It's Thursday and the weekend is almost here. If it weren't for that one 8 am class that I face every MWF I'd be able to sleep in every day. Even when I need to get some sleep, I toss and turn until 4-5 am before I get any sleep. No wonder they call it beauty sleep. Now I've always had these hideous dark circles under my eyes, and they used to get me out of classes and unexcused absences all the time. "Ma'am/Sir(depending on whether it was ECW or LC), I was really sick yesterday, and here's the letter from my mother." Pulled a long face and looked a lil tired and it worked like a charm all the the time. Now I don't even have to try. I look like a racoon.

Oh yeah, ECW used to insist on a letter from my parents. They used to want to meet my parents too, twice a year! Imagine that!! In college no less. My dad never had the time, he got so annoyed once that he told me to provide them with a photo of him. He insisted that they'd be able to see him more than twice a year that way. I used to wonder if my education in a high school convent just got extended for another three years. Compared to the classes I attended over here, ECW seems worse than a convent. Do this, don't do that. Break the Rules from Boys is the most apt song for ECW. Anyone who had to listen to the crap that the teachers dished out, would agree with me. The stuff I take from my students over here is amazing. If Mala Ma'am were to ever listen to these kids she's probably have a coronary. They eat in class, they put their feet up on the desk when working in class, they walk around whenever they want to, and they also drink soda in class without asking me for my permission!!!! Remember those days when the teachers would threaten you with a TC? I would've chucked these kids out on their ears gazillion times for just their belligerence.The URL of this page is the result of one of my football player students, who insisted on calling me Sushi Baby(I have a feeling he just wasn't about to even try to remember my real name). Shyamu Baby would have gotten me kicked out of the college :) Yes Mala Ma'am, they keep 'frowning their eyebrows' at me all the time.

The best part of ECW was the time when one of the QT teachers gave us homework and then went around grading us, in class!! Of course, I hadn't done my homework. I was then forced to stand for what was left of the class. This was college! Oh! and there was the time when I wasn't able to answer a question in class and had to write out the answer to that question 15 times. Not so bad when compared to the kids who got a score lower than 50 on their test. They wrote out the entire exam 15 times. I have a feeling I'd lose my job if I ever did that to any of my students. There was this other time when a couple of my classmates actually had to wear only salwars for a month because their t-shirt was too short....or they shouldn't have been wearing capris....or something equally inane.

There was this other incident that comes to mind when discussing the narrow-mindedness of Madrasis. I remember a teacher telling me that she'd nabbed this girl playing hooky with her bf every day from college. Her car would drop her off at college and she'd hop into another car with her bf and get dropped back at college in time to go back home. 'We caught her red-handed!' and she looked so triumphant about it too. C'mon!!! and don't give me all that crap about our 'culture'. Almost every kid in Madras has a bf/gf. They hide it real well. They start as early as 6th-7th std. It happens in co-ed schools all the time. That's probably why there are still so many convents still reigning in Chennai. I can vouch for the fact that convents are the most stifling, intellectually stunting places. They ingrain such stupid ideas in students. The girls go stir crazy...become sex starved by the time they're out of school. The opposite is true too. Guys tend to look at women as mere sexual objects. Hence the incidents relating to ' eve-teasing' is rather high in Chennai. Hindus pray to godesses too. Shakthi, Devi, Meenakshi, call her whatever you want. They pray to her, yet they treat women so badly. That's another issue altogether. I hated the two years I was forced to attend classes at the 'Chapel Meadow'. I don't know about the other schools but the nuns at this one were real curmudgeons.

Right, I have a tendency to ramble on. Oh! and a self professed nonself-critical reader. My advisor has been expressing his feelings on my shortcomings quite a bit of late. I think that would be evident from the fact that he's kept me on the same chapter for a while now. Anybody who knows me also knows that I have frustration pouring out of every pore of my body right now. What can I say? I could say what every body else has been telling me. Patience! Lordy! If only He had doled out extra my way I think I'd be a better person all around. Believe you me, I've learnt patience the hard way after I got here. I just need a large dollop of it right now.

Alright, I'm done whining for now. I have many many 'whys' in my head now. Will be found pondering them while listening to ARR at my desk if needed.