nostalgia

It's post midnight and i have to wake up early tomorrow. The thing is, I just don't sleep early. I just cannot. So i while away time doing something far from useful and funnily enough time flies and before i know, it its 1.30 p.m !! But it is the opposite when i am sitting in my classroom. Everyday i wake up, nowadays, thinking " why!? Oh! why should i got to college!" It is that boring and if not for my friends i just cant imagine myself continuing college studies. Thanks! you guys! Coming back to the 'oh so boring' classes that our famed lecturers handle, they must be given a double Ph.D just in ' advanced studies on various ways of putting students to sleep' . My friend Grace has now become one of the fore runners for the award ' I can be put to sleep in class before everyone else ' contest! Sorry Grace!! lol! But i wonder why they come to college daily just to do that!? Gone are the days when they would inspire and motivate, cynical as it may seem, i think most people in my class at least would agree! Then i wonder. " why sit here and waste my precious 4 years when there is a lot more to the world other than completing assignments and records?" But that is the sad state of affairs that we are forced to deal with. No longer do i feel interested to know more about anything. actually we cant really blame our teachers you see, they actually do try hard to gain our interest.

Today while i was day dreaming in class, which is common around here, i began to think of how it used to be when i was in school. I strangely did not crib for even a single day about going to school. Not when i was five nor when i was fifteen! My mother still remembers me crying to go to school even when it was declared a holiday! Isnt that funny considering its usually the other way round for most children! We at my school had the most wonderful time of our lives and all of us agree to that. we still remember our silly stories, tantrums and the funny games we played!

here are a few we loved playing:
Lock and key: most children in bangalore know this game. very popular as 'tag' i guess.
There is a denner, and the rest are free to run. once the denner is near somebody they put their hand on their head and scream out 'lock' now he has to be 'unlocked' with a 'key' by anybody other than the denner. one who fails to lock himself up before the denner touches him, is out and the game resumes with a new denner! simple!

chain cut: In this game, we had to hold hands in pairs and one of them had to be the denner and another without a partner. whoever is solo and is touched by the denner is 'out' .

soda lemon ginger pop!: i dono who invented this but it was popular wherever there were 4 stairs! the denner calls out one of the four words and the others had to jump to the proper location. those who were at the bottom ( at pop) could be chased and if they did not escape they are 'out' . I guess! I have forgotten the details of it..

red letter, crocodile, chat pat kal beka munn beka ( read in kannada), doctor doctor, dodge ball, tunnel( a more interesting version of dodge ball!) , kunte bille ( Kannada again) , making sand castles and weird sand birthday cakes with candles!, hitting a tyre around and the list goes on.

we waited to get out and play! oh i am feeling nostalgic! we had a lot of trees in my school. mango, guava, neem, gooseberry, gulmohur and a few more. The favourite was the gooseberry tree. The largest among all and we had a great time throwing a football at the branches only to be showered with a lot of very sour gooseberries! we would take it to the school kitchen, wash them and eat them with salt! simple pleasures!

Our school had no regular shape or form! it was an old house converted to a school. complete with an old tramp like woman who lived in a small room in the backyard whom we were very scared of! The common dare around was to go near her scary cottage! funny how we fell for stories about that poor woman! Then there was the tree that has white and yellow flowers whose branches split very low. so we were taken there by my teacher to climb them!

there were so many unexplored alleyways with undergrowth that it felt like a great discovery and the 'explorers' took credit for the findings. Our endless playing in the sand pit and the large wooden blocks saw time fly by. We apparently were so reckless that after our short break we has a minute of silence when nobody was to stir or talk. We had our part of fun by standing in silly postures! We found something amusing about everything. The craft classes were never taken seriously apart from a few goody goodys. the art class was spent in freeing the boys from their ties being tied with their arms! Our art teacher would always draw a boy flying a kite and then continue tying up all the guys' hands with their ties! Western music classes in the big piano room were much awaited. I personally loved it. We had this cute teacher who taught us timeless country songs. prayer time lasted almost an hour and all we did then was pull at the coir from the mats we sat on.

all this was part of the primary school which had two playgrounds, the front yard and the back yard. with a quadrangle in the middle. the rooms had names too. the piano room, yellow cupboard room, p t room, prep room, shed room, wooden blocks room!

