He said, “I can understand you, and I can see the difficulty. You have never followed any rule. I have had reports against you again and again, but I have never called you because I know that you may not be following the rule, but whatsoever you will be doing must be better than the rule itself. I know you, I have been watching you,” he said. “For example, many professors were reporting to me,” he told me, “that you fall asleep in their classes. Now, this is not right. And if they wake you up, you create so much fuss about it – that nobody has the right to wake you, and what harm are you doing? You are simply sleeping.”

I had told my professors, “It does not disturb your lecture, and anyway, who cares about your lecture! And whatsoever you are saying is all nonsense, it is better not to hear it. And this is my time – from twelve to two I have always slept. From my very childhood, in my school, high school, undergraduate classes, I have always slept. It was a recognized fact that from twelve to two, I am going to sleep. And people have come to accept it, because I was not going to do anything else at that time. You can throw me out of the class; I will sleep there.” I have been thrown out of the class – I slept outside, it didn’t matter, but that is my time of sleep.

The vice-chancellor said, “I told your professors, ‘Don’t be worried. You can look at his marks in your paper last year. How much did he get? Ninety-eight percent. What more do you think he will be able to manage by keeping awake?’”

I told the vice-chancellor, “Here you are wrong. If I had been awake then ninety-eight percent would have been impossible. Even to get eighteen percent would have been difficult. That man was throwing so much crap into everybody’s mind; I somehow avoided him. The two percent they are missing…it seems that even in my sleep he has shouted something and it has entered my mind; otherwise why not a hundred percent? Those two percent must be his doing, and I am going directly to him to ask about the two percent: what happened about the two percent?”

He said, “It has been reported that you don’t follow the hostel rules, and you are the prefect of the whole hostel. You are supposed to manage one thousand students and make them follow the rules, but you don’t follow them at all. How are you going to manage one thousand students?”

I said, “Who bothers? And they are as happy with me as they have ever been with any prefect, because I never interfere. In fact I don’t even know the faces of all of them. I don’t know their names. I never take their attendance. Each month I mark them present, and send the register to the office. I have told them : ‘If you are absent, inform me; otherwise there is no problem. If you don’t inform me, it is accepted that you are present.’”

He said, “You get up at three o’clock in the night, and a few of your disciples” – I had disciples already – “they also get up at three o’clock, and you make so much trouble for others.”

I said, “Those people are fools”…because the university I was in, and the hostel, was in such a beautiful place that three o’clock was the right time there. It was just on a hilltop, and just below the hill was a vast lake. It was so serene and so calm and so quiet that to miss this whole thing sleeping…. “It is perfectly good to miss the lectures sleeping, because those idiots are simply telling things that they know nothing about. Some other idiot has told them, and they are simply transferring it.