Vivian Tales

It may have been about 10 minutes for the bell, signalling the end of the exam. I had completed my paper   save for one lone question that I wasn’t sure about. I looked up and as I surveyed the classroom, I beheld many of them writing furiously onto their sheets and maybe a couple of them like me doing a survey. It was then my gaze fell on my bench-mate, a pretty lass from 10th grade. She had finished her paper and had neatly put that on her desk, front page down. Her pen and pencils neatly tucked back into her pencil-box. Very meticulously as if unconsciously, she patted down her skirt as if to shoo away any eraser crumbs, of which there were'nt any. She beheld me surveying and as our eyes met, she smiled. Pleasantly surprised, I smiled back. Maybe it was her pair of spectacles, I felt a warmth gushing in. Shyly, as I roved my gaze away from her, my thoughts quickly changed to how best to answer that lone incomplete question. It was then that   I espied Bala (Balas...

British Airways used to run an ad campaign in the 90's: The ad pictured a bunch of school kids running on a footpath…with the caption   -   Children walk to school, but run home… the caption, I felt was   a brilliant example of simply capturing those unarticulated joys of life. . In the chequered life of a school kid, some words never fail to evoke an emotion out of the ordinary. Exam, Test, Semester were enough to leave us with that sick feel in the tummy. Those were the days, when examinations were a mandated feature of school life. We never heard of any deliberations of how not to tax the young minds. It was a given, students had to be evaluated   once a while on their acquisition of knowledge and by inference their ability to accomplish something in life. It was not that the news was broken to us all of a sudden, it was according to a schedule which was followed almost to the T, and announced in the School Diary. The School Diary was am...

Growing up in Bombay in the late 70's and early 80's, we had all the makings of a polyglot. English was the language of instruction in school, We had the option (really?)   of picking up one of Tamil or Malayalam, as the School offered these subjects and in grade 4, Hindi, the national language was introduced and the next year, Marathi, the state language was added too. So we were formally learning 4 languages. And living in a cosmopolitan   society, other tongues like Gujarati, Kannada, Konkani, Tulu etc. were never really out of earshot. I don’t know if it was due to the early start I thought, we took to English, as ducklings take to water. Tamil or brahmin Tamil the lingua franca at home and friends, made the subject Tamil a little nuisance that we could tolerate , Hindi was a tad uncomfortable, when realization dawned that what we spoke among friends and what we studied in school felt like two different subjects. But it was Marathi, that filled my heart with dread. ...