I was in fourth standard I believe. My teacher had just taught us about electricity and conductors. Metals are good conductors, wood is a bad conductor and so on and so forth. But I didn’t believe in many things (that was then with no youtube :D ) unless I do it and see it myself. So I made this amazing action plan to experiment with electricity. I ‘borrowed’ a voltage tester from that sacred brown box in which my dad kept all his tools. This brown box still lies around in my parents’ house with that old red pliers, this same old tester, lot of broken wires and other sorts of junk and metal. Anyway more about the brown box in some other post. I also found a pair of scissors that my mom used in the kitchen. The experiment was to find out whether the scissors could conduct electricity.

Now my experiments had to be systematic and went through with well thought out steps. So I first inserted the tester on to the mains plug, then switched on the plug. Yup, the tester glowed and it was working. Good. Next step: I removed the tester, inserted the scissors in. whaaaa… FAIL!! If you were smart enough you would have noticed that I missed one step, I forgot to switch off the plug before inserting the scissors in. :( Boom! I don’t think it is easy to put into words what a 230 Volt shock direct through your hands would feel like. It was like two or three wrestlers hitting me on all parts of the body simultaneously with tremendous force. I went blank. Next thing I remembered was my cousin sister, who was baby-sitting me, calling me frantically asking what happened. As I opened my eyes I was lying flat on the floor, some 2 or 3 metres from the scene of the experiment. Well you can’t say the experiment was an utter failure. I did learn what a real power shock means!

Our chemistry lab periods during school was always fun. We all had a lot of fun mixing and matching various chemicals, trying to make a kaleidoscope of patterns and colours in our test-tubes and beakers. Once, we were busy engaged in this activity before the real experiment started and while our teacher was giving us instructions. The guy next to me – Vinod I think – already had the chemicals poured in his test-tube and kept near to the burner; but lost interest in the teacher’s talk and shifted attention to our alternate experiments. While doing so he suddenly turned and asked me what the teacher said last. I opened my mouth to start saying ‘Keep the test-tube away from the flame’, but before that we heard a small pop and the liquid from his test-tube shooting up like a rocket. The experiment created a nice elaborate pattern on the ceiling. There was moment of silence, we were sure this was the end of the world. But everybody else was going about their business, having not noticed anything. Relieved we put on our innocent angels’ masks and continued working. They did notice though, the next week our lab assistant, Madhu Uncle came and told us that these juniors are never careful, look at what they have done to the ceiling. We all nodded our heads struggling to keep the laughter from coming out.

I lived around 20 kilometres away from my school and it goes without saying that I spent a lot of time in Three Bus. My best friends in school, the funniest incidents, the time of my life – I owe it to that old cheerful yellow vehicle. We had two rows of seats reserved for our gang. Shankar “Chubby”, Pranav “Paandi”, Aswin & I, being the first to get in, held fort and clung on to these two seats not letting any chirpy young kids or intimidating seniors to enter our restricted area – till our troop was fortified with the arrival of Sandeep, Arun, Vinod “Sticky”, Akshay “Chuksy” and occasionally Vishnu to complete the elite 3 bus gang.

“Three Bus”, now Bus no 8 :)

And as any young kid would do, our main job was to obviously look out of the window and watch the city around us. And yeah we did see the entire city en route to school, for our three bus was the worker horse for Loyola – it traveled to distant suburbs many of my other classmates didn’t even know about. Our major past time was to spot vehicle number plates and find out which is the newest registration number we saw on the street. And the guy who spotted it first was our superhero hehe.

Then one day there was a huge fight. Pranav finally had learned of the ubiquitous 4 letter word and found an opportunity to use it against Akshay. Major pandemonium broke out, with Akshay calling Paandi back “goy”. Well I don’t know how he came up with that, but instantly people started taking sides on what was the bigger insult – the F word or “goy”. We searched dictionaries, referred library books (sadly no Internet at that time) – finally someone decided “goy” was the worst insult in the history of mankind. To this date, I have not changed my opinion. :D Then there was this other fight I remember vividly, this time again Paandi, but on the other side it was Sandeep. And poor guy Paandi, already reeling at the trauma for being called a “goy”, got his ear bitten by Sandeep! Yup he really bit his ear. And the amateur doctors in us were shocked – Paandi is going to loose all his hearing skills in 2 years. 10-12 years passed since the incident, I saw him last week with full auditory powers, helping him hear worser insults than “goy”!

By eighth standard we had become grown ups. Hormones were raging and it played an important part in us trying a major (failed) attempt to shift our seats to the other side of the bus. We all developed a crush on this girl who used to wait for the bus in a common bus stop. Someone told us her name was Praveena, I don’t know till now whether that is really her true name. Poor thing, I don’t think she ever knew so many prying eyes were on her all that time! :D Hmmm.. I wonder what she is doing now… ;)

Time has gone on, things happened, life’s changed… We have gone our different ways, I became an engineer, Paandi is doing his MBA, Chubby became a lawyer… Yet those days don’t seem so long gone. They are so vivid in my mind as if everything happened yesterday… the golden days in Bus No 3 :)