Parshvanath Laughter

I'm only laughing on the outside / My smile is just skin deep / If you could see inside I'm really crying / You might join me for a weep.

Those four years, it seemed wherever you went in PCT, you were surrounded by Profs with a ‘Raju Srivastav’ complex. Every prof harbored a not-so secret desire to outdo everybody else in the humor sweepstakes. Now just desire, no matter how heartfelt, is never a guarantee of a concomitant abundance of skill. So you couldn’t walk two paces without pitching headlong into some tasteless joke, rotten and stinking from overuse. But if your term work marks are dependent on said comedian wannabes, those peals of laughter had better keep coming in hard …and fast. And as it happened, by the end of those four years, we were masters in the art of ersatz laughter. Our belly clutching, tears streaming down the face howling would have fooled but the most perspicacious of people. Since our profs were not burdened by perspicacity, that unhappy event never came to pass.

An anecdote here would go a long way in showing our mastery of this craft. Prof. P was one professor who loved topical jokes. Now in the March of 2003, we were busy finishing assignments during a lecture on Satellites, when our trained ears picked up the hollow scattered cackling that signified only one thing…a hapless group of students being subjected to a choice joke. Standard protocol during these times was to rally to our unfortunate comrades’ aid and let loose with our armament of ‘Parshvanath Laughter’. This is more difficult than it sounds though, especially when you have absolutely no idea in hell about what the joke was about. Not that hearing those jokes ever helped, but we are rational beings and the mind yearns for justification if we are to be guffawing loudly for an extended period of time.

Prof. P however saved the day. Seeing a sudden surge in the interest levels of the class, he felt kind enough to repeat his hilarious snippet, ‘If you don’t finish these notes in 16 minutes it will disintegrate’. Then grinning from ear to ear, eyebrows raised, he delivered the line again, ‘If you don’t take down these notes in 16 minutes it will explode’. The peals of laughter that crashed and slapped at the classroom walls threatened to drown out the whole college. Satisfied and encouraged by this response, Prof. P rattled off a number of variants to the 16 minutes theme. By this time our classroom resembled curtains close at The Laugh Factory. And among those students who were rolling about in the aisles, there were a vast majority, who hadn’t even heard the ‘joke’ once, let alone begin to comprehend its terrifying depths.

There were a lot of things we picked up, surviving those four years at PCT. But of all the skills we learnt there, laughing-on-demand was the most valuable. There have been countless times, when, midway through laughing boisterously at my boss’s inane jokes, a silent thought of gratitude slips through my lips, ‘Thank god for Parshvanath Laughter’.

P.S. And if dear reader, you are still wondering what significance sixteen minutes had to copying notes during a satellite lecture, let me draw your attention towards a newspaper article that caught my eye a few days days after that episode: