I got out of Rashtrabhasha in school for a reason that I now feel is so flimsy, how did they let me get away with it? My reason was that “I have to eat lunch with my sister in primary school because we get one dabba.” And that was it. I was allowed to skip Rashtrabhasha for every year it was compulsory. You will ask what is the connection between eating lunch and Rashtrabhasha?
Well, the connection is that Indian schools do not respect any leisure time for children and any free time for non-teaching activities such as games and PT periods or zero hour were regularly encroached by teachers seeking to finish their portions. Is it any wonder that we are a nation that neither values sports nor values downtime for children and adults alike? Have things changed in schools now with fancy new age curriculum ideas that seek to ‘unteach’ making their entries?
Okay, so Rashtrabhasha classes would happen during lunch time. The school would give a 15 minutes break for lunch post which you were expected to be back for class. The only people who got away were girls who went home for lunch because they wouldn’t be able to be back in 15 minutes from their homes. And weirdos like me with younger siblings who were in danger of going hungry because of a slightly delayed lunch time between the primary section and mine.
What a freaky excuse that was. The solution could have obviously been very simple. Your sibling and you should get separate lunch boxes. Somehow, no teacher insisted on it. I don’t know why. And I would have rather dearly clung to ‘my sibling will go hungry’ excuse than have suggested it myself. In any case, I am very thankful I escaped Rashtrabhasha. I have no idea what I did in the free time I had given that the rest of the class had to slog it away in the break. God alone knows how I spent that time.
So, I am talking about Rashtrabhasha because my classmate Megha’s feature film is currently streaming and trending in the top 10 on Netflix and opens with a teen bunking a Rashtrabhasha kind of scholarship exam. Megha was my classmate at the University of Pune and vibrated at a different frequency than everyone else. Go and watch her lovely little film, which is called “What are the Odds?” There is a lot of Megha growing up in Pune in the film. I would have linked it here, but Netflix is not permitting WordPress to do so. You will not regret watching it.
I am not entirely sure when exactly I became aware of Valentine’s Day. I began reading newspapers at a precociously young age and may have come across it there. It may have explained to me why on a certain day, the florist at the corner near WestEnd cinema opposite my school was extra busy with more bouquets displayed than usual. Unlike the other side of the Mula Mutha, Pune camp was generally more liberal about these things and Valentine’s Day was usually a pretty visible affair. I remember it mostly as being marked with more activity than usual around flower stalls during my childhood. In any case, I don’t recall asking my mother for an explanation about this day so I am inclined to believe that I perhaps encountered it through the news and understood for myself what it meant.
What I do remember is how the buzz around Valentine’s Day changed over the years. High school adolescence by which I mean upwards of Std VII, brought along with it the discovery of many things. My stupid school had a barbed wire fence separating the girls section from the boys section. Boys and girls would study together until Std IV and then Std V onward were pushed into two entirely different schools under the same name. This segregation by fence was taken extremely seriously by the teachers, some of whom earned notoriety by humiliating and even rusticating for good, girls who were found talking to boys either during school hours or when in the school uniform. It took me a long time to unlearn a lot of the damage that my school caused in terms of how I perceived the opposite sex. In any case, I had my own thrilling encounter with the fence one day, which now that I think of it was quite filmy.
Sometime in Std VII, I discovered basketball and turned into a regular addict. I had to shoot at least a couple of baskets every day without which I would acquire a raging headache. No, not kidding. I was hooked in every way to the sport and loved it with the passion of a fanatic. Dribbling the ball around the court was the only antidote to the headache. The irony is that I never played on the school team. This was only the privilege of those who could afford to pay ‘coaching fees’ to be able to play, which was beyond our means. I told you, stupid school. This meant that all my day dreams of actually being in the thick of the rivalry with the affluent snobs from St. Mary’s whom I used to then hate with overwhelming passion, amounted to little more than heroic matches I played in my head. Since money was not a concern for inter-house matches, I played my heart out there. It was during the run up to one such match that I was on the court practicing and a voice calling out my name, rang out. Loud and clear. Only, it was from the other side of the fence. Completely stunned, I actually ended up shooting a pretty little basket. Score.
