What’s in a name?
Gokulanatha Hindu Mahajana Higher Secondary
School. (catches one’s breath)
If you do not believe me, go look it up on
Google. This was my school in Salem, Tamilnadu, India.
I spent 6 years of my life in that school.
As schools go, this was like any other school. Had a fixed syllabus, belonged
to the state board, had a decent pass percentage; after all these years I do
not distinctly recall if it was supported by the government or not, but it was
certainly a private school.
Ours was boys only school. I still do not
understand why our school did not have its name as G.H.M.B.H.S.S? (One
additional B would not have made the school’s name longer)
The school was so strict about it being
boys only that there were no female teaching staff too.
We always envied the other school students
who could easily say they were from Little Flower or CSI. On being asked which
school we hailed from, we always had to stop whatever we were saying, take a
pause, collect a long breath and start saying Gokula….
Feeling the blues
While I will have no major grievances about
my school, anyone who studied there is certain to have one major complaint. Our
school uniform.
No other school in the world can match this
sartorial disaster.
Khaki pants and blue shirt.
Not a pleasant blue. The shade is probably
registered as GHMHSS blue. There can’t be a bigger eyesore than few hundred
boys clad in this horrible combination covering the entire assembly ground on a
Monday morning.
Thankfully, unlike many other schools, our
school insisted on this only during the morning session of Monday. We carried a
spare shirt and changed to a different shirt during the lunch recess.
The long walk to freedom
The PT (those days it was physical training
and later it transformed to physical education) periods were the most sought
after. There were two periods in a week. As our school did not have a
reasonably big ground (the assembly ground, a square field surrounded on all 4
sides by ugly and imposing buildings housing class rooms, was only good enough
to do some random shit during the lunch recess) we walked to a really big
stadium, about a km from our school building. This was indeed a big stadium, at
times it even hosted a cricket match between Tamilnadu state team and Sri Lanka
national team. (This was before Sri Lanka achieved test playing nation status)
The human right guardians and child welfare consultants of today would cry
murder today if they had seen our “march to the ground”. About 80 students,
from two classes, marched two single files from the school to the stadium. They
were led by the PT master. This procession crossed a main road just outside the
school main gate, entered a small patch of sandy stretch where five hundred
students pissed twice a day, every day, crossed a railway track, at times
waiting for a train to pass, walked on the other side of the railway track and
reached the stadium. The journey to and back from the stadium usually consumed
30% of our allocated time and comprised more than half of our intended workout.
It was pure unadulterated chaos once we entered the stadium. There was no
structure, no organization nor any leader. The PT master was the least
interested. His job was shepherding the students to the stadium and bringing
them back to the school. He usually disappeared once we made it to the stadium
and magically reappeared only to take us back. Appointed monitors of the
classes brought sports equipment from the store room.
To call those stuffs
sports equipment is a travesty. Some played basketball. Have you ever seen 30
players on a basketball field? It was more like pass the parcel on the dining
table than a full-fledged game at any point.
We played cricket with baseball
bats and balls.
Some simply ran around the stadium. It was enough if you had
sweated.
You may find it hard to believe but we did go back to school, in those
sweat stained dresses, continued the remaining classes and went home at the end
of the day. If the school ever had an evaluation system for its staff, how they
rated the PT teacher was a mystery.
We kept a 5 paise coin on the railS and
watched the wheels of the train roll it into a long strip that we kept as a
souvenir. Later we kept rocks and see them pulverized by the relentless force
of the train. We kept increasing the size of the rock that could be balanced on
the rail and all of them were shattered by the wheels. At times the vibrations,
caused by the oncoming train, dislodged the stones. If the train was not close
enough we went and re-positioned the rock only for the driver to blow the
whistle so loud that it caused us to jump in alarm and dislodge the stone by
ourselves. Stupid actions looking back, but they were good when they happened.
Who is Eric Arthur Blair?
No idea, right?
The guy who wrote 1984.
Ah! You mean George Orwell.
See, we know many by their popular names
than by their original names.
It was the same with most of our teachers.
