Bunking lessons from an SFH bunker

Remember the good old days when one could blame a destructive dog for not being able to submit one’s homework? Or the various kinds of ailments that would suddenly strike us, making it well nigh impossible to get out of bed, let alone out of the door and off to school? Well, today’s kids are smarter, in the sense of having smartphones to use as weapons of mass disruption — although seemingly not smart enough to not get busted. A 10-year-old boy, tired of attending online classes in his Ghaziabad home with schools shut, ingeniously used his WFH parents’ phones to send out ‘threatening’ messages to relatives. The messages were apparently from a ‘hacker’ warning them that the boy — ‘poor innocent beta’ in class 5 — has to ‘leave classes’ or else.…

The ‘or else…’ bit was supposed to get the boy off the hook and enable him to play hookey. Instead, it got everyone suspicious and worried enough to call the police. This not being a young Mark Zuckerberg or a Pegasus feeling its wings clipped, the ‘Ghaziabad Pimpernel’ was traced. No Sherlock was required to see what happened when the boy’s access to any phone was ‘restricted’. The ‘hacker’s’ messages stopped, the police traced their origins, and the rest, as they say, was back to the daily grind of (online) school. The things that human ingenuity is capable of when trying to cut class/office.