funny smell...

this happened a long, long time ago... when i was still in college...

i was in the library... now, don't get me wrong... i am not a member of the species bookus wormus... but the exams were on... and the library, with it's imposing shelves with untouched books created an uncomfortable environment which kinda helped me cram the precious pages into my head... besides, it was one of those subjects that i learnt for all of 3 days... never before that and never after that was i ever venturing near that again... 'strength of materials'... or something like that... i wasn't in the habit of buying every textbook on the list and so went to the library, as a last resort... even managed to locate the book amidst all the irrelevant ones... (i have still not been able to learn the logic behind the arrangement... probly coz there is none...) anyway, i settled down with the book, in the darkest corner i could find...

just as i had gone halfway down a page, i smelled something funny... not nice funny... disgusting funny... since the toilets lay just across the walls, i figured, people had stank up the place so bad, it was reeking through the wall... so i picked up the book, the papers, the biscuits, bottles, and the rest of the picnic basket and moved to the other end of the library... i settled down after some subdued commotion... and glares from members of the species, bookus wormus... (you know how noisy a packet of chips can be... especially when someone else is hogging them...)i had not read more than half a dozen lines when the smell was back... now, i panicked... i began to check out one thing after the other... since i walk quite a way, and you never know, nor want to know what's on the roads, i checked the underside of my shoes... thankfully nothing... i opened my bag and scrambled the things around for any left-overs from the last-sem that might have finally hit the critical-decay-point... again, nothing... and so it continued with every item around... finally, i was ready to give up... and the smell had gone down a bit too... or was i just getting used to it??... anyway, i decided to just ignore the smells and opened my book back... AND THE OVERPOWERING SMELL WAS BACK!

though i felt a little foolish smelling a book, i did just that... found to my enlightenment that it had been the book all along! seriously... the book was an old one... with pages coming apart at the seams and had recently been bound together with glue... the smelly glue whose side-effect was the fatal smell!! mystery solved by shirley holmes!!

with a grin that set me up a notch higher on the strangeness-scale, i finally settled down to assessing the strength of materials...