Memories from School....

Being slightly good in your scorecards is a huge advantage during your childhood, where the score or rank in the exams is a kind of single appraisal point. And it was due to that I always managed to get unscathed though at times I felt very guilty when some of my friends’ parents chided their children for this…and through the corners of my eyes, I could always see them using the choicest of words for me in their minds

Childhood was awesome fun and we were real pranksters and naughty. Right from sneaking a small binocular in my bag (Mom had brought it for me, least aware of the use it would be subsequently put to) to use it for the common good of peeking into the girl’s common room to reciting sections of some porn magazine to a very attentive class (obv when the teacher wasn’t present), we were a bunch of real naughty guys. While there were many such incidents till class X, here are some which I often get nostalgic about.

• Aaja meri gaadi mai baith ja- This was Ritesh at his best. He had a huge crush on this girl, 3 years our junior and one fine day we were driving back in his Ambassador when we see this girl, going infront of us. We go near her, stop the car, open the door and play the then famous Baba Sehgal’s ”Aaja meri gaadi mai baith ja..aaja meri gaadi mai baith ja”. Needless to say, we had a tough time apologizing to the principal the next day.
• The blade and the ass: this was what was supposed to be total harmless fun but went nasty. There was this new guy, a boarder who had joined our class. Now in the background of the typical dayscholar Vs boarder rivalry, we knew there would be something today. So, a blade was put in the chair where he was supposed to sit. And unfortunately the blade cut through and made way right in some unsolicited territory. While no major harm was done, it was bad enough for the class to again get suspended.
• Alex and Co love for tadi (local liquor) : this was particularly amusing. Alex and some of his friends had this local liquor called Tadi in one of our picnics and developed a fondness for it. Given its resemblance to Limca, they could easily bribe the canteen guy to procure it, bottle in Limca and give it to them, which they could easily sip after classes. What happened post being caught was anybody’s imagination.
• Chirania’s condom collection- people have weird fantasies. Chiru had this really weird collection of condoms which he kept meticulously arranged in a photo-album, with the condom pasted on the right flap and its description in the left. (He never got to use any). Now the funniest part is that in one of the box room raids, it got caught and in the dinner hall that night it was really really amusing to have the Vice Principal holding the album, flicking it and saying,”So this is the source of Chirania’s inspiration”
• Rendering a teacher unconscious- this I must say was over doing things. We wanted a particular prefect to accompany us to the class picnic. As always happens, the class teacher assigned a different one. Big deal, we went with the designated teacher, made him smell something (forgetting what’s it called), he became unconscious, we put him in a mattress, dumped him in a corner and carried him back to the hostel. No prizes for guessing that the class was suspended the next day.
• The Chaos in Chemistry labs- we always looked forward to Chemistry Lab classes. We tried our hands at everything, broke as many test tubes as we could, threw mild acids at each other blazers (ruining them) and what not. The theory classes were no better actually, with all kinds of noices, crackers, seven seas smells etc