Memories Spring back to life

A few days ago I had told you people about how I had enjoyed life in my school around a zillion years ago. This is another story of how I and my friends used to be the centre of attraction in my school.

You might recall MD, the friend I have mentioned in one of my earlier posts. You see, this friend of mine is very brilliant. Why, he managed to get a score of almost 59.7% in his class X exams. He was a God amongst us mere mortals. We used to worship him. Another interesting fact about this dude is that he was always susceptible to wacky ideas.

We had a science fair in our school once, and on display along with other paraphernalia were : sex toys! Really! I didn't realise it then, but I distinctly recall the Professors being queasy around those displays. I thought it was because they were hideous looking. But I know better now! Along with the sex toys, there was a display of a car that runs on chemicals. This fascinated us kids a lot. We decided to find out what exactly made it go zoom, the way it did.

So, we went to the inventors of the car. You know the child geniuses that are the pride of every school? Well, one such fellow was the master mind behind the car. They are not actual children. They are nuclear scientists masquerading as school children in an effort to find out when school gets over. (If this doesn't make sense, read an earlier post titled : "My School Days") These people caused all sorts of trouble for duds like me, because my parents always were comparing me with them, in an effort to try and make me as brilliant and hard working as them. What my parents didn't realise that unless I was subjected to nuclear radiation of the kind that affects the brain cells of a dinosaur, there was no way I was going to improve. But they tried anyway.

Anyway, back to the nuclear scientist, I mean the "child genius". This dude told us that by combining Hydrochloric acid and Baking soda, we could produce Carbon dioxide, a gas, which when let out through a nozzle, makes the car go forward. Simple, yet effective. Actually, this is what I learnt from a web-site I was surfing. What I had heard originally, was unintelligible blabbering by a nerd. But I had got the gist of the matter, even back then.

After listening to the geek, my friend MD realised three things :
1. Hydrochloric acid is used to clean toilets.
2. Baking soda is available cheap.
3. His parents were going to be out this weekend.

Our plan was hatched. We decided to make a car that would go faster than the geek's and then we would display it in the next science fair, maybe arrange a drag race or something inorder to show off the greater speed of our "MDmobile".

So, the saturday morning was spent in acquiring all the necessary stuff for the car. Finally, in the afternoon, we had finished assembling the car, which looked like a trojan horse. We were really proud of this. It was the first constructive work we had done in all our life, if you discount for the fact the cleaning up of dirt from our class. I mean, the beating up of the nerds and the geeks, who are there in school to create misery for the average student.

The reactants, or whatever they are called, we added to the car (if you could call it that). But the car wouldn't move forward. This time, I had a brilliant idea. I realised that more reactants would propel the car further! So, we added more Hypochlorous Diacid and whatever Soda the dude had told us about.

The car was all over the house. There was so much smoke, that I couldn't even begin to describe what the house looked like. It looked like we were going to have to change our objective from : "Making a car that runs on chemicals" to "Run like hell before MD's mom arrives"
The reason I recalled this piece of information from my old beat up memories is because I saw something similar in a science fair I had recently visited. This time I had participated in the fair, and I and another friend of mine had made a car. But this one was more sophisticated than the previous one. It didn't smoke around like the previous one. It did what it was supposed to do : namely, move at high speeds and explode.

Yes, the car did actually explode. We were aware of this possibility and we blamed it on sabotage by our competitors. We got the second prize for initiating interest in what was otherwise a boring science fair!