The fearless student and the fearful teacher - Part 2

If the temptation of receiving bottles full of amber intoxicants does not attract an internal examiner, the fear of being jailed certainly makes him sit up and take notice.

Whoever said girl students studying BDS are shy, polite introverts, has not met many of them. And whoever also said that proficiency in English must be a necessary pre-requisite for studying dentistry, was sadly mistaken.

After a very disappointing viva voce during an Internal Assessment examination of a girl student, a rather frustrated examiner asked her to spell tongue.

T-O-U-N-G-E.

Er... umm... what? Say that again?

T-O-U-N-G-E Sir.

Are you sure?

I am sure Sir. I am 100 per cent right. If I am wrong, I will write down the correct spelling one thousand times.

The examiner is speechless for a few moments, the six letters of the word churning over in his head.

And if you are wrong, Sir, you will have to write it down 1000 times. The examiner wakes up from the mental game of Jumble that he was playing.

Out come the textbooks, and the results are inevitable. The girl walks off out of the room in a huff.

Perhaps 15 minutes later, the examiner receives a call on his mobile phone. On the other end was the father of the student. You are mentally and physically harassing my daughter, the man says. How dare you make her write a word 1000 times? The fact that the student had herself volunteered to write the correctly spelled word a thousand times is entirely lost on the doting father. Do you know I can have you arrested for behaving like this with my daughter?

The examiner decided to send in his resignation. The father was a senior IPS officer, and there was only one direction an argument with such a person could take. Mercifully, there had been other witnesses to the entire viva voce session in that room, but one did not take chances.

The Chairman intervened. The Principal intervened. They did not want the faculty member to leave. The police officer was (not) coincidentally a close friend of the Chairman. He apologised. The matter was dropped. The faculty member took back his resignation.

Needless to say, the student passed all her university examinations in that and subsequent years in the first attempt. Otherwise, it might have been...