A recent visit to my alma mater, Seventh-Day Adventist High School, Bengaluru, kindled memories. I was the eldest in a brood of five, and the teachers here shaped and moulded our lives.
My sibling, N J Prasanna Kumar, a year younger, and I shared the same classroom and textbooks right from primary to standard X. We disengaged only after matriculation, choosing different knowledge streams matching our interests.
If you enjoyed reading this article, you can help support our journalism by adding OHeraldo as a preferred source.
Bengaluru earned the moniker ‘pensioner paradise’ and ‘garden city’. Kids plodded or got ferried to school via humble cycle rickshaws or bicycles. My brothers and I loved sprinting to school, lugging our cargo of books. We competed with other pedestrians, hurrying on the way. Playing pranks on fellow students by foisting ink from our fountain pens on their crisp white shirts was par for the course. Once, a bold senior caught a fruit bat hanging near the principal’s window and displayed the terrified creature for all to see before gently releasing it. I kept my distance, though!
The Jyothi Nivas College, famous for its beauties, was a stone’s throw away from our school (the college subsequently moved to Koramangala). The young brats had the cheek to pull the ‘pretty ones’ legs by asking the time. A pushcart vendor who hawked his merchandise in front of the school displayed no qualms about posing with the belles for pictures.
Students lined up before the classroom post-lunch and trooped to the school kitchen for a refreshing warm milk drink. Everybody enjoyed the freebie. Corporal punishment was in vogue, and our hard-as-nails maths tutor Mr Rasalam scared the living daylights out of us, mercilessly thrashing errant pupils.
The sports day was a gala affair, and we strived to put our best foot forward to finish on the podium. Champions in the senior category had their pictures splashed on the sports page of local dailies. My brother number three, J Gokul Nath, was second to none in essay writing and oratory and bagged accolades galore. A debating contest on temperance saw him walking away with the top prize. The effort earned him a special mention in a local tabloid. Baseball was a popular sport, and the keenly contested inter-house competitions drew a packed audience. We went ballistic whenever a batter whacked the ball over the school’s fence and scampered for a home run!
One of our most thrilling moments came in 1974 when the mighty West Indians, led by the ‘Big Cat’, Clive Lloyd, locked horns with the ‘Tiger’ Pataudi-led Indian side in a Test match at the Bengaluru Chinnaswamy Stadium. For the first time, the school introduced us to the magic of television as the teachers and the students sat glued to the small screen watching the live telecast.
We looked forward to the monsoon to make a splash or sail our paper boats (manufactured from pages pulled out of a notebook) in the streams along the roadsides. We also enjoyed building sand castles, chasing butterflies or playing with tops and marbles. A chill permeated the rainy and winter seasons, and sweaters knitted by elderly ladies of the house would emerge from the closet – rarely seen today in a city affected by climate change and global warming. How nice would it be to traverse that road again?
