Chapter 5: Fraternal Angst

Soon I lost my sense of humour, which made the manner in which I overreacted to everything all the more funny.

But more than the crappy mess food and the noisy locals, it was the systematic ass-licking in college that made me want to hurt someone, Rajnikant-style.

Most Law Schoolites, I soon found out, would do anything and say anything to get ahead... and not just in terms of their grades. There were ridiculous instances of people cleverly out-maneuvering other fellow applicants in order to get into the Bathroom Cleanliness Committee.

Whenever I came in direct contact with this well-entrenched practice of sycophancy, I felt especially eager to practice my cigarette-flicking-twenty-times-kicking South Indian movie moves.

More often than not though, I avoided confrontation.

Almost everyone seemed to have been plugged into the System… and the irony is that this was 2 whole years before Keanu Reeves finally figured it out in 1999.

Leading the toadying pack in my class was Biceps G (Leela Ganapathi), a broad-shouldered girl with a pair of small balls.

I had initially put her down as a Hell Wench, but Cabby had given me the inside info about what lay within. It was a completely different thing altogether that he had tried to ascertain this fact firsthand during a 5th year farewell party.

Somehow, Biceps brought out the Contender in me.

And so, during a Criminal Law class, I made it a point to refer to her condition when I asked our Prof. (when he was discussing Prison Sentences) whether in his opinion transgenders fell under the same definition of a woman.

“Sir, if Leela had sex reassignment surgery, wherein she had testicles attached to her, would the Law consider her a man?”

There’s something to be said about non-imaginative Professors, but I was asked to confine my questions to confinement.

And this was after I had even thrown in a good old fashioned ‘wherein’.

Unfettered education was still a distant goal in NLS.

Biceps meanwhile flexed, adjusted her little pair and made a mental note to fix me after class.

While the Contender in me vanished on account of messages from various sponsors, I shuffled out of class before the bell rang.
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Needless to type, but if Biceps is reading this, then there’s a high likelihood that I’ll soon be in pain.

And I’ve got a nasty premonition that it’ll be testicular in nature.

But that was the way it went. I was the angry young adolescent. Always ready to take on Nagarbhavi.

And ever so often, not really up to the challenge of being taken on.
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Till one day I stopped overreacting. And to a large extent, reacting.

I don’t know which was worse – losing my sense of humour, or acquiring the comfort of apathy.

The latter was apparent in the way I bumped into people in the corridors and didn't really care about what Cabby and the entire cast of The Matrix thought of them.