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...