Some memories from my school

Some memories of my childhood never leave me - I still remember the picture of me walking down from the park, my bat in my hand, dust blowing all around on a grey cloudy evening. The Kalboishakhi, also called the Mango Showers, had arrived, threatening to blow away the rather strangely placed tin sheet on a part of the roof of our otherwise palatial house.

Opposite that park, used to be my School – Salt Lake (Eng. Med.) School. The Eng. Med. part of the name was important. It meant this wasn't like one of the many other Bengali Medium schools in the neighbourhood, and that you had to wear clean shoes, and cut your nails. And that boys with long hair could find teachers tying up their hair with rubber bands.

This was in Salt Lake - land created by filling up a marshy salty lake; a suburb of Calcutta; known for its matrixed roads and green parks. One such park, the biggest of them all, was the BA-CA Park. The one in which I played cricket.

Ah, I should mention this here - as I tell you about all this, you would observe that all the objects appear in past tense - the school was, the park was. It is not that the school or the park or other things don’t exist anymore. Just that they are not my school or my park any more.

So, this BA-CA Park used to be my park at that time. It was divided into two halves, one for the BA Block and one for the CA Block. And, each half was almost the size of a football field. At one end of this park was a small tent-like structure. It used to be called some football association, but besides the football classes in the evenings, it used to also hold Karate classes in the mornings. Briefly, Bhupati sir, our PT teacher, also used to conduct physical training here.

I was always very bad in most sports. I used to play cricket and sometimes opened the batting too. But that was because of three reasons. One, I used to own the bat. Two, the lunch after the match was always at my place. And three, my captain always knew that I would not survive beyond an over so the batsmen to follow would never have to wait for too long.

There was a fourth reason too, perhaps. My friends used to like me.

Now I am confused. I don’t know for sure what I want to tell you about. There are so many small things that happened in the school that I could tell you about. Or, I could tell you about my summer holidays when I played table-tennis all day. Ok. Let’s settle for this. I will tell you about all of those, but for now let me just show you around my school and let me tell you about some things that changed my life forever.

Ok, now you know that my school stood in front of the BA-CA Park. This was a two storied building, white in color. When freshly whitewashed with chuna, the outside of my school building used to dazzle shamelessly on summer afternoons. The classrooms weren't whitewashed so often though, and had strange patterns built by dampness every monsoon. In most rooms, there were blackboards. Some had boards that were green, and those looked so much better. My class was one with a green board. It was a largish room that was divided into two parts by a wooden partition. One side was my class, Class IX B, and the other was Class IX A. And, there were these desks and chairs, of the same color as the wooden partition. The polish on the wood was particularly bad, and was made to look worse by all the scribbling with compasses that we had done. These scribbling were never as obscene or direct as they used to be in the boy’s toilets; most often they were either declarations of love or simply some grouse against a teacher. I never had the guts to scribble my secret yearnings though.

What were the other objects in the room? Chalks. Duster. A wardrobe in which absolutely nothing was kept. Fans. And the tube-lights of course. White radiations of which I always hated and the lizards always loved.

Talking about tube-lights reminds me that they always need a starter to get started and often we (I say we because I was part of the class, never part of the gang that did this though. Ah me, the timid little stranger in class!) used to take out the starters and hide them to delay classes. This was especially effective on those unlucky rainy days on which we didn’t get our rainy day holidays.

I want to tell you a lot more about rains really. They have been linked with my life in many ways. Lot of good things happened to me on days when skies were grey and the roads in Calcutta were water logged. To begin with, I was born on one such day. Then, on my fifth birthday (or was it sixth?), when whole of Kankurgachi was submerged in water, I had forced Mummy to get my birthday gift, wading through those waters. Years later, it had rained copiously on the day I finally got admitted to my college - Presidency College. Intriguingly, that was my 19th birthday too. And then of course, CAT 1997 – it rained in December. IIMC interview – 25th March 1998 – it rained. IIMC results day – it rained. And first day in IIMC again – it rained.

Two things here – one, it doesn’t rain round the year in Calcutta. And two, I think other things would have happened too on rainy days that I either don’t remember or have not mentioned here.

Ok, so back to the classroom and the tube-light and lizards. I hate lizards. Perhaps they look slimy, so I hate them. But I hate them. And, they make a strange kind of rhythmic sound that is so easy for humans to replicate. I had learnt how to make that sound way back in class II, and then made that sound in the school assembly when we literally had a pin-drop silence. And, when I was asked who made the sound, I had promptly pointed the finger at the girl next to me. I had taught her how to make that sound, and she had made it too with me. She got a slap for it. Eventually I got two when the whole story was out.

I hate lizards, that’s it.

Ok, so I told you that I will show you around my school. I have shown you the classroom, and you would have realized that there wasn’t much to see there. There used to be something to smell every now and then even till class VI when one of my classmates would lose control of his bowel movement. We will skip that though.

So, get out of the classroom on a typical day. Let us say it is Thursday afternoon, the period after lunch. It is the Drawing class. Drawing sir, PDG, with his long gray hair and much whiter mustache has asked, as usual, who all had not got the paints. Dipti is one of them. She is asked to leave the class with twelve others. I have got the paints, but tell sir that I don't have them either. Standing outside the class, atleast I get to see Dipti. It is a different matter though that I have never spoken to her.

Anyway, ignore us and just walk down the corridor. We have our morning and afternoon assemblies in this corridor that surrounds the central quadrangle. As part of our Socially Useful and Productive Work, we had planted some Dahlias and Chrysanthemums in middle of the quadrangle. You can see the flowers blooming now.

