A Tribute to Boarding Schools and Boarding School Stories

 So, very recently, I graduated from a blogger to a proud "author"! For I have a five percent contribution to the contents of 'Acorns - An Anthology.' This is my first writing to appear in a publication which is not a periodical, and not an institutional publication. It certainly is the first publication which is being bought by eager readers, for good money, as against being distributed en masse! Many of my readers (of the blog, for I have not yet got reviews for the book) have commended my writing, and have encouraged me to write books. It is a given truth that any IAS officer, who retires unscathed in career and health, shall surely write a memoir - and you cannot fault them (or us, hopefully, in the future) for that - for our daily life, especially in the field postings, is rich with interactions with diverse characters and events, not sharing about which would be a sheer waste of such God-given experience. However, I have always wanted to write fiction. Inspired by all the above, of course, but still, fiction. For fiction gives us some creative liberties, to drive the story to an ending happier than real life would normally allow.

My story, in the above anthology, is truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. However, given the fact that the names have been masked, and the narrator has no name (except for the nickname provided by AM), it could be very well taken as fiction - which would be my defence if any of the characters of mine take offence! The story was a part of a novel (still in writing, sadly) called 'In Grey and White'. The title is a play on the common phrase, 'in black and white', and refers to what we called our regular school uniform. This was written way back in the later half of 2005. I had just written my second, much better, and yet still unsuccessful attempt at IIT-JEE, and had resigned myself to complete my Engineering from a second tier college (which is also in retrospect, for back then it felt like third tier!) Reminiscing about my school days, which had ended only a year back, was an effort to relive an association which a top-notch educational institution. So the writing style, and the world view, is that of a Class XII pass undergraduate, bereft of any benefit brought by higher education, wider reading and 16 years more of experience.

The story, like the whole anthology, is in the genre of Boarding School stories. It is a rich genre, which has fascinated and delighted the still-too young-to-be-a-boarder students, and on the other end, facilitated the reminiscence of older gentlemen who had once been boarders. The genre is almost as old as the very British institution of Public Schools - a nomenclature which is quite misleading, for the public part means that the school was open to all religious denominations and trade, and not just a particular sect (unlike the purely religious boarding schools that were there from before.) Among the earliest classics are Tom Brown's Schooldays, much inspired by real events at Rugby College, in the nineteenth century. Later, a whole series of stories, on girls' boarding schools, were written by Angela Brazil, in the earlier part of the twentieth. They have been my guilty pleasure, courtesy expired copyright and Project Gutenberg! In the later half of twentieth century, we have works of Enid Blyton - like Mallory Towers, and St. Clare's, although it must be admitted that her works encompassed much more than boarding schools. For the millennials, the best example would be the Harry Potter series. For behind all the spells and dark magic, and a lot of world framing later in the series, it started as, and for a large part remained, a story about a residential school, with its four houses in constant competition, with teachers who lived with their students 24 hours, with classmates who were also dorm-mates, with the budding school romance and school feuds, and with must win at any cost Quidditch Inter House Championship. When Harry must shop for his robes, wand and books, it surely reminds all boarders of their own kitting before a school term, when we had to account for items ranging from over coats to socks and even shoe laces, lest we find ourselves without them on the remote hills!

Why has this genre been so popular? My theory is that boarding schools offer the closest option we can have on alternate reality. A group of students, and their teachers, shut away from the rest of the world for months on end, in a rather remote location, in a place with decades, if not centuries of own traditions, create something which cannot be replicated in a setting where the interaction with the society at large is rather constant. In the earlier days, all the contact with family was through weekly letters, and with the world at large, through newspapers. Television, though available, was a weekend luxury, and that too as a privilege that could be withdrawn on the slightest pretext. Telephone meant a walk to Barlowgunj, 4 kilometres uphill, till Class VIII, and after that, the school gate at Jharipani. We got a telephone in the dormitory in our final year, though. This cocooned existence led us boarders to compensate the lack of breadth of our human experience with sheer depth. We had really strong feelings about class honour, school honour, and, during the months of September and October, House honour! We wept when our classmates left school, for whatever reason. We were at the top of the world when our House won the Cock Shield in the Annual Athletics Meet, and I recall vividly the lamentation and mourning one of our rival houses underwent when their 14 year stint as Champions was broken. We had a very strong peer pressure against boozing and fagging (the tobacco one, not the indentured services of a junior, of which we had aplenty), which some of our classmates, who had joined from privileged backgrounds in Class XI, found to their great dismay. We had taken the art of self study, and collective self study at that, to another level - a habit that has come handy till date. We choreographed our own dance sequences and light works, with skillful use of cardboard, wood and cellophane - the pinnacle of which was the 'spaceship' load of five aliens our class had brought to stage in Class VIII. We even wrote our own dramatics plays, both of the official kind in the Interhouse Championship, as well as the ear burning and ribald variety, presented in the honour of the Teachers-of-the-Day, on the night of every 5th September! As I write these lines, that decade from 1994 to 2004 swims vividly in my thoughts. I am sure most of our rival schools from Mussoorie, as well as other schools across the country and the world, would have equally relatable stories to share, and that gives a continuous feed to both the supply as well as the demand for more Boarding School stories.

