X Public

The late 70s were the emergency and post emergency years. The fall of Indira Gandhi & congress party and rise of Janata Party to power happened at the center. I remember suddenly everything was measured, displayed and rates controlled. So Idli at restaurants had to be of a measured weight – 50 gm @ 25 paise - prominently displayed and any customer can ask it to be weighed.  Though congress was out of power I think the school management was always with the Congress party and we had Indira Gandhi come and address a meeting at our school grounds, the closest I got to see her. Though politics was not on top of our minds the winds of change and the effects governments can have on us was dawning and quite ominously. In TN Anna DMK led by MGR came to power and there were changes to the reservations policy where TN led the country and while it benefited many it also affected some. The pool of seats available in the open category shrunk by more than half as reservation touched close to 70%. My brother Ram and like him many others suffered setbacks in getting admissions for professional courses and brought a major variable in what next. Ram went to do BSc Zoology at Chennai instead of Medicine. 

Blue shirt and bell bottoms

These adolescent years brought need for independence, urge to explore and friends circles to the forefront. There were groups for different activities like -travelling to school would mean a bunch of us taking the same bus from the same stop. Lunch was with another gang which got lunchboxes delivered at lunch time. Evening sports & games was another group cutting across years and weekends would mean cycling to friends’ homes to study, go for a movie or see some event nearby or just hangout. Prabhat, KS, Kutti Ravi, Babu Venkatesh, Sundaram, Sameer Thakur, Mansoor , Sridhar were frequented, we would get indulged periodically by the mothers making us feast on lunch or dinner. The school was a co-ed but largely conservative so while some would flirt there was no teenage romance. But dressing and being fashionable was important. Personal statements started getting formed. Bell bottoms and Step cut (for hair) were very popular. Step cut was not allowed at home and getting tailor Verghese to stitch a trouser with bottom more than 24” would not happen as he would say it will not look nice or the cloth length is not enough. School had prescribed shoes but after school was about Bata’s Quovadis and Topper model of chappals – but we used to have a shop custom make these models for us which would both last and not be branded. I had this blue striped shirt which remained a favourite for probably 5-6 years well into my college days. Movies and music offered most of entertainment as TV had still not reached. Listeners choice in Radio (we had a old radio with tube diodes/ triodes), finding the music studios’ which would record songs on to tapes from LP discs as per a collection and using the 60 or 90 min tape fully without leaving empty spaces were frequent pastimes. Kumar Athimber (my cousin) I think made a trip to Japan and got us a cassette recorder which made listening to music fun. And the voice recorder was a leap and came in quite handy to record performances.  

Summer holidays now could be solo trips (still to visit other family members). I think it was summer of 79 when I went to spend a brief vacation with my cousin Ramesh Anna. I think he had asked me to come over when he visited Coimbatore and I landed up there. He lived in a bachelor pad (a lodge) with a bunch of bachelors in Madurai. It was great experience of getting to see how bachelors lived and had fun. Bed coffee came to the room, and breakfast was at an Iyer mess. On some days I could go with them to work, Anna worked in a bank and had a lot of tallying work that had to be done and could help. I could also visit some of his friends’ offices to see how things work. It was fascinating to see how newspapers came out – I think one of them was in Indian Express and seeing how the news bits came through telex, got composed, edited, typeset, lead cast and then printed all through the evening and night was great. Little did I know then that I would later land up to work in Madurai.

Over 9^th & 10^th the school prepared for the boards and built a good suspense. Competition was flamed and fueled not just in studies but also in other fields. The advent of group study or testing each other with a twisted question or trivia in the morning of the exam was fun. During the 10th something happened that made a bunch of either induce or indulge in graffiti at school. The principal Mr. Michael Ponnusamy had so much experience, that he smartly rounded us up soon. But what he did was different. Looking back, I think he just addressed our conscience. He did not get into asking who did what, call your parents, give a written apology etc. He just called us in small groups asked to apologise and not repeat it for life, I think it was powerful and reinforced the belief that if you realise a mistake and be conscious on not repeating it, it is more than enough. 

As one prepared for the board exams and it was a week or two away had my first experience of a dog bite I was cycling home and it was one of the neighbours dogs which they would train to chase cycles as an exercise and while he was familiar with me no answers as to why he dived to bite me. Though he was a house dog the advice was to take the shots – 11 or 16 I forget but one had to go to the government General Hospital. It was an interesting but avoidable routine one had to go through of reaching the GH before 8 getting the shot and then rushing to school for the exams. GH showed how government institutions worked and the scale of people needing treatment and the mismatch with resources of what they had to deliver service, which still continues.   

1980 - X Public - our first board exams for 10^th was to be taken. There was the attached tension of letting thing go outside the sphere of influence. The question paper is set by the board so not predictable, the correction will be done by teachers from other schools who will not know you. The formality and diligence of the public exam system of hall ticket, an elaborate exam seating arrangement, the invigilators, the profound silence, printed question paper (not cyclostiled) and crisp special answer sheets is still fresh in mind.  The 10+2 system kicked in, increasing schooling by 1 more year in the CBSE system (which earlier had just years and then straight to graduate courses). The issue of children not beign able to get into professional courses both due to reservations and CBSE board being frugal with its marks was a simmering volcano. 

We finished the exams and it was clear that the school is going to go through changes and mostly not continue with CBSE and drop the +2, which meant we will need to look for another school...