School
Of the phase of life that was spent at school, I miss nothing in particular. Consider the healthy, cute-faced seven-year-old, who has been doomed to needing glasses, despite never having strained his eyes as such from that very early age, when one is merely in second grade. Unfathomably, the hours and hours his younger brother now spends before the screen seem not to have affected his vision in the slightest.
A cute face, should it be doomed to needing glasses, shall be a choice object of a bully’s insatiable machismo. For he, certainly at first glance, appears quintessentially hapless, frail and timid. But in the fortuitous event that there are no serious bullies, such a face appears to radiate a certain stupidity — perhaps a certain resemblance to that incipiently hapless Rohit Mehra whose life changed for the better by the blue alien’s touch — a certain ‘distance’ from the usual crowd of students, amidst the perfect-sighted ebullience of whom, the bespectacled schlemiel appears as an aberration. One is at a loss to explain whether the teacher expects from him a certain wisdom beyond his years and is disappointed, for he, as a child, naturally fails on that front; or cannot bear to look at him, for his face, by vice of those glasses, is a grotesque spectacle of cherubicness and growth.
By now, it would be evident to the most troglodyte of readers that the accursed student in question is me — quondam student, so far as the school is concerned. One can never accurately predict what ‘would have’ happened, especially when referring to demeanour in early childhood, had one acted in a way different from what one indeed did. But I can never help wondering whether it might not have been better, for one, to never have been doomed to needing glasses, and for the other, to have been much more gregarious.
It did not help that I must have appeared too pygmaean a creature before the imposing, athletic boys of the class. But perhaps, the physical stature or lack thereof notwithstanding, a blend of academic brilliance and a generally copacetic if not charming appearance might have aided in the cultivation of friendship, and should this imagined boy have been more entrepreneurial, a cultivation also of a smooth-talking Romeo as he blooms into adolescence. A debonair and an ace pupil; the star of the class if not of the school.
As the sixth grade dawned, I discarded my timidity, but was nonetheless not the consummate student; hardly ever interested in sports, and I dutifully excluded myself from conversations on sports. To date, I remain a sports ignoramus. I was blissfully unaware of developments in the world of movies, uninterested as I was in them, my only exposure to them being a tale of divinity that occurred in 2008.
For four years, from the seventh grade to the tenth grade, I was academically brilliant, socially average, physically perhaps less so and temperamentally somewhat haughty. The best memories I have of school are restricted to competing with the highbrows of the class in solving mathematical problems with such rapidity, that at our best, we ended up solving five times as many problems as the teacher would assign as classwork. I was only occasionally the speediest. I aced Sanskrit; my pronunciation was flawless; my English was better than that of most students. I was as much at ease with Physics and Chemistry as with Mathematics; not so much biology, and slightly above average in the social sciences.
Of the last two years in school, however, my memories are uniformly bitter. After the tenth grade, it was a declivitous drop. It is no wonder, therefore, that I do not miss school, and I never shall.
