G.H.M.H.S.S............................

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!