During my engineering, we had one class with a teacher nicknamed Sambha. He was popularly known as a “force to reckon with” among seniors. He was known for handing out most backlogs to seniors. Seniors cautioned us to take his class seriously. I was curious about his nickname.
I got my answer in our very first class when I saw him. That teacher looked just like one Famous Hindi-movie Character, Shamba from the movie Shole. His classes used to be very dull. Those 40 minutes used to feel like 2 hours. Students often got caught yawning and talking to each other and were thrown out of his class.
He didn’t allow anyone to enter the classroom if late. No exceptions. We were a group of 4 friends, myself, Manish, Alam, and Amit. We often liked to bunk his class as we didn’t want to die of boredom. Bunking his class Instead, we spent that time hanging around the canteen area. One day he announced the name of a student whose attendance was falling short.
Undoubtedly 4 of us were on the list. Sambha had instructed us to attend all remaining classes this semester. We decided not to miss a single class as we knew Shamba’s reputation that he wouldn’t let us sit in exams with less than 75% attendance. One day we got to class 2 minutes late, we were sprinting towards the classroom, praying for shamba to be a bit late, but he was already inside.
We took a peek from the window and saw Shaba writing something on board. We were wondering who should go in first as none of us dared to face the wrath of Sambha. Manish was the shortest among us. We started forcing Manish to go in first as he looked innocent enough that could melt the stone-cold heart of mighty Shamba. Manish was like, hell No.
I am not going in at any cost. We looked at each other and telepathically agreed to make Manish our scapegoat. Manish was clueless about our wickedness. We asked Manish to get close to the door and try to listen to what Shamba was teaching. He agreed to that, unaware of our evil conspiracy against him.
As soon as he put his ear close to the door, we pushed him towards the door and ran in different directions. Manish almost fell inside the classroom. He somehow managed to keep his balance and stay on his feet. By that time, he was already 3 feet inside the class. The whole class, including Shamba, saw him with puzzled eyes.
Before anyone could react, Manish gathered all the energy he possibly could and ran out of the classroom. He was out of Shamba’s reach within a fraction of seconds. We got to the canteen area, uncertain about the consequences Manish had to face.
After a few minutes, we saw him running toward us with the angry-young-man look, the same look Veeru( Dharmendra in Shole movie) gave to Gabbar(Villen) after Jai (Amitabh Bachchan) had killed.
He ran towards us with all guns blazing and showered us with a mouth full of cuss words. We three could not stop laughing at the very mean thing we did.
Alam pulled him close and said, “Manish, Do you kiss your mom with this mouth.”We all burst into big laughter.
We ordered tea and samosa for us. We kept laughing while we enjoyed our tea. This incident makes me laugh every time I think about college life. I miss my college life. It was the best time.
