Village schooling in the Seventies Corporal punishment might suck, but we grew up better muscled By Cecil Pinto
"Jerry Pinto is forty years old. He is fat and brown and is losing hair." So it says on Page 122 of Favourite Stories for Boys, a lovely book from Puffin/Penguin. There's a fabulously hilarious dialogue between schoolboy Jerry and his mother, which is nothing short of brilliant. That's what inspired this column. Besides, like Jerry, I am fat. But I am dark brown and not losing hair. Let's see if this forty year old is outdated enough to indulge in school nostalgia. Keep in mind that village schools, especially boys' schools like the one I attended, are vastly different from city and co-ed schools. Sure we had uniforms but acceptable footwear was Payel bathroom slippers. Black leather shoes, white socks and ties on Fridays, and white canvas shoes only on the days when there was drill practice for the Annual Sports Day. School bags were not like haversacks but the normal flat 'sling it across the shoulder and it hangs around your hip' variety, mostly khaki coloured. But if you held the bag at chest level, and the strap was under your arms and circling your back, you could swivel the bag over your head onto your back - and in effect make a haversack. The more macho guys didn't like school bags and just carried the absolutely necessary books in their bare hands, thanks to which they developed good forearms and won the impromptu arm-wrestling matches held across school desks. For some strange reason although plastic bags were around nobody thought of using them as school bags – and this was even before we became environmentally conscious. My mother, the perennial penny pincher, once stitched me a school bag from some left over curtain material. It was a light grey with a pattern made up of flowers and little bunnies. A schoolboy carrying such a bag today would have been ragged no end about being gay. In our days we didn't have gays, though we used to throw around the word 'homo' to describe effeminate boarders. 'Day scholars', who lived at home, could never be homos. Some teachers who got too physically close to students were also suspected to be homos. They didn't scare us as much as the sadist teachers, mostly alcoholics, who would device punishment methods that would have found approval with Torquemada of the Inquisition. We were made to kneel on sharp stones, do sit-ups (calves and torso improvement) by the hundreds, 'sit' against the wall with no support underneath and with hands up in the air (which led to good thigh and buttock development), run many laps with a heavy stone held high (good for biceps and stamina) above the head . We were whacked on our heads, palms, elbows, legs and everywhere with sticks, chappals, palms and wooden, plastic and metal rulers. We had our side-lock hair and ears painfully pulled. We had shoes, wooden dusters, chalks, pens (there was a popular brand named Pinto!) and books thrown at us. Few injuries occurred. A bottle of 'red medicine' (I always thought it was 'mercury chrome' when it's actually mercurichrome) was always handy in the staff room. Major injuries would be treated at the Health Centre nearby. A healthy student would take the ailing or injured student double-seat on his cycle. A cycle was an Atlas or Hercules and the standard men's model with straight handle bars, and shaft brakes. Only the very rich and frivolous could afford the fancier models with curved handles and cable brakes. The cycle race on Sports Day was a sight indeed with the bigger sporty boys hunched over their non-racer cycles and pedaling away noisily on the small track in dangerous proximity and high speed. Cycling helmets or protective gear was unheard of. Collisions and injuries were frequent. Compass boxes were Camlin. Erasers were two toned, dark pink and blue and shaped like a parallelogram. One side was supposed to be for ink and the other for pencil. Actually it didn't matter which side you used. The sons of Gulfees had those nice dainty scented erasers and sometimes even these cool non-Camlin compass boxes. And only later did those nice 3-D rulers, which changed pictures depending on the angle at which you looked, came along. Pencils were always HB and that hexagonal red and black stripes variety. Any artistically inclined teacher was deputed to teach us Art Class where grapes had to be in a perfect triangle in reducing numbers and always purple. 'Sceneries' always had a sun with perfect rays setting between symmetrical mountains. All human figures were very two dimensional – approaching Egyptian. Only later in life did we encounter a trained art teacher who introduced us to other possibilities, perspectives and pencils. 2B or not 2B was then the question. The richer boys celebrated their birthdays by giving one cheap sweet each to every boy. Each teacher was proffered the remainder in the packet and normally took between three and five. I have never know a teacher to take just one sweet. The poorer boys just did not mention their birthdays. The smarter semi-poorus boys, like me, conveniently had their birthdays in end-April which was always vacation time. Birthday takeaways were unheard of. We all stood up and sang Happy Birthday to the lucky boy loudly in the first period. On particularly boring days we sang Happy Birthday at the start of every period. Even if the teacher suspected that Happy Birthday had already been sung she/he could not stop us for fear of hurting the Birthday Boy's feelings. On very, very boring days we made up birthdays just so we could waste the first few minutes of every period singing Happy Birthday in unison and loudly. Developed our chest muscles, that did. Failing a class did not bring much ignominy back then and so we often had huge grown men hulks in the higher classes who had been 'classmates' to a whole generation. Day schoolers living close to school went home during recess to have kanji. Our Bal Bharati English text books were all illustrated by Mario Miranda. Those were the days. As Simon & Garfunkel sang, "Mama don't take my mercurochrome, Mama don't take my mercurochrome awaaaay!" ---------- The column above appeared in Gomantak Times dated 28th Feb 2008 ======
