“Bench”Marking Creativity

September 15, 2011 at 11:01 pm (Uncategorized)

“Get up” he bellowed!

I looked up, pleadingly, at the stoic determination on my room mates face in the background of bright unforgiving sunlight streaming into the hostel room, my heart sank as the hopes of foraging a few more minutes of sleep went out of the window. The groggy sighs of frustration at having been bellowed out of my slumber gave way to the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel….maybe, just maybe, I would be able to reach class early enough to get a seat in the coveted last row today.

If a typical classroom is a city, the last benches form its top end real estate, the price of which is the mighty sacrifice of 10 extra minutes of sleep in a business school (basically the last benches rent for a bomb in terms of opportunity cost: and this isn’t one of those much feared real estate price bubbles because the dearness of sleep is not expected to fall, ever).

So why do last benches “sell” at a premium?

Well, these islands of original thought remain immune to the mundane proceedings of the classroom. But whether it is the backbenches sire creativity and spawn original thought or is it the creative people stick to the back-benches is a classic chicken & egg problem.

Back Benches also seem to have their own way with words (or at least, thoughts),  myriad sentences stitch themselves together into meaningful compositions with frightening composure.

It is in the backbenches that our hungover minds moderate the fight between blood and alcohol which leaves our heads in a tizzy the morning after we let alcohol gain  a huge head-start in the tug war between sobriety and inebriety.

Given, that the last benches are prime property, but they do stand the risk of being razed to the ground by profs who believe in class room participation and choose to flutter around the class on the punctured wings of belief that the whole class has come because of more than the proverbial stick of attendance requirements.

Alas, my finance prof taught me that no assets come without risk, this principle doesn’t fall flat here too since even the back benches do fall prey to the professor’s whims sometimes when the backbenchers are “invited” to fill up the empty shacks that are the front rows.

And as this piece comes to an end with me starting to relax the frenzied pace of typing with fingers now trained to move  thoughtlessly on the Qwerty keypad of my overused (or in fact, abused) phone while I do the blank look and nod routine with the professor, I would have added one more brick to this wall of thoughts for which the back benches have laid the foundation.

 

 

P.S.  Partly Fictional, My room-mate would NEVER be in a position to wake me up for class. 😛