Month: April 2020

Every batch had some boys who couldn’t handle the home sickness and tried running away. The fact was that many of us would have run away or at least , made an attempt to. If we didn’t ,it was only due to lack of courage or ideas not for lack of intentions. What kept us in may also have been due to an acute awareness of the futility of the whole exercise. And even at that age the ego was strong enough not to let the tears show and we carried on ,all our movements controlled by the wardens’ whistles and the school siren. People like me had to go through four more years in the military academies, living from siren to siren. A passing thought ; why is it that only jails and hostels have wardens ? Be that as it may , every jail would have stories of great escapes. We also had some odd guys who would tried to break free from the system control . I would refrain from names to avoid embarrassment.

Today it is all comical to think of the attempts by boys to run away from school. In the year 1968, Udumalpet , the nearest town with a railway station looked far far away than the 17 km that separated the place from Amaravathinagar. The road to Udumalpet was virtually deserted and there were just three buses connecting the two places; CVNT (C Velusamy Nadar Transport) AMS, pand one more.

A little boy who felt homesick didn’t have time , inclination or the resources for planning a trip by bus. He wanted to run away and that is just what he did. He started running on the road towards Udumalpet. The other direction led to Amaravathi Dam, a cul de sac, so there was no possibility of taking the wrong direction. When he felt tired he started walking. It provoked amusement as well as a sense of pathos to see a little boy trying to carry a huge trunk and finally deciding to just run empty handed as there was nothing of his baggage he could carry on his tentative road trip.

So , what happened to these runners? Some time after the run started, someone missed the boy , informed the warden and house master and started looking around. After checking from friends , once it was established that the boy indeed was a suspect and was prone to misadventure , the real search started. A word was sent to Mr Cherian, the only teacher who had a scooter. He didn’t have many places to search; he went straight on the Udumalpet road looking for a teary eyed , tired little boy trudging along the road . After a couple of kilometers , often well short of Manupatti , the nearest village ,the boy was found and he generally complied when asked to sit on the pillion. The boy was back in school and all was well; the story came to an end.

There was another type of running away which happened with older boys and that was more serious. Such a thing happened when there has been a serious lapse on part of a boy and he was convinced that his continued stay in the school campus was detrimental to his physical well being.

He was generally , flagrantly on the wrong side of seniors, masters (teachers) or the whole system. This could happen after a theft that has been found out or likely to be found out or when anonymous complainant against the system was identified.

Such cases resulted in much better planning and sometimes a clean escape. Normally such boys reached Udumalpet undetected. More agencies had to be sent to Udumalpet bus-stop , railway stations and other places where the boy could proceed further on the next leg of his journey.

As for as I remember there was only one case wherein a boy reached Madras (now Chennai) to give a telegram saying that he had reached home and all was well. Today it sounds all comical, but at that time the escapees as well as the school authorities would have been through a harried time of anxiety and tension. Anyway, all is well and most of the then escapees have successfully graduated from the school and are holding eminent positions in the society today.

The first thought that comes to mind when I think of the food we had at the school was that it was wholesome but not extravagant bland but not characterless; something that one gets well used to while at the school but would not like to go back to later. Like most things are in life it was a mixed bag.

During the vacations ,this was one aspect that visiting mamas and mamis , these days called uncles / aunts, had lots of questions to ask about. After the first question “Why Sainik School?” the next query invariably went like “Kalambara enna poduva ?” . The question literally translates to “what do they put in in morning ?“. Even in Tamil it sounds more like feeding cattle or horses than children. I presume it meant a lack of choice and feeding of children en masse. Then other questions follow like whether it would be like Aathu saappadu, meaning home cooked food. Some go into the details of the kind of rice and cooking oil used. In a typical brahmin household parboiled rice for meals was sheer blasphemy, and so were certain types of cooking oil. I generally answered in monosyllables in yes or no format . Honestly I never knew what I was eating except the name used for the final form. Khaja was a sweet served generally on Saturdays ; I could fairly describe what it looked like and tasted like but if someone were to ask me whether it was made of atta or maida , dalda or groundnut oil, sugar or jaggery and so on I was totally clueless.

I was never a foodie and never cared to remember what I had for the previous meal and what I am likely to have for the next meal. It is quite unlike my children who would ask about the menu for dinner at the breakfast table and could say with authority , “no not Chinese, we just had it three days back!”. Till date, I can have idli or bread ,day after day without getting bored or even repeat the breakfast fare for lunch. I wonder if the trend started at the school where the menu was fixed for years together ! Can’t really say that as I see many of my then class mates now turned to greedy gourmands . Who knows!

