The Standard Arrangement

The Standard Arrangement

 It was his first project of school. He was in fifth standard and they were given the task of collecting pictures of things having national importance and paste in their scrap books. It was also the first time he was working in a scrap book. So he was very excited and wanted his work to turn out as good as possible.

He managed to find four pictures. When he was sticking them, he placed each picture on one corner of the page so that all four corners were occupied, and looked at the arrangement for some time. It looked too…ordinary. Everyone did it that way, as if it was the socially accepted, standard arrangement of four pictures on a page. No, let’s make some changes, he thought.

He moved the picture that was on the lower right corner to the center of the page. There, this is not ordinary anymore. From a distance, the pictures appeared to make a ‘7’. He quickly glued them, wrote their descriptions on the adjacent page and stuffed it in his schoolbag. The next day at school, he was the first one to submit it for correction.

When he got it back, though, the first thing he saw was a big, red question mark on the lower right corner of the page where he had stuck the pictures. Why? He thought. Is something missing? He couldn’t think of anything, so he borrowed his friend’s scrap book and tried to take a hint from that. His friend had stuck five pictures, one on each corner of the page and the fifth one in the center. He looked at his own scrap book. There was that big, red question mark, lying comfortably where a fifth picture should have been.

So that’s what it is for, a fifth picture. He got it now. But there was no fifth picture! He had only had four pictures from the start, and four pictures were what he intended to stick there! Unaware of that, the teacher had been expecting a fifth picture because that was what the standard arrangement for five pictures on a page was – four on each corner and one in the center. He had filled all the positions except the lower right corner, hence the question mark.

He was saddened; disappointed that his first effort for the project hadn’t paid off as he had expected. That question marked looked bad, ominous. It had ruined his work and tarnished its appearance. Fine. With a sigh, he returned his friend’s scrapbook and tried to steer his thoughts away from the project and the question mark.

If one was to observe his scrapbook at the end of the session, they would find that all the pictures after the first project were stuck properly and neatly, in the standard arrangements of four, five or six pictures on one page, depending on the number of pictures he had stuck for each project; and there were no question marks on them either. 

He had paid his excitement and the tendency to wander away from ‘standard’ in return for a clean, highly graded scrapbook.  

 -Avnish Bansal