On the left, is my friend Harold in green pants. He has bushy hair that grows upwards. Quite funny. But that’s how it is. I’m George, you see in blue pants. Harold is my best friend in school. We walk together every morning to school. Harold is scared of dogs. I carry big plastic injections filled with water to shoot at dogs that come around Harold. Harold is happy. Harold says I’m his hero.
For me and Harold, school is too boring. There is nothing much we could do. One day when Michael climbed up a monkey bar in the playground, I warned him that he is 20,000 feet above a mystical river that kills people if fallen and he can never come back. Micheal screamed, his head was hanging down with legs up and hands were clenched to the pole. He didn’t want to jump off the bar. The whole school came running to the ground. I just made Micheal imagine. Mr. Krupp says that imagination will lead to a lot of creativity. Otherwise it’s boring. Have I committed any offence for being a bit creative? Hmm...
We got to sit at a desk and listen to all the animal stories, big America, water cycles and global warming. Even then, airplanes pee while they are up. Tell me now, isn’t that polluting environment? Aircraft Engineers should be taught of a better technology to squat.
Professor Poopypants is amazed by triangles, rectangles and squares. He thinks Pythagoras is the greatest of all. I think Pythagoras is his hero. Professor Poopypants say that someday he will solve the Polydimensionarian theory. Oops! Let me introduce Professor Poopypants. I think he is important because he is taking all troubles to solve theories around the world. He is our math teacher. But Harold says he poops in his pants. Everybody in the class laughs then.
One day I and Harold had to fight some aliens to save Captain Underpants. A spaceship was trying to abduct that poor soul. He is the crazy Principal in our school. He may well be the greatest scientific genius the world will ever know. He knows every chemical reaction on earth. May be he even knows what will happen if pee gets mixed up with adenosine triphosphate. Unfortunately, nobody takes him seriously! He is been laughed out by every University he has taught, possibly for his name. In fact, he comes to our school under one condition. Captain Underpants assure to himself that “kids are so accepting and loving”. He thinks that nobody will make fun of his name or write a comic book out of him. Because if someone does, he will fly into some rage and destroy the planet by mixing all acids and carbons he has got to know.
Childhood days are fun. I’m sure we’ve all found funny teachers and comic Principals of whom we've laughed off our backs when in school. But not for all. For some they were bad days, trying hard to put on with homework, getting scolded by teachers for not giving the correct answers, getting punished for not bringing books or bad handwriting and many more. And yet, we embrace those days with much happiness. There are days we wish to go back. Like for Harold, we had many friends who helped at every instance. They became our heroes of all time. Friends were good enough to trust because they were easy to know. We were all carefree.
But time has a way of taking away the joy. We are left with nostalgia as we move on from childhood. We ought to become more responsible for what we do. We are forced into a society filled with imbalanced proportions of laughter, pain, trust and seeming goodness. We are thrown into a society where human action is complex to explain. There are men capable of doing many things. There are men who can hide their spots even when a tiger cannot. There are friends today, who become tomorrow’s backstabbers. Stealing and killing have become a way of life. Some satisfy their worries by putting others to death. There is jealousy where there is beauty. Laugh is rare. Tears have conquered.
Kids are the most accepting and loving. Captain Underpants is correct. But interestingly they turn into rascals as they grow into adults.
What carbons and acids would have turned these loving creatures into deadly rascals? Would Underpants know to formulate the chemical reaction?
( Published in " The Nation" newspaper on the 15th June 2014)
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