Though it had been in class IV that I last spoke to him, I knew it had to be Tushar. There was just no other way, anybody from dabba batli (what we would call Dastur Boys) would have even cared to remember my name. That too three years after we were made to turn our backs on each other at the end of primary school. Tushar and I were bench partners, played raja rani chor police with chits everyday with our neighboring bench partners, and never ever wrote each other’s names on the blackboard for talking in class when made class monitor. Best of all, he always held up all ten fingers for me whenever the teacher made us sing individually and took an audience poll for ‘ratings’. And then the final exams came and I never saw him after that until that day when he yelled out my name.
For all the name calling that Tushar did, we never really spoke or even saw each other ever. There was just one tuck shop that would service the boys and girls section through two separate windows and the boys with love interests in the girl section would all gather at the fence to boldly gaze and indulge in some name calling. This was really akin to going up to a paan patti in the real world. The girls on the other hand who knew that their special someone lurked on the opposite end would walk to the canteen pretending to not really be concerned about the boys, but their darting glances fooled no one. Like good Indian girls, they wouldn’t hang out at the window though. It would be a quick buying affair and then they would retreat to a safe distance before they could turn back and throw casual glances at the fence to spot if their boy was still hanging around. Given that most of these friendships had blossomed in tuition class or from staying in the same apartment complexes, it was only in school that there was a need for so much covert glancing at one another. After school hours was a different matter all together and I had quite a few of my classmates go out for dates even when still at school going age. Myself? I stayed in a ghost neighborhood with no human soul for interaction leave alone having friends and the exciting lives that some of my classmates led made me quite envious.
So anyway, I did spot Tushar a few times at the fence and it was certainly thrilling to know that someone was making the effort to linger for you. I received confirmation that it was he who called out to me that day because Jaya who was a raging beauty and caused regular heart attacks and swoons every time she went up to the canteen told me that he had asked about me through her friend who was at that time the head boy of DB and who went to the same tuition class as her. By this time we were in class X, but barring one incident when Tushar followed me through the common passage that connected the girls school to the primary school where my sister was studying, we had no encounters whatsoever. Such good kids we were.
That then was my first experience with anything bordering romance. Valentine’s Day in high school was all about looking at those roses and teasing each other with the names of the boys who were interested in you. More importantly, it was ensuring that you had your hands on a good Nancy Drew Files book to read on that day. The thing about Nancy Drew Files is that it had quite a explicit emphasis on romance between Nancy and Ned than in the ordinary Nancy Drew books. As high school approached, Files quickly became a raging hit among even those girls who were not really readers. Tracking and swapping the Files that were read was a hot activity and having a Files tucked into the pocket of your pinafore marked you out as cool. Every time, Valentine’s Day approached, all girls would scramble to ensure that they had at least one Files on hand to read. This was our way of participating vicariously in the proceedings of that day.
But, here too, St Helena’s and Bishop’s caused us much heartburn. An unconfirmed (till date) rumor that circulated, told us that these two schools held a social prom like nite for their students. Now why Bishop’s would spurn the worthies at St Mary’s with whom they too shared a fence to go a longer distance to socialize with the Helenites is beyond me. I was aware that they had some land dispute going on, but what is a little bit of land between two top notch schools, eh? In any case, St Mary’s was apparently left without a boy school partner even though I knew a lot of Vincentians who would have gladly laid down their arms for them – consequently causing much consternation among the St Anne’s girls who were across the road from Vincents. Whatever the case, hearing that Bishops and the Helenites could socialize over prom nite with each other made us all sigh at the thought of what scandalous gossip could be circulating around these schools when we with our measly fence had so much to talk about. In the present day, I doubt St Helena’s is a sought after school at all though both Mary’s and Bishops have held on to their eminence. Oh, how I hated the Maryites. They were everything I was not and of course wished to be though I would have rather died than admitted this then. Think Rajput vs. Model from Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikander and you will know which side of the fence I was on.
Which brings me to Std XI and XII when out of school we entered the scary world of college. I was first admitted to Symbiosis which scared and intimidated the hell out of me. Not only was it very far from my home, but I also did not know a soul there. Everybody was so much more self assured, so much more cooler, and so much more prettier than me. I fled to Ness Wadia which offered me the comforts of Pune Camp and where a lot of my schoolmates had taken admission, sensibly. Still the inhibited geek, romance and Valentine’s Day in college was nothing more than walking across the road to an Archie’s outlet and browsing through the cards there. That was all the romance in the lives of some of my friends and I. That and Bally Sagoo’s remix of Pehla nasha. This version of the song was released sometime when I was in college and it made all of us very dreamy. I think we even much preferred this version to the original.
