Book 1 Ch.1: The Road to Education
“Certificates!”. The voice boomed, like the music of a canary at the exact moment it’s blown apart by cannon fire. I placed the dossier of my life accomplishments on the table and waited.
The man across the room looked like a benign Buddha except for an oddly placed toothbrush moustache that simultaneously gave him the appearance of a genocidal dictator and an 80’s romance hero. He carried a grey Safari Suit with elegance — the ultimate fashion statement of men slightly past their prime and midriffs. His pate showed the wars he waged everyday to keep the remnants of the “fur that once was” gently woven across a surface it clearly did not belong on.
“Impressive”, he said as he turned to the fourth page of my 18-year achievements. “Do you play sports?”
If you’ve ever had to carry a certificates dossier around, you know the fear of the fourth page. The first and second pages have the latest grades and diplomas, so they are a necessity. The third has the precarious “Certificate of Good Conduct”, which doesn’t mean anything except you’ve managed to not kill a fellow human being or commit grand theft larceny. Or at least not get caught doing it. Yet.
Everything after page three is just random pieces of paper added in for extra weight. A runner up in frog-jumping from first grade. A certificate of participation in a class painting competition in third… An attestation of the fact that you were alive during an important event, as a useless part of the audience…
“Cricket”, I said. I’d played cricket once when I was roughly ten years old. Ok, I had seen some kids play cricket then. I believe it’s the game where the older kids constantly scream at each other on the apartment terrace, and the youth is deputed with the important duty of running down three flights of stairs to retrieve fallen balls.
“We have one of the best cricket grounds in our part of the city”, he beamed. “You’re in, get to the college tomorrow”.
Due to a series of perfectly avoidable circumstances involving sleeping in, a really bad movie, and a friend’s motorcycle running out of fuel, I was a few weeks behind on joining my esteemed college.
Since I had skipped the college’s scheduled start date anyway, I decided to hail a cab for the first day before settling into the bus.
The college I’d chosen to join was supposedly in the city I was born and raised in — Chennai, a coastal maze of roads, bridges and people that were torn between a laid back past and a bustling metropolitan future. Supposedly.
If you are familiar with Chennai, you’d know there’s this massive 6 lane road connecting the outskirts that is now the unofficial tech district of the city. Fifteen years back, that road was more popularly known as “take that dirt track just off this tiny temple and keep going till the end of time”.
Initial conversations with the nice cabbie centered around places and things enroute. Eventually “What’s this building, uncle?” progressed into “What the heck’s that animal, and why isn’t it moving?”. Once we crossed the 20 kilometer mark, engineered structures gave way to trees and shrubs, and then… nothing. We’d crossed the threshold of places where life had considered trying to evolve, into regions where it’d just plain given up.
The idea of Big Things is generally hard for most people to come to terms with. I remember an amazing physics teacher in the 9th grade who tried to help us realize the wonderful ways of the world. And he decided to start with making us see the enormity of Avagadro’s number. 6.023 X 10²³.
“Do you even understand how big this number is?”, he asked. “Give me an example of something this huge.”
“The stars in the observable sky”, said the first bencher with the terrible habit of screaming answers before the teacher’s soundwaves reached the second row. “Drops of water in the ocean”, ventured the studious kid. “Sand in the Sahara”, screamed the kid whose father worked in Dubai and therefore had intimate knowledge of the middle east. “The hair on the human body”, said Raghu, perhaps to indicate that his puberty hormones had started to kick in.
“No, no, no”, the teacher dismissed these trivial examples. “Not even close! Can anyone tell me how big you really think Avagadro’s number is?”.
This was an open challenge — and Wuz the 6 foot monster rose up to it. The class waited for his ingenious interpretation. “Go on, son”, the teacher nudged him on in passive encouragement. Wuz pulled his arms wide and exclaimed “This big, sir”.
