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Blog 17 – Lost and Found

When I was around 8 years old, my mother and I went to the famous Ranganathan street in T. Nagar for Diwali shopping. Chennai residents will know how crowded this street usually is and festival times are even worse. However, what brings so many to this street is the wide range of shops it has, where one could buy everything including electronics, kitchen vessels, toys, flowers and clothes. When we reached the street, my mother told me to hold her hand tight or I would get lost in the crowd. I held her hand firmly and we walked into the street, and made our way to one shop after another, getting the items on our list. Generally, my mother would plan our outings in the non-peak time of the day, which was usually between 11 am-3 pm, when the crowd would be minimal. On this particular day, we were delayed, and it was past 5 pm when we got out of our final shop. As soon as we exited the shop, the massive sea of people flowing into the street pushed me away from my mother, who also d
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Blog 16 - School elections

If you have been reading my other posts and feeling jealous that I went to an awesome school, you are going to get further jealous! In addition to all the fun extracurricular activities, our school also had elections! Yes, you read that right! We had elections every year to select the School pupil leader or the SPL, assistant SPL (ASPL), the treasurer and the cultural secretary (this was a coveted position that most contestants were after). The ASPL would step in if the SPL was absent or if there were many tasks to do. I think the treasurer managed the funds of the student union. Usually, it was a commerce student that was selected for this post. The cultural secretary, people thought had a fun job, as he/ she was in-charge of the interschool ‘culturals’, where we would go to other schools and vice-versa to participate in various, fiercely battled competitions. But the reality was that the cultural secretary was often running around trying to get everything done while being in the
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Blog 15 - ‘Project week’ event at school

Unique to our school, we had an event called the ‘Project week’. This event was for primary school one year and middle school the next, so depending on which class one was in, we would get to participate in the project every alternate year. During this week, each subject (department) would be allotted a classroom in the ground floor. So, there would be classrooms marked: Mathematics, English, Science, Hindi, Social studies, Tamil and so on. Every year, we would have a theme. I remember once it was ‘Malice against none’. Every student could pick one or more subjects to participate in, collaborate with other students and discuss ideas with the respective teachers and then, adhering to the theme given for the year, had to make different ways of using the subject and display the concepts to the public. This was a public event, where the entire school would be open to parents, grandparents, siblings, students of other nearby schools and other interested people from Korattur
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Blog 14 - Festivals at school

A new year has just begun with a lot of joy, hope and fervor. We have all had weeks of celebrating one festival after another in the last two months. This season was and is my favorite time of the year. Even in school, this was the best season of the year. Our school celebrated all the festivals in a grand way. For Dusshera, we would have a massive ‘Golu’: multiple steps decked with hundreds of dolls brought in by teachers and students. Teachers would even take turns and perform the puja everyday and even make the tasty ‘Sundal’ and distribute to all the students. We would be taken for a class-wise tour of the Golu, a great way to bunk one period of study! They would also have fancy dress competition with a Dusshera theme for the nursery kids, who would come in costumes of all possible gods or characters from our mythology. After Dusshera would come Deepavali/Diwali, the festival of lights. Diwali would be a school holiday, where we would celebrate with family and friends a
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Blog 13: Extra-curricular activities: General assembly (G.A.)

I have strong memories of two specific events that took place in my school. I think ours and PSBB school were the only schools who had these events, and both were unique in their own way. The first one was called general assembly or G.A. and it was basically the first two periods of a working day (split into Monday for primary school (1 st to 5 th standard), Wednesday for middle school (6 th to 8 th standard) and Friday for High school (9 th to 12 th standard)). Every week (apart from the exam season), we would have different competitions like oratorical, debates, mock-news, just-a-minute (JAM), ad-zap, singing, dancing, vedas/shloka recital, fancy-dress etc. Children would be encouraged to participate as per their talent or interest. After the usual morning prayer assembly, the “G.A. classes” would stay back and move to the school portico, where the stage would be set with mike (and props when required). Someone among the students would be pre-picked to compere the e
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