So I wish the readers of Acorns a pleasurable and hopefully reminiscent reading experience. I must thank the whole team, led by Amit Suri sir, a super senior, as well as my contemporaries Nikhil and Tabish, for the honour of making it to the first cut. I hope we see more volumes, for I surely still have much more to put to paper. Happy Reading!

Acorns - An Anthology is available on Amazon, at https://www.amazon.in/dp/9390488737

Weekend OTT Review

 Much hoopla is going on about Bridgerton   - someone on social media said it was a modern equivalent of Jane Austen! Well, I could not get past the first episode. It is fiction, of course - but Black Aristocracy, in 1813? Seriously? (Britain abolished slavery in 1833, for the record) A whole of gratuitous titillation aside, the above mentioned historical inaccuracies, as well a pathetic Darcy-Bennett attempt combined to leave one totally uninterested. Leaving it off in the midst of first episode was a good decision, which was not made with Tandav. 

Too bad, for once one gets past the first episode, one is somehow obligated to finish (a form of mild OCD, you see!) May be the first episode, bad though it was, did no go beyond the point on no return. May be it was so bad, that one was compelled to look for a meta joke somewhere! However, after the first episode, it was just 4 angle shots of Leading Lads and Ladies swaggering across the Raisina. For quite sometime, these leading Lads and Ladies have been doing just that in their movies, and they simply did not get that their swaggering about is one of the reasons why viewers are quitting their "Main Stream" Cinema and going for OTT content. Viewers expect a gripping story and real acting - and that is why within the time we finished the series, it dropped from 4.6 to 3.7! Too bad we started it a day too early.

So, if you are still looking for a tip about what to watch, I would suggest "The Boys". It is a great story, with great performances, as well as contemporary satire.

On Elections and Coup - Us v US

 [ Schadenfreude -  noun, scha·​den·​freu·​de | \ ˈshä-dᵊn-ˌfrȯi-də 

: enjoyment obtained from the troubles of others ]

One could not have imagined that this year would give another opportunity to write, so soon. However, this morning, my facebook feed was overrun with news about how the supporters of the US President had run amok in the Capitol building, effectively stalling the proceedings. It has been described variously as an Insurrection, or a Coup. That things should come so far in one of the world's oldest and biggest and definitely the most advanced democracy is definitely a matter of concern. However, with a sheepish grin, we must say that for many of us here, it is also a matter of schadenfreude!

There are many reasons for things coming to this level - the gradual erosion of niceties in public discourse, aided by the electronic veil of social media, but not without significant contribution from the mainstream media too. Anyone in doubt should watch 'The Loudest Voice' on Hotstar. The truly outlier nature of the incumbent President is a big factor, as the afore mentioned erosion has taken place across the globe, but few respectable countries have seen such shameful spectacles. However, what really connected both - frenzied mobs and a paranoid megalomaniac, in a common intent and purpose, was the purported "stealing of the election."

I have always been much thankful for the invention of the Electronic Voting Machines, especially as a person who has to get elections conducted, quite periodically. Whenever the debates over the propriety of EVMs had come up, some detractors have brought up the question, as to why advanced nations like the United States do not use them, if EVMs are so good? I hope, again, with a guilty feeling of schadenfreude, that this question has been laid to rest.

While most qualities of EVMs have been enumerated well in the above linked article, the most significant advantage it gives is the quick, and immutable calculation of results. While the quickness is a great administrative convenience, for which I shall be eternally grateful, the immutability is what gives the result its strength. Manual counting of ballot papers is a long, tiresome process, and prone to errors, both honest (especially if the counting has been going on for a long time) as well as malafide. Hence, there is, to begin with, a justification for recounting, and later, when such errors are discovered, there is a cascading distrust on all the counting which has happened. It gives the losing candidate a fig leaf of the possibility that the count was wrong (and the election was stolen from him). Some candidates, like in the District Board Constituencies in my subdivision in Meerut, just lie down on the roads for a while till they are chased away by an overworked and really annoyed police. Some, as in yesterday night's disgrace, exhort their supporters to run over the national legislature.

