So many Alma Maters!

 Almost everyone I know went to one school, maybe two, all their schooling life and one, maybe two universities for their higher studies. Me? Well, my crazy parents, crazier self, and craziest life had made sure that I have handfuls of Alma Maters and dozens and dozens of “classmates” left behind and lost, who I would have loved to still have in my life. In this too, my life has been quite extraordinary.

I was all of 2 and a half years old, when I insisted that I should go to school. Why? At a time when earliest school age was around seven, why did I want to go at 2 and a half? Well, we were at the IIT campus in Kanpur, and while dad did his class and lab work for his MTech, mom and I stayed in the quarters. In a city it might have been fine, enough stimulation and company and things happening. But IIT campuses are isolated, quiet and lonely at the best of times, designed to help prioritise studying above everything else. The only other kids around were older than me, and would traipse off to school, leaving me the only kid home. One day, I decided enough was enough, and told mom very clearly that I was going to school – that mythical land where all the kids went to have day long fun!

At that time, the IIT wives ran what is today called a play school. Kishalay was – in the late 1970s – a very unusual place. The children danced and sang and played, as did the teachers, and somewhere along the way, magically it seemed back then, some learning took place. My parents also put in a request that I not be “taught” … just allowed to play and sing along. So, that was my first school. As has been the case, more often than not, it turned out to be a great experience – what I can remember of it.

When we moved back to Dehradun, my parents deemed me old enough to start kindergarten. So, I went to one of the then small but now world-famous schools of Doon – Bright Lands. I was there for a grand total of TWO whole weeks! In my second week, the “auto” which was hired at monthly rates to bring me to and from school failed to bring me home. What one needs to remember is that this is a 3-year-old, in school in a city for the first time. When my panicked mother asked the auto driver why he didn’t bring me, the teacher who also travelled with us jumped in and started screaming about how the child should have had the sense to some find the auto on her own, and the auto driver has no responsibility to make sure the children he is being paid to bring home, actually get home. The principal of the school… when informed of the teacher’s misbehaviour, turned around and not just supported her, but claimed my parents were irresponsible and rude. My extremely principled and progressive father promptly told the man where to stuff his “great school”, and took me home.

This was when they decided I was better off in a school with the other kids my age, among our family friends group. So, a few of us, people who are in the rare category of “still in touch”, were sent to the Pine Hall school on Rajpur Road. Frankly, I have absolutely no memory of the two years I spent at this one. The only thing I have from this time, is a photograph of a tiny me, with two of my friends, in one of those class line-up things.

 

Then came Vidya Mandir, also on Rajpur Road, which is now a huge institution called Scholars Home. The name change happened while I was a student there, and I do have mixed memories of the place, but mostly good, I think. Pretty happy school life, friends, pranks, a few adventures, and so on. Overall a good time, which, again, for some reason was decided had to end.

So, entering class five, I joined probably the best school of my life, Mr Marshall’s school. Today it is still one of the best in Dehradun – which is saying a lot – and runs under the name of Marshalls School. Back then, in that prehistoric past, Mr Marshall himself was still running the show.  Francis Russell Marshall, British educator and all around nice man, made sure that his school was very different from other Indian schools at the time. Concepts that are all the rage now, so popular in these international and world schools, we had back then. There were no exams until class 5. Classes were fun, often in the open, and always playful. In the early 1980s, girls had the option of choosing the “trousers” uniform instead of the skirt, and – my favourite – we all wore shorts for sports/games days, none of that divided skirt nonsense Indian schools foist on female students. I was quite happy, had my first (and second) crush there, made some amazing friends I wish I had some way to trace now, and would have happily ended my schooling career from there, but – of course – my crazy life had other plans.

 

 We moved to Madras in the middle of my class 6. In the middle of the academic year, the first decent school we heard of, we went to. Now, my father always had two main principles with regard to our education – no single gender institutions, and no donation. So, wherever we have gone, whenever we changed schools, it was always admission by examination, not a single penny to be given as donation or capitation. So, bhai and I, gave the exam and stated at Boston Matriculation School, Chennai.

This one was a horror show. Used to the free mixing, open, friendly, secular atmosphere of the Dehradun schools, the segregation, orthodoxy and narrow-minded outlook and atmosphere in the school made me very uncomfortable. A girl in my class was beaten – with a wooden ruler – because she claimed she liked a boy from a senior class. She has never spoken to him, he didn’t know she existed, but they held a school assembly and shamed and beat a girl of class 6 – for daring to step out at lunchtime to LOOK at the boy passing by!! In the same larger event, I was accused of making “adult jokes”.

