The Lecturer From Hell: Part I

It was by sheer fucking coincidence that I had a flashback of one of my lecturers during those uni days. This guy was not a normal lecturer. No. You wouldn’t enshrine his name in your autograph book to show your kids in the future. You wouldn’t wanna give him a parting gift when he left the university to teach in USA. This is the type of guy you would wanna strangle with your own two hands and watch his freaking eyes pop out. You would wanna plant thumbtack on his seat before classes just to watch his reactions. This was Dr. S.K. Rao.

Now, I am not afraid of Dr. S.K. Rao (SKR), but this was not what we called him. We called him by his first name. Everyone knows that Rao is a surname. I am not mentioning his name coz I simply fucking hate him. Period.

Now, SKR isn’t your typical Indian expatriate. True, he dresses like an Indian (**note that I am talking bout Indians from India) and has an Indian accent. But he is much more than that. This guy fucking ABHORES fun and entertainment. The slightest hint of that would send him into fits. I got to know this from a friend, who actually had small talk with SKR’s wife when she came to Malaysia for a one month visit.

I had just started my 3rd semester of the 1st year of studies, and after the registration for the courses, I entered a class to see this man. SKR was a short man, around 5 feet tall, with a balding head, 2cm thick glasses, perpetual body odour and a lowly, unkept sense of dressing. Little did I know that this man was going to be the ONLY thorn in my side during the next 1 ½ years.

When he asked me for my name, I told him. I spelled it for him. I would later realize that he will never learn to pronounce my name correctly. He called me Kau-laan. Jeez. How fucking hard is it to pronounce three syllables? We got off to a wrong start immediately. But I tried to mend things, and relinquish my stubbornness.

The first class I took under him was Object Oriented Programming. At one point, where mathematical calculation was needed (I dunno why his classes often deviated from the subjects), I was in a jam coz the mathematical functions he used were alien to me. In fact, they were alien to most of the class, though I was the only one who opened my big mouth. I explained that most of us only did a foundation course before starting our degree courses, and we did Form 5 before that. And those syllabuses didn’t cover certain stuff. I asked whether he could allow us to go study what was needed, and return to the subject at hand at the next class. Well, he could have answered either “YES” or “NO”. Instead, he said, “Kau-laan, if you are stupid, please don’t assume that I am too. It is not my fault that you are stupid. Sit down and keep quiet.”

I retaliated. I said that in Malaysia, lecturers still respect students as adults and treat them accordingly. To which he replied: “If this is a class in India, I would have sent you out. I do not allow my students to ask any questions during class, let alone speak!”

After everyone at class failed their first assessment, including me, the dean was furious and wanted to know the cause of this. Of course, being a prick helped me a lot. I spilled the beans on the incidents of past. What followed that was a war of words, counseling sessions for me and SKR and me going on a revenge mission. Failing an assessment for the 1st time hurt my pride a lot.

By and by, SKR started getting on the nerves of many, especially with my juniors and students from the School of Engineering. There was united hatred towards this man, and none dared to make a scene in classes for fear of their results. During his reign, SKR never gave any student even an A-. No matter how good some of them were towards him. He remained that sad, old prick. I was the biggest casualty. He was partly responsible for me not achieving more than a 3.24 average. I never even got a B for his papers. Not once.