And all this time , through this change only two things remained constant. The first was school, the place we learnt to call home. Now I’m not going to get al emotional and sob out the names of all the peons, staff and principals (notice the ‘s’ at the end?)whom I learnt to honor and respect, though I do retain that option as a backup. I’m going to state as matter-of-factly as possible that school ab-so-lute-ly R-O-C-K-E-D!
The first thing that happened every morning was the smile on everyone’s face when you entered the class room. The look of incredulity when Mr. Jackson checked you for your nails, tie, trousers, shoes and (uhhhh) hair. The scraping of chairs, the protests of ‘Sir, I missed my attendance’, ‘Sir, I’m suffering from temporary amnesia and have no idea why I have been marked absent the whole of last week.’
Thereafter time flies. What with thirty six equally soul-destroyed pupils sitting next to you growling and snarling, discussing movies, motives, mobikes and the really cute puppy someone saw in front of their house last evening. We know we’re not fooling the teacher, but there isn’t any harm in persuading ourselves we are.
Then the unforgettable politics involved in the selection of the sports teams, the hurried conferences in the corridor in between periods, the battles for supremacy of the inter-galactic conurbation! OK, so I’m exaggerating. Try defeating the sinister looking extra-terrestrial life-forms yourself, you self-effacing noodlebrain.
And the practices, the hours and hours spent in proving “What can go wrong. Shall go wrong.” Although the new and improved dialogues of ‘Sholay 21’ (now available on all virus infected Franciscan PC’s) didn’t all go waste. Except spraying myself with HIT in the middle of act IV (ab laggi machcharon ki waat), that I’m willing to admit, was a bad idea. I still remember Sharmaji’s little gig on stage, he had no hands in the play, but his shy at Hritik Roshan’s dancing crown was admirable. The singing choir somehow spent more time practicing the songs they weren’t supposed to be singing, or were too politically incorrect to sing, including The Real Slim Shady, I can imagine the shocked look on Eminem’s face right now. The result was the usual catastrophe of the second degree. The fist award goes undoubtedly to the packing up of the sound system in the middle of a solo dance by the hottest chick in our school (note: our school is all boys).
This is what I’ll remember when I step out of the hallowed portals of my soon to be alma-mater, my institution, my home. Not the Cahn-Ingold-Prelog system of isomeric compound nomenclature, but the years of roughing it out in the backfield. The months it took to convince the principal to let us go for a picnic. The weeks we spent planning out next outing to perfection, yet managed to end up being ten minutes late for every movie we ever saw together. The days we exchanged pen drives loaded with songs by Nickelback under cover of a notebook filled with unanswered test papers and foolscap sheets of practice problems. The hours we panicked before every exam. The minutes we counted before the results came out. The seconds that ticked past the scheduled time for the final bell.
This is the first thing that has and will always remain constant, in thought and reality. The other? The other is that mum will always have to search for the tie, no matter what.
