Luv Ranjan, director of Pyaar Ka Punchnama, was asked to delete “Screw her” from the film but Censor Board has no objections with Delhi Belly’s catchy number where the clincher is DK Bose. Does this mean, if one plays smart one can get away with almost anything? We asked the city’s bright sparks about their rendezvous with smartness and got an assorted mix of experiences.
Nikhil Gulati, who is a scribe with an international news agency, was not the brightest kid in school but was quite observant. When he was a student of Class 5, he noticed that the teacher would never pose a question to students who looked confident. Since he never knew the answers, he would often be questioned. But things changed when they had a new teacher. “I would raise my hand everytime she would ask a question. She used to ask students from the front row to write the solutions on the black board. I was never called because I was thought to be bright and confident who knew all the answers. This image helped me immensely. I was the evil being in the class yet was never thrown out,” he laughs.
Two bikes. Two bikers. A regular check-post. One traffic cop, who didn’t stop biker Ankit Singh but stopped his friend. Seeing his friend in trouble he parked his bike a little ahead and went to check on the matter. He says, “It was my first encounter with that policeman, but I behaved as if we have known each other for sometime. I asked him, ‘Bhaiya, ab aap hum logo ko pakdoge?’ and he thought we really knew each other. I told him a story that my father is a senior police officer and that once he worked under my dad. He actually believed and started praising my dad. His exact words were, ‘Inke pitaji ke under jo kaam karle, aur unki baaton ko samjhle, uska kabhi bura nai ho sakta hai.’ We were happy that we saved a couple hundred bucks by being smart.”
Jiya Kotnala had applied for a house under DDA’s housing scheme and when luck refused to favour her, she got back a cheque for the money deposited. The account number on her cheque was misprinted which meant she had to go to the main branch where the DDA-related issues were being addressed. She says, “When I reached, the Internet was apparently slow. I asked the guy a rather stupid question, ‘Airtel ka Internet slow kaise ho sakta hai, it’s the fastest.’ I was getting anxious so I asked if they have a second Internet line to which he said no. Later I got to know from the other girl that she was working on an MTNL line. Then I asked him to shift and changed the line on his computer and taught him a lesson.”