Git the Halfwit

Now, I normally don't say too much against NMK ( aka - not by me, but otherwise popularly - Git) , because like most people who know him, I understand that our normal expectations of a human being don't apply to him. You can't really trust him to cover up for you with your parents or remember to wake up in time for a debate session, but he's reliable enough when it comes to having done enough random reading to get us through a weird debate and doing an excellent second speech. But today, I must speak out, because this is the Last Straw.

The inter-schools debating championships are on in NTU and both he and I have been denied the honour of winning it on one pretext or the other throughout our years in NTU. This year was to be the final comeback - for the both of us at least. We make a pretty good team, Karthik the funny man, NMK and I, even if I say so myself. We could have won this one.

But it was not to be. On the day of the semi finals, my students (whom I coach for debates - secondary school kids) turned up in hope of watching a reasonable debate and cheering for me. I bought them dinner for being so sweet, and while they were eating, called up my teammate to see where we should meet before the debate.

Turned out, he was asleep - with half an hour to go to the release of the motion. I told him, in a bit of a panic, to wake up and get his butt to the spine ( which is where the tutorial rooms etc are). It was then that he deigned to inform me that he was sick and wasn't planning to turn up at all.

What else is there to say? My other teammate and I and quite a few others spent the next half hour frantically looking for people to take his place, but no avail. We had one guy convinced finally, but it was too late. If only NMKie had informed us earlier... So much for responsibility, no?

And here's the icing on the cake: we had a dummy debate anyway, with one of my students standing in for second speaker - him as complete and utterly a rookie as you can imagine - and we still managed to have an exceedingly decent debate. I even thought we won that one.

Let's hope the flu bug doesn't get NMK during the Asians or the Australs or something.