An eccentric pianist...

Miscellaneous Current Events
1

…made threats of and attempted physical violence on me.

He was twice my size, so there was good reason for my heartbeat to start speeding up when he started his one way shouting match on me.

Man, was today scary.

The behaviour was only half as strange as what threw him into the rage.

“You’ve been scowling at me all day. Stop scowling at me! Stay out of my life! Or I won’t stay out of yours!” he said, with a single hardened finger shaking at me. To think even looking at the wrong person could be dangerous (and I don’t even remember looking at him specifically).

I chose the too easy option of ignoring him and walking away, at which point he lunged a kick, and a chill went through me when it only brushed past the loose folds of my jeans. He then walked away angrily, but later kept threatening me from a distance when he found me later outside college campus.

Everybody else nearby, being the good New Delhi citizens they are, looked a little amused, rather than concerned. I guess they reasoned anybody who becomes the target of someone’s long verbal tirade probably had it coming some way.

The pianist is normally absorbed in his own extracurricular work, and tends to have distractive behaviour whenever he actually is in the classroom. I remember feeling sorry for him when a professor physically had him picked up from his chair and escorted outside the classroom last year, with the professor snarling, “Nauseating character!” I don’t remember why that happened, but the pity for the eccentric changed to genuine fear when he was almost about to beat up somebody half his size today. He’d have been in deep trouble in this strict college, but he nonetheless had his fists ready against somebody who couldn’t have fought back.

Did you guys ever deal with psychos? This may have been the first time I ever did.

2

My youth was one lunatic after another. In high school I was a magnet for bottomfeeder students with nothing going for them but their gang of equally worthless scum. I was so high strung from ceaseless threats that I started just punching anyone that came near me. I ended having to quit the school or their would have been corpses. The feebleminded don’t know when to give up. The wonderful world of school.

3

Well, in this world of vegeterian Indians, most people are thin and tiny and wouldn’t have much strength to pick fights with each other.

School was relatively mild and easygoing compared to, say, what happens with giant black American students in the public schools of not so well off areas (there are some stories of insane fights that they start). I was in a class of 23 mostly introverted students, so it went in an easygoing manner.

A person who at all reaches six feet in height and with wide shoulders is a rare thing, and it’s only worse that he had a bad temper. Although eccentricities are not uncommon here - for one, this boy has the habit of making strange sounds in the middle of class. Sometimes in the streets here, a man will take a “pulpit” in the middle of the road and start giving speeches to all strangers, and then there’s old folks who play in garbage. I am long past speculating on why anybody does anything here.