Ranipet - School and stuff - A long one

I went to Ranipet on Monday evening and I came back to Chennai on wednesday evening. It was a very short visit, but stuff happened.

I went to my school on Tuesday. Yeah, MY school. I was part of the first batch of 12 std to "pass out". I was house captain, daughter of the of two of the trustees of the school, hated the school I previously went to and loved this one. Why? Just because. But I haven't been a very good alumnus of the school. I don't visit often enough and when I do, I don't stay long enough. Why? We'll see.

What I loved most about this school was that it was very open. And not just figuratively. The class rooms on the ground floor alone had doors, and even these were patterned (filigree?) metal doors that you could see through - sort of like those ornamental windows. And on all the other floors, the class rooms had 3 walls and the fourth one was a half wall, facing the corridor and a gap for the door. It was great.

It was a 3 storey (Ground + 2) building that had been a warehouse before its current avatar. People who passed it said that it looked like a cinema theatre from the front. I thought that was very cool.

On the 2nd floor, there were just 6 class rooms, and rest of the space was open. There was a raised platform on one end which served as a stage for in-house and small school productions, festivities and rehersals. There was seating space between the stage and class rooms to seat some 200 people, on the floor. Maybe more. There was a badminton net there, rarely used because it was very windy. The library was also on this floor, over looking the NH4.

The 1st floor was full of class rooms and a creche for the teachers' kids(the ayahs pronounced it creeche, it rhymed with screech). And the staff room. Nothing else on that floor. The ground floor had some more class rooms, two lunch halls for the younger kids, the labs - physics, chemistry, biology and math, the offices and the sports room - a cavity under the staircase. In the past 2-3 years, they have added a new principal's room, a conference room and a few more rooms to the side of the building.

When I was in 11th std. they built a new, small building near the back of the old building, This was a squat, flat building with just 4 class rooms and 2 offices. The terrace had a multi-coloured railing - 4 bars red, next 4 green, then yellow, then black and so on. It was weird, but it grew on us. The older kids (my class and the next in line) were moved in the next year. So that we wouldn't corrupt the kids, I guess. This building had a well next to it, with a rusted iron thing over it.

There was a hill behind the school. It was not much of a hill, but it sort of kept us cool. And we got a lot of wind because of the trees on it. We got a lot more than just wind from it, though. It was a very pretty sight. Imagine driving past a long, cream building, with a sloping roof; a smaller, square building next to it, at the very back, the view almost covered by the trees lining the road; framed by a hill, mostly green, though in very dry summers, it would turn brown. I really like it there.

We had a primate-infestation problem. Monkeys used to come down in droves from the hill during our lunch hour and really, really bug us. The damn creatures were annoying and smart. A scary combination. They very soon figured out where we kept our lunches and it didn't take them long to figure out how to open the boxes. They would lick (yuck!) our lunch boxes clean and leave them on the floor of the class room for us to find when we cam back from lab or worse, PT. Or worse still, they'd throw the empty boxes into the bloody well. The damn well was dredged once a week and we'd alway find a once-missing lunch box in it. Damn monkeys.

No primate infestation this time though. But the place was filled with tiny, brown creatures with high pitched voices and dressed identically. They were called students. aaaaaaaahhhhhhh. I was never that small. NEVER. Anyway, the assistant headmistress (forever Nirmala Miss to me) had asked to to talk to the new 12std class. Me. Talk. To impressionable kids. What was she thinking!? My mother thought it was a good idea (huh?), my father asked me to "be prepared" (wha..?). I got up late that fateful morning, and called up my mother and asked her to send me a car to go to school. No. Not because I am a spoilt brat. I am, but that's not why. It was because my school was 15(?) Kms away from home and very few buses other that the school buses stop there. And it was bloody hot. And I was on a vacation dammit! Ok, so I'm spoilt, bite me.

