ON SCHOOL

‘Memories all those ten poems by next Monday, else…’. I just can not write our teachers’ threat explicitly in this liberated era where in to punish the pupil for their own benefit can cause havoc. Our teacher than will make his threat true to every extent of his capacity to all fifty five of us small small tender & delicate boys in khaki half pants & white half shirt. We’d pray to our own respective beloved gods & goddesses who may, we felt, will grant our wish of not permitting Sun god to rise that Monday, head master to give us off, the teacher concern to fall ill seriously & the wish list is long. Yet, to my knowledge god never paid heed to our demands. Later I knew god has so many men & women in the world to look after he too has his own priorities. How can he intervene in our internal school matter of his own incarnation in devilish teachers & us the angel of love & tender feelings?

Those years of boyhood are full of fun, revelry. All those butterflies on flowers, kits in the air, paper boats floating & sinking in rain water, chocolates, and ice-cream are the treasures of boyhood. But for one or the other reason, this happiness is diluted & only then let percolated into our tender lives. I call this elders’ & teachers’ jealousy towards us kids since they can’t enjoy themselves like us. Now a day these elders have planned to keep us busy round the clock & by the time we get time we are dead tired to fall on bed to sleep. Just left with no time for enjoyment.

Like all those great souls I too strongly feel one should learn to just understand which five rupees bill is & which is ten, twenty or hundred & there is no four rupees note neither thirty nor forty. Frankly speaking even during school days I strongly felt of having wasting my life. Well, my views on learning earned marks on my both chicks & on the back; my earnings on both the palms in school are bonus, the reason was same.

If learning is meant to earn living then, why study wasting your golden boyhood years of life in studying something never going to be useful in future. For knowledge purpose one can read Shivaji, Auranzeb, Akbar for Indian or Hitler, Roosevelt, Lincoln, various Georges from England, Czars from Russia for world history. Down load Googal search for world geography, Wren & Martin for grammar, what is there in English other than Shakespeare? Nothing beyond BhagwadGeeta for philosophy. Reading Einstein, Raman, and Bohr for physics etc. etc. This all & much more can be read in a years’ time period then why waste those entire valuable ten, eleven or thirteen years unnecessarily I don’t understand.

I learnt zoology the difference between you & I are, I know domestic cats are called Felis-domesticus & Rana – tigrina for frog just that much. This much I can learn & much more taking a years’ sabbatical. That too this learning would be fun than fear. This fear of exams has always haunted me falling me sick in the face of exams increasing my mothers’ blood pressure. She would always fear of whether her son would appear for the exams at all or what?

My VIth standard son is busier than I am. Before I wake up at eight o’clock early in the morning he’s gone taking his bath, brushing teeth, breakfast & duly decorating himself with his school uniform tying his tie to shoe lace in chaos of his hot dialogues & difference of opinions with his own mother & with my own mother. When he comes back from the school by quarter to three in the mid noon I’m taking my happy nap after heavy lunch. He takes his lunch plays for ten minutes with his pets & younger brother marches for his tuition with another knapsack. By the time at six o’clock in the evening when he comes back from his tuition along with his friends I’m either watching my TV programme or reading some novel. His homecoming starts with my preparation for my outing in the evening. We exchange our views for a moment or two if he is free while taking his milk & biscuits. By the time I reach home nine o’clock plus in the night my future incarnation is either fast asleep or in process of so watching his cartoon network on the idiot box. Yes certainly not before completing his school home work.

I visualized school to be held under the big banyan tree with teachers teaching all those required by each of us as per capabilities & necessity to live. Not dump the brains with unnecessary & unwanted information. What does a clerk do studying rotational period of Pluto or Neptune around the sun, their composition, mass, temperature & their average distance with respect to earth for exams sake? He better should know averages, debit, credit, sundry creditors, sundry debtors, balance sheet, profit & loss account, various entries & their tally. If he wishes to go through the space, solar system & mysteries of universe he can any day taste that, why waste his years’ learning for that sake? As I did for mathematics; all those limits, differentiations, hyperbolas, parabolas, ellipse had eclipsed my life then.

By

Vijay Yelmelwar