Thursday, February 4, 2010

Mixer remix

"Sir"
"What?"
"Project, sir"
The teacher held up what we showed him and inspected it.
"What is this?"
"Toy mixie"

In 7th standard, my project partner and I decided on 'toy mixie' as our project in this course called 'electrical gadgets' which was P/F(pass/fail - which meant it didn't matter). It was one Sunday's work - buy cups, a motor, rotating blades, some wires and a battery, connect the blades to the motor and connect up the motor to power and voila!
We got a P with distinction on that assignment. This post is not about that, though.
We were in 11th standard. We still had 'electrical gadgets' taught by the same teacher and it was still pass/fail. In the 4 years since 7th standard, the scope of the course had changed immensely to high-tech electrical and electronics mumbo-jumbo. TVs, antennas, diodes, ICs, Ritchie Street (where one presumably bought these items), transformers - you name it, the syllabus covered it. The teacher painstakingly suggested project topics which I can't even remember now and told us how we could go about buying stuff at R-street, connect stuff up and make stuff work, to put it in technical terms. What hadn't changed in four years, was our decision to not take this course seriously. Also, the toy mixie.

Me : "Looks like people are actually doing the project da"
Partner : "What nonsense. It's EG, man. No one's doing anything"
Me: "Ok"

Partner : "I saw XYZ in Ritchie street, da. Tomorrow's the deadline for the project submission"
Me : "What project? No one'll submit, man. Who dare submit when we haven't done anything?"
Partner : "Worst case? If everyone submits? Shall I bring that toy mixie from 7th class?"
Me : "You mean go to the those juniors and steal their project?"
Partner : " No no. I have ours from 4 years back"
Me : "Oh great! Done! That should work!"

And so the worst case scenario did come true. People were roaming around with ICs and antennas and the classroom felt like a miniature ISRO launch. Our mixie faded in comparison but it still worked (- we'd gotten a new battery). Our turn to submit came after an especially complicated project.

"How did you even think of submitting this? Where's the electronics, da? Antenna? Ritchie Street? I taught so many things in class? What the hell is this?"
Our teacher was delirious with anger. We didn't have much to say to redeem the situation.
"Toy mixie, sir" and I connected the wires and the blades started rotating. I thought some action would do the trick. Not to be. He grabbed it and flung it on the table.
"I know what it is. I know what it is. I know what it is. The big mistake the school made is to not include this course in your marks. You would not even have passed. You would have stayed in this class forever. In fact..."
I switched off. I think the outburst went on for 5 minutes. It was a lifetime's frustration from conducting a pass/fail course so we didn't hold it against him.
"...but now what to do. Next"
We saw him put a P in the P/F column. We looked to see if the mixie had been damaged. Could come in handy in engineering college.