about CO2.

Mr. K. later told my dad when he was trying to inveigle him into sacrificing me at the altar of his lame-ass weekend tutoring sessions that no one who attended them actually needed, that he had been AWFULLY IMPRESSED by my positive attitude during the above interrogation, and with how I had been smiling like some ideal goddamn epicene Indian Brahmin kid from centuries past (read: Adarsh Balak). As a matter of fact my smiles were the product of rage, helplessness, and misery.

While I'm on the topic of FIITJEE, by the way, I would be remiss if I neglected to bring up the time Mr. K. was MAKING shit up in class as usual to appear smart, because he thought no one would be on to him, since ICSE science was elementary at best. He was going off on a tangent (actually, it was more of a rant, since everything he ever uttered was delivered in the form of a rant) about how the simplistic structure of atoms we studied prevented us from comprehending the intricacies of the universe, and used words like "orbital" that were calculated to make us all feel dumb, and he drew sigma and pi bonds on the board. But get this - he called sigma bonds pi bonds and pi bonds sigma bonds. I had ACTUALLY paid attention at FIITJEE when they taught us this, and it took an immense amount of self-control not to stand up and say, "You, sir, are wrong."

Another time he wanted the class to know that he knew his biology, so made some shit up about the diameter of the blood vessels in your eyes being 1/10 the diameter of a human hair, and how that contributed to color blindness. 

Oh, and what about that time when he was prepping us for the practical test? A different teacher was going to preside over that, and Mr. K. was telling us in detail what to do. "You do this, and this, and this," he said. Then he glared at everyone. "If I hear that you haven't done this, I will go down to the lab, and give you fatal injuries."