Coming back to the main idea of what we ate at school, I’ll go over some of the unique features and dishes rather than the weekly menu that was repeated for forty weeks in a year; considering that about 12 weeks went off in vacations. Every place has some unique signature dishes . If you ever come across an Ex NDA , someone who has been through its haloed campus in the last seventy years of its existence , ask him about cold coffee, scrambled eggs, or tipsy pudding. You will find an instant gleam in the eyes followed by cartwheels and back-flips for the next 5-10 minutes!

We too had some unforgettable dishes like cutlets, Jaangri, mysorepak and so on. More then the dish itself, it is the association of a weekday with a particular item that one remembers fondly; Thursaday Jaangri ,Fridays Cutlets, Saturdays idli & Khaja , Sundays Dosai and Mysorepak and so on. Items like sweets and cutlets and Dosais were controlled items while rice and sambaar /daal were unlimited. Bread for breakfast, as I recall, fell somewhere in between highly controlled and totally decontrolled. There was a default number of four slices per head which was more than enough for people like me and there were boys who, always asked for more like Oliver Twist. Butter , Jam and milk were limited in any case so one learnt to stretch these items through half a loaf of bread or more. There was a peculiar way of eating bread in that slices were further broken into small bits and stuffed into half a tumbler of milk. It is amazing to learn how many slices can be stuffed that way to be eaten with a spoon like some kind of pudding.

I know I have missed out totally on meat dishes, as those days I scrupulously avoided non veg stuff including eggs. The kind of vegetarian substitutes we used to get were pathetic; a handful of monkey-nuts, a spoon of butter or some such thing; nothing really to write home about. The potato cutlet in place of fish cutlet was an exception.

There were some guys who were very choosy and would demand bread in place of idli ; but by and large, most of us were omnivorous. Anything on the table was demolished with gusto, with a keen eye on what else could be got from neighbours and / or a helpful waiter.

If you ask anyone , what was the single most despised item of food, it is likely to be something we called “chukka roti”. Much later in life I learnt that it was “sookha roti” in hindi meaning dry bread with no oil or ghee, that became “chukka roti “ for us Tamilians. It was covered with powdery atta ,dry and bitter . On hindsight it must have been made through subsidized govt supplied wheat flour. Be that as it may, I never recall leaving anything on my plate ; sweet, sour, burnt or bitter. The practice stands till today.

One can’t ignore that we are all prisoners of our times. Those were the days when most people consumed food from Public Distribution System and open market was expensive . There was no junk food . Be it at home or the school ,one waited for the regular meal times and were not too picky about food . Nothing was wasted and anything edible was always welcome. Today , when I go back to the Boys Mess or cadets’ Mess as they call it now, I tend to compare it with the food at NDA or other residential schools. But looking through the eyes of a young boy in the 70s, I must say, it was one of the best fares one had as a child.

Sainik School is known for Games and Sports . We did play a lot of organized games like Basket ball and Foot ball in the regular games period. But the much looked forward to games period lasted for just about 40 minutes or so, and the day had 24 hours; too long to be spent sleeping or studying.

Boys are boys, as they say, and mind you those were the days when computers and video games were unknown. Even a humble transistor radio dishing out film songs on Vividh Bharathi was not accessible and regular sports items were not available other than during games period. Necessity is the mother of inventions and everything from sticks and stones or regular use items like buttons and slippers were marshaled to invent a plethora of games.

Of course Kabbadi was the best game to play which needed no equipment at all. But it required a number of players. There were many major and minor games that could be played by two to ten players, but I’ll restrict myself to three unique games we played; Snake pit tennis, Slipper cricket and button – carrom. I know the names themselves must be sounding outlandish though we never really referred to these games by any name as such.

Amaravathinagar was infested with snake and scorpions . In the senior houses , every house had a knee-deep , rectangular shaped snake-pit or trench at the main entrance to keep the crawly creatures away. It is a different matter that the snakes were more scared of the boys than the other way around. It was not uncommon to see a disciplined squad trooping along the road for the evening prep ,suddenly breaking ranks to join a hunt , when one of those reptiles is sighted off the road. A snake can never outrun , or may be out crawl the boys and generally ends up stoned to death. Other unfortunate creatures in the campus that were hunted down were lizards, