A lesson to learn

It was a Saturday night and was raining hard, so the movie was cancelled. We had our dinner. Saturday night dinners, we had a choice those days. We can choose either tiffin or the usual rice meal. So, I and Kumar (714) would team up and take either of them between us and share. We enjoyed both. Hot upma and sambar, OOOOmph, my mouth is watering even now.

But that night, we were all bored. We decided to go and pluck some ground nuts from the fields just beside our farm. Four of us, took two pillow covers and went out for the kill. Many others offered to come but more than four is a crowd, so we promised to bring the farm fresh groundnuts to the house and we planned to have a feast. In the mean time the ‘ground team’, the boys left at the house would make arrangements to boil the ground nuts.

It was slightly drizzling and we were fully wet when we reached the ground nut plantations. The watchman for the field was inside his hut. The light was out. We crawled to see if he is inside and we heard funny sounds of smooches and giggles from inside. He was busy, and that made our job very easy and we stuffed the pillow covers with as much as we can uproot and wanted to run back to our house. But in the moon light I saw Kumar(714) running towards the watchman’s hut and knocking the door and then joining us in the run back to the house.

“Why the hell in the world did you do that?” I asked perplexed.

“He is F****** raa” he said.

To this day I did not understand how Kumar was bothered if the watchman was actually F******.

Now, it is the ground team to take over. They made wonderful arrangements to boil the ground nuts. We pulled out the nuts from the plants and put them in a plastic bucket. And heating was to be done by “electrolysis” method. The electrodes were two steel locks. The wires were put into the plug in our bathrooms.

We knew it would take a long time and so we crowded around it in the bathroom and sat in anticipation. C.N.Reddy(903), who later was our School Captain and now our batch coordinator started educating us about how many calories does it need to heat 20 liters of water from 30 to 100 degrees. I waved him down “No more chemistry here please.”
"Physics" he corrected me.

Just then I remembered we did not have any salt. And what is boiled ground nuts without salt? Someone has to go to the mess and bring salt in that earthly hour. All of us looked at one other and finally it was decided that C.N.Reddy should go. He was reluctant but we managed to convince him. He made funny faces, but there was no other choice for him.

“O.K, I will go, but on one condition” he said.

What?

“You should not touch the ground nuts until I return”

Everyone nodded in unison.

And we waited. Waited for a long time. No sign of CN. The water started to boil and we waited. Waited and waited. CN did not return. We lost our patience. We wondered, what kept CN for so long. But never the less we decided to start the ground nut feast. We pulled out the wires and started to relish the fresh nuts.

Suddenly there was a sound from behind the window of the Bath room.

“AAAAAH, I knew you people would cheat. You started to eat before I returned” CN shouted.

“Now I am not going to get the salt” he said.

So, all the while he was hiding behind the window to see if we cheated him.

So, the Moral of the Story:

Those days we were young and innocent, but now: some of us waste our time waiting for people to live up to our expectations of them. We are so concerned about what others are doing that we don't do anything ourselves. Often we wait for people to make, what we think are, mistakes so that we can 'get back' at them. It’s a mindless and fruitless exercise doing so. You do the right thing without waiting for people to do what you think is their bit.