Fruits

What would we do without them? They are absolutely essential to us, but still many of us don't give the due respect they deserve. Without fruits, we might be exposed to serious malfunctions and troubles. And despite all the good things fruits provide us, they can easily turn sour when they come in contact with a rotten specimen.

But there are some fruits which never rot, irrespective of what is done or where they are. I am referring to FRUITS (pazham a.k.a nerds) whom we meet in our day-to-day life! Don't we really try hard to "change" them?

At school, it is pretty easy to recognize them in a room: most often than not, they are front benchers (not because of height, but due to their enthusiasm), teacher's pets, jump to answer any question, ask for permission for opening a geometry box, etc. We, the "normal" students, would not be caught dead talking to them in a general sense, but would need them for copying forgotten homeworks. For some reason, most of the fruits belong to the male gender (maybe there are pazhams in the opposite sex too, but I don't know), and are gun shy talking to them, so at any given oppurtunity, we would innocently push them in a girl-group and walk away snickering! Actually, the fruits should thank us for helping them to initiate communication with girls, well before we did it!

As is the case with most of the schools in TN, almost everyone becomes seriously involved in studies at their 10th, 11th and 12th classes. Yenna periya studies - mug ashhtu poindey iru. Yet, the fruits manage to outbeat us by scoring 100% even in class tests. Class tests, for God's sakes! And as always, they are the ones who cream the board exams and the entrance exams.

Some of the pazhams solidify at college level, since biologically speaking, the hormones kick in and you just cannot afford to be the same pazham in vadikattina paal. But not all pazhams change. I know a guy in college who, until the final year, mugged everything in the textbook. And there was this other guy who would skip lunch that day if he scores anything less than 90 in a unit/class test! There was this pazham whom I have never heard utter an expletive - he used to say swimming fool, for example. During the last day of a semester, there was this fruit-salad who questioned a girl why she was flinging paper rockets in class and I can still picture the girl's amazed expression which said "Man, act alive!". And even at college level, the teachers compare others with them. We tried to corrupt them by any means necessary, but ALL failed. Maybe it was due to the fact that these things were done in a notorious college where the pazhams feel right at home. In any case, we were unable to do anything to them.

After graduating from college, it was difficult to come across new fruits. My graduate school friends were all veteran convicts. So it was kind of a struggle to cope up all those strange CS concepts by ourselves. We really missed fruits during that time. After all, they made good friends and helped us a lot during exams.

At work they are even more rarer. But I did manage to locate one in one of past jobs. He is a post-doc, comes from an affluent family, and is a mega-fruit. If I need to have some fun for a change during work, all I need to do is to ask him if he knew a certain person (hyothetical) in a so-and-so university's department. Once I asked him if he knew Dr. Dre who works at UCLA, specializing in chronic liver disease studies. He spent the next 15 minutes searching for Dr. Dre's publication records in PubMed but could not find anything. He was confused since he graduated from UCLA. So, then I asked him if he knew "Dr". Patrick (I am sorry, I cannot give the link) who specializes in gynecology at UC Davis. He could not find that one too and was getting "weird" search results! After I finished rolling in laughter, I told him that Dr. Dre was a rapper and "Dr". Patrick was not even close to being a professor. All in good spirits. He was a good sport.

Fruit friends - What can we do without you?