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.

THE IDIOT BOX LIVES UP TO ITS NAME.

It was a Friday evening. I was enjoying the free time I had after a long time. It was a particularly enjoyable evening because I was aware of the fact that I could just laze around for the rest of the night, not caring two hoots about homework as the blissful weekend was around the corner where, all I had to do was ‘do nothing.’ I let myself slowly slip away into the vast expanse of nothingness and maybe a small nap when….
‘‘ SELVI,SELVI,SELVI’’ I jumped nearly 4 ft in the air. It was the idiot box blaring on top of its wires, and needless to say it was SUN TV with one of its soaps that had been rude enough to jolt me out of my skin. Annoyed, but at the same time a little intrigued, I moved myself to the couch in the most undignified manner (crawling b’cos I was too lazy to use my legs to their full extent) in the hall and sat down to watch it. Of course, I didn’t know till then that it was sheer retribution to do so because I had rarely watched TV, let alone soap operas as I was a huge fan of reading and it kept me occupied most of the time. I guess it was a quirk of fate and it just wasn’t in my kismet to spend my leisure time productively ’doing nothing’ b’cos, it was a Tamil soap opera that was running on the idiot box.

This is the scene that went on (including a recap of the previous day‘s episode) : mother and father ganging up on the daughter, forcing her to marry the groom they had chosen for her. It is imperative that she marries him because he is rich and they are poor. It really doesn’t matter that the man is already married and has enough wives who could share all his wealth and still have enough left for a few more women. The girl of course is a person of principles and she doesn’t believe in marrying someone just because they are rich. It could have also been that she was in love with another guy- I lost track of the whole thing after awhile. The ‘negotiating’ then turns into an argument where the father suffers a heart attack and is rushed to the hospital. He is almost at death’s door when the daughter very nobly agrees to marry the man her parents choose and , voila! Miracles never cease- the father recovers almost immediately and even goes back to his cigarette smoking, beer drinking ways. That was all I could handle- I left the place , with my head swimming. Does the plot sound boringly familiar to you? It should. You would have probably seen the same plot in a hundred different yet same soaps. By the time the story is into its fiftieth episode you can't remember what the plot was and/or how it started.

It was then I guessed that this was the general theme for most…no, the general theme for all soap operas .

Time has lapsed since SELVI is done and over with (after about a few hundred re-runs on different channels, dubbed in every other vernacular language one could come across ) and has been replaced by a bunch of new ones much to my dismay. Arasi and others are the ’new’ ones, just a few hundred episodes old. They all follow a fairly similar plot...and you get the feeling that even if the characters were interchanged, it wouldn't make any difference whatsoever.

The Hindi ones are no better. They all start with girls being married to men from respectable communities, gal loves husband, husband loves gal, mother-in-law is jealous that son is supposedly paying more attention to his wife(if the mum is so desperate, why even get the son married?) and results in Mother -in-law being cruel to daughter in law who in turn runs off to her parental house. These Hindi ones sound too much like the Tamil ones. Only difference is that the houses and clothes and the abundant jewellery of the people in the Hindi soaps are made up of richer stuff, the mother- in -law is ‘Saas’ instead of ’Athai’ and the absence of a poor father, drowning himself in smoke(or beer, whichever is convenient) .

Tennyson said in his poem Brook ’Men may come and men may go, but I go on forever.’ Whether this is true of a brook or not, It is definitely true of soaps.
‘Generations may come and generations may go, But soaps go on forever.’
Like the title says, the Idiot box has and will continue to live up to its name.

SVR AND PAVI- TWO OF THE BEST FRIENDS I COULD EVER HAVE

At the age of six, we met in grade one, clueless perhaps that we would probably remain best friends over the next twelve years and more to come. I remember the first day I saw her. I thought she was a tomboy in the making until I saw her cry like the typical girl that she was :) . Before I knew it, we had soon become thick friends, thicker than one could ever envisage. Sruthi’s practically family- it would be unfair to put it any other way. And indeed, she is known by more than half my family. I tell mom that Sruthi’s coming home and pat comes the reply ‘’I’ll cook fried rice for lunch, she loves it.’’ That’s how closely related she is to me and my family.

Over the years, we have shared lots of things in common- our love for sanskrit, having fun at girija ma’am’s house during bhagawadh gita classes, us knowing each other more than anybody else could possibly know of us, crazy about books, hanging out together with our other very close friend pavithra, raiding oxford, going to the beach, pigging out at cakes ’n’ bakes(her favorite place) and the chaat corner at Spencer’s Daily(my favorite place) … the list is endless.

In all these years, we never once thought of the grim prospect of studying in different places after our 12th- it was something that just did not cross our minds. Until, one sordid day, pavi and I came to know that Sruthi would be leaving for sastra in tanjore for further studies. Today was that fated day .Pavi and I went to the station to see her off … it is unimaginable to think that this lass wil be gone for 4 years. Hard to think of it too. Here’s a small poem which popped up when I thought of her :).


