Autoplay: Not-so Stories

by G. Sampath

  As he sat there at his desk, Roll No. 27 tried to once again think his way out of his predicament. But before he could even begin to do so, another part of him reminded him that this very attempt to think about his current situation was itself another way of avoiding what was his only priority and task right now: finish the chapter on semi-conductors, so he could move on to optics. So once again he tried, in vain, to persuade the words on the page to unload their meanings onto his brain. His mind (to his mind) seemed unable to pause long enough on a given locus of attention for him to be able to feed it some (or any) bolus of necessary fact or theory or knowledge that might be usefully retrieved during the examination. On the contrary, his delinquent mind seemed to combine the whimsy of a monkey injected with narcotics with the motility of a freshly ejaculated sperm as it continued to taunt him, and squirmed out of his feeble attempts to capture it and hold it still, and even as he willed his thoughts to infiltrate the meaning of the paragraph he was now re-reading for the eighty-third time, they continued to skitter around like dust particles, his thoughts, dancing the Brownian dance. He was a student who had to study, and the oppressive imperative, it seemed to him, had transformed him instantly into a student who could not study.

  But this transformation, if true, was neither instantaneous nor complete. If there was indeed a structural issue here, he thought, how then could he manage to focus for nine hours at a stretch if he was reading a novel by D.H. Lawrence or a treatise by William James – reading materials his scholastic peers either did not care for, or would not, he suspected, be able to summon the necessary mental focus for. As for discussing them with his hyperactive sibling, he likely stood a better chance trying to tickle himself.

  But he was not going to be assessed on his understanding of Sons and Lovers or The Varieties of Religious Experience, not yet. Even among his mandated subjects of study, he still could access, occasionally, and through the steely capillary tubes of his own thirst for knowledge, the odd water table of joyful learning (as he did when he’d spent an entire day in the school library lost in a book on how Bohr came up with the Bohr model of the atom, and on another occasion, at the National Book Fair, he’d spent four hours standing, reading a paperback on the Theory of Everything until he was shamed out of the stall by one of the stall assistants) amid the desert of facts and knowledge packaged into 20-mark questions and Match the Followings and True-or-Falses. But those water tables were few, and though enjoyable, were all either theoretical (with little bearing on formula derivations, ability to use notations, ability to solve numericals) or out of syllabus or irrelevant from the examination point of view. It wasn’t lost on Roll No. 27 that while the examination had a point of view, he, as a student-examinee, wasn’t allowed one.

  5

  A speaks truth in 60 per cent of the cases, while B in 90 per cent of the cases. In what per cent cases are they likely to contradict each other in stating the same fact? In the cases of contradiction, do you think the statement of B will carry more weight as he speaks truth in more number of cases than A? (7 marks)

  The paradox being that while it was true Roll No. 27 could not study, it was even more true that he was very sincere about his studies. He always had been, whether he could study or not, did well or not. He always strove to give his best, to work the hardest, to be disciplined, to revise regularly, to follow a strict and regular schedule of daily revision, to not watch too much TV, to go to bed on time, to submit his assignments on time, to not think bad thoughts, to not spend too much time reading storybooks or out-of-syllabus books, to pray to God every day, to bathe every morning, to have his meals at the same time every day, to do dynamic meditation for twenty minutes every morning to improve his concentration, to eat vegetables irrespective of whether he liked them or not because his female parent never tired of reiterating that she would rather spend on vegetables than on doctors or medicines, to consume almonds soaked in milk every morning despite a deep-seated aversion for almonds surpassed only by a deeper-seated aversion for milk that should have but did not, to his tragic disappointment, qualify as lactose intolerance, to do yoga every day, especially sirshasana and viparitakarani as they both improved the memory by increasing blood supply to the brain, apart from also having the more immediate bonus effect of clearing his blocked nose by increasing blood supply to the nose (which they could do because the nose happened to be on the way, so to speak, for all the blood travelling to the brain, and the increased blood circulation in the nasal area, in combination with conscious, slow-motion breathing, consisting of a premeditated duration pattern for inhalation and exhalation in the ratio of 1:2, caused a sustained application of optimal pressure on the semi-viscous particulate waste matter obstructing the free flow of air traffic in his nasal pathways, effecting said waste matter’s eviction).

  Though Roll No 27 was not always successful in abiding by all (or any of) these injunctions, he strove to speak the truth at all times, to never cheat, to never consciously mislead anyone in anything, and to be conscientious in everything he did – in short, he was a model student in every way. Or rather, in every way except one: results.