Along with Archies and Pehla Nasha, there was Rahul. I first saw him in German class which is the language I opted for in college. It was a disaster. I wish I had never laid my eyes on him. I did not know how to handle this very obvious attraction I felt for this person, which stemmed from the fact that he spoke German like a pro, was every inch the suave school topper from St Vincent’s, and had a 1000 watt smile with thick hair that lushly fell over his forehead. He was a Leo and everything that Linda Goodman says Leos are. Now, when I see him balding and being teased by his wife for his receding hairline in the profile pictures that she puts up of them, I can’t help but laugh at the Rahul I once knew. Naam toh sunna hoga?
It didn’t help that those were the days when ShahRukh Khan ruled the box office as Rahul. Dil toh Pagal Hai, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, and Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham being the prime culprits.I never really learned German as well as I should have. In spite of attending Max Mueller Bhavan. You see, he was there too and the darling of all of the instructors. My half-baked knowledge of the language, which is the language I use to scold myself in even today, is the legacy of the painful teenage years of yore thanks to him.
Five years of Ness Wadia only told me that I needed to pursue what I truly wanted to do. As the rest headed out to their MBAs, I switched gears and went to study communication at DCS. This time around, I was much more prepared for life across the river and embraced the University of Pune with all my heart and soul. Life after that was never the same. It was instead, the best thing ever. I discovered myself, grew in confidence, shed so much of baggage only to acquire a set of new ones, but in the bargain became the person I was meant to be and doing the things I was meant to do. Somewhere along the way Rahul was forgotten.
I don’t know where Tushar is and I hope all is well with him. I do know where Rahul is and am glad to see that life is good to him. My school and college days are thankfully over and I no longer hate St Mary’s even a teeny weeny bit. Pehla nasha though, I still like. You had to be me in Ness Wadia browsing through and giggling over greeting cards with friends to understand why this remixed song appealed to us so much even though the original is by all accounts the better one of the two. Today, when I went to look it up, I was surprised to see that there does not exist a single good print of the video. I actually came across it accidentally when looking for music to write to after being at a wit’s end over some work stuff that I am trying to finish for a deadline tomorrow. Instead, ended up writing this post. And am now in trouble. Bye.
It is a pretty good deal when there are no translations for things to get lost into. Just the plain unvarnished sounds of languages you do not understand. You respond not to comprehension, but to rhythm and the cadence of the syllables. You listen keenly as the reader threads these words with expressions, emotions, and accents. Your attention stays on the speaker, unwavering and hypnotized. The phone lies forgotten. There is nothing to google, nothing to look up, no quotes to tweet, no pictures to instagram.
At Lekhana this weekend, the time in between sessions was dedicated to reading excerpts from the work of authors who participated in #awardwapsi. While the intent was to read the translated works of regional language authors, translations were not always available. None of us really minded. While the Tamil, Hindi, and Urdu works were still accessible to me in varying degrees, I found myself responding to Malayalam, Gujarati, and Kannada with nothing but the reader’s dramatization to bring alive the language. These pockets of non-comprehension had my undivided attention. I simply did not understand enough to do anything, but listen. It was a novel feeling in ways both literal and metaphorical.
***
Later, one of the speakers at the festival – Raghu Karnad, read out excerpts from his book that through his family history details the Indian contribution to the second world war. I was only half listening to him since I have read a lot about the book. And then my head suddenly jerked up as if responding to a pull from a long time ago. He was articulating sounds that were intensely familiar to me, but forgotten. My tongue would roll over these every day and though I had no idea what I was saying, they were words that kickstarted my day, every day all through my school days.
As he stumbled on those words, I recited them to myself with far more fluency than him. They were no longer a part of my routine, but I had no difficulty in summoning them back from time. I wonder if he knew the meaning of what he was saying. I did not. He apparently has Parsi ancestry from the maternal side of his family. I was unaware of this since I had thought all along that his mother was Coorgi. When I was taught these words they came with no explanations. I wonder why children are thought so unimportant and while obedience is expected by supervising adults, explanations are seldom returned to them.
