The Curse of the Evil Prof.

Tuesdays have always been pretty hectic for me, at least ever since I entered college. The morning, as usual, was fully packed with classes on all slots, & after lunch, I head for my first physics lab. I'd always heard from my coaching teachers, the names of the experiments I was about to encounter & also done some reading about the practicals in IIT (Chetan Bhagat's 'Five Pt. Someone'!!lol). So, I was pretty confident. I've been forging readings ever since I went to my first science lab in school, so my confidence level was further boosted. Even made fun of a guy who said that my 1st experiment was to be in a dark room & he was totally frightened, after the experiment, to go to any dark room. That the room was cursed, the experiment was cursed!

So, I went inside, feeling how much I'd love doing all my experiments in there itself, for there was air-conditioning in the room! My first experiment-'Grating Spectrometer'. My instructor for the experiment- Prof. S.N. Bhatia, a name none of us from P4/2 batch would ever forget. I had known it to be a difficult experiment with sure shot time wastage on the set-up part (the exp. in itself is very small, only the setting up of the apparatus is time consuming), the first time. But, I had that the experiment is somehow completed in the given 3 hrs. Huh, were they all bluffing when they said the last line? It took me 2hrs to identify that I was to reach even till the Schuster's method. After 10 more minutes wasted, where the Prof. was shouting at me for being such a lousy bastard, good for nothing, bribed entry into the IIT, he came to check out my status.

I've always felt, though never actually done, that I have every right to shout & abuse, at least twice as much as he did, a Prof. if he himself is unable to do an experiment of which he is the instructor. Whatsay? I don't have even 30mins to do the experiment, & he says, "Maybe there is a problem here." What 'maybe'?? :-o You were trying for the past 20mins. There has to be a problem. Pair me up with someone else. Help, help!! This experiment has 6marks contribution in the total. Somebody plz call 911! Somebody do something. Oh God, I wanted to do well in this sem at any cost and this prof., he has made me a pauper before I could say 'any cost'! He has screwed up my 1^st experiment and with that my confidence level…

Well, that's how I felt. But, the prof. never did. I was still stuck up with the same apparatus, but was asked to bypass that step, for then. How incredulous…

But, then someone had called 911. Oh no, it wasn't 911, it was a Godsend, my guardian angel in the form of a lab assistant. He came, and with him, returned my life, which was going out of the Dark Room, like the light from the high powered bulbs, on our tables, on the click of a button. He came really as a savior, a messiah, and said, "Bhatia ko jaane de, fir paanch minute me tera Schuster's khatam kar doonga. Tu bas uske baad apna readings jaldi se le lena. Yeh Bhatia bada hi ghatia hai!". And we both stuck to our word. I took only 30mins extra time & completed my experiment, and got real poor marks, but in my own P4/2, it was an average score.

This was when I realized how that superb air-conditioning became the DARK ROOM, all in capitals, when it became the dungeon, the a/c & the darkness felt like I was in a drawer of the mortuary of AIIMS, and this was when I decided never to return to that room again, never to go back to that death chamber…

Thank God, I came out alive!

PS: I did go back for the last 2 experiments and actually cracked them, & got an overall AB in the course. Maybe someone had broken the 'curse of the evil prof.'!!