Back to School

If god granted me a wish of going back on time, I would prefer the one when I was in 9th grade. I have no second thoughts about it. What’s so special about that year you may ask? That year was laughs, laughs and only laughs.

June 1st 1998, the first thing the class realized was that the class teacher was “Rashid”. He was a terror; I mean he would try to get creativity out of every single person in class even if the student dint like his own talent. According to him everyone in the class should come first, all 80 of us had given names for “singing competition” (thankfully that year due to lot of unplanned holidays, portions were on toss and hence it was not held on stage). I still know all the elements of the “periodic table” coz he made us draw & paint them on those big KG card boards, colorfully. Oh also all of us in the class had to have a stainless steel scale, so that he could take our scale and hit us. He believed in hygiene, what if someone had allergy & when he hit that diseased person, the scale touched him and then hit someone else?

The staff was one funny bunch; the clerk in the office put on so much weight every year that her chair had to be changed.

Rashid didn’t like the management and the management didn’t like him; we the students were scapegoats. Charles always skipped his English class and my diary read “Charles sir did not take class” on that day. Rashid forced us to write such stuff on our diaries.

Chondamma’s look when she saw two people of different sex talking, like as if they were doing it.

The Sanskrit classes took a major hit, Nanda Kumar resigned after teaching us slokas the humming way, then came G.Bhat, who read only “ladies” magazines like “Women’s era” and quoted all that he saw in them. The boys would go “Ooooooooooooo” and all that in the class which could be heard till the Staff room. He was fired for bad behavior and then came a tiny lady who was Suhas’s aunt and she took tuition. She gave full marks to her students consisting of entire class except me and Neha. “How cheap”, we both thought.

In between all this lot of basketball, throw ball, some studies too happened.

The staff also had their favorite dialogues that they repeated all the time. I’ll quote the ones I remember,

Sahaya Raj (Principal) –

1. “Who is the monitor of the class? Write 5 names and come to my office”
2. “Who is the monitor of the class?” someone stood up & he says “you are not the monitor but man eater of the class”

Christopher (Social & Eng teacher) –

1. “You bugger, you are fit to be in gutter, but accidentally you are here.”
2. “I’ll jump on you and kick in your stomach” (I wonder with that EPND belly that he had, how on earth he could do that)

Mukundan (Art teacher) –

Listennnnn, art is a skillful media, listennnnn, art is, listennnn, art is a skillful media through which creative ideas are expressed. (For 3 long years he said just this)

Swathi (Biology teacher) --

Species {Blah Blah} Species {Blah Blah} Species {Blah Blah} & I used to doze off. Excuse me; it was the 1st period post-lunch. What else can you expect?

On day I counted the # of "Species" she used, just to stay awake and I got 118 for just 40 minutes!!!

Glady’s (English teacher) --

This was addressed to myself and Neha when we were trying to form sentence out of the word “astonished” - “I am astonished to see how girls like you can behave so badly in the class?” (She told this just because we were talking, what rubbish)

Also she made Neha sit on floor and the next day princi changed the teacher and Neha was back on the bench.