When I wrote that article, the use of Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail, or VVPAT for short, was not universal. Detractors could say that the total of the votes being shown by the machine cannot be verified with each singular vote. Any person who has worked with the EVM knows that it is teue. Then again, justice not only needs to be done, but also seen to done. The public at large could not be so sure, earlier. Not anymore. For the uninitiated, the VVPAT is a printer cum box that prints a slip with the election symbol polled for, which is then displayed in a window for 7 seconds before falling into the box, much like a ballot paper. Thus, firstly, each voter can see that the slip printed matches with the vote he has cast, and secondly, at the end, the slips in the box can be counted as one would with ballot papers, and matched with the result being displayed electronically. In the last election to Lok Sabha, five of the booths were randomly picked in all Assembly Constituencies, for the said comparison. None of them was found mismatched, across the whole country. There is a provision where any voter can get the fidelity of the VVPAT machine checked during the poll, by asking for a dummy vote in public, so that anyone can see whether the button being pressed and the symbol being printed match or not. Not a single challenge has succeeded in proving the VVPAT wrong, till now. [Of course, there are some challenges with the VVPAT - all administrative. The next few lines are technical and may be skipped by those who are put off by such discussion. Unlike the rest of the EVM, which is purely electronic, these are electro mechanical. So they suffer from all the ailments expected of a mechanical device - they can jam, their printing mechanism can get stuck, the paper roll can tear off, and they are susceptible to mechanical and thermal shocks. This simply means a lot of replacements and loss of time. Nothing that cannot be improved over the years. Then again, the 7 second display slows down the poll, but it is small price for full transparency. There is another administrative and legal issue of initiation error - where, after the mock poll, the polling officer fails to remove the slips from the box after resetting the machine. In this case, on verification, the electronic count would fall short of the manual count, by the exact margin of the mock poll results. Conversely, if a polling officer ends the mock poll by counting the slips, but fails to reset (CRC) the machine, the electronic count would exceed the manual count by the exact margin as of the mock poll! With the mock poll certificate in hand, it is not an unresolvable issue!]

Soon we are to embark on yet another election to the rural local bodies of the State. Polling would be held in the traditional ballot paper and box manner. Each voter in this election casts votes for 4 posts - members of the Wards of Village, Block and District Panchayat, as well as for the village Pradhan. Provisioning 4 EVMs for each booth would not be possible. However, we now have multipost EVMs. States like Kerala and Maharashtra have used them in local body elections. Even we have used them in the Urban local body elections way back in 2017. In fact I was responsible for the first use of this technology in the State. While the programming of this machine is a bit more complicated than regular ECI EVMs, for the voter, it simply presents 2 or more ballot paper on the ballot unit, and he may press one button next to each of the ballot papers, to cast his votes on each ballot. During the counting, the machine displays results for each ballot sequentially. It would have heartening to see its use in the upcoming elections too. However, these machines are still not enough in supply. May be we would see them in the next cycle. So meanwhile, we find ourselves in the unenviable position of more sleepless counting nights, and candidates throwing tantrums. Our only solace would be the thought that it could never get as bad as the United States!

On New Year's Day

 It is a known truth that if one claims to be a hobby blogger, then one must show for it at least one article a year. Consequentially, there is this immense urge to get the first write-up of the year off the mark. This urge begins when, on the midnight of any December 31st, the clock ticks, and lo, we are in a new year. Hence, this much celebrated transition happens to be the subject of this article.

We humans have divided our day to day life in many temporal divisions. An ordinary human deals with units as small as seconds, when a frozen dish needs to be nuked in the microwaved, to half decades and decades, when we do long term planning. We have minutes, hours, days, weeks, months. However, passing of any of these hardly merits a celebration like we do when a year passes. Some puppy love couples (and parents of infants - I included), do celebrate passing of months (menniversary?) However, we put special emphasis in the celebration of our circumambulation of the sun - not only the calendar year, but also the things like birthdays and wedding anniversaries. What lead to this primacy of the year, over all the other time periods? Come to think of it, most of our time partitions are artificially constructed. The only two naturally occurring time divisions are diurnal, and annual. We can observe the sunrise, the growing of the sunlight, the bright noon, the evening, with sunset and dusk, followed by the night. However, the day repeats too frequently to be amenable to celebrations - though some of us do solemn prayers early morning! Similarly, the annual cycle is a natural cycle - the warm glow of spring, which grows into the blazing summer, which grows humid and culminates into the rainy season, followed by warm sunny days that lead to the winter chill, when, as the saying goes, the spring is not far behind! In the old days, the waxing and waning of the moonlight would have affected humans significantly, and hence there would have been significance of the monthly cycles, but the modern Gregorian months are no longer exactly aligned with the lunar cycles anyway. Hence, the year occupies a special signifance in our hearts.

