This morning, as I headed towards the airport, I called up my seventh thru tenth grade Geography teacher – Mrs. Bhowmic in India. We talked about those good old days – when I had a full head of hair (I know, it is difficult to believe it today, but trust me, I was not born this way 🙂 ). Evidently, she follows my random thoughts in my blog/Facebook. And she encouraged me to write a book some day. You know, many people have encouraged me multiple times to consider writing a book. One even gave me a book on how to publish your first book. Till date, while I often feel the urge to lend words to my thoughts, I have never felt the urge to publish a book. But I know things change and I change too. Maybe some day…

But here is how much things change. Back in seventh grade, if you ever told me that people actually will want to read what I write, I would have laughed as hearty a laugh a thin-rail constitution could cough up and come back with some smart Alec comment like “Yeah! And someday I will lose all my hair too!!” (I know, I know, I was gullible then).

However, every time somebody encourages me to write, my thoughts go back to my desk mate in ninth grade – Dibyendu Dutta. As I said, he sat next to me a whole year on the same bench. He was my hero when it came to composing in English. At that early age, he had mastered the art of writing just about anything in the most beautiful way possible. His command on the language English, his ability to stitch various thoughts together and his great ability to pun almost always produced essays that flowed like some mellifluous music.

There was this weekend homework our English teacher – Mrs. Biswas had given us to write an essay on. The subject was “Sound”. As you can imagine, I approached the topic with clinical and yet scientifically sound approach. I was not much of an English writer, but I knew a thing or two about Math and Physics and all that. So, my output was extremely dry but unchallengeable. It started something like “Sound is a form of energy….”. If my memory serves me right, I immediately followed up my impactful first statement with “It travels at the speed of 330 m/s in air” 🙂 or something like that. Again, any Physics teacher would be proud of me. An English teacher? Not so much!!!

Our teacher had talked about Dibyendu’s essay and how well written it was. In fact, she made him read out his essay to the whole class. He got up and started ” ‘Waaah’ wailed the baby as soon as it came out to this world. And what a beautiful sound it was to everybody present around the baby”…. and so on. And of course, I was like “Dude! what has that got to do with writing about Sound? You forgot to mention that it is a transversal wave form of energy. Remember last year, our teacher told us sound cannot travel in vacuum? Man, I need to talk to our Physics teacher about you”… 🙂

What an idiot I was!!

Dibyendu Dutta, if you ever read this blog in the future, I just wanted to give a big shout out to you. You were not only outstanding, you certainly have served as a great inspiration to me till this date. I fervently hope that some of your talent eventually rubbed off on me. After all, we sat only a few inches apart!!