Memory is selective; you only remember important things, little things that were good or things that went miserably bad. These were disasters.
Lesson in Class Unity
Yours truly was in 6th standard1 in "bharat ka swarnim gaurav lane wala" kendriya vidyalaya, Kota. The background is that this particular KV housed a lot of rogue elements who did not approve of the honorable KV motto. They had a fetish for making other peoples treasured tools such as a compass box2 or pilot pen3 their own. In my own division, if some girl would display her unkil-gifted strawberry-flavored rubber4 one day, she found it missing the next (found it missing?). Being the righteous one, I always felt indignated at the fact that nothing was being done to nab the culprit (phrase courtesy:cnn-ibn). After all, those little damsels in this-dress i.e. the cute blue skirt needed someone to stand up for them. No, I didn't do anything, not until my own compost box went missing (Really, the pencil shavings kept rotting in there would have made good compost). As soon as I realized that the box containing my favorite poking instrument (at that time - the divider) was missing, I went straight to the class teacher to report the crime. I did not have much faith in him, like the UPA, he was too soft on terrorism & did not round up the usual suspects. Instead in his standard non-POTA way, he made everybody stand up & started asking each one personally rather than the 3rd Degee water boarding or narco-analysis test that I would have preferred. It was a simple cross examination where the mulzim could get away with murder. So the futility of this exercise was making me mad. In that rage I blurted out:
“Aise bhikhari jaise maangne se thodi koi batayega” (!) a little too loudly.
Luckily, Sir hadn’t heard those words. But since everyone around me had a hearty laugh on that comment, he became suspicious. He came straight to us & asked one of my friends (at least I considered him one) what they were laughing about. Pat came the reply:
“Sir is ne bola ki ……. ”
& as they say the rest is slapstory. I never got the box back & my faith in fraandship was shattered.
From then it won’t be until the 9th std. that I would meet fellas who understood class unity and make good clean fun of our revered teachers without getting caught.
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1. The author’s usage of angreji may imply that he did not go beyond 6th std. but surprisingly he did!
2. No compass in this box.. likely a produce of Indian English.
3. I would have had lots of stained shirts if Luxor did not import these Japanese pens but it also stymied my chances of having a beautiful girlfriend like the one in the Vodafone chhota credit ad.
4. Verbatim from 6th std. lingo. One day I would realize that real rubbers erased prospective family trees.
Next on recollections, The case of mistaken identity.
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