Mr. (grim) ReaPer!

After immense deliberation I have decided to tell the story of Mr (grim) ReaPer. Let's just call him RP for now (well his name is Ravi Prasad). Mr. RP was my professor in college, an authoritarian(not in a good way!) and was proficient in Computer languages, at least he thought so and we were "forced" to believe him. No offence meant, I am surely not the type who disrespects, or thinks lowly of a lecturer, infact I respect them and admire their noble profession, but with this one I had to make an exception.
RP sir, as we called him, was what you may call a very under average looking tall and extremely well built man, a non professor looking and more of an office boy type. I can prove my observation with an incident.

It was the first day of college and a fresher, with absolutely no idea of the teaching staff, found a guy fixing the tube light in a classroom. He was lost in the corridors while trying to figure out his classroom, and on coming upon this person asked him where the first year classroom was.
Of course the student assumed he was the college peon and asked him in a tone that sounded something like this : "Namaste Anna (Brother, more of a slang) where is the first year classroom?" The "college peon" gave him the necessary directions, and the fresher thanked him with the "Thanks anna!" and left for his classroom. The first class for the fresher hadn't started and when the lecturer walked in a few minutes later, you guessed right, the fresher was sorry for the rest of the four years and RP made sure of it.

Looks aside, RP was generally a very unsophisticated individual who used abusive language on the students. The moment he entered the class you could actually hear the pin drop. Not respect, it was fear. He had an annoying policy of not letting people take notes during his class. In his words, you had to listen and vomit them into your notebook later when you got back home. And if ever, god forbid, you were caught in the act of taking down notes during his class, dusters, chalks and swear words would fly around. The fiasco would end with your being kicked out of the class, maybe for the rest of the year, whichever favored his interest.
Throughout my four years of engineering, there was never a time when he wasn't assigned a subject in my class. Thanks to the hype, created around him, when he came to teach us Information Technology and Numerical Methods (ITNM) in my first year, I was eager and happy. Little did I know then, that I would be taught only Information Technology (IT) with the Numerical Methods (NM) part left out for self study. Can I say that I had learnt everything, atleast within the prescribed syllabus, before I appeared for the exam, nope. RP would give us the worst slip tests ever, not to forget the next morning questionnaire on what we had previously learnt. One may think, that the student would have to be dumb, or close to illiterate to fail the final exam, given the circumstances. But, it was just the opposite, it was considered sheer genius if you managed to ace your semester exam. After the numerous classes he took , when my exam was nearing and I opened my textbook, what I found in there was nothing short of rocket science. My belief, given the right lecturer, rocket science is understandable that is how I grade my intelligence (I am a good student and a quick learner!), and here I was reading a simple IT textbook, prescribed for the average intelligence of a first year student, and yet, it was indecipherable only because his teaching had confused me totally. I feel grateful and blessed that I was able to pass my exam with decent marks. Another incident that took place during the exam is mentionable.
While writing the ITNM exam, Mr. RP was prowling the exam halls, looking into student's papers trying to get a peek into what the students were actually writing (considering the fact that he hadn't taught anything). I remember clearly that evening, one of the students was commenting about how RP sir woke him up when he was dozing over his paper, and then how he was hovering around the area to make sure that the student wouldn't get back to it. Another student was also talking about how RP was peeping into his exam paper and how he kept trying to hide what he had written. The student also dared to comment on the situation. He said something like this: "That guy taught us nothing, what was he expecting to see in our exam papers anyway " I liked that one, and laughed my hardest that day.
When I safely graduated to my second year of engineering, Java: Object Oriented Programming it had to be.
This time I was careful, I studied before hand, but nothing was ever enough. There is this really funny incident that I must narrate.
Mr. RP walked into the class one day and asked the students if any body understood what "public static void main" in a java program meant. "The entry point" was the common answer.
He wasn't satisfied and he started asking everybody around. If we couldn't answer the question to his satisfaction, we had to remain standing. RP caught hold of one guy who he thought knew the answer, and kept telling that student (our hero!) about how wrong all the answers were. When actually, this guy did not know the answer himself. I assure you he was pretty afraid to own up to RP. The drama went on till the whole class was standing up, and then RP finally asked our hero. Rest was hysteria!
RP stories were all over the place, too many to count. Students, even the college management said his name in fear, He-who-must-not-be-named. Personally speaking, I loathed him. I hated every class that he took, and I considered his teaching methods and general student-teacher relation miserable. And I sincerely believed that because he never had any knowledge of the subject, he just went about terrorizing students. He, for me, was synonymous to Grim Reaper. No offence meant, once again, but that was just RP.