Thanks to Karnad, I came home and googled the words that all these years were only sounds to me. It is a Zoroastrian prayer. I studied in a school run by the Parsi community and our school day began with Yathu Ahu Vairyo every day. Since I was a part of the school choir, I would often go to the Agiyari to sing and to hear the Dasturjees at the fire temple recite this prayer was always a treat. As non-Zoroastrians, we would sit outside, but really did not mind because our Parsi teachers and classmates were always so apologetic and hospitable. The community is quite a fun and eccentric collective anyway and it is hard to be offended with anything they do. For a moment I was back in the school assembly. Eyes closed, hands folded, reciting words I had no idea about. Until today.
Closing the day with the knowledge of forgotten sounds that are suddenly infused with meaning. Years after having left them behind. The whole thing was like this Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem coming to life.
I waited for poetry today, but it did not come my way so I went looking for it, but returned empty handed all the same. This is the proper words waala poetry, not the metaphoric kind of poetry that one finds in random moments. I am in dire need of poetry in the traditional sense of the term right now, but since it refuses to happen, I can only surmise that perhaps, sometimes, unless you already acknowledge the poetry that a short while ago, had enveloped you in its profoundness, newer verses may not find their way to you. So, this is an attempt to remedy that.
In an earlier post, I had written about listening to Mann kasturi re while reading the lyrics of the song. It is by far the most well written song for me from this year. What I did not write about at that time was another line that wasn’t part of any of the songs in Masaan, but which I found thanks to the film. I had at that time turned the lines over and over in my head marveling at the sheer force of its thought and how sometimes I too have taken a leap of faith based on nothing more than audacious optimism. I wish these lines had been there with me in those moments, it would have made those leaps far less terrifying. These lines are by Dushyant Kumar. I found them here and they said,
Kaun kehta hai ke aasmaan main suraakh ho nahin sakta, ek patthar toh tabiyyat se ucchhalo yaaron.
Even if the ideas are common, poetic thoughts in languages other than English often resonate and appeal to me more simply because it is not the language of my everyday. I hold on to them and remember them for long after so much so that I can recite them verbatim – something that does not happen to me with thoughts that are expressed in English which is the language I am most fluent in be it reading, writing, or speech. The very nature of the ‘foreignness’ of languages like Hindi, Urdu, and Punjabi and the unexpected contexts of encountering them are personally valuable to me because I wouldn’t know where to go looking for them if the onus were on me to find them because I don’t know enough about the tongue. So sometimes, when I do meet these verses, I find myself more vulnerable to their messages and what they have to say. Not only do I not know the first thing about poetry, I am also not interested enough in poetry to pick up a book of verses and read by myself. Hence, whenever poetry happens to me, I feel like these fleeting encounters that I have with verses in the midst of my prosaic life embody what the true essence of poetry anyway is – to create small embroidered pockets of restfulness that are threaded together by the prettiest combination of thoughts and words to usher in meaning that lights up your heart. It is why I love Hindi film songs so much. Their lyrics set to tunes offer me a short cut to poetic thoughts that I am only too happy to receive.
These lines by Dushyant Kumar have little to do with why I need poetry right now, but I feel I must record and acknowledge this because serendipity sending poetry my way is my only hope and perhaps this will appease whoever is in charge of these things.
P.S. I find my school education a tragic waste of my time. While it equipped me with the rudimentary basics of literacy, there seems to have been much that I missed out on. Chief of which is a rather underwhelming experience of learning about both Hindi and Marathi literature that were the regional languages I learnt in school. Why weren’t we introduced to thoughts such as these that occurred to poets like Dushyant Kumar? Why, after spending grades I-X studying Marathi and grades V-X studying Hindi can I not even think of blogging in any of these languages? I made a last ditch attempt to learn to read and write Tamil in my last five months in the United States and am semi-literate in my mother tongue now, but that is all. I spent three months learning to read and write Kannada when I moved to Bangalore, but I have forgotten much of that too because I did not keep up with practice and the alphabets are back to being squiggles that confuse me in my attempts to distinguish one from another. What a waste of time spent in school. So much so for coming from a country that boasts of linguistic diversity.
P.P.S. There are a couple of lines from my grade X Marathi text book which are the only ones I ever remember and something that I will never forget because the story of Phulvedya Mai (A lady who was mad about flowers) had a question as poetic as this – “Yevdhushya mannala jhapaycha tari kiti?” This heart so little; how much can one control its desires?
