Lesson 2: The University

Part: A



When he thought about joining an engineering college he thought it is the place where people invent, discover things daily. He visualized that place with old professors with long white hairs and a bunch of disciples following them between class room and labs. Well, that was not exactly things were in the real world. After the first day itself he concluded that the way system works is just not fine. He decided to change the system. He looked around. He fought against almost everything that came in his way. He thought he is the chosen one against all the evil forces on earth. The crusader of truth. The silent rebel.

It took him two years to find the way he fights against the system is not just fine. It took one more year to understand that he was among the worst students in the class. In the final year he understood that he is the only one who is responsible for everything that happened in his life. It was too late to do something.

He hid himself in his hostel room. He did not cry. He did not laugh.
All his thought had a dark shadow. That was the time when his face looked pale and his thoughts became darker than black. He was the dead man in the campus.



He wrote few poems too. One goes like this:

What I want to tell is
Not that I want to write.
What I am writing is
Not that you want to read.

When I made up my mind,
I found myself searching in the wrong place.
When I reached the right place,
You are not there to hear me.
When you started hearing me,
I lost my words.

Never mind, after all words are incomplete.


In one evening he was passionately kissing his teacup in front of his hostel room. That was on the third floor. He was staring at the ground far below. Altogether his life was a messy affair. It was not quiet interesting, not colorful as it should be. He was depressed to the core.

Galileo's Leaning Tower of Pisa experiment came to his mind first with some more high school physics concepts.
Weight = mass multiplied by acceleration of gravity, where g = 9.8 m/s² (meters per seconds-squared).
He was around seventy five kilograms at that time.
The thought process was broken when someone came near him. That guy gave him a book and said “Buddy, you need this”. He finished the book within two days. That was a kind of sacred revelation to him. He became a new man. That was a sea change.

Part: B


Somebody asked Little John about his ambition. For a primary school kid that was a new concept. After thinking for a while, he decided on being a scientist.
What kind of scientist?
He looked around. His home was in a tea estate. And a lot of plants, and green leaves. He decided to be a plant scientist. But he knew he needs to discover something to be a scientist. What can he discover?
He looked around. More and more greenery and flowers. He thought he will discover the biggest flower in the world. But since it is the biggest, lot of people might have seen it already. So I will discover the smallest one, he said to himself.
His days became busier. He started looking more curiously to the environment. One day on the way to school, he found it. The smallest flower in the world. It had a size of an ant. He found it in the sand in between the metal pieces of the road. There was an entire family of that plant with many flowers hiding between metal pieces. He felt really good about his discovery

Part: C


Little John was in the verge of crying. He felt a burning sensation in his ears. It was hot with red color. Hence, red-hot. They were trying to teach him mathematics. The kind, which involves lots of Sine and Cose. He tried to memorize the equation, but he could not. It is not that he didn’t try. He did try. He tried to imagine it. But he could not.
He tried to make a connection between them. He tried to guess. He tried to find a pattern in it. But he could not. They asked him basic multiplication tables. He was so poor in that too. When they say add or subtract he imagined a big numeric table with all the numbers pasted on it. But even that proved futile.
He wondered why it takes at least few seconds to raise his left or right hand when asked to do so. Every time he needs to refresh about the eating habits to determine the right hand. In the mean time lot of knocks and hits bombarded on top his head. Fists of fury. He felt as if something grew up within his throat. He felt sweat all over the body. He could not resist. He started crying which lasted hours.
The teachers were hopeless and they left him alone. He really wanted to do something about mathematics. He wanted to make something that helps him to remember the cruel face of Mathematics.

There was an empty ink bottle on the book shelf. He took it in hand and collected few tears in it. He was so keen on filling the bottle with tears. He determined to live and prove that human beings can breathe without knowing maths. The inkbottle with saltwater would help him remind the oath.