  The word ‘results’ evoked in him a volcanic eruption of hatred and disgust that was out of all proportion and totally out of character given his extremely timid and retiring disposition. Even his younger sibling and assorted cohorts taunted him about his paltry aggregates just to amuse themselves with the rare flashes of passion that animated his otherwise stolid visage. When his simple pendulum experiments in the physics lab did not give him the results they were supposed to as per the laws of simple harmonic motion or when his magnesium behaved like sodium or when his mouse died before he could pin down its circulatory system, to him it signified a secret pact between physics, chemistry and biology to humiliate him. Autonomous physical phenomena, when they made contact with his consciousness, assumed the form of personal insults flung at him by an inscrutably wilful world, and undermined the objective reality of the world inside his head, where results were no more than an interesting diversion, only of mundane importance, and ultimately nothing more than a manifestation of maya.

  But ‘results’, tragically for Roll No. 27, was a word wielded routinely, and aggressively, by nearly everyone he knew, and in particular by his male parent, in a multitude of tonal variations yielding an array of interpretive possibilities signifying any of a number of emotional and/or rhetorical effects, from irony to sarcasm to anger, resignation, frustration, helplessness, despair, doubt, etc., and Roll No. 27 could never really escape even for a few minutes of his waking life a paralysing consciousness of the fact that he (Roll No. 27) was actually a perfect student except for the results, and indeed, everybody who came in contact with him automatically assumed that he was a perfect student until they came to know of his results, for seen through the unsparing filter of results, Roll No. 27 was not just an underperformer but, in the words of a cruel classmate he happened to overhear (and perhaps was meant to overhear), Roll No. 00.

  Roll No. 27’s aggregate total in the half-yearly exam held a few months ago had been the second-lowest in a class of thirty-six students, higher only than that of Roll No. 33. But Roll No. 33 at least had the excuse of being a repeater, having missed four months of the previous academic year due to successive attacks from typhoid and jaundice (it must be added, however, that there also floated rumours suggesting far more glamorous reasons for Roll No. 33’s prolonged disappearance, including, according to one version, a failed love affair with an older woman that Roll No. 33 sometimes alluded to in a vague and mysterious way but would not categorically confirm or deny).

  But Roll No. 27 did not even have the consolation of a failed love affair, and far from being a repeater – and God forbid such a fate ever befalling him – he had never, in his entire academic career (his amorous career, being non-existent, was immune to success/failure judgements), thought of himself as a failure. And not only had he never thought of himself as a failure, he resented anyone slotting him – even i
n their own minds – as a dumb student (the red lines in his report card denying him even the dignity of a rank, however low) despite him having failed, repeatedly and consistently, in four of his six subjects (he never came close to the pass mark of 40 in physics, chemistry, maths and biology, while managing to scrape through in the early-to-mid-40s in his purportedly favourite subjects of English and Tamil – and these two, unfortunately for him, were subjects that nobody seemed to care whether he did well in or not since he was a science student and the only thing that mattered was his performance in PCMB) in the last twelve testing events as a higher secondary school student, of which eight were class tests (they involved only a fraction of the syllabus and were easier to prepare for and do well in) and four were the quarterly/half-yearly/annual examinations (these involved, as their names suggest, the quarter or half or the whole of the syllabus of the subject, and a very serious view was taken of your performance, with a poor one typically provoking a summoning of parents for a meeting with the class teacher, the concerned [failed-] subject teacher[s], and/or the vice principal/principal, and if the poor performance recurred in the academic year-closing annual examination – the last, the most decisive, the Big Daddy of all the examinations, and second in importance only to the all-important BOARDS – you could be officially pronounced a ‘fail’ and not promoted to the next grade and be forced to endure the extreme shame and disgrace of having to repeat a grade, spend a year competing with, and suffering the taunts of, kids one year your junior, being finger-pointed at and whispered about as that ‘fail case’, and be relegated to the ‘untouchable’ class in the eyes of the wider world, or at least that part of the world whose opinion of him mattered to him, and stand accused of befouling the legacy of his dead older sibling, and this was the worst kind of humiliation/nightmare that Roll No. 27 could imagine, and lived in mortal terror of living through, as a student), his failing streak essentially going back to the first class test of Class 11. It was this annual examination that Roll No. 27 was currently not able to study for at 3.58 a.m.