Where one wall of the corridor meets the other, there are the toilets. So, ignore them too and take a right. And, you hit the Physics laboratory on your left. Peep inside. If you see a spectacled middle aged lady sitting on a desk, it must be Sushmita miss, my Physics teacher. If you see a young athletic mustached guy with a smirk that can never be wiped off, well, that is Rajat da. I cannot tell you much about the other stuff you will see inside the Physics laboratory. For one, it was way too long back when I had seen all that. Secondly, even then I hardly knew what all that stuff was. If you are a keen observer, you would have noticed by now the windows of the Physics laboratory open into our small playground.

Talking about playgrounds, actually we had three playgrounds inside the school. One at the back side, the one at the front, and the third was the quadrangle. We were not supposed to run around on the grass in the quadrangle, but invariably that was the place where we enjoyed playing the most. That was also the place for the major punishments – like Nandita miss used to give us – “Go and stand in the quadrangle with your tongues out!”

The playground outside the school was of course the large BA-CA ground. That’s where we practiced for our Sports Day and that’s where our Sports day used to be held.

Ok, now move forward from the Physics Laboratory. This again ends at another corner that has the toilets, so take a right turn again, and you have three classrooms on your left. If you had come here with me, or with Manas perhaps, in 1996, you would have seen an Aquaguard water filter on this wall. This filter was installed that year but didn’t survive long. Manas’ friend, Golgi as he was known, wanted to figure out how the system works and ensured that it never worked again.

But you keep walking. Further down is another corner. On this corner is the staircase. The wall adjacent to that has the staff room. We shall not go inside the staff room for now, as that would be another long story. Let us go down instead to the ground floor. Right underneath the staff room is Madam’s room. Next to that is the school office where Rajesh sir sits. Behind other walls are classrooms or toilets in the same way as they you saw them on the first floor.

Now you must be wondering how the school could accommodate its 1200 students. Well, we had two batches – the morning batch and the day batch. Morning batch timings were from 7 am to 10 am. Manas had the misfortune of being in morning batch for several years. I was always in the day batch. For my batch, the school assembly used to be at 10:30. That was also usually the time I used to leave my home at. I had to run diagonally through the park, and as a result I knew long before we were taught in Geometry that the sum of two sides of a triangle is always greater than the third. Anyways, I used to be invariably late and I would hope that Sapna miss, our strict Vice-Principal would ask me to go back home for coming in late. But that never happened. I had to write in my diary twenty times – “I will never be late again” – and I would be allowed in.

Ok, so by now you would have figured out what a loser I was. Yes, always late to school, standing out even in Drawing class, opening the batting and getting out for naught, having a crush on a girl that I had not spoken to all my life… the list could be endless. In fact, from class III to class IX, I had always been “Promoted on trial”. Probably it took some doing to flunk in Salt Lake (Eng. Med.) School.

But then some things just happened.

We had to choose our sixth subject in Class IX. Or, I should say our sixth subject had to choose between us. The options were – Physical Education, Computers Science or Economics.

My 20 seconds for running fifty meters and the inability to complete three pushups had disqualified me from Physical Education. Now, it was a toss between Computers Science and Economics.

Those were the heady days of computers. Our school had four of them. All kept in the only air-conditioned room in the whole school where no one was allowed to walk in with their shoes on. And, even among them, the most coveted was the one with a color monitor. One in which text appeared in green.

So, there was a high demand for the Computer Science course. The initial plan was to take in students based on their marks in the final examination of class VIII. But somehow this plan got changed. So there was to be a test for the Computer Science course – an aptitude test.

20 students out of our class of 60 were to be selected. I was obviously a rank outsider.

Now, I don’t remember whether it rained that day or not, but an aptitude test was held. It had none of the math questions that I surely wouldn’t have been able to answer. Just some silly sequences and pictorial patterns. Ah, nothing from the syllabus at all.

As it would be, when the results came a lot of people were surprised. I had reconciled myself by then with taking up Economics. But I got the second highest marks in that test. A test in which there were negative marks, I had got 19 out of 25. Highest was 21 out of 25. And, most of the class was below -6.

Something triggered there.

Then came in Sushmita miss. Yes, the same spectacled middle aged lady you just saw in the Physics Laboratory. She joined the school when I was in class IX.

And, she came to take our Computer Science class. Or, was it the Physics class? Well, I cannot remember.

Anyway, she asked a question in the class, and I was the first to respond with the correct answer. Now, I don’t know what it was, was it that one correct answer that I gave or something else, Sushmita miss started believing that I was the best student in her class.

Ask me, was I the best student? No way. No way, at all!

But Sushmita miss believed it nevertheless.

I had already started believing that I was underselling myself to my own self, and started believing in my abilities. And now, there was this expectation of a teacher to be met.

So, what followed was a virtuous cycle. Old habits didn’t change. I would still not do my homework as it needed to be done. I would still have to burn the midnight lamp to pass my exams. But my performance improved. And improved quite a bit.

In my board exams in class X I did rather well. And then, in class XII, I was made the first Head Boy of my school.

Years later, during my MBA, I read about the “Pygmalion Effect”. In a nut shell – if you expect, not just want, someone to do well and convey that in unambiguous terms, then that person is likely to reward you for your belief in them.

For too many years, I had not believed in myself. And, none of my teachers had believed in me. And, when that changed, my life changed.

I feel lucky that this happened to me. I have seen many people whose would have done so well with one such trigger in their life. This, of course, is not to say that I have succeeded in keeping all my self-doubts aside. But then, I do believe that all of us have the inherent ability to achieve whatever we dream of.