Then came the high school building. as old and as funny as the primary one. We now had other ways of having fun. the boys who were mischievous turned worse with regular 'troubling the teacher' instances. inking the teacher's Saree. setting the alarm in a watch and letting the teacher search fr the source of sound. playing undertable football with a basketball mind you! all this in Sanskrit class. English teacher was nice woman who wore too much talcum powder! and had a Tamil accent! we played cricket during Kannada class while the class was in progress. our dear ol' math teacher ( she taught me math from 4th to tenth std mind you!) was so fed up with us that she decided to play her lesson on a cassette player in class! library hour was converted to' tear out posters from magazines and stick them on the walls' class! most of them never turned a page over the entire year! I am proud that i did read a few. But i must say we did have a good collection which we would appreciate even more now! but we knew one thing. they loved us all and we did too. We had a bonding that we don't share with any of them nowadays. i agree we are old enough now and don't need parent like care but that human factor is missing in colleges. when i look back over the past years in college, i cant remember many happy hours spent in a very carefree way.

i will always long to go back to school!

Why history??

History is created everyday and everywhere. Whether people remember it a week or a month from now depends on how sensational it is. Some instances are remembered and cherished even centuries later. How many people did actually think they would be remembered for their deeds for many years to come. Most of them would not even dream that they would be studied by millions of children in their history text books. Imagine a viking or maybe Marco Polo sitting in class five and listening to children read about their brave conquests or rare findings.

But how important is it for us to learn something that happened on the other side of the world a century ago? Some may say, 'why should we care?'. What is the whole purpose of reading about the Egyptian civilisation and the great Pyramids and about which Pharaoh built them, when he has long been dead?

I say it is good to know. Simply because history is full of people's experiences. It is a window to the world before we came into existence. I think it is more exciting to know what has already happened which may have been instrumental in changing the course of life itself than thinking about what lies ahead. Many events in history, be it the invention of the wheel or the discovery of fire make me wonder what life would be if they were never invented or discovered at all. Life without these seemingly simple things is unimaginable.
Some instances in history keep repeating. My favourite is discovering something by accident! How 'cool' would it be if tomorrow, I start my day as any other day but by the end of the day I am 'hot' news because I just found something nobody knew about till date? Sounds fascinating to me. This surely happened to many people over the years and whether they deserved it or not, they earned their place in the history books. Be it Columbus in search of India only to discover a huge new landmass which we simply cant imagine not being found until now! or Newton's accidental discovery of the mysterious pulling force of the Earth. How would it be if just nobody bothered to question a phenomenon that we see everywhere and everyday? Life would just be too different if the world just decided to take a different course during its journey.

Whenever something phenomenal happens around us we tend to compare it to something that happened before.That is very natural of us, trying to give meaning to all the events that occur. For example, if someone climbed the Mt.Everest he would probably be called
"Tensing Norgay of today" or Edmund Hillary for that matter. We, knowingly or unknowingly, live everyday in constant reference to the past. History today or history 20 years later is an indispensable part of our lives. There is constant reference to 9/11 even today( may the souls of the departed rest in peace). Examples form history keep us from committing the same mistakes over and over again. Nobody today would dream of claiming that he would one day rule the entire planet because he who really is sane knows very well that it is a task that would just remain his silly dream. When Alexander dreamt of it though, the world was a much smaller place. At least the known world seemed conquerable to him. But he too, failed.

History to some may serve as a book of examples. One who looks through it would already know what other people know and what needs to be found. So he need not discover everything by himself. People through the ages have invented many different things and discovered a lot of possibilities so that in future one knows from where he needs to continue. That is how a civilisation progresses.
If everybody lived by himself and never bothered to leave behind him, a record of all his findings, people would never have progressed. They would have probably kept finding out the same things over and over again. That would have been rather foolish.

Therefore, in conclusion, I would say History is an integral part of life. It is more than just relevant. It is indispensable. There is a lot happening in the world that is worth knowing. One lifetime is just not enough to know it all. So, we need to document everything that is worth remembering and must continue making history if we as a civilisation must continue to progress.