Skip to main content

Octopus and Leech


Insipid humour like life

“Yes, Sir, I was just thinking of you,” said Dr Prerna when Dr Rakesh walked into her office.  He was not even in the most remotest part of her thinking.  He knew it too.  That was just one of their many secrets. 

Dr Prerna had done her PhD on the artistry of octopus tentacles and Dr Rakesh’s thesis was about the destiny of leeches for sucking blood.  The former was the principal of the school and the latter was a leading principal-aspirant.  The latter warmed up to the former hoping that she would recommend him for the vacant vice-principal’s chair and the former entertained the latter as he played the role of both the stooge and the snitch.  Having buried his soul in the most dishonest flattery and having informed on all his colleagues who matter, Dr Rakesh would cover up the stench and filth of his inner rot beneath his three-piece suit.

“Your disrobe looks fabulous today,” said Dr Rakesh as usual trying to flatter his boss’s new dress.

“What?” Dr Prerna was scandalised in spite of herself.

Dr Rakesh’s knowledge of English was one of the many handicaps that he hid beneath his three-piece suit.  So he had sought the assistance of the English teacher, Joyonto, to learn the name of the Queen’s latest garb which looked like a hybrid between the cassock of Catholic priests and the habit of Tibetan monks.  The crooked Bong had played a nasty game on him, realised Dr Rakesh.  Saala, what does he think of himself?  That eating fish-head will make him more shrewd than Dr Rakesh?  Let him wait and watch what Dr Rakesh, the Chanakya of New India Residential Public School, has in store for him.

While the Chanakya sat in the air-conditioned office of his Queen, Joyonto was taking his usual evening walk on the campus with his little son.

“Be careful,” he warned his son.  “Don’t fall down.”

“Why, dad?” asked the boy.  “What will happen if I fall?”

“Friends will laugh,” said Joyonto.

One of Joyonto’s friends was having his laughs sitting in the Principal’s office.  “He is promiscuous,” Dr Rakesh had learnt that word from Joyonto the other day.  “Have you noticed the way he flirts with the lady teachers?”

Promiscuity was a good allegation, thought Dr Prerna.  She encouraged the stooge to exercise his creative imagination and fabricate some substantiating episodes for Joyonto’s promiscuity.  Every staff member has to be kept in his or her place.  A principal who doesn’t know how to do that is a potential failure.

“Your AC is very good,” said Dr Rakesh having come to the end of the creativity of his imagination.  He thought it wise to depart from the disrobe while flattering the Queen.

“Sir, sir,” the Queen became suddenly excited.  That was one of her diseases.  “Have you heard the joke about the patient who complained about the cold in the operation theatre?”

“No, tell me, madam.”  He said though he had heard the joke twenty-five times since the lady assumed her present office.

“The AC is very cold, said the patient.  Then the doc said, if you find this cold unbearable how will you bear the cold in the mortuary?”

Dr Rakesh roared with laughter.  “Oh, I’m sorry.  You made me laugh so loud,” he apologised.

Don’t be sorry, you numbskull!  The Queen said in her heart.  Your mortuary is getting ready.


Comments

  1. parwatisingariJanuary 6, 2016 at 6:12 AM

    :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. ManiparnaJanuary 6, 2016 at 7:53 AM

    “Your disrobe looks fabulous today,” :-D :-D

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJanuary 6, 2016 at 7:59 AM

      I'm sure you have come across such characters in real life.

      Delete
  3. RakeshJanuary 6, 2016 at 11:03 AM

    What a character! I would have sued you for slander on my name, but for the laugh. :D

    Too funny, sir! And, yes... I've really come across such creatures in the corporate world. :D

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJanuary 6, 2016 at 11:10 AM

      Your name is as common as the moon :)

      Today schools are more corporate than the corporate world!

      Delete
  4. Kokila guptaJanuary 6, 2016 at 5:18 PM

    I liked the choice of the topics.I myself had a narrow escape with errant behaviour of nauplius larvae under xyz conditions. Now you made me wonder if there was more to the name ..eh?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJanuary 6, 2016 at 6:04 PM

      Larvae are very common in today's workplaces. They take upon themselves the mission of ruining those who have greater potential than them.

      Delete
  5. sunaina sharmaJanuary 7, 2016 at 5:36 AM

    Octopus - brainy yet hideous, doomed when they meet their mate. The principal satisfaction for the principal would be just promiscuous tales....:)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...
2 comments
Read more

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...
18 comments
Read more

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...
16 comments
Read more

The Life of an Activist

Book Review   Title: I am What I am: A Memoir Author: Sunitha Krishnan Publisher: Westland, Chennai, 2024 Pages: 284 Sunitha Krishnan is more of a conqueror than a survivor. She was gangraped at the age of 15, and that too because she had started working for the uplift of the girls in a village. She used to interact with the girls, motivate them to go back to school, give them remedial classes, and discuss topics like menstrual hygiene “and other intimate issues”. Some men of the village didn’t like such “revolutionary” moves coming from a little girl. Eight such men violated Sunitha Krishnan one evening as she was returning home from the village. “Any sexual assault is a traumatic event and leaves deep scars on the psyche of the survivor. The shame, the guilt, the feeling of being tainted, the self-loathing that it brings in its wake is universal. I was no exception.” That is how the third chapter, title ‘The Girl Who Did Not Cry’, begins. Sunitha Krishnan didn’t l...
10 comments
Read more