In our country, though, there always remains a question of "which year". In our working and social life, we are dictated by the Gregorian calendar. Hardliners would call it the "Christian Calendar", and they would not be wrong, as the calendar was started by a Pope. There is a "Hindu Calendar". In fact there are two - the Saka Samwat, the official calendar of India, and the Vikrami Samwat. The year in both coincides, but the count of year is different. The Samwat calendars do impact our lives significantly - our major festivals are "fixed" in them - Holi falls in the Poornima of Falgun month, as does Deepawali on the Amavasya of Kartik. Infact the Samwat calendars are much complicated and scientifically advanced. The months are lunar, and follow the moon cycle accurately - with Amavasya and Poornima falling on no-moon and full-moon days. The year is roughly solar, and stays true to the solar cycle over a long period of time (unlike the Hijri calendar, which follows the moon faithfully, and hence falls short of the solar cycle by 10 days every year, which leaves us with the interesting phenomenon of Eid and other festivals falling in different seasons over a long period of time, unlike Hindu festivals, which largely stay in a defined time band.) This is because the Samwat calendar puts in an extra month or Adhimas every few years. The Adhimas is added to the month it follows, and successive Adhimas get added to the following month, so that over a long period, all 12 months get an Adhimas. The consequence, of course, is that the "New Year Day" does not coincide with the same spot in the cycle every year.

Thus, for all its historicity and practicality, the celebration of the Gregorian Calendar New Year has become a worldwide event. Though it is a part of the Christmastide (which is itself wholly inspired from the Germanic Yuletide), the New Year's Eve and the New Year's Day is wholly a secular holiday. Hence, it was a little jarring to go through my Whatsapp feed this time. The number of messages wishing me a Happy "Western" New Year, or "Working" New Year, or "Anglican" New Year, or "Foreign" New Year, to top it all, had multiplied manifold. Some messages were downright apologetic and condescending- implying that this is not truly the New Year, but since you believe in it, hence I deign to wish you a Happy New Year grudgingly! There were a few messages contrasting the drunken revelry some of us do in the New Year's Eve party, to the pious fasting done during Chaitra Navratri! These qualified wishes do take away the whole point of wishing someone. The social media is replete with the whole spectrum of indic cultural revival, and yes, there is a need to restore pride in the cultural treasure of this rich civilization. However, pride is endogenic. If our expression of pride is coming through sanctimonious pulling down of "the other", it is not pride, but plain old envy in a self-righteous disguise. With the powers that be turning into a permanent Grinch for the foreseeable future, this is the last thing we need with us.

Another jarring observation was the fact that how many of us were demonizing the year gone by. Lots of memes, with the zero of 20 replaced by a blow up of the coronavirus, and the one of 21 replaced by a vaccine syringe, were shared. Somehow that defies logic, as if the pandemic is somehow contained in the year. Well, for starters, the disease of commonly known as Covid-19 - that 19 stands for 2019. So blaming 2020 somehow is like putting the blame of the arsonist on the guy whose house he burnt down! However, all said and done, we cannot deny that we have lived through a remarkable year. It was marked as remarkable way back at the turn of the Century. We were in our earlier teenage, in the school. The nation had just flexed its nuclear muscles, and we were told that we would be a superpower in 2020. It was safely far out in the future for conjecture and hyperbole, and yet near enough to tantalize. The mere sound of it - Twenty Twenty, was magical. Well, we all know how it turned out finally. We did have the pandemic, which was truly once in a century event. However, more remarkable was the Lockdown that was created by it. That was unprecedented. As administrators, it gave our generation something to reminisce about later - for some get the opportunity to hold elections in 5 years, some get to do the Census in 10 years, but only a select few got to do the management of a nationwide curfew for such a long period. As an icing on the cake, we also had a plague of locusts this year, something straight out of the biblical accounts!

Anyway, what transpired earlier cannot mar the enjoyment of the moments when one year melds into another. Others prefer loud boisterous and boozy parties. I, in true Yuletide spirit, prefer it quiet. My current dwelling has a hearth (which had been boarded up by the previous occupants, and had been got restored by us), and a nice blaze really sets the mood. Some dry cake, some reading material - like the history of the District, and to complete it all, some good music. Unlike the Christmas playlist, New Year's Day has fewer songs to its credits. There is always the classic Auld Lang Syne. Or, for us who were adolescents at the turn of the Millennium, there is Waiting for Tonight by Jennifer Lopez. However, for some reason, this time I found myself playing the immortal Aane Wala Pal, Jaane Wala Hai - on a loop. There could be no better song to celebrate the passing of time, capturing at the once the ephemerality of it all, as well as the opportunity of living out an eternity in that ephemeral moment! On that thought, I end this article, and wish the reader a very Happy New Year!