The Professor

The other day I woke up early in the morning and met a friend of mine. The meeting was unexpected. After performing the routine early morning chores (i.e. brushing the teeth, taking a shower etc.), I went to the kitchen. I was feeling a bit frail. I had to prepare my breakfast. I did that and took it. In the meantime, my frailness was on my mind. I thought about senility. I thought what an organization does to its senile personnel. Academics were on my mind. I thought that the higher administration would literally fire a really old professor. A plot for a movie then developed in my mind’s eye.

I finished my breakfast. After some time I met my friend. As he came to me, he suggested that we should make movies. This was, of course, not preplanned on his part, as I had finished thinking about the subject some time ago. But he was surely kidding. I know that about him because he is kidding about everything about me almost all the time. He says something in a very serious tone and an emotionless grimace. He is only serious about things that concern him. Nobody really knows what concerns him the most. Some people rightly believe that he does many things. Others can develop an impression that he is just a malingerer. Indeed, he can be found wandering around a place often, apparently with a lack of zest in life. But that is not true about him. The only thing he loves in life is meticulous pragmatism, no matter how bizarre it may be.

As much as I know him, my friend is a very accomplished person. He is up to quite a few things all the time. He spends most of the things doing those things. He spends rest of the time planning about things he is doing or he should be doing. In this small span of time, he can sound really clueless about the real world. A cherubic innocence prevails all over his countenance.

It is not that I didn’t think that my friend could be kidding. He knows me a little bit. And he tries to poke me where it hurts the most. So I have always known how he likes to ravish my emotions. So I could just have ignored him or turn a deaf ear to his idea of making a film. But I still followed his cue and explained to him what I had had on my mind a few minutes ago. I told him about the plot. That a professor became old. The university eventually fired him. The professor got deeply disappointed. He spent a few days in depression. Finally, the peace loving, gentlemanly, old professor decided to avenge his poor fate. He listed a few culprits and planned his vengeance against them.

The professor was not an ordinary person after all. He had taught network security to his pupils for a long time. So he knew how to hack into systems. He had also had a profound interest in chemistry a long time ago. So he knew how to work with explosions. The film eventually unrolls with events in which the professors breaks into the systems of his protagonists. There were also a bunch of detonations in the backyards of those villains. And the professor keeps on going with his blanch, hirsute head, with glasses on his face, and wearing nice suits which make him look like a soft, handsome and a quite old man. The plot could be refined, I told my friend.

I also tried to convince my friend about the viability of the plot by giving examples about Entrapment in which Sean Connery plans robberies. I also gave another example of Aakhri Raasta in which Amitabh Bachan assassinated the killers of his wife after coming out of jail. There were loads of underground detonations in that movie.

While listening to my story my friend looked askance at me. I got slightly disappointed. But not too much. I think I am becoming immune to such disappointments. I had to tell him that the problem with both of us was that none of us takes each other seriously. Both of us consider each other naive. So another great plot for a blockbuster action/thriller has gone down the drain.

Photo by EpicFireworks