Princi !!!

As he came in,hands folded behind,face stern and angry with the meek peon following him with a cane in hand,the class just fell silent in fear. " who is the class leader?? " he grunted..and i stepped up shaking ,with tears just about to stream out any moment."is this the way you monitor the class?" " sorry sir " i said. "ok.give me the names of all the students who were speaking in Tamil". "ok sir" i said and he left.

"i hate him".that was my first impression of him.i hated him from the bottom of my heart. he was our new principal Mr.Shanmugam.we had just entered the 6th class,came into the new "senior school" from the junior one (which had classes KG to 5) thrilled and excited.basically both the junior and senior schools belonged to the same institution,just physically separated.the senior one being situated in the outskirts of our small town,in the midst of a beautiful and scenic location.(more about the school in a different post).but now, all that excitement was dampened by just one factor, the new princi.

he was a lot different from the previous ones we had.here was a man for whom "discipline" ,"order","punctuality" were not just words.he was tall,well-built and had a powerful personality with a voice well suiting it.he was widely travelled,well educated,had worked in a number of distinguished schools,the last was as a principal of a school in Fiji.

my first thought was, "what is he doing here??" i mean, ours was a small school,by no means popular except for the fact that it was run by the chinmaya mission and this was a "small" town somewhere down in south tamilnadu. we sat in groups during our 10 min breaks, the lunch breaks and basically wherever we met, discussing about him,moaning and cursing him."why didn't he go to chennai?"." why did he come here?".

well the list of complaints against him were long.but most of all he broke all the traditional rules for a principal.

principals were supposed to sit all day in their office doing some crap,just show their face in assemblies, render some speeches on things nobody cared to listen and just smile when they meet students.

he travelled in the school bus , got in at the first stop and sat in a two seater occupying 3/4 of the seat with "The Hindu" occupying him ( or so we thought) for the whole journey. we lost our freedom to gossip and shout in the bus.

he walked around most of the day,shrewdly observing everyone and everything he saw.his daily assembly talks were always about the bad things he had noticed the previous day.

we were made to pick up garbage (like plastic bags etc) wherever and whenever we saw them.
we were not supposed to chase peacocks around for feathers( yes peacocks!!).
worst of all, we had to talk in english, always !!!

now this was something unheard of in our school's annals,nobody had ever laid such a rule.english was just a subject,but how could we talk in it for 8 hours??? "you can speak good english, only when you think in it",he said in the assembly once. "oh ,there he goes" we thought,now he has started policing our thoughts too!!!

the assemblies now had 1 student talk on some interesting topic for 2 mins and another one read the news headlines.so now we had to break our heads for the assembly topic and my legs shook when i stood before the school addressing it.(there was once a funny episode when a student didn't have the time to write down the news and started reading it out right from the newspaper in the assembly.the principal's face was a sight to watch !!! )

he started teaching the english paper 2 classes.the only class which was fun and full of stories and didnt have to be taken seriously was now filled with his baritone reading out "the mayor of casterbridge" and others, to a class forgetting to even blink for a moment. we did not utter a word in his class for fear of our english being corrected by him.we had to write character sketches of all the characters in the story and each one had to be unique.no copying!!.

the school timings were increased by an hour in the evening.he introduced student clubs for journalism,quiz, dramatics and gardening which got together twice in a week after classes.so 2 days of our play time gone!!!

well, the list was endless. he had spoilt every minute of our school life.there were rumours that even the teachers hated him.

so when he left the school,after 4 years of his reign,we were delighted and overwhelmed with happiness.

slowly,things changed. my legs and voice didn't shake as much as before, in the school day plays and elocution contests.i could write on any topic thanks to my journalism club activities.my quiz club participation had definitely sparked off a small interest and my general knowledge was better than before (which was 0!! ) though limited to GK books. most of all,the small,insecure underconfident girl who was just good in academics was beginning to take slow steps towards other actitivities. he had made me discover things about myself which i would have never done on my own.

when i got the best all round student award in my last year in school, a lump rose in my throat. he had passed away, cruelly,in a road accident in chennai some time back. how i wished i could take back all my curses and the bitter remarks.how i wish i could just meet him once and tell him all that i wanted to say and watch that rare smile brighten his face.

i don't believe in heaven and hell but i know that he lives in my memories.