High School massacres and Khadi clad professors

I’ve tallied three medical schools so far (one more and I’ll be certifiable). The first was so insufferably self-absorbed with it’s own sense of importance that every time it drops a bit in the rankings, it is A Matter of Great Joy. I hope they drop out of sight one of these days. The second pioneered the idea that healthcare could be delivered at a pittance to a vast swathe of rural India provided foreign capital could be married (yes, married) with local, collaborative planning and implementation (and yes, I have just written that sentence without batting an eyelid). They did public-private partnerships as a matter of course before anyone in India had even thought of the phrase.

I didn’t exactly like the sound of it, and went there reluctantly. It changed my life. So now I go round there on an annual pilgrimage, as a sort of good luck talisman. This time, I dumped Kevin on my very political professor who trots the globe in all of 4 khadi shirts (and some frighteningly patched up pants).

“Why do these kids kill all these people?” he asked me, rolling a fag with utmost concentration.

“Social deprivation,” I pronounced, with the solemn certainty of the truly ignorant.

Anyway, he was busy and so couldn’t cook lunch as promised. Since I was ticketless, he deposited me at his travel agent’s with a warning that the bus would stop for dinner at a potentially diarrhoeal joint. He suggested that I pack dinner. Having slept on planes and buses for a few nights on the trot, I went to sleep after a nice lunch. By the time I’d gotten up, it was too late to pack dinner. But when he came back to drop me to the bus in the evening, he was carrying a largish, white polythene bag. ‘Food’, he grinned by way of explanation, handing it to me once we’d wound up our Sage Discussion of South American Politics.

I opened it once inside the bus. It contained the following-

1. A packet of Krackjack biscuits;
2. A packet of crisps drenched in chilli, labelled ‘Snack’. I’d just told him that morning that I like to eat chilli crisps at loo breaks in the middle of the night.
3. A large bottle of cold Bisleri;
4. A packet of a local sweet puff pastry, labelled ‘For your father’;
5. Two neatly wrapped paneer and vegetable roomali rolls, labelled ‘Dinner’; and
6. A large bar of Cadbury’s fruit n’ nut chocolate, labelled ‘Dessert’.

He missed the beer. But still, the man is very nice. He also has a hip wife with lethal Hotness Quotient (HQ). Now we know why I keep going back. Guru-chela relationships and all that.