The ecstasies of a last-bencher !

               How do you expect a guy to be whose dad is a physics professor?  Studious, pretty serious, ambitious, first bencher, taking notes seriously & excelling in all things with a great academic record? Well, I was hardly like the description above & never liked the first bench. Owing to height, I was made to sit last bench in school days, this trend continued in high school & college etc. You know what? Sitting in last bench has its own advantages & I enjoyed it a lot. First of all the probability of making line of sight eye contact is less, you get saved if you haven’t done the home work or assignments. Basically the essence of being a last bencher is you can have your own space, create friends circle there & have your opinion on all things taught in the front. You get to explore the lighter side of fundamentals taught there & enjoy in a cool way as we will learn the actual concepts before exam anyway. First benches are for intelligent guys who mug up things & wish to get higher grades whose sole purpose is to outperform others without having choice of their own. I have friends who were first benchers & had ambitions like marine engineering, advertising, singer, actors, army etc, there were a dozen who told that they would become scientists or astronomers, at least I managed to become an amateur astronomer, but that’s a different topic anyway. But now all are in IT companies just like everybody else. Last benches are for intellectual ones whose level is one higher than intelligent ones & have a cool & unusual opinion about the concepts. For e.g. in engineering I never understood the subject Information theory & coding. I was always wondering if the life on earth would end, we should have backup of all the information, the knowledge gained over ages archived, so that life could continue even if handful of humans left on planet or by having a server on mars or suitable planet & migrating there in case of any catastrophes on earth. With the advent on internet, the amount of information has increased so much that there is so much repetition of information if at all we decide to archive it. That database would be huge even with today’s terra bytes hard disks. No doubt I managed to pass the exam with difficulty.    

                In engineering, suddenly the number of intellectual guys tends to increase & last benches are more in demand. Last ones get filled & then the first ones. Infact at many occasions at my college SDM Dharwad, which rhymes with Harvard & we have a popular saying “Rejected Harvard to study in Dharwad” few first benches would mostly remain empty & professor would have to shamelessly ask students to come in front. Unless the teacher is pretty looking lady it’s pretty hard to motivate the students to come & occupy the front benches. Other advantages of last bench include you can sleep so that you can find time off-class hours for more important things like eating, roaming, chatting on various flowers in the world. You can keep staring at girl whom you like & just enjoy the time passing by watching her because you are damn serious about your one sided relationship with her. Parents often insist their kids to sit near to board because they believe this will impact their performance. Well, I seriously doubt that as I have friends who are first & last benchers who are software engineers in Infosys, TCS, and Wipro just like everybody else. I recently had to sit in first row as apparently all the seats were taken at a lecture at IIA - India Institute of Astrophysics. The lecture was on Bose Einstein condensate which was cool of course as name suggests. This made me nostalgic & recall the long forgotten sweet memories of being last bencher all through my life. Hence this reminisce post.

  

I miss you last bench wherever you were!!

God bless the last benchers with more fun ;-)