On the way to school, it hit me that I was going to be facing some 30 kids (17-18 yr olds) and that they are going to be expecting me to actually say something that makes sense. What would I have done 5 yrs ago? I would have expected this stuffed shirt, pompus older person to be awfully boring and would have thought it a terrible way to spend time. BUT, definitely better than doing tests or homework or studying or cramming or taking notes and all that stuff I was expected to do in the 12th yr of school. Miserable time, that was. Anyway, back to the present (more like recent past, but who cares).

So I went about 15mins later than I said I would, met Nirmala Miss (yeah I still call her that. Great lady. I have never seen her not smiling. But formidable still. Chemistry teacher) and Mr.RamKumar, the Principal and had a nice conversation with them. Bhubaneshwar, Chennai, college, school, friends and all that jazz. Then I went around the school with Nirmala Miss and she showed me all the new stuff they had done to the place. I approved. Then she handed me over to Mr.Karmegam (Bio). He took me took the 12th class room (which was on the 1st floor of the 2nd building! when did they build this floor???) and left me to the mercies of the evil, angry girls and boys. Ok. maybe not evil and angry; just looking at me expectantly. Scary.

What happened thereafter shall forever remain between me and them. No, just them. I have repressed those memories. But since I don't wake up at night sweating, with nightmares of pen & pencil yielding zombie teenagers with glowing eyes chasing me up the dark and grim hill, my face getting scratched by the thorny bushes, dripping blood, sweat and tears all over the hill side, we can safely assume that all went well.

It did. They asked me questions about college and I answered as honestly as I could without getting into trouble with the authorities. This went on for about 20 mins. I gassed, and they took it, fully aware that it was gas; nice kids, they were.

And that was that.

I re-read what I have written here, and I realised that I have written only about the place and not the people. My teachers rocked. I studied there only from 8th to 12th. I wish they had started the damn thing earlier. I wouldn't have had to go through the trauma and torture of my earlier school.

My tamil teacher used to make us read out from the text book in class. And sometimes, she made us explain the poetry.It used to be hilarious. Prose was ok, but tamil poetry! Half the time it was as if it was in a foreign languge. And she hated it when I turned up in class without a pottu. She used to make a dot on my forehead with her red pen, in front of the WHOLE GODDAMN CLASS. But, it was all good fun.

My chemistry teacher was awesome. He made organic chemistry come alive. Every thing made sense, it was all so logical and beautiful.

My math teacher was also in charge of my class from the 9th std till 11th. He was brilliant. Funny but if anybody did badly in a test he'd make them feel so bad, without saying a word.

I had several English teachers. The first one was also the principal at that time. The old lady was fabulous. She also taught History. I loved her classes. It was magical. She was funny, sacarstic and knew EVERYTHING. She did, I swear. She was the one who taught me public speaking. She used to make me stand in front of her and make me speak. We had a lot of extempore stuff in her class. The next lady, I don't remember very well. The 3rd was a blind man, who we all thought was just faking blindness. He knew everything that was going on in class - if we passed chits, if somebody wasn't paying attention, if we even looked outside, he just knew. Then we had a cute, short, fair lady who taught us in the last two years. She was a constant source of amusement to us. And very easy to talk to.

I don't remember all the social studies teachers that we had. I remember just one. She was tall, skinny, freckled and fair. And she was the only one who made geography even remotely interesting. That was the only year I paid any attention at all in geo class. The next social studies teacher we had was young, pretty and female. Since there were 10 males in their late teens in our class of 16, not much attention was paid to what she taught. I remember that she told us in the first class that she had never taught before and that she hated geography too. She was a great civics teacher. Anything I know about the political system is because of her and to a small extent, NDTV.

We had a bengali PT teacher who was also a singer and a dancer who later married a Odissi dancer. He taught lots of the kids some folk dances and a couple of the local teachers would teach some other kids rudimentary bharatnatyam and we'd have a dance show thingy. Great fun.

I want to go back to school.