A
Beautiful Memory: Learning, Belonging and Other Musings
High School Reminiscences, part 5 of 16
*“Mile Sur Mera Tumhara
Toh Sur Bane Hamara.”
*“Mile Sur Mera Tumhara
Toh Sur Bane Hamara.”
If inspiration speaks in quietness at the briefest of time, I thought boxing myself up in some imaginary problem or the other would probably not be a good idea. Besides, not being able to acknowledge inspiration per se and not benefit from it could also be a miserable thing too.
I wanted out – to just break free from the shackles of my hyper imagination co-mingled with the conflicting 'green goblins' of vulnerabilities, jinxes, self-doubts, dread, etcetera etcetera. I longed to bask in the warm glow of freedom and self-discovery and experience life’s delicate ironies while making ample room for love and passion (more deeply than I could convey, yeah!) or anything encouraging that life has in store for me was generally welcome. To be sure, if things like these have the desired effect, then, my dear friends, I guarantee you that my chicken is cooked all the way through and ready to be served and savoured. Too bad, Life is a harsh mistress!
Never been friends, but just classmates
I welcomed the day when finally, the time had come to escape from the unfriendly ‘friends’ (the ill-assorted senior secondary school classmates). Their ploys and trickeries; their constant psychobabble about gaining personal growth; their intense fetishism of ‘getting good marks’; their obsessive-compulsive desire for career-making rounded off with their vindictive temperament were fast getting on my adolescent nerves like Snafu, angry red ants.
Yet when the time had come to leave the school forever, I remember, a feeling as though a strange desolation had completely engulfed me never to let go of me for a very long time. Thanks to such a thing that transpired, I realized afterward that the school I had passed out from gave me no friends (or rather I failed to make at least one). My little situation had accorded me a bunch of indifferent career-fixated know-alls who, I am certain, were never really the types you expect them to look back upon the school memories or all the good times we have had sitting together in a classroom studying, playing, trooping into the science labs to do ‘practicals’, or just being students eager to learn and have fun. I can’t imagine why couldn’t they look at friendship as an important and significant part of their lives. It – beats me. That is an unforgivable sin, as far as my common sense tells me. I realize I’m being harsh with my classmates but that’s how things were: marred by intensifying ‘competition’, envy, and jealousy that manifested among ourselves into an awful crescendo. Naturally, I worried about it then, to such an extent that I was feeling lonely and lost without a decent friendship worth its salt – except of course one, just the one in P.S.V.V.S.T.U.V.W.X.Y.Z. Ramraj (Remember Kondapalli Toys for surnames? That's the guy I am talking about). But thank goodness, I got my shit together and moved on. And that’s that.
Carl Jung, the Swiss psychologist, said: "I have always tried to make room for anything that wanted to come to me from within."
With no one to share my concerns (but with a little bit of Carl Jung’s psychology I had read somewhere, probably in the school library, twisting and turning in my young adolescent mind), I resolved to go my way to seek my kind of career about which fortunately I never got around to telling my class fellows. Since I felt that my dream was a sort of ‘chimeric dream’ the jingoistic classmates I was fated to be associating in that school couldn’t be expected to get their heads around it. Expecting this ‘Arrogant Lot’, who I thought was marred by competition and jealousy, to understand my career goals was out of the question. So it seemed well and good for me to abstain from discussing it or try not to listen to their career plans. Tit for tat? If they are not keen to hear me out, why should I be all ears to their stupid career-making buffoonery?
While they completely immersed themselves in setting up their sweatshop of self-worth and cold behavioural antics engine running in full steam but on low unfriendly fuel, I thought I can do one better than their general way of unfriendliness and utter lack of fellow feeling in the classroom. The rapaciousness with which my classmates (barring the docile girls), the Arrogant Lot (the boisterous boys), had acted – their deliberately bewildering jingoistic fervour notwithstanding which grew monstrously bigger in its abject bitterness day by day – was enough to stymie any anticipation for the happiness of studentship in that school. Consequently, I put forth a valiant effort by staying hesitant, tight-lipped, and for the most part hung about in a state of being continually tizzy about the things I was witnessing for the first time in my life. Indeed, even as I was shying away from being a good-natured jingoist myself, I was not up to the challenge of making my ‘career plans’ public. Whatever they were I didn’t let anybody in on. Actually, that's one of the main reasons why I turned my back on talking about my career options with the prejudiced elements of my class, nor did I bother to discern theirs. And being straightforward and direct has never been one of my strong-points but sometimes it’s smarter to say what you feel and not hold back when you have to. No hard feelings, mate.