Another line in this story went – “Vede vha, vha thode vede. Nehmi shahane rahnyat, kai shahanpan aahe?” Be mad. Be a little mad. What is the wisdom in always being so wise?
I used to sing in the school choir. Pune has this whole inter-school choral festival twice every academic year and one of the times used to be just before the X’mas vacation. I loved choir practice like nothing else. Okay, playing basketball comes a close second. Even with the fair Mr. Antia who used to constantly needle us saying the St. Mary’s girls were way better than us and nothing we could do would beat it. We would curse him wondering why he taught us if he liked the Maryites so much. Antia used to teach music in a lot of the schools in the camp area and sometimes, he would tell us that the Helenites had it coming for us this time around. Grrrr.
I studied in a school run by Zorastrians and for some Parsi girls in our school, he was the first unacknowledged crush they had. I remember once a classmate excitedly came and told us. “I could smell his aftershave!”. He would often be featured in the local newspapers for his abiding passion of collecting train sets which only added to his (ahem) mystic. The irony of this all was that Antia was rumoredly quite gay.
Anyway, as the day of the show would near, we would all march down to Gulati Hall in St. Vincent’s school. If you grew up in Pune camp, this was the boy’s school to be in. (Sorry, Bishop’s. My loyalties are with the Vincentians. Unless the Loyalites come on the scene, but being on the other side of the city, they were too far away for us to care in school). We would walk down once to Gulati Hall for a rehearsal and twice over the weekend to sing for the final show. I spent a blissful three years singing my very alto vocal chords out in the choir. I would love whatever song we would be made to sing. I would often wonder, why Antia would not tell us who the original singers were or where he got these songs from. Maybe, we were too unimportant to be given a context to what we were singing. Now, however, I haz the Internet. Little did I now, that when we girls were singing “I talk to the trees”, it was a Clint Eastwood song that we were reprising. I discovered this only today when the song came unbidden to me and I googled it up. Here is the original. It is from a 1969 musical called “Paint your Wagon”.
By the looks of it, the spirit of the choir festival has kept pace with time. There is this one video of the Abhinav Vidyalaya choir team completely rocking the show with “O Fortuna” and Metallica’s “Nothing else matters” a few years ago. It was a pleasant surprise. For one, I did not realize that schools from the other side of the Mula-Mutha had begun to join us in the choir festival. For another, we were not lucky to sing such songs.I don’t know if Antia is still on the school music scene or if it is still held in Gulati Hall. Miss Doctor, our resident school music teacher passed away a long long time ago. I generally hated my school days except for a few instances here and there of which singing in the choir was one. And for that, I will forever cherish the memories of Antia and Doctor ganging up and screaming at us for not getting the pitch right. They were terrors, but they gave me lovely musical memories.
I was once part of the choir that very famously sang in a garbage dump near our school as part of a cleanliness drive. Miss Doctor would write up the lyrics and set it to chartbusting Hindi film tunes. One of our welcome songs for Dasturjee – the head priest for the Parsi community in Pune was set to the tunes of “Ilu ilu kya hain”. Only we sang it as, “Aao aao, khushiyan manao. Sab milkar jhumo naachao, jee bhar kar gao” Nothing to beat the sheer cheesiness of it, but how I enjoyed the whole thing. Another time, I was part of the choir that welcomed Field Marshal Sam Maneckshaw when he graced the opening ceremony of a newly renovated Parsi Agiyari in Nana Peth. The food after the ceremony was one of the yummiest I have ever had as was the warm hospitality of the Parsis. Since non-Parsis are not allowed to enter the agiyari, they went out of their way to ensure that we were comfortable and apologetically explained that it was a religious rule.They are a community I remain very fond of even today.
To end, here is the Abhinav Vidyalaya team. The lucky buggers:
We had this rain poem in school.. In Std IV if memory serves me right, not sure.. It was in Primary school though.. It often floats to the surface during deluges, today being one such day..
A sorry attempt at translitering Marathi to English.. And if anyone knows the whole text and name of this rhyme, please help me out:
Aabhal vazla dhadha dhoom Vaara sutla soo soo soo Veez chamkli chak chak chak Ikde tikde lak lak lak
Heer toh badi sad hai 