I so wish I was back in school, you know. Even if it means being beaten by that bully, Simran Bhalla, every day during lunch break. Believe it or not, it’s for the textbooks.
Back in my day, textbooks were uninspiring. All they had were benevolent kings who laid beautiful roads and planted shady trees on both sides. As if.
Life is so unfair. Just look at what today’s kids get to read.
The eminent educationist Dr VK Sharma, in his health and physical Education textbook for standard 12, gives today’s youngster the following nugget of wisdom about female anatomy: “36-24-36 shape is considered the best shape for females, as those are the requirements for Miss Universe and Miss World pageants.”
If only I had been made aware of this life-saving piece of information via my school curriculum. I could have saved myself so many beatings from my father for stealing his James Hadley Chases with, ‘Hey, easy, Pop. You want me to be class first or not?’
And imagine the evenings doing joint studies with my classmate ‘Paddy’ Padmanabhan as we pored over his foreign-returned uncle’s Penthouse collection to get the ‘diagrams’ just so for our record books.
Another eminent educationist, Shri CB Gupta, in his textbook Basic Business Communication , gives future scholars pithy advice on online brevity: “E-mail messages should be like skirts — short enough to be interesting and long enough to cover all the vital points.”
Now he tells me.
There was no e-mail back in my day but at least I would’ve known how Hotmail got its name.
If mere textbook writers are finding exciting new ways to teach future generations, I assure you, their bosses aren’t lagging behind.
Rajasthan’s education minister, Shri Vasudev Devnani, has shared a breakthrough scientific discovery that can solve all our environmental problems in one shot: cows don’t just inhale oxygen, they freakin’ exhale it, too.
Whaaat?
Alas, had we known this, my deep-sea-diver buddy, Kuruvilla Verghese, would’ve been alive today. He would’ve strapped a compact, reliable cow on to his back instead of the substandard oxygen tank, and he would’ve found the damn pirate treasure we were supposed to share.
Be that as it may, we are living in fantastic times as far as knowledge dissemination goes. And that is no pun, Dear Reader.
According to Justice MC Sharma, who is just one step away from being a bestselling textbook writer if you ask me, the peacock has pious qualities just like the cow, is a lifelong brahmachari , and the pea-couple doesn’t have dirty, dirty sex to make pea-babies. The peahen just swallows the peacock’s tears and, voilà, she is pristinely pregnant!
Now put those two together. Imagine what we’d get if we combined potent peacock tears with the life-affirming exhalations of a cow under zero-gravity conditions. And rubbed the resultant mixture on Messrs VK Sharma and CB Gupta. I have no idea what, but it’s worth a try. Who knows, they may both emerge from the lab in super-short skirts, flaunting 36-24-36 figures. Anything is possible in these surreal times.
As we speak, I hear that, in a mathematics textbook being written by Farah Khan, along with whole numbers and prime numbers, students will get to study hitherto-neglected item numbers.
And apparently a chemistry textbook is in the pipeline, too. To be written by Shah Rukh Khan and Kajol, with a foreword by the late Sivaji Ganesan and KR Vijaya to please Madrasi children.
Now that we’re here, why not just make Shakti Kapoor Grandmaster-Go-Go of Studies, or whatever it is they call it these days. I see a future where our leaders will be caught on camera, browsing textbooks.
Krishna Shastri Devulapalli is a satirist, humour writer and co-editor of the anthology Madras on My Mind: A City in Stories.