During the two years of my life at the K.V., not even once did I ask these boys and girls – what I call the Arrogant Lot, youthful and fantastic and all that oft-repeated bunkum that comes along with their lot – what their ambitions/aspirations or whatever you call it was. Why didn’t I? Because the response to that question was as self-evident as it was obvious to me at that point: either it’d be that done-to-death Engineering or nothing at all. So no point in asking. Not surprisingly, medical was a dream but not a viable option for them. Medical was, without question, far tougher/harder to get than its easily-available and easily-doable Engineering counterpart. Therefore, everybody was going to be an engineer, a clear case of herd mentality!
Up next: ‘Good marks’ fetishism
My classmates used to holler so much in class about what they would like to do after graduating from a school that their bombastic plans echoed like a rumpus din. While on one bench you may end up sitting with a pompous buffoon such as Hawkish Sribathtub and self-important and self-seeking types such as Hangorag Tarik and Baljee Risla and on the other bench you may have to joust with the comedic twins: Maha Ranaa Prataap and Maha Rajaa Prataap, Dhanoj, Shaik and Haymunth. Though blessed with consciences that can only be expected as childish but they, lamentably, had their axes to grind. If such behaviour in the class is supposed to be taken lightly as ‘competition’ (pitted against one another), then will someone be kind enough to tell me what should be taken as a friendship of mutual affection? No one cared.
Whenever these fellows compared notes on who got what marks in which subject and how many, their high-decibel banter that issued forth knew absolutely no bounds. It razed down whatever little ounces of decorum we were supposed to have in the classroom. The standard spectacle of “getting good marks” was high up on their agendas as though nobody can outperform their pedantic skill at getting “good marks” but themselves. Trust me, I am not misrepresenting when I state that. Obtaining good grades cannot be wrong, but the manner in which these students hankered after it as though their whole life is precariously dependent on it and that they would most certainly die of some sort of disgrace or shame if they don’t get their due, their pound of flesh! was, I thought, antagonistic, disagreeable, and unfriendly. Others like me who were not used to making brash pointless deliberations about gaining good marks were consigned to shaking our heads automatically in rather weary exasperation: “oh no not again!” and look away as if we were hard of hearing or something! If only they realized that “good marks” and “friendship” can go hand in hand, then things could have been to some degree better amongst us teenage students. If only you guys knew that getting good marks cannot be a deciding factor to snub all friendships. Career is important I know, but isn’t everybody going to make one ultimately? What about the school friendships we never had? No one cared about that. I bet you still have no answer to those questions and I suspect you’ll never have. I am not passing any judgment here but only trying to provide a perspective, a point of view, into how things could have been and what we can learn from it.
Fortunately, cracking up in class was their most loved past-time, and whenever they did that everybody including the not-so-boisterous ones got embroiled into the noisy racket of these openly jesting young boys (and sometimes girls, their docility got out the window!) shouting their hearts out. I acknowledge even I was considered sometimes “simply too much” when it came to pursuing needless fun, especially when playing ‘football’ with an abandoned PT shoe inside the classroom! Other than being once in a while “studious” (unlike the ones who crib for “good marks” or battle with one another to “dazzle” teachers in the fond hope of getting “good marks” and all that) at school, I thought I was quite acceptable at making fun by attempting to be somewhat funnier than others. I had always felt that I was quite clear and sorted, though I admit I was slightly introverted, about certain things in my life.
[An anecdote: Once when Gowrie ma’am, a strong-minded, iron-willed Chemistry teacher, came briskly into the class, she began applauding me to high heavens about my near-perfect performance in the Chemistry Unit Test, appreciating the efforts that I put in had fetched me top marks and outperforming everyone in the class. To a rare appreciation coming from a “strict teacher” like her was really surprising but it definitely felt good and I was inwardly smiling away in all glory. I recall my jingoistic classmates’ long faces dropping to their sagging chests as though they were dissolving in, what I thought, their putrid curry of shame and envy. It appeared to me that they didn’t quite figure that things will ever come to such a pass and I suspect they may have felt very miserable (deservingly, I concede) about themselves that finally someone had trounced them in their game of one-upmanship and was suddenly in the limelight. Stealing a side-glance at them made me unusually happy that day. I saw them licking their wounds, all of it was very well-deserved. It felt supremely good, not that it didn’t, however they needn’t have to feel so miserable about it, after all, it was just a semi-final, not the finals. Moral of the story: Today you might do well, tomorrow somebody else can and will, and he/she has the right to score top marks beating every other classmate in their own backyard, and why not.]