Now I happily admit to be an excellent cracker of adult jokes in my adulthood, but in class 6 I was such an innocent that I am astounded to think of myself that way, when I look back now. So the accusation was not just unfair, but absolutely false, and the entire public beating was too shocking for words! Luckily for me, by the time I finished out the 6^th, my parents had decided Boston Matric was not good enough for us and decided that we should change schools.

The rest of my stint at Madras was in the same school – one Sri Sankara Senior Secondary School, Vidya Press Road, Adayar. Nice as Madras was in so many ways, the gender segregation and orthodoxy were things that always got on my nerves. In Sankara, the school was officially co-ed, or my father would never have sent me there, but it was weird as hell. I still haven’t figured out the mystery of the section A which was all boys, the section B which was all girls, and the section C which was actually co-ed.

There were other weirdnesses, like the side eye everyone from the sweeper to the principal would give you if they saw a girl and boy just standing and talking in the corridor, there were strange teacher like Vijaya Joseph who would insist that you try to “hear the smell”. But there were also good teachers. There were a ton of Sanskrit shlokas to be chanted at assembly, and a “pandit” who made you memorise the Geeta. But there was also a principal who would admit a student thrown out of 2 schools for failing, and tell his teachers that anyone could get a good result out of a good student, and the real test of a teacher was to get this kind of a child to pass.

Overall Sankara was a decent enough experience. But, crazy me and crazy parents, dad decided to move to Bombay at the end of my class 11. Now plenty of people change boards after 10^th, for one reason or another, but no one changes cities, and no one changes boards after the 11^th! In fact it would be horribly difficult to come in at half point of what is essentially a 2-year course, and expect to do well, is foolhardy. And since the result of the 12^th standard boards basically decides your entire career, it can be a horribly bad move too. But, as my teachers from Sankara pointed out, there would be far more opportunity and exposure in a place like Bombay!

So, the next academic year found me enrolled in Patkar College, Goregaon, Bombay. The strongest memories of this time, sadly, involve the riots. The year began well, amazing new city – what teenager wouldn’t love being in Bombay! – new friends, new interests, so many new things. The first time I set foot in a bar, with friends, the first time college friends celebrated a birthday in a restaurant, the first time I watched the shooting of a song or a film scene, the first time I saw all those Bollywood people, only seen on screen so far, just walking around, buying milk, going to market, Bombay was a lot of firsts. Half tat first year was spent less in class and more hanging out outside Filmistan Studios (which was, conveniently, just opposite the college) hoping to – and succeeding in – catching a glimpse of another screen icon.

The rhythm was interrupted, suddenly, unexpectedly, and violently, by the post-Babri riots. That was my first experience of violence on such a level, such long curfews and confinements, and such sustained atmosphere of apprehension and fear. I lived through the post Indira Gandhi assassination anti Sikh Pogroms, of course, but I was small, and we were in Dehradun which had been nowhere as bad as Delhi. And the riots in Chennai after MGR died (of natural causes) was more like a day of vandalism and looting than sustained violence. Nothing in my experience that far, in all my 17 years, had come close to the level of horror, anxiety, and terror of those days.

By the time some semblance of calm descended on the city again, there wasn’t that much of class 12^th left, and a ton of syllabus to get through – new board, new curriculum, making up 2 years’ worth in a few months – and the pressure was mounting. Just about a month later, while we were buckling down to the task and focusing on classes and studies, the second round of riots struck. Various competitive exams were already happening at this point, and I remember us – the whole crazy family – driving across the city while Bombay burned around us, from Andheri to Churchgate, to give some exam or the other, because they hadn’t notified us of cancellation.

So, the latter half of 12^th passed in curfews, holidays (Ganpati and Diwali total almost a month), and exams, and soon I was doing a BSc in Zoology. This was the one time in my life when I didn’t choose exactly what I wanted to do. This was also the first, and only, time my amazing dad had an attack of Indian father syndrome. He insisted I take science, even though I was reluctant, because I had the marks for it, and – as he put it – you can always switch to arts (as humanities were called back then) later in life. And somehow, I lacked the conviction in my own interests to insist I do English Literature, as I wanted. But by the time the year ended, I was sure this is not what I wanted.

Another college, another place, 2 years making up a 3 year course (bit of a running theme in my life), and I emerged clutching an honours degree, and trundle back to “home” – the yet another new city of Pune.

 Pune University was amazing. Fun, open, fairly progressive in parts, farcical and story worthy in others, but overall quite the ride, PU was what I imagined college abroad must be like.

And THAT, the final institution, concluded the great educational saga of my life, bringing the grand total up to 10!