Read Online Like It Happened Yesterday by Ravinder Singh - Free Book Online
Authors: Ravinder Singh
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had suddenly come to this? After a point, I started losing all my self-confidence. I felt I was good for nothing. The fact that I was still better than at least twenty students in my class failed to hold up my spirits.
My father, who, only till a week before had believed that I would make him proud, started openly lamenting that his dream might never come true. And, to add to my misery, the
Chitrahaar
music programme started airing this new song twice a week on Doordarshan, with lyrics that went:
Papa kehte hain bada naam karega … Beta hamaara aisa kaam karega …
Talk about wrong timing, man!
Again, the race to do better brought about one more change for me. At the parent–teacher meeting, my class teacher and my mother mutually agreed to the Hindi teacher’sproposal of shifting me to the first bench in the class. All three of them believed that it would have a positive effect on my concentration levels.
I wondered—with that logic, should there be any benches in the classroom from the second row onwards at all?
9
A Change of Schools
‘No! I don’t want to go to that school!’ I screamed.
‘Chup kar ja, hun,’ Mom warned me. She did not want me to make a fuss about it, and so asked me to shut up.
‘But why are you doing this to me?’ I retorted in anger.
‘Because you have cleared the entrance exam for this school and now you will have to join it,’ she answered in a voice that was louder and sterner.
I got scared and counter-questioned her, but this time in a lower voice, ‘But I have cleared the entrance exam of Madnawati as well! Why aren’t you sending me to that school?’
She didn’t respond and went back to chopping onions in the kitchen. I walked out to the veranda, as a mark of my silent protest. I sat there and sulked for a while.
The school in Burla conducted classes only till Class VII. Of course, it was a small institution. Even the state-board-affiliated coaching centre had more students than we had in our class! But as this was the only English-medium school in Burla, to continue further studies in the same board, one had to move to Sambalpur, the nearest city as well as the district headquarters. And I had successfully passed Class VII. So the argument I was having with my mother was about which school I should go to next.
There were quite a few English-medium schools in Sambalpur. Three out of the four that I knew about were affiliated to CBSE (the Central Board of Secondary Education), while the convent school was affiliated to ICSE (Indian Certificate of Secondary Education).
I had a vested interest in joining the convent school. It was really quite simple—the girls of that school wore skirts as part of their school uniform! On my way to school in Burla, I had seen the bare legs of a few girls while they hopped on to their school buses in the mornings. From the boys of that school, I had heard secret stories of them intentionally dropping the pencil to the floor, in order to get a peek into the mysterious territory lying between the legs of the girls behind their benches. Those early-morning eye candies and motivating stories from the boys had made me daydream of some day joining the convent school.
But my daydream of becoming the one to drop the pencil and have fun got busted for two reasons. Firstly, the conventwas the most expensive school in the city. I came to know of how expensive it was from Nishant, a good friend of mine who went to the same convent school. That day, he was narrating yet another motivating story, about a girl who sat on the bench next to him, on the left, and preferred to roll down her socks and pull up her skirt as soon as she entered the school campus.
The moment I learnt that, I questioned him about the expenses of studying at that school. ‘Convent school mein padhne ke liye kitne paise dene honge?’
‘I pay two hundred and fifty as my monthly fee, and the bus fare is another hundred bucks,’ Nishant answered after doing the
My father, who, only till a week before had believed that I would make him proud, started openly lamenting that his dream might never come true. And, to add to my misery, the
Chitrahaar
music programme started airing this new song twice a week on Doordarshan, with lyrics that went:
Papa kehte hain bada naam karega … Beta hamaara aisa kaam karega …
Talk about wrong timing, man!
Again, the race to do better brought about one more change for me. At the parent–teacher meeting, my class teacher and my mother mutually agreed to the Hindi teacher’sproposal of shifting me to the first bench in the class. All three of them believed that it would have a positive effect on my concentration levels.
I wondered—with that logic, should there be any benches in the classroom from the second row onwards at all?
9
A Change of Schools
‘No! I don’t want to go to that school!’ I screamed.
‘Chup kar ja, hun,’ Mom warned me. She did not want me to make a fuss about it, and so asked me to shut up.
‘But why are you doing this to me?’ I retorted in anger.
‘Because you have cleared the entrance exam for this school and now you will have to join it,’ she answered in a voice that was louder and sterner.
I got scared and counter-questioned her, but this time in a lower voice, ‘But I have cleared the entrance exam of Madnawati as well! Why aren’t you sending me to that school?’
She didn’t respond and went back to chopping onions in the kitchen. I walked out to the veranda, as a mark of my silent protest. I sat there and sulked for a while.
The school in Burla conducted classes only till Class VII. Of course, it was a small institution. Even the state-board-affiliated coaching centre had more students than we had in our class! But as this was the only English-medium school in Burla, to continue further studies in the same board, one had to move to Sambalpur, the nearest city as well as the district headquarters. And I had successfully passed Class VII. So the argument I was having with my mother was about which school I should go to next.
There were quite a few English-medium schools in Sambalpur. Three out of the four that I knew about were affiliated to CBSE (the Central Board of Secondary Education), while the convent school was affiliated to ICSE (Indian Certificate of Secondary Education).
I had a vested interest in joining the convent school. It was really quite simple—the girls of that school wore skirts as part of their school uniform! On my way to school in Burla, I had seen the bare legs of a few girls while they hopped on to their school buses in the mornings. From the boys of that school, I had heard secret stories of them intentionally dropping the pencil to the floor, in order to get a peek into the mysterious territory lying between the legs of the girls behind their benches. Those early-morning eye candies and motivating stories from the boys had made me daydream of some day joining the convent school.
But my daydream of becoming the one to drop the pencil and have fun got busted for two reasons. Firstly, the conventwas the most expensive school in the city. I came to know of how expensive it was from Nishant, a good friend of mine who went to the same convent school. That day, he was narrating yet another motivating story, about a girl who sat on the bench next to him, on the left, and preferred to roll down her socks and pull up her skirt as soon as she entered the school campus.
The moment I learnt that, I questioned him about the expenses of studying at that school. ‘Convent school mein padhne ke liye kitne paise dene honge?’
‘I pay two hundred and fifty as my monthly fee, and the bus fare is another hundred bucks,’ Nishant answered after doing the
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