Paramount friends we always are ,
Best friends we'll always be,
For eternity and evermore,
You and Moi!

Longer than the shortest sms,
Deeper than the deepest ocean,
All the fun we’ve ever had,
You and moi.

Till life goes on,
We go on too, till the very end.
Friends may come and friends may go
But we’ll remain close forever.

It does feel bad to think that one of my close friends will be gone for a long time. But then again, life goes on. Pavi and I miss you, SVR. Better get back here soon :).

enTRANCE Examinations
I have jus finished my entrance exams and have been admitted into the college I wanted. Having come out of all these entrance exams unscathed(luckily), it is only fair that I dedicate a small(a very small) part of my blog to it.

Cometh the beginning of April and it's that time of the year again when all students (except those, gifted few who fall into the unsavory category of nerds and geniuses) across the country are tearing the hair out of their heads, frantically(also read frenetically, hysterically and anxiously) preparing for various entrance examinations. These white papered, pencil shading exams are looked upon as more terrifying than the board exams as they can ’make or mar your future’ if you happen to mess ’em up.

For those of you people out there who are cogitating over where you can spend your holidays after your boards, save yourself the trouble. The end of your board exams marks the beginning of a new period of torture with more sleepless nights and increased hair fall due to the building tension- the enTRANCE exams. The board exams are really not the end, especially for those in the 12th stds, they are just the beginning. The board exam fever soon gives way to entrance exam fever where all thoughts of holidays are soon forgotten. Students across the globe, especially those belonging to the science streams will attempt a few HUNDRED entrance exams in order to make it to ONE of the top institutes for their higher education.

Attempting entrance examinations is a Herculean task . It is a period in which students have to brush up their basic vocabulary, as they have forgotten the existence of words like ‘fun’, ‘easy’, ‘leisure’, etc. They(exams) require sizeable efforts by the already jaded and weary students.
The training for the entrance exams encompasses 10 hours of studying at the various coaching centers, another 5 hours at home in the morning, 3 hours in the evening, a few hours of traveling to these classes and a big hole in the pocket, as the coaching fee for these exams are definitely not small sums.

Once D-Day arrives and the exams are over, fun time still doesn’t arrive cos the results are yet to be announced and this in turn entails a nerve wracking period for us poor students who have reached the end of our tether. The long wait is a period of intense turmoil and anxiety for the students . After the results are announced, counseling begins ,and after the counseling ….the wait never ends….

There was a time when entrance exams did hold value and were of some use as they segregated the best students form the mediocre ones . Now however, entrance exams in most places have become a farce as , students who have not done well still pay lakhs of money and somehow manage to get into the coveted institutions despite pathetic and abominable grades.

As Chetan Bhagat says, exams are the reasons that may have led to the decline in the number of trees due to the increased usage of paper. So, why not do away with them?? You may agree to it, and so will I, but what about others?(the teaching community)

However, once you get into the college of your choice, the burden of these exams are forgotten in the sweet goings-on of college life. But don’t forget it completely as you know what you have been through to get into your dream college.So, the next time someone condescendingly says ‘’ah, entrance exams are a cakewalk long as you prepare for them’’ feel free to stick you tongue out at them and say’ brraacck .’ It is definitely not rude :) .

RANGANATHAN STREET
A few weeks ago, my aunt had come down from the USA after 8 long years. Being an energetic person with a penchant for shopping, she asked my mother to accompany her. The duo set off to ranganathan street. A couple of hours and 3 aspirins later my mom and an extremely weary aunt devoid of energy came back home. On making inquiries, I learnt that they had been to ranganathan street. No wonder my aunt looked so frazzled. She had entered the portals of Ranganathan street, t.nagar!!

Since time immemorial, it has been thronged by people, dogs, cats, people, malls, retail outlets, people, small offices, and more people, clichéd though it may sound.
Some call it the perfect haven for shopaholics. Some term it the dingiest and most inhabited place on this phase of the earth. I, for one, believe in calling it ranganathan street, t.nagar, Chennai 17.

We often hear lovers dramatically proclaiming that they would travel to any part of the earth to get goodies which will make their soon-to-be partners giddy with ecstasy. Not needed. All they have to do is to enter into ranganathan street and they’d find every kind of gift ranging cheap from five rupee earrings to extravagant Rs.5000 dresses and more.

One cannot drive through the place without wishing for a broomstick like the ones in the Harry Potter series.’ I seriously wonder whether even the broomstick with the rider hovering several feet in the air, would survive the continuous throng of people who dominate the area and the plethora of things it has to offer.

Another fact that is synonymous with Ranganathan street is the ruckus and cacophony of the small time hawkers and vendors who walk the by-lanes of this street and it is of little wonder that the E.N.T specialists are laughing all the way to the bank.

