The Public Take on Public Exams...

Witty words from my father on the above...

Dad: "A picture before the gold medal"
Mom: "Why are you not with your books"
V: "Something fishy"
Sister: "They must've suspected you to be a copycat"
K (Dad's friend): "How much did your dad pay the photographer"
Candidate herself: "Don't BUG"

I wonder if our pictures also would've come in some random Tamil newspaper like this for some random event. Surely they must have. An article on the way girls sit while writing exams - not very ladylike to show off their bloomers to all and sundry. It wasn't enough that we wore bloomers - we had to spend precious minutes taking care that we didn't show them off even though we had barely three hours in which to score at least 190/200 on an exam that they told us would decide the rest of our lives. The exam of course was completely forgotten in two months...

India needs to take a step back and stop putting so much pressure on so many young kids because the truth of the matter is nobody gives a fuck about what how many marks you got in school... Ah well, we were fooled into thinking they meant everything and generation after generation will continue to be fooled by the "high marks" protagonists who got to us too - parents, older siblings, teachers, nuns, and let's never forgot those geeky peers who went crazy on results day and ran around like headless chickens to check who got the highest marks. I don't think that people who know me would call me mean or spiteful but I just couldn't help deriving a perverse pleasure out of watching them cringe if I had got a higher mark. I just didn't care if my mark was the highest or not but they did and that's why I was free and they were not! They were bound to this belief that the highest mark meant that the world was their oyster... I wonder if they still hold on to that belief. I wonder how many of them were married straight after high school? I wonder how many of them chose to give up their careers to start a family? I wonder how many of them are unemployed or underemployed? I wonder how many many of them have really gotten to eat of the oyster? I guess we'll never know...

Let there be no misunderstanding - I believe education is important and knowledge is power and high marks are praiseworthy. I just believe that schools in India (not that I know much about schools in other countries) have taken the joy out of learning and wrongly told its students that a high mark is the only indicator of actually having learnt something. Maybe if they had just let children be children and not forced them into tuition they didn't even need from an early age, people would actually look back on their school days with fondness... The way I do... There was no pressure, no responsibility, just days of wonder at learning about things and events and cultures and theorems and experiments (can we ever forget that one thing in Chemistry we spent that whole rainy Saturday memorising - well I have obviously forgotten it now but I haven't forgotten the fun I had learning it)! And with the exception of my arch Nemisis Hindi, I did look forward to each new class...

But there must be so many others who remember their school days with loathing... Who would want to remember waking up at the crack of dawn to go over your school books before heading to school where the teacher was your enemy and everyone seemed smarter than you, and then home again but not for long because your five hour tuition in just about every subject had to be gotten to and then back home for homework (if you were lucky, you managed to do some of it at tuition) and then dinner and bed just to wake up the next morning and repeat it all over again.

I shudder just thinking about it... I'm so glad that wasn't me or most of my friends. Whether we had the high marks or not we had a decent childhood and adolescence.

People cannot go back to school and relive those days but they can change the way their children live... Lets hope they get to enjoy the simple life we did!

The Road to Hell...

When exactly did I get on it? The first time I swore? The first time I mentally called my mother a bitch? The first time I wished my sister had never been born? The first time I wished my father would never come home from one of his binges?

But I did regret those things as soon as I thought them so perhaps I was forgiven - after all, I did go to confession at least twice a year in those days and what other sins did I have!

So maybe it was the first time I had 'impure' thoughts about a boy (I don't even know who or when that was), or maybe it was the first time I kissed a boy, or maybe it was the time I lost my virginity? Or maybe, just maybe, it was the time I introduced three dear friends - alcohol, cigarettes and marijuana - into my life... once they were in, there was just no turning back was there? No fun memory in the past six years is complete without one of them being present and most of the time, all of them were. Hell - they were the life of the party, not you or me!

So what should I do? Give it all up? Turn over a new leaf? Not today... I don't have the strength to do this today.

So I'll leave you now, and return to my life, where I live in sin with my boyfriend and smoke a joint every night and drink myself into an alcoholic stupor every weekend... oh well, I'm not complaining.

And the prayers of the more virtuous members of my family should help when it comes down to judgement day!

What's in a name...

Madras... Chennai? What's the difference people ask? I suppose there is none to most... But to me, the name Madras evokes so much... it was the birthplace of my everything... I suppose it still is...

How did such a backward little fishing village become so much more? People from Delhi, Bombay, even Bangalore look down upon us... What do they know? Have they been witness to our secret smoking spots, carefully selected after days of trial and error, and then us having to move on again once the residents became edgy... Have they spent night after night hanging out at Marina beach and Elliots beach and numerous other nameless beaches on the East Coast Road... Have they known the simple pleasure of eating sensational bread omelette outside of IIT and making fun of the cows... Do they know the relief of not having to worry about any crime more serious than an auto driver trying to rip you off... And have they known the people that made every night more fun that the last...

I suppose Delhi and Bombay and Bangalore have their own versions of all these things but for me Madras is where it's at and where it always will be...

And Chennai is just wrong!!