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
No comments:
Post a Comment