A distinguished report card
Indeed, even the beautiful students from one class junior (11th) used to smile at us garrulous seniors from class 12th for being the noisiest fellows in the entire school campus! Their voices still ring in my ears. Here is a very well deserving report card that synopsizes some of my bunch of classmates’ (including me) unique characteristics in term of negative and positive traits:
I wanted out – to just break free from the shackles of my hyper imagination co-mingled with the conflicting 'green goblins' of vulnerabilities, jinxes, self-doubts, dread, etcetera etcetera. I longed to bask in the warm glow of freedom and self-discovery and experience life’s delicate ironies while making ample room for love and passion (more deeply than I could convey, yeah!) or anything encouraging that life has in store for me was generally welcome. To be sure, if things like these have the desired effect, then, my dear friends, I guarantee you that my chicken is cooked all the way through and ready to be served and savoured. Too bad, Life is a harsh mistress!
Never been friends, but just classmates
I welcomed the day when finally, the time had come to escape from the unfriendly ‘friends’ (the ill-assorted senior secondary school classmates). Their ploys and trickeries; their constant psychobabble about gaining personal growth; their intense fetishism of ‘getting good marks’; their obsessive-compulsive desire for career-making rounded off with their vindictive temperament were fast getting on my adolescent nerves like Snafu, angry red ants.
Yet when the time had come to leave the school forever, I remember, a feeling as though a strange desolation had completely engulfed me never to let go of me for a very long time. Thanks to such a thing that transpired, I realized afterward that the school I had passed out from gave me no friends (or rather I failed to make at least one). My little situation had accorded me a bunch of indifferent career-fixated know-alls who, I am certain, were never really the types you expect them to look back upon the school memories or all the good times we have had sitting together in a classroom studying, playing, trooping into the science labs to do ‘practicals’, or just being students eager to learn and have fun. I can’t imagine why couldn’t they look at friendship as an important and significant part of their lives. It – beats me. That is an unforgivable sin, as far as my common sense tells me. I realize I’m being harsh with my classmates but that’s how things were: marred by intensifying ‘competition’, envy, and jealousy that manifested among ourselves into an awful crescendo. Naturally, I worried about it then, to such an extent that I was feeling lonely and lost without a decent friendship worth its salt – except of course one, just the one in P.S.V.V.S.T.U.V.W.X.Y.Z. Ramraj (Remember Kondapalli Toys for surnames? That's the guy I am talking about). But thank goodness, I got my shit together and moved on. And that’s that.
Carl Jung, the Swiss psychologist, said: "I have always tried to make room for anything that wanted to come to me from within."
With no one to share my concerns (but with a little bit of Carl Jung’s psychology I had read somewhere, probably in the school library, twisting and turning in my young adolescent mind), I resolved to go my way to seek my kind of career about which fortunately I never got around to telling my class fellows. Since I felt that my dream was a sort of ‘chimeric dream’ the jingoistic classmates I was fated to be associating in that school couldn’t be expected to get their heads around it. Expecting this ‘Arrogant Lot’, who I thought was marred by competition and jealousy, to understand my career goals was out of the question. So it seemed well and good for me to abstain from discussing it or try not to listen to their career plans. Tit for tat? If they are not keen to hear me out, why should I be all ears to their stupid career-making buffoonery?
While they completely immersed themselves in setting up their sweatshop of self-worth and cold behavioural antics engine running in full steam but on low unfriendly fuel, I thought I can do one better than their general way of unfriendliness and utter lack of fellow feeling in the classroom. The rapaciousness with which my classmates (barring the docile girls), the Arrogant Lot (the boisterous boys), had acted – their deliberately bewildering jingoistic fervour notwithstanding which grew monstrously bigger in its abject bitterness day by day – was enough to stymie any anticipation for the happiness of studentship in that school. Consequently, I put forth a valiant effort by staying hesitant, tight-lipped, and for the most part hung about in a state of being continually tizzy about the things I was witnessing for the first time in my life. Indeed, even as I was shying away from being a good-natured jingoist myself, I was not up to the challenge of making my ‘career plans’ public. Whatever they were I didn’t let anybody in on. Actually, that's one of the main reasons why I turned my back on talking about my career options with the prejudiced elements of my class, nor did I bother to discern theirs. And being straightforward and direct has never been one of my strong-points but sometimes it’s smarter to say what you feel and not hold back when you have to. No hard feelings, mate.
