School Exhibition Stories

Our school exhibition was held earlier this month and, as tends to happen at anything organized by our school, things got a little surreal.

One morning I went to school to conduct play rehearsals and found the auditorium locked because of some miscommunication about rehearsal timings. I was running around trying to sort this out, when my class nine English teacher caught me and dragged me into a nearby classroom. Some kids were rehearsing a scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the exhibition’s English Literature room, and my teacher wanted me to give them acting tips. So one minute I was walking upstairs wondering how to get the auditorium unlocked, the next I was instructing a thirteen-year old Titania in the finer points of serenading a donkey.

The exhibition was still a few days away, so from here, things could only get weirder. Sure enough, a few days later I woke up to find two high school kids in our drawing room. One was heartily tucking into chicken salad from our fridge while the other constructed a Pascal’s triangle out of colourful cups. Why they chose to do this in our house – as opposed to their own houses or indeed in school – is still not entirely clear to me.

At the exhibition itself, a teacher set fire to the Chemistry room while demonstrating the dancing sodium experiment, and a maths prodigy tried to interest casual visitors in his project with the immortal line, “Ki bolchhen didi, apni polynomial equationer ekta root theke shob kota root bar korte chan na?” (What do you say didi, from just one root, don’t you want to find out all the roots of this polynomial equation?)

But my favourite story is that of the little girl pictured on the right. She was demonstrating Bernoulli’s Principle through an experiment, and this was her version of the principle: “When the air flows with a very high speed, pressure doesn’t have the time to fall on that place.”

Hat tip to Srijata for the quotes, and to Deyasini for the second photo.