Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Nutty Professor

The first indication that there is a nut (sorry) loose somewhere, is when your professor starts his very first lecture with the words.

"I am a pothead."

You can fault him for being moral equivalent of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy, but you cannot fault him for his ability of being able to have a group of 20 really bored students hanging on his every syllable, about 15 seconds after he entered the room.

The shock and awe of this new discovery of Dutch abrasiveness has no time to gather itself before he says, "...and my son is a pothead too. Sometimes in the morning I am drinking my coffee and reading the newspaper, my son comes downstairs and says good morning, while he is rolling a joint."

"...and then we share it. Some people find it quite surprising how we live life in Holland."


Holland.

That explains so much. For a man who has to be the most chill dude since Steven Segal, he doesn't look like it at all.

Before me stood a man of average height and average build, with appraising round glasses and an obvious disdain for hairstyles. Sounds like every pot head in the world, except for the fact that he had very wrinkled skin. The fact that he is 63 would probably make you second guess.

He was also ridiculously badly dressed for a man who has lived in France for half a decade now - you rarely ever see a professor walking to class in an ill-fitting shirt and a pair of jeans. The only thing that stood out about his clothing was his shoes. So polished were they, that they gave the impression of having been used by NASA in some zero-gravity experiment...

...which led me to examine his shoes a second time.

...which was when my eyes fell on something brown, cowering in the corner. At first, I thought it was yet another Indian student suffering from culture shock; I was wrong.


...it was a fucking dog.

The guy had brought a fucking dog to the class.

But hey, who am I to judge? The guy was the head of Heineken Beer for 12 years. Maybe if I'm really nice, he'll invite us to an end of term beer bath. It sounded far fetched and outlandish at first, but then he dropped this bomb, just before the class finished -

"...you know, there was at least something good that happened because of Hitler. In 1945, the war ended, and in 1946, I was born. I was a 'celebration baby'. My father was like 'WOOOOOOOOAAAHHHH THE WAR IS OVER!!! PEACEEE!!!', and then he fucked my mother."


I have a feeling that I'm really going to enjoy this class.