During the two years of my life at the K.V., not even once did I ask these boys and girls – what I call the Arrogant Lot, youthful and fantastic and all that oft-repeated bunkum that comes along with their lot – what their ambitions/aspirations or whatever you call it was. Why didn’t I? Because the response to that question was as self-evident as it was obvious to me at that point: either it’d be that done-to-death Engineering or nothing at all. So no point in asking. Not surprisingly, medical was a dream but not a viable option for them. Medical was, without question, far tougher/harder to get than its easily-available and easily-doable Engineering counterpart. Therefore, everybody was going to be an engineer, a clear case of herd mentality!
Up next: ‘Good marks’ fetishism
My classmates used to holler so much in class about what they would like to do after graduating from a school that their bombastic plans echoed like a rumpus din. While on one bench you may end up sitting with a pompous buffoon such as Hawkish Sribathtub and self-important and self-seeking types such as Hangorag Tarik and Baljee Risla and on the other bench you may have to joust with the comedic twins: Maha Ranaa Prataap and Maha Rajaa Prataap, Dhanoj, Shaik and Haymunth. Though blessed with consciences that can only be expected as childish but they, lamentably, had their axes to grind. If such behaviour in the class is supposed to be taken lightly as ‘competition’ (pitted against one another), then will someone be kind enough to tell me what should be taken as a friendship of mutual affection? No one cared.
Whenever these fellows compared notes on who got what marks in which subject and how many, their high-decibel banter that issued forth knew absolutely no bounds. It razed down whatever little ounces of decorum we were supposed to have in the classroom. The standard spectacle of “getting good marks” was high up on their agendas as though nobody can outperform their pedantic skill at getting “good marks” but themselves. Trust me, I am not misrepresenting when I state that. Obtaining good grades cannot be wrong, but the manner in which these students hankered after it as though their whole life is precariously dependent on it and that they would most certainly die of some sort of disgrace or shame if they don’t get their due, their pound of flesh! was, I thought, antagonistic, disagreeable, and unfriendly. Others like me who were not used to making brash pointless deliberations about gaining good marks were consigned to shaking our heads automatically in rather weary exasperation: “oh no not again!” and look away as if we were hard of hearing or something! If only they realized that “good marks” and “friendship” can go hand in hand, then things could have been to some degree better amongst us teenage students. If only you guys knew that getting good marks cannot be a deciding factor to snub all friendships. Career is important I know, but isn’t everybody going to make one ultimately? What about the school friendships we never had? No one cared about that. I bet you still have no answer to those questions and I suspect you’ll never have. I am not passing any judgment here but only trying to provide a perspective, a point of view, into how things could have been and what we can learn from it.
Fortunately, cracking up in class was their most loved past-time, and whenever they did that everybody including the not-so-boisterous ones got embroiled into the noisy racket of these openly jesting young boys (and sometimes girls, their docility got out the window!) shouting their hearts out. I acknowledge even I was considered sometimes “simply too much” when it came to pursuing needless fun, especially when playing ‘football’ with an abandoned PT shoe inside the classroom! Other than being once in a while “studious” (unlike the ones who crib for “good marks” or battle with one another to “dazzle” teachers in the fond hope of getting “good marks” and all that) at school, I thought I was quite acceptable at making fun by attempting to be somewhat funnier than others. I had always felt that I was quite clear and sorted, though I admit I was slightly introverted, about certain things in my life.
[An anecdote: Once when Gowrie ma’am, a strong-minded, iron-willed Chemistry teacher, came briskly into the class, she began applauding me to high heavens about my near-perfect performance in the Chemistry Unit Test, appreciating the efforts that I put in had fetched me top marks and outperforming everyone in the class. To a rare appreciation coming from a “strict teacher” like her was really surprising but it definitely felt good and I was inwardly smiling away in all glory. I recall my jingoistic classmates’ long faces dropping to their sagging chests as though they were dissolving in, what I thought, their putrid curry of shame and envy. It appeared to me that they didn’t quite figure that things will ever come to such a pass and I suspect they may have felt very miserable (deservingly, I concede) about themselves that finally someone had trounced them in their game of one-upmanship and was suddenly in the limelight. Stealing a side-glance at them made me unusually happy that day. I saw them licking their wounds, all of it was very well-deserved. It felt supremely good, not that it didn’t, however they needn’t have to feel so miserable about it, after all, it was just a semi-final, not the finals. Moral of the story: Today you might do well, tomorrow somebody else can and will, and he/she has the right to score top marks beating every other classmate in their own backyard, and why not.]
A distinguished report card
Indeed, even the beautiful students from one class junior (11th) used to smile at us garrulous seniors from class 12th for being the noisiest fellows in the entire school campus! Their voices still ring in my ears. Here is a very well deserving report card that synopsizes some of my bunch of classmates’ (including me) unique characteristics in term of negative and positive traits:
- Baljee Risla – Negative traits: a mean and an artful dodger that has a poor sense of humour, terse, mostly keeps to himself, laughs inwardly at others’ faux pas, allergic to sharing notes, doesn’t give a damn about anyone; Positive traits: patience, formal and hardworking.
- Hawkish Sribathtub – Negative traits: a veritable buffoon, a character that is standoffish to the point of being brusque, toots his own horn, self-centered, crafty and loutish; Positive traits: laughs uproariously and shouts a lot, has a timid sense of humour which is at least better than his co-bencher.
- Hangorag Tarik – Negative traits: a chronic sweet-talker, withholds secret jealousies, suffers from ‘good marks’ syndrome, curt in his replies, toots his own horn, shrewd, very glad to hog all the available limelight, eager beaver; Positive traits: speaks decorously and suitably amiable.
- Dhanoj, Shaik, and Haymunth – Negative traits: nothing in particular but…err…slightly confused in a comical way; Positive traits: mostly candid and plain-spoken, conscientious, believe in shouting their hearts out whenever an opportunity to make fun arises. Cool bunch of dudes.
- “Biddis” and “Piddis” – Negative traits: escape artists, sometimes scathing, get carried away too easily; Positive traits: sociable, happy and humorous, highly enthusiastic, spirited, considerate, good team players, and punctilious twins.
- P.S.V.V.S.T.U.V.W.X.Y.Z. Ramraj – Negative traits: hardly anything to write home about, occasional spells of wavering hesitancy; Positive traits: moral strength, distinctly friendly, chivalrous, guffawing sense of humour that bursts at the seams, communication and people skills, sense of efficiency, and dependable. Also, an endearing I-get-to-speak-first loudspeaker box.
- Yours truly – Negative traits: a puzzled, out-of-place sheep (thrown among the wolves?), introverted, shy personality and doesn’t stretch beyond his comfort zone; Positive traits: calm, conscientious, patient, dignified and suave.
Last but not least
Like cackling of angry birds the blare would ascend from our classroom and take a flight to the Principal’s Office located at a far distance, from there it would leap to the School Library past the Drinking Water Tank, then swing to the School Buses stationed under the cool shade of huge neem and peepal trees overlooking the large Derelict Auditorium with rooftop, doors, and windows all gone, then vanishing to the ramparts of the school and finally heading all the way to the Tech Area of Indian Air Force Base where pointy-nosed fighter jets are at a ready to take to the air.
Oh! Sometimes the level of noise we used to make in our class! Even friends from 11th standard used to rightly think that the folks from 12th standard were nothing less than fun-loving crack-pots. And there was no stopping us from being funny, especially during the free periods.
By Arindam Moulick
* "Mile Sur Mera Tumhara" is a classic 1988 video song played on the Doordarshan television channel promoting national integration and unity in diversity back in the late 1980s. I still have a schoolboy crush on that melodious song.
Disclaimer: This blog is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of my imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Like cackling of angry birds the blare would ascend from our classroom and take a flight to the Principal’s Office located at a far distance, from there it would leap to the School Library past the Drinking Water Tank, then swing to the School Buses stationed under the cool shade of huge neem and peepal trees overlooking the large Derelict Auditorium with rooftop, doors, and windows all gone, then vanishing to the ramparts of the school and finally heading all the way to the Tech Area of Indian Air Force Base where pointy-nosed fighter jets are at a ready to take to the air.
Oh! Sometimes the level of noise we used to make in our class! Even friends from 11th standard used to rightly think that the folks from 12th standard were nothing less than fun-loving crack-pots. And there was no stopping us from being funny, especially during the free periods.
By Arindam Moulick
* "Mile Sur Mera Tumhara" is a classic 1988 video song played on the Doordarshan television channel promoting national integration and unity in diversity back in the late 1980s. I still have a schoolboy crush on that melodious song.
Disclaimer: This blog is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of my imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.