DOWN MEMORY LANE OF A PSBBian

Another year whizzes by. It is without doubt, a year to remember, a year that has left a great and lasting impact on me for more reasons than one. A year with reminiscences that I will cherish for eternity. It is a year that marks the beginning of a great end- my school life.

Even as I am penning this article, my mind takes me down memory lane, way back to my PRE.KG days where I found myself in what I had heard people call ‘shool’ (the way I had pronounced ‘School‘ as a three year old). It was a year of fun and frolic, playing in the mud pit, occasionally learning ABCs, getting out of stuff I didn’t want to do by smiling sweetly at my class teacher… LKG was pretty much the same and the teacher who taught me , Mrs. Girija Dilip is someone I can never forget - she used to be this ever smiling angel(still is) who would make you feel all warm and nice inside… even the worst brats(like Moi for instance ) would want to do anything she wanted them to.

Before I knew it I was in third grade- that was when I discovered my love hate relationship with Mathematics (I scored a 98 in it and lost the coveted centum due to an addition mistake; something my best friend Sruthi and I still laugh over.) At a later stage however, it turned into an all hate relationship. In grade four, I discovered a beautiful subject- Sanskrit. The subject and I go back a long way . It was taught by a teacher for whom I have immense respect. Yes, Mrs. Girija Krishnamurthy made Sanskrit interesting and logical- so interesting that even now, despite being in my first year of college, I am still studying it, not out of compulsion but out of sheer love for the language. Middle school came and I thought it was the coolest, most ‘grown up’ part of life…. How wrong I was… life got worse ‘cos, it was at this juncture that I realized that math and biology were vying with each other for top rank in my hate list of subjects…..

I remember the day I made it to Main School…. I remember entering its portals on the very first day of my Ninth standard and feeling unexplainably excited- here was a place which would ensure that I had my quota of fun. Four years in PSBB Main has indeed made me a better person in various aspects. I fell in love with English- I choose to see it as something more than just a subject . Writing became my passion. English classes were the only classes I looked forward to in my 11th and 12th stds. Taught by my favourite teacher Mrs.Viji Raman, my love for the subject increased manifold. She had a way of teaching the subject in a manner that would ensure learning, without the pupil even realizing it. English classes in my 11th and 12th meant fun combined with learning. She is one of the main reasons why I miss Main school so much(pun intended). Well, this school had its flip sides too, I fell prey to math and accountancy- two subjects which showed absolutely no mercy on me. I have passed my 12th standard, but for the life of me, I still cannot understand and unfold the intricacies of geometry or the demystifying and elusive accountancy with its numerous balance sheets with columns of assets and liabilities that never did tally for me even once; no, not even in my board exam!!!

TRRRRINGGG!!!! The phone rings, and I am startled out of my reverie. I wake up to the reality that school life as I knew it is over. I am now a college going teen. I feel a little empty and lost inside but I go back to reminisce about it and I feel a lot better.

School was and still is something special to me. It made me believe that the world was a comfortable place where everyone and everything would be easy going and fun loving. Well, so much for that. The real world, well, is a lot different… take it with a pinch of salt.

SAVE THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE !!!

English is a beautiful language and it looks like some people are absolute sadists- they utterly cannot stand to see a beautiful thing last forever. Baffled??? Read on to comprehend.

There was a time when speaking perfect English and employing perfect grammar had other people staring enviously at the speaker, wishing desperately that they were at least half as good as the person speaking. Now however, it is a different story altogether. Try speaking perfect English or correcting someone using incorrect grammar and the response one will elicit is ‘’Stop showing off dude.’’ Sadly, in this modern and sophisticated era when people break a tooth or/and nail in their campaign to achieve perfection in every field, a person employing sophisticated and perfect grammar is seen as a persona non grata.

Bad English hangs around our necks like a dead albatross. The abominations inflicted by the person ‘supposedly speaking English’ upon the listener are too many to keep track of. The other day, I was enjoying my rare evening walk, taking in the sounds and sights of the place after which I made my way to the ice-cream parlor. I was enjoying my ice cream and taking in its sugary sweetness when I heard the shopkeeper tell the customer that the cost of the ice cream was ‘tolve’- meaning twelve rupees. On observing for a short period, I noticed that 95% of the people I came across pronounced ‘twelve’ as ‘tolve’ and worse, no one found it to be wrong at all. What is it with people these days? At the going rate, there might well be amendments made in the Thesaurus, replacing ‘twelve’ with ‘tolve.’

Another way of killing the English language is by using literal translation. In Tamil, people say ‘ leave podaren’ - some people very nonchalantly convert it to ‘put leave’ instead of saying ‘taking the day/week/month off’. Same is the case with ‘late panran’ which has been translated to ‘he made late’ instead of saying ‘he delayed someone.’ Its a good thing that William Shakespeare died when he did. If he were to be alive now, he would have killed the people butchering the English language and would have been condemned to death - a very undignified way to die .

One more thing which drives me up the wall is the practice of adding an ‘a’ to a word thereby adding a Tamil touch to it. For instance - ‘’Sachin outta?’’ (is Sachin out?) or ’’had fooda??’’(had food?) . I mean, is it really hard to say three easy words rather than omit one of them and ruin English grammar like never before?? It looks like people are caught in this never ending competition where they praise and glorify the person who kills the English language the most .

The bottom line - it is NOT fashionable to speak bad grammar. Bad grammar is out, flawless and faultless grammar which does not cause shock attacks to 2 out of 40 people (the number of people who probably speak relatively decent grammar) is the in thing.

P.S. : IF YOU THINK YOU CAN COVER UP FOR YOUR BAD USAGE OF THE LANGUAGE BY EMPLOYING A PATHETIC IMITATION OF THE AMERICAN ACCENT, YOU CAN THINK AGAIN.