We knew them by the names we had given them. There is no malice in it.
Nicknames to teachers are as old as civilization itself.
(It never once occurred to me that my
mother was a teacher as well and in all probability the students in her school
had a name to her too; well it is what I would label as professional hazard of
being a teacher)
Padhi Paramasivam (Lord Shiva / 2)
Pic Courtesy : Pinterest.
We must start with our headmaster. He had a
squint. In Tamil language the description for a man with a squint is “1.5 eyes”
As Lord Shiva is known to have three eyes, our head master was one half of him,
as far as eyes were concerned ,and he was Padhi Paramasivam (Padhi is half in
Tamil and the term paramasivam was chosen to have an alliterative sound to it)
Lambda
Pic Courtesy: Wikipedia
He was our science teacher. Physics,
actually. He was exceptionally lean. And he had the slight forward thrust of
his upper torso as he walked. When you watched him in profile, ambling from the
teacher’s room to the class, when his hands were aligned with his body, not
swinging away, he resembled the Greek alphabet lambda.
And what can be more fitting to a science teacher
than a Greek alphabet?
Ashok blade
Pic Courtesy : Youtube
This was a shared sobriquet. We generously
granted this to many of our teachers. Of all the shaving blades that were in
use, somehow this brand developed a reputation for getting blunt too quickly.
There was probably no truth in that claim, but well circulated opinions were
often accepted in those days instead of challenging them. So, any teacher who
was capable of making a boring subject even more boring was immediately
bestowed this. We had a cryptic numbering system ( learnt from our history
lessons, William the first, William the second, ….) by which the combination of
Ashok Blade and a numeral pointed to a specific individual.
Auto Walker
This was our English teacher. If he had
been a tad shorter he would have been classified as a dwarf. A tad taller, he
could have become one of those short people. But he was of this magical height
which earned him this name. To understand the significance of this name, you
must know what an auto-rickshaw is. Even if you had not seen a real one, you
must have had glimpses of it on magazines, seen them in films (remember
Octopussy). One gets inside this vehicle already in a sitting position. And
while disembarking, you get your legs out first and the body comes out almost
horizontal to the ground and then straightens up once out of the confines of
the vehicle.
This man could walk inside this vehicle and step out. Hence the name,
auto walker!
Mobile Tiffin Box
He taught us math.
He was a mysterious man. There were more
stories about him than all the other teachers combined. The headmaster (the
erstwhile mentioned Padhi Paramasivam) was his student, he was the state
topper, he lost his son, the district education officer was afraid of him, he
never spoke with the other teachers, his salary was the highest in the school,
he would sit with his legs stretched out on the table when the headmaster came
on rounds and not even get up (why would he? The headmaster was his student 😊) and so on…
We had no ways to check if any or all were
true. We did not have to.
Students in their high school days usually believed
everything so long as it was unbelievable.
The other teachers used to bring text books
or notes to their classes, but not he. He usually brought a bag with him to the
class.
From time to time he used to extract stuff
that he would eat, during the class.
They were the usual snack variety that
broadly fell into the category of a “tiffin” in southern part of India. That
bag was actually the Mobile tiffin box and he inherited the same name.
The harmless abbreviations
Not all teachers were lucky (or unlucky,
depending on from which side you are viewing it) and many just got away with
their initials. It was a school run by a well-known Brahmin community and most
teachers were either Iyers (the horizontals) or Iyengars (the verticals).
The two innocuous broad categories are based on how they smeared their forehead
with their respective divine allegiance.
Pics Courtesy : youtube
And in such Brahmin community the names
usually had about five or six god’s names in them.
Srinivas Ramanujan Venkat Subramanian will become
SRVS and thus we had PRSK, PVR, SVSM, KVSR etc..
My daughter had some really terrific
stories from her school days too, the regimental Army Public School. Making fun
of teachers in an Army school must have been more normal.
My best recollection of our family moments
is those evenings when my daughter used to enact her teachers’ actions (with a generous
dose of exaggeration) leaving my son literally ROFL
And Karma is a bitch!
My daughter is a teacher in a school now!
