I was listening to the song "Give me some sunshine" from 3 Idiots recently which tells about how heavy workload and exam pressure spoils childhood. The line "Concentrated H2SO4 ne poora bachpan jala daala" (concentrated H2SO4 burnt my entire childhood) struck me significantly, taking me back to my school days when I had to learn what happened when the dreaded carbon bonded with hydrogen, oxygen, itself and god knows who else. I had tried hard to understand the subject, taking down notes, byhearting formulae, drawing diagrams, but finally resigned to the fact that the carbon molecule was far too mean for someone as good natured as me to handle. While I was not alone in loosing to Carbon, there were a few intelligent people who seemed to find organic chemistry as interesting as Mallika Sherawat dancing to an item number. To avoid looking at these gifted few, as they listened with rapt attention to stories about allotropes, single bonds and double bonds, and worrying about my inability to understand the same, I took to hiding my lunch box underneath my desk during class time, snatching bits and pieces out of it, and sharing it with other lesser humans, who like me, were looking for better things to do.
