The School City : 2

The first day I reached school I was shocked to see the skewed sex ratio in my class. So that's what they mean when they say the female to male ratio is screwed in India. Come to think of it, I was never a womaniser but still, six girls for 39 guys. You gotta be kidding me. The last class I was in had 20 girls and 25 guys. But that was how it was, and I had to live with it.

The lack of quantity was made up by the warmth which the girls welcomed us newcomers. As a matter of fact only a handful of people in the whole class welcomed us. The rest were busy either scorning us as the 'outsiders' or digging holes in their feet thick 'IIT Physics'. I was overwhelmed at witnessing this ritual of studying IIT- this or IIT-that in the class. Even the teachers didn't disturb the guys as if these bookworms had the proof of their intelligence hidden somewhere in the 1000 odd pages of the books.

One thing that stuck me was the duration of the morning assembly. For 60 solid minutes we were supposed to stand in the queue and listen to the 'harmunia-master' (our music teacher) belch out tunes after tunes with the school choir. After this long enough singing sessions came the bhashanbaji sessions of our esteemed school mates. Who the hell ever thought that oratory skills should be nurtured at school! At the end was the 15 minutes long speech about how to behave ourselves by the Princy. Though the content differed every time but the intent remained the same "Behave or we will throw you out". All this was made bearable only by the gorgeous prefects of our school. They roamed around giving us a chance to ogle at them. God bless the female species!

The teachers had a kind of khauf in the students which I had never seen before. Even the deadliest of all guys (later we found out he had murdered a 10 year old kid while he was in class Xth) was shit scared of the teachers. Coming from a convent school, I never knew what fear of a teacher is. In my previous school, we were always encouraged to behave with teachers as friends and we almost did. But here the case was different. The teachers were marshals in the reform centers and we were the condemned. When the guys from my class saw me talking to the teachers in the way I did, some of them were scandalised. Some even came to warn us about the school-children-devouring-monster' who came at night to cut our equipments one inch short every time we misbehaved (their concept of misbehaving was pretty skewed, I tell you) with a teacher.

There were some interesting characters in the class. Each one of them deserves a special post for them, and in some cases an obituary. You read right, an obituary. Two of my classmates are dead now and one among them was a very very dear friend. But more about them later. BTW, I think our section was jinxed. We started as a section of 45 students and passed out the school with only 43. One was murdered and the other murdered someone. One guy died a couple of years later.

They say the first impressions are the last impressions. That is absolutely true. I knew I would never fit in the school and I never did. I was always an outstanding student in DPS. I stood out of the classes, in front of the VP's office, in front of the Princy's office, in the defaulter's queue in the assemblies. I hope you get my point.