The area seems to be well equipped with a highly well organized network of secret undercover agents with efficient ’homo sapien’ detectors in and around the vicinity, which seem to attack any driver with a vengeance. Surreal though it may seem, the moment the administrative body gets wind of the fact that a motor vehicle is rolling in a carelessly effortless manner, they make the shoppers walk even more carelessly along the same path of the vehicle and right there, on the middle of the road, meet long lost friends and new acquaintances even to the extent of them forgetting the main purpose of their visit- shopping. The auto drivers make it the order of the day to hone their already well polished bargaining skills and woe betide any newcomer in the city who unknowingly ends up in their midst. The ultimate result is that, the poor car driver is invariably left cursing fluently under his breath for the next few hours or even worse- till as long as it takes him to draw up enough energy to overcome the never ending flow of humanity that dominate the streets of t.nagar.

If you are one who doesn’t believe in being a spendthrift, then, you're looking for, Ranganathan Street which sells you everything- from 'pirated’ VCDs' to pirated books, fashionable hand-me-downs, gold, gold plated and…………..the list never seems to end.
‘LEISURE” and ‘RANGANATHAN STREET’ are two words that cannot possibly be used in the same sentence.
A few hundred million years ago would have probably been the best time to actually think of a shopping spree here. In fact, ranganathan street has given a whole new meaning to the word ’crowded.’

To put it in a nutshell, if you ever get bored, drop into Ranganathan street and see your boredom vanish along with every ounce of energy you possess. Experience the ultimate shopping experience and see your energy levels go from 10 to 0 in just a second. Nonetheless, trust me, it’s definitely worth it.

IT'S NOT THE MONEY,IT IS THE PRINCIPLE OF THE THING!!

Below, is an sms that was circulated among my peers a few days before the 12th board exams results were announced. Having received the same sms from about fifteen odd friends of mine made me more interested in the message and has culminated in this article.

New exam pattern by the government:
FC: answer all the questions
BC: answer any 5 out of 20 questions
MBC: answer any question you like
SC: 'read only' questions
ST: thanks for coming.

Education of late, has become more of a ‘business deal, especially in this modern era. The covenant goes thus: Marks are not a measure of man’s intelligence. So, an individual who pays 20 lakhs for a Rs.20,000 merit seat has a better chance of getting it, as opposed to a person who has scored 99.99%. I may sound mordant, even acerbic. But that’s how the truth is- extremely acerbic.

What is with people these days?? We have reached a state when we pay more importance to money rather than veracity and principles. The government has brought about a few drastic changes, making life better for various sections of the society, especially the backward classes. Nothing to write home about. The question however is, how many of these allegedly ‘deserving people’ actually deserve and merit the seats they get in various colleges? At first, I didn’t take much notice of this razzmatazz . I had to go to one of the colleges to take up an entrance exam for my admission into the literature group- a group which has fascinated me since time immemorial . The invigilator in charge asked us to ‘give’ our attendance and a voice quipped ‘’if I give it (attendance) to you, what will I do without it?’’(I am not joking, this horrifying incident actually took place!!) .I was shocked and for the first time in my life at a loss for words.(no, I wasn‘t neurasthetic, just plain shocked.) Here was a girl who didn’t have a clue about English and there she was, writing the admission test for the literature group. The next day, the results were out and this girl actually made it into the college with her coveted group. Yes, she had desired the group and had got it too. But did she in actuality deserve it? These things are not common to one group alone. Such incidents are also commonly associated with the medicine and engineering seats as well.

Bizarre though it may seem, people with top marks are not granted admission into a few colleges for the simple fact that these students ‘lack recommendations by influential people.’(I can almost picture that look of incredulity on all your faces…). A commonly asked query is why recommendation when the student has scored top results?? That sadly, is a question to which we may never know the answer. The government has made life easier for the backward sections of society by raising the number of seats for them in various institutions. There are a few of these people who actually work hard and get into these institutions despite being from the backward sections of the society. But, what about the rest? The SMS at the beginning of this article should give people a fair idea as to what we are actually headed for.

Einstein once said ‘The value of a man should be seen in what he gives and not in what he is able to receive.’ Indeed, the more the amount of money given, better are the chances of a person receiving a ticket to their’ dream college’ , irrespective of the marks obtained. But Einstein sure did not mean it this way!!
When Darwin said ‘survival of the fittest’ he for one wild moment wouldn’t have thought that people would have taken it in the sense that more the bucks they pay, better the seats. Sadly, that is what people are doing. They have forgotten what conscience, values and integrity are . These words have been unceremoniously replaced by words like’ money, big bucks, bribes etc.’ ‘Honesty is the best policy’ has been shown the door and has been replaced with phrases like ‘money talks honey’ and their ugly likes. Money seems to be ubiquitous, but what about our values and principles? Money seems to have lost its values along with education. Unfortunately, ‘values’ seem to have lost their value too- a very sad state of affairs.

Like I said, ‘it’s not the money. It’s the principle of the thing.