With the Big Things, at least we have a frame of reference to compare against. But the concept of nothingness is close to impossible for the non-philosophically inclined mind to truly grapple with. Mere days after we knew the Avagadro’s number was bigger than Wuz’s outstretched hands, we had a chemistry teacher explain Rutherford’s experiments to figure out the insides of an atom.
“Nothing”, she exclaimed, with the excitement of a 13 year old that had just discovered that asking the juice guy outside school for two “half glasses” of lemon juice added up to slightly more than one full glass for the same price.
“The majority of space in an atom consists of Nothing!”. “You mean, it’s just air?”, we asked. “No, nothing!”, she said once again, because repeating what you’d just said over and over again suddenly makes it infinitely more understandable. “Like inside an empty container?” we asked. “No”, she said. “There’s nothing”.
If the palpable silence in the room was any indicator of the collective understanding, that was the day an excited high school chemistry teacher experienced the true meaning of Nothing.
But for me, personally, there were still a few years to go before the concept would finally sink in. To the momentous day when I embarked on a four-year roadtrip down a dirt track by a temple to get myself a graduate education.
About 40 kilometers from any place worth mentioning, in any direction, is a college. The only thing mildly interesting about this college is a model airplane strategically placed at its gates — metaphorically explaining that flying is the only sane way to get out. This wasn’t my college.
A few kilometers beyond, or just as well a thousand, were the last vestiges of human civilization — an oasis of men and cows that had congregated into a tiny village, cut off from the rest since the dawn of mankind. About 10 kilometers beyond this village, through an unassuming arch made with leftover building materials lay the gates to where I should study for the next four years. And become an engineer.
Was the journey tiring already? Yes. Did I consider the option of turning back and giving up on a college education, then drop that idea because going back would mean journeying through the endless neverness again? Of course. Did I realize that I had aged two decades since I started the drive that morning? I guess. But I could still feel a few feeble drops of excitement within. With the cabbie gone, I started on my journey from the gate to the building inside.
Now this is sometime mid June — the time Chennai summer usually enjoys turning man and beast alike into roasted dinner. And through the burning glare of the Sun, far away in the distance, I could see… nothing.
No buildings, no people, no animals, no plants. Nothing except an endless stretch of sandy banks and tar road. Nothing.
Nature and evolution have a way of filling up even the most deplorable places with a semblance of life. There are eye-less fish swimming at the deepest depths of the oceans living merely by smell and touch. There are creatures that have strangely intimate relationships based on repeatedly electrocuting each other. There are bacteria adapted to survive in the sulphurous fire of volcanos. There are creatures that live and thrive at temperatures way colder than your air conditioning would allow.
There’s the wasp which has no purpose to life other than scare the life out of innocent humans. And there’s the fig tree, whose entire plans for holy matrimony depends on inviting a hungry pregnant wasp for dinner, and then killing it.
Of course, there was TePan — a slimy smelly creature that clearly proved Darwin and the entire evolution theory a hoax. But I’d only come to TePan’s acquaintance as a classmate in college, which means I didn’t have this totally unrelated piece of knowledge yet.
As I continued my trek through the sandy pits of satan, I understood the true meaning of Nothingness. Here was a parcel of land too inhospitable for even the most inhospitable of creatures. Not even the killer wasp, or the killer fig that kills the killer wasp. Nothing. And that’s where I had decided to gain my worldly wisdom from. Nothing.
On and on I walked. The road curved ahead. On and on I walked. Mirages I’d so far only read and heard about in middle school geography danced in front. On and on I walked. Over the carcass of a dead camel. I thought I saw a few desert folk dancing in the corner. But of course, that was just my imagination — no dancing desert folk would ever venture into this gaping void of void-ness.
It was too late to turn back now — just had to keep walking and hope somebody would find my dehydrated body in time. After all, my mom said I had to get an education.
This story is part of a running series about tales and non-incidents from my college life. If you liked this story, let me know by hearting this post…
Previously on my Four-year Transforms:
