A walk-back to the good old school days that you should not miss!

As a kid I always had a problem in reciting the second line of our Indian National Pledge. I would shout my lungs out during the first line 'India is my country' but would just murmur something insanely during the second line 'All Indians are my brothers and sisters'. It would be funny because I will say that part with eyes on the ground wearing a 'WTF!' expression. But, you can't blame me for that, could you? If you had hots for the girl sitting next to you (thanks to that 1Boy-1Girl sitting arrangement in my school) and the teacher, both at the same time, then one needs to really have a twisted mind to say such an offending thing. Thankfully, I wasn't a psychopath !


Talking about psychopaths, beautiful teachers and girls at school, I always wanted to ask a couple of things from people outside my circle of pervert friends. First, do you also still discuss your gorgeous school teachers sometimes over a conference call with your school-time friends? Second, do you also at times see on the Facebook, pics of gals from your school time and say to yourself with utter guilt 'Oh come-on! How can she turn out to be so beautiful! God surely doesn't exists' ? NO? Great, we are on the same page then as even I don't indulge in such things. Was just a simple inquiry. Now back to the original topic. <<Crowd Alert>>It's going to be a long article, so empty your urinary bladder and empty/fill-up your non-urinary bladders now itself. 


Of-course when we look back now, we laugh at the things which resulted in us getting punished. The teachers, true to their part, believed that punishment would instill discipline in us, perhaps leading to a better life. But if one closely monitors the life trajectory of those who got regularly caned during school days, it would be pretty evident that they aren't exactly heading any World Peace operations at the United Nations now. They are still doing almost the same things, only at a larger level! For instance, one of my friends was once punished in the 7th standard for calling another guy a cabaret dancer. Really! Is it that criminal? But surely the punishment didn't deter him an inch, as he grew up to be the most foul-mouthed guy I have ever come across.


And for all that philosophical fuss, what would the actual punishments be like?
'Write a 1000 times that I will not do such-and-such thing again', which would invariably be written by your elder sibling or parents, whoever is most jobless (by the way did any of you followed my technique of writing all the 'Is' together, followed by all the 'wills' and so on?); 
'Sit between those two gals', which again wouldn't really be a punishment unless you had set really high standards for yourself; 'Get out of the class', again I could see a bunch of silver linings in that one; 'Hold each other's ears', though looks straight out of Dostana script, but would always turn into a laughter riot. The only punishment that I dreaded was when the teachers would make a pony tail out of your hair for keeping your hair  too long. (Would never forget or forgive my Social Science teacher for that)

The pic that fooled us into thinking how
easy our future life was going to be!

Needless to say, not all teachers are devilish. No matter which school you went to, there is bound to be that one lenient teacher whose class everyone used to look forward to. More often than not, this would be your Art or Hindi teacher. I had this Arts teacher who, for three long years, just asked us to practice one drawing. 
Every week he would come and put that traditional fruits-on-a-platter picture over the blackboard and ask us to draw. If that was not enough, we would sometimes ask him to take that pic down so that we could use the butter paper to trace/outline the pic. And his pet dialogue or rather SOS dialogue was 'Why have you made this class a fish-market' !


Examination time was a time when we would always find a thousand ways to screw ourselves. Starting from preparing for the wrong subject i.e. messing up the exam schedule to forgetting to attempt a sub-part of a question, you name it! Some would even discover that there was a second page also in the question paper, but sadly after coming out of the exam hall. But for me, there was just one interesting thing happening in the exam hall and it was that who would ask for an additional sheet for the answers. Boy! That was one poisoned harpoon right into my chest. There was this one gal in our class who would ask for an additional sheet almost within 15 minutes into the exam. The gal's gesture would somehow make other students believe that either they are not doing well enough in the exam or they have mistakenly received the wrong question paper. This would almost immediately push me and my friends into a channel of distress and disbelief and we would start looking at each other as if we saw a ghost, prompting some asking for a glass of water and others an increase in the fan speed. The fact that this gal used to do this in every exam was provoking an inquiry from us. So finally one day we got hold of her answer sheet after the exam only to notice that on our 10 inches wide answer sheet she would draw not just the left margin but also a right margin. Yes, you read it right, a right margin, both 2 inches wide and to pile on our misery she would write in XXL font size. Satisfied with this sensational revelation we breathed a sigh of relief with our self-belief and pride restored.   


There are many more such incidents and characters that I can share, like that one time when one of my classmates trying to reason why he hasn't completed the summer vacation homework said (and figure this out for yourselves): 'Sir, actually I finished the entire assignment, but just one day before the school re-opened, a monkey took my notebook from my room. I chased the monkey, being a disciplined student that you know I am, but it dropped the notebook in a house. If it was some other house, I would have gone and collected it back, but Sir that house was haunted! We are forbidden to enter there'. Goes without saying, what followed that explanation was the most sickening display of a 35-year old man repeatedly jackhammer-ing an innocent and (foolishly)creative eighth grader. 


I must stop here, only for the fear that what I found enjoyable of my school-days might not really ring a bell with you. Maybe a sequel. But would love to hear of any such moments that you might have to share, I am sure there are aplenty!!


P.S. Alright, I know that I have already exceeded both, the max-readable-limit-even-for-the-most-jobless and the max-readable-limit-befitting-an-article-from-a-pathetic-blogger limits in this post, but I don't see that preventing me from mentioning one last and perhaps the most memorable incident of my school life: There was this creepy boy in our class who would lead an extremely reclusive life, wandering around with his hands always in his pockets. He really used to freak us out as even while writing, his one hand will be in the pocket. So this one time, during an exam, the most gorgeous (and the most cocky too if I may add so) teacher not just of our school but perhaps in the history of English-medium schools became suspicious of that weirdo, suspecting a cheating attempt or a possible concealment of a cheating weapon, you know with all that one-hand-in-the-pocket-even-during-writing thing. So she proceeded to frisk him and then came THE moment <cue ominous organ music> when she entered her hand in his pocket. Ladies and Gentlemen, let me have the privilege of telling you something about the high pitched shriek that followed next. Just to give you some idea, that piercing cry is still rebounding among the walls of my (now dilapidated) school. Apparently, the weirdo never used to wear any kind of underclothing and had removed his pockets from inside altogether! Goes without saying that the guy turned into a legend overnight. 


P.P.S. 'Good Riddance' are perhaps the two words you are thinking of. Notwithstanding that, let me assure that if you liked this post even a tad bit, then you would surely enjoy one of my old post on college life:Examination Fever