A little understanding……….

My best friend is always in trouble with my teacher. Her crime: she's always late to class in the morning. She's so bad at being punctual that none of us, teacher included, expect her in class before at least half an hour after class has started. All of us have flaws. Tardiness is her imperfection. Some times we wonder if it's physically impossible for her to come to class on time. But friends are supposed to be under standing right? And the only way to understand is to find out why. Why is she late to class every single day? What are the road blocks on her path to becoming a teacher's pet?

Now, my friend's a typical teenage girl (although with enough brains to know that Europe is not a country). Anyways, she lives in a typical teenager's world where many things are expected of you as a 'typical teenage girl'. After class, some unwritten rule insists that all of us friends hang around chatting about everything and nothing for at least two hours at our class room or at the bus stop or the friendly neighborhood shop cum restaurant, which means that she reaches home a full three hours after class.

Once home the beast in her takes over and she spends some time nourishing her body, tired from her efforts at fulfilling her typical teenage duties. Being a girl and eighteen, she's doomed to spend the following two hours taking a bath and grooming her hair, skin, nails and eyebrows. She painstakingly scrubs, plucks, waxes, tones and moisturizes. At the end of this tedious routine, she's left with very little time to do her home work and more importantly, to watch TV to enrich her head with very important pieces of information which every teen should know if she's to sustain any two minute conversation with her peers .She dutifully spends her time enlightening herself on the lives of reality tv stars, actors and other 'celebs' . In the midst of this come urgent calls from her friends –boyfriend problems, movie on Saturday?- she multi tasks and manages them all. And if , god forbid, any of her friends has a birthday coming up, she has to spend hours deciding on a gift and making plans to bring about that 'surprise' every birthday girl expects. After all this exhausting work she logs on to her orkut/facebook/whatever... account to do the mandatory amount of social net 'work'-ing . she spends hours replying to all those annoying scraps and scribbles and fending off irritating friend requests from either boring people with no profile photos or hyper active ones with 900 friends. Then at last, past midnight she shuts her laptop with tired eyes only to suddenly remember that the assignment given a month ago was due the next day. Ever the responsible pupil, she dutifully finishes it and collapses onto her mattress after another round of combing, scrubbing and moisturizing.

She is shook from her slumber by the faithful phone alarm which shouts out some annoying tone. Snooze. Five minutes.There it goes again. Her mom pokes her head into the room. My friend pretends to get up and goes back to sleep. Then a pair of hands, her mom's, physically removes her from the bed and shakes her till she wakes up.

My poor friend, with only an hour and a half till class begins, takes a ten minute bath and proceeds to dress. An act of no consequence which would take five minutes you'd think. But you'd be very, very wrong. She is about to make the most important decision of the day in our typical teenage world. That un-answerable question: 'what should I wear??'. She spends half an hour contemplating and trying on different sets of clothes. Then she puts on her favorite pair of jeans and a carefully picked top and proceeds to makeup and hair. She tries on different hair dos and then takes a look at the clock and puts it all into a pony. She carefully puts on eye make-up and lipstick .She hunts her drawer for earrings and other paraphernalia and puts them on. And voila, she's done. Ready to face the world. Thirty minutes to class. What else? Books! She puts her texts and notes into her bag and stuffs her lunch in. no time for break fast, has to catch that last minute bus. She races towards the bus stop, the bus is already at the stop. She runs. The bus jerks forward and then stops again for a lady. She waves wildly. The bus passes her by. The conductor grins.

She waits for the next bus. Ten minutes till class begins. Where have all the buses gone? The next one takes another five minutes to arrive. She jumps in. she prays for the bus to over speed. The conductor looks her up and down as she gives him her student ticket change. 'Card' he says.. She fishes out that scrawny little yellow card. The guy looks at her photo and scrutinizes all the little details in it. He gives it back with the ticket. The bus is overflowing. Guys hang on to the door handles with their life. The driver drives slowly lest he should accidentally shake off some of the people dangling on one side. Old ladies push and shove and mess up my friends carefully combed hair. The bus plods through the dirt tracks which lead to the city.

After twenty minutes of torture my friend is pushed out at the college stop by a torrent of humanity. Her dress is crumpled and she realizes that the bath she took in the morning had been a waste. The class has already started. She rushes with other late-birdies and risks her life crossing the road with no zebra crossings or signals. She walks as fast as she can. The campus is eerily quiet. She almost slips and falls while climbing the stairs in her clumsy slippers. She runs to class and is joined by other late comers to our class. They wait at the door with embarrassed expressions as the teacher tries to figure out what to do with them , " oh, just come in…"she says in exasperation. "The next time, I will send you to the principal, why can't you come to class on time? You're only students. What's keeping you so busy that you can't make it to class on time....?"

With all due respect ma'am, you have no idea………..