Would you...?

This is a story from a time long gone. A time when I wasn't bothered by the possible effects a recession could have on me - I guess I couldn't have spelt recession. Neither was I worried about how long an ISR took to execute. Tim was yet to invent the Internet as we know it or it probably was still command-line. I used to happily hum Mere Sapanon Ki Rani instead of the usual Creeping Death or Master of Puppets that keeps playing on inside my head today. I was four-ish back then, I think.

At the age of four, I had this crazy idea that I could convince people to belive in whatever I wanted them to. It was probably the earliest (and maybe, the only) signs that my folks had that I would probably become a consultant with an MBA. Thankfully, today, I am not. Atleast...not yet.

There was this phase (which lasted quite a while) where I wanted everything to be either strawberry flavored or colored. I still maintain that back then Kwality's strawberry ice-cream tasted different from what strawberry ice-cream does today. I have memories of eating half-raw strawberries from bushes that grew in my uncle's garden in Ooty. So much so, that I colored all the mountains in my 'scenery' pink and spent a lot of time trying to convince my teacher that it wasn't unheard of - in fact, I gave a very reasonable explanation. Someone had taken loads of pink paint and gone to the very top and tipped the container over. The result was what I had drawn. She was a little impressed.

We had a grapefruit tree in the school playground and after months of resisting temptation, one fine day during lunch I went and tried to examine what these big things were. Needless to say, thirty seconds later I was holding the fruit, completely detached from the tree in my hands. And then, the enormity of the situation sunk in - punishment and a note in the diary. Not the one to give up so easily, I hailed a classmated and asked him to hold the fruit up so that it was in contact with the spot where it hung from previously - if not, I warned him, that it would start rotting. I promised to return with a tube of glue so that we could stick the grapefruit back and then no one would ever know. I ran back to class and sat down - the epitome of innocence. It wasn't till much later that a teacher saw the poor chap holding the fruit to the tree looking very silly. Oh, and yes, there was a note in the diary that day.

The one thing that kept confounding me in school and sometime even now is that question - " Would you do this at your home?". If I were scribbling on the walls of my class with crayons and I answered no, then the automatic response was a lecture about how school was like a second home and ya-da ya-da. If I said yes, then the cold reply was, "Well...this is not your house!" How is a four-year old supposed to handle a question like that without having to resort to crying (which is what most of the girls in my class did)?

So would you...?