The Geek

She found his notes in her old house located in the old narrow gullies of Kolkata. 
An old moth eaten black diary of yellow pages and blue fountain ink pen scribbles.

The pages had become yellow with time. 

It was a black leather diary dated 1953 gifted by Mansfield Oil Gas Company 

located on Radhanath Choudhury Road. 

He spent his growing years in these lanes, in the middle of large open wooden windows with sunlight seeping into rooms, before he moved into a flat of sliding glass windows giving him a view of the city, from an elevation, only the very few could afford. 

24 days to Higher Secondary Examination…all his notes were about the sections

of science subjects he had to finish written to fractional details…

Chemistry (1/4 completed)

Physics (1/8 completed)

Biology (1/2 completed)

Mathematics ( 'hoye jabe' meaning not a problem)

There were references of him hating Organic Chemistry and loving Mathematics.

He was a Maths scholar and loved numbers and she could see how painstakingly he stored scores of cricket matches of England vs West Indies deciphered from the strict British diction of the BBC Radio Channel.

Geeks are not nerds. 

As she unfolded the pages she saw how his heavy baritone wooed women on All India Radio while playing black circular records from Beethoven to Beatles.
 Like all other boys his age, he pretended he did not smoke at home and gave excuses of eating spicy hakka noodles in cheap chinese stalls opposite National Medical College. 

This was 1953. Almost 60 years ago from now. Poetry was considered to be written by girls and not boys. She found scribbly lines of poetry scrawled across the gutter space of organic chemistry and calculus problem columns.

60 years later, no wonder his daughter fell in love with a geek unknowingly. 
Surprised to find a new side to a geeks world, she always knew geeks were wonderful and in ways she was a geek herself.

The dictionary definition of a geek brings forward a person who is extremely focussed on academics and sometimes they are ridiculed as people who hate participating in extra curricular activities. 

She wondered who created such definitions and how definitions were used as a measure for constant explanations or a bench mark for understanding.

Geeks are as human as non-geeks. 

In fact differentiating and humiliating them is foolish enough. 

The Geek showed her that if we all are geeky about what we do 
and no matter what it is…

then these terms and definitions will slowly erase into oblivion.