Guest Lectures

This is old news, really. Guest lectures at my insti are always a bore, except for some. What they do is just eat up into the precious free time available which would have been spent on clearing the backlog of sleep. However, some really are worth attending. Like, the one by Mr. Robert Blake, the US Chargé d'Affaires for India on 23rd August. He spent some time answering the questions posed by the students, most of them questioning the Iraq war, the new Visa system, and the finger printing system of USA. He was truly the diplomat he was and answered every question satisfactorily. However, this is not about him. This is about the Defense Attaché, Col. Steven Sboto who accompanied him. He did not mingle much with the students and stayed away from us.

I had a small chat with him. He was a true republican. He hated Michael Moore and his movies because they were false. What must have distracted him was the fact that I was wearing a pink shirt. Apparently, only females and male homosexuals wear pink in the USA. Though he must have realised by now that pink is the 'blue of India'. Another guy cut in and started talking about the army and such crap.

That aside, my friend had a question to ask - Why only the football captains in American movies are heroes and not geeks. The Colonel said that was not true, the superheroes, spider man and superman were are geeks. I thought, but only when they were not geeks, they went to save the world and got the girls, but did not ask.

When my friend asked the same question to Mr. Blake, he started saying that, he too was a geek and envied the jocks (as he called them). Later, when he became a diplomat, the tables were turned and he was the hero everywhere he went and his jock friends were envious.

Later, it started raining and I am not quite used to rains. Chennai is hot for most of the year and it rains a week every year. We talked for some time about the climate, then I had tea and puffs and came back to my room, and lived happily ever after :)