  6

  Assume that a meditation and yoga course reduce the risk of heart attack by 30% and the intake of certain prescribed drugs reduces its chances by 25%. At a time, a patient can choose any one of the two options with equal probabilities. It is given that after going through one of the two options, the patient selected at random suffers a heart attack. Find the probability that the patient followed a course of meditation and yoga. Interpret the result and state which of the above stated methods is more beneficial for the patient. (10 marks)

  When, in the half-yearly exam in Class 11, for the first time ever since entering the portals of academia a dozen or so years ago as a moderately cute three-year-old enrolled in LKG with little or no expectations from him by way of academic performance (at least none that he had internalized back then or could remember having internalized at that age), he failed in a subject in single digits, his parents had shed tears of fear, hysteria and helplessness at this sudden inability of their technically eldest son and primary carrier of family prestige and beacon of hope for their future and their best bet at fixing the fiasco of their dead first-born – the third-born, displaying wisdom beyond his years, had never threatened to come anywhere close to academic excellence, taking, by some mysterious genetic instinct, extreme care to languish at the heart of the normal probability distribution bell curve right from LKG onward – letting them down not just academically but also socially and filially by failing in his duty as a student and son, and their tizzy-trauma of near-cardiac proportions at his successive failure, which peaked (or should we say, troughed) with his single digit result in mathematics (4/100), changed, perhaps forever, the way Roll No. 27 was thought of by his parents. For until then, neither Roll No. 27 nor his parents had ever believed him to be anything but a good student. True, he had never been brilliant, had never stood first in class (the lone instance had been in Class 6 when AK, the usual first-ranker, had fallen sick and missed two subjects in the quarterly exam and so it didn’t really count though Roll No. 27 did get a First Rank badge for it that he wore for two months – feeling all through like a pretender and having to endure jealous sarcastic barbs from AK who had come to think of the First Rank badge as his personal property – before it was reclaimed by the aforementioned first rank monopolist and Roll No. 27, instead of the disappointment everyone expected him to feel, felt only relief, and was secretly glad to be somewhat freed of the burden of teacherly expectations [over and above the burden of parental expectations] and the performance anxiety that went with sporting the First Rank badge, which, furthermore, had the effect of putting him in the spotlight in the classroom, with the teachers expecting him to take the lead in answering pedagogically useful but otherwise dumb questions posed by them in the classroom and also in a number of other ways set an example for other students so that if, for instance, he turned up for class without having finished an assignment his fault was not merely that of not having finished an assignment but also of letting down the class as a whole, which looked up to him, etc.), but he had nevertheless always been among the top five or six in a given class right through school. But things began to change for Roll No. 27, slowly at first, and then rapidly.

  The first time it happened, Roll No. 27 had sobbed uncontrollably for twenty-five minutes (give or take a few seconds). He had just turned fourteen. He was in Class 9, and in superb form academically, despite being in a new school where he had entered the fray as an unseeded player, as it were – nobody knew him, nobody shared their notes with him, and he had to rely on his own intelligence, hard work, and engage in persistent nagging of his teachers to get his doubts cleared and problems resolved.

  He tasted some spectacular early success to the extent that he upset the by then established class hierarchy to rank second at the end of the quarterlies, having scored an unprecedented centum in maths and physics in two consecutive class tests. Now, finally, the cream of Class 9 not only began to take note of him, they even began to acknowledge him as one of their own, lending him their Tin Tin and Asterix and Hardy Boys, including him in their hand-cricket matches and book-cricket tournaments, and even approaching him on one occasion to settle an argument regarding the reproductive system of fern, for it was by then widely acknowledged that he ‘owned’ biology, just as JH, the class and school topper, owned maths and physics, and CA, his male parent’s then boss’s only son, owned chemistry, and they were each of them regarded as the final arbiters on any difference of opinion in these subjects, (unless, of course, someone wished to ask the teacher directly). Roll No. 27 even received handsome positive reinforcement for his academic achievements from his female parent who kept her promise to get him a new bicycle if he scored 100/100 in maths (a subject that had traditionally been his Achilles heel).

  But barely a couple of months post his majestic triumph in the quarterlies, one October evening, a Tuesday, Roll No. 27 was at his study table in his room at home, preparing diligently for a class test in biology (one of his favourite subjects), when he found himself unable to concentrate. When it happened, he probably did not even know what was going on, and probably did not use concepts like ‘concentration’ to understand what was happening, or not happening. All he knew was that he could not sit at his desk for more than fifteen seconds at a time. Something unknown and nameless welled up inside him, a force that found no mention in his science textbook. It unleashed a churning within that felt both delicious as well as terrifying. Like being on a cliff edge high above the waves with the wind on your face and the waves so far away they seem like children playing softly in the sand. His knees would get all wobbly and dizzy from the height and the looking down and a hand reached out to him, making him lean forward and take a step and another, and then let himself drop, like gravity’s baby, into the seductive whispering far below, and that’s when he had stood up, his chair scraping the floor as he did so. He was sweating, and felt the way you feel when you’ve already stopped rotating on your axis but
the room you were in was yet to.