Fat kid in the mirror

Speaking in officially cold terms , I attended the last class of my academic life recently . Of course , I hear Gandhi-ian phrases about learning continuing till the last breath . But the classroom thrill of watching the brown haired pretty girl sitting on the first bench and then noticing the dark mallu guy sitting dangerously close to you is unique . And the feeling of learning without a pot bellied professor as my personal sleep inducer shall not be the same.

After the last class ,we guys celebrated by doing some emotional stuff for the camera . Me and Himanshu felt it would be a complete insult to pass out of college without being involved in the filmy 'couple-in-the-lawn' situation . We searched for a quick girlfriend but with that not happening over the last 24 years, we had to do this ourselves for the camera . Damn the shiv sena members .

I am the guy lying down . The guy over me is himanshu. We were just grinning at each other behind the International marketing book and yelling to nishant 'jaldi photo kheench ,sacchi mein koi paap na ho jaye'.

Also , a couple of evenings ago , I attended the farewell party the juniors put up for the Dramatics cell . It was a nice evening . The girls pleasantly ignored me. When people got bored of looking at each other and saying "Party is nice na" and "Ice cream is nice na" , they asked me to do a little stand up thing . I did the telebrands thing . The thing where tall , blonde and well muscled guys dress up in underwears and say stuff like 'pehle mera wazan bahut jyada tha.Fir mere dost Tony ne mujhe iss machine ke baare mein bataya.Kamaal ki machine hai' to sell exercise equipment on TV. People say I can mimic that thing well , without being tall , blonde , well muscled and wearing more than an underwear . People laughed when I did that telebrands thing . So I think I could enact that , unlessthey were laughing because my fly was unzipped all the while.

In other news , due to some wonderfully terrible luck , I was inside a clothes store twice over the last week . My ma will have a eighty feel tall exclamation mark springing from her head if she gets to know this . She knows I hate shopping . And as if a gas chamber wasnt fun enough , I was in a gas chamber with a suicide bomber . In more direct terms , I was in the shopping thing with a lady . You give a thirsty woman dying in a desert a choice between a chilled coke and 40% discount sale on raamdulaari saaris , and she will take the latter gladly . So the only way I survived it was to plop on a cushioned seat and pretend I was brain dead while she went around the shop with the confidenceof a stoned Shahid Afridi.

Clothes stores are amazingly bad places for me to be in . First , my interest in clothes compares well with Sunny Deol's interest in the telecom industry of Jakarta . Not that I belong to mallika's say-no-to-clothes school of thought , I just don't like shopping for them . Secondly , I am very scared of that little cubicle in the corner called the 'Try room' where people get naked and try clothes without having to pay for it . Along with maths test results , Try rooms remain the worst memories of my childhood.

For the cause behind this psycological scarring by try rooms , I need to admit something . I was a short and fat kid .I am still short ( Four months ago , I went to a clothes showroom , and the polite sales girl told me the kids section was upstairs ) . But being a kid , I was shorter andbeing a very hungry kid , I was fat.

I used to hate the trips to clothes stores then . I dreaded the moment when my dad held out a little pair of trousers to me , pointed to the try room and growled 'try these trousers' . My dad can inspire a dozen nervous breakdowns by the sheer steel in his glares . It is said he once he strangulated one of his patients with his stethoscope because the guy asked if he should seek a second opinion . So I dragged myself to the try room when he told me to . My self confidence was blown into bacteria sized particles the moment I turned in there . Roof to floor mirrors surrounded me on all sides . To make sure I dint miss anything fat layers , lights bright enough to hold a one day match in the tropical forests shone on every part of my bloated body . For a fat kid to look at himself without trousers under bright lights is one of the most effective ways to develop an amazing inferiority complex . Somehow I huffed and puffed my way into the trousers which were loose enough to fit in an ethopian athlete . I defied all physics and textile engineering lessons to button up the trousers around my tummy . At the end of it all , I was left wincing wearing a trousers with atleast 5 inches of length sticking outside my feet like dolphin fins . I would open the door slightly and try to gesture to dad and call him to check out the agonising fit . To make sure no traces of self esteem remained , he gestured back to me . Which meant I had to walk all the way from the try room to my dad . So in a store where every kid was slim and smart and looked like Vandana Luthra's illicit child , a fat and short me flopped my way to my dad , who then touched me all over and declared I needed to try a size slightly larger . A large part of my low sense of self worth can be attributed to the time I spent without trousers in a little room.

Anyways , all that is history now. I am trying to build my life anew , changing clothes in dark and mirror free rooms.

And I am loving this song . I found this lovely track called 'Aankhon ke sagar' by Fuzon . The voice , the words , the music come together to create a dreamy and almost trance like state . If you have ever liked a two eyed girl for reasons other than her rich dad , this song may evoke some memories . And they would be a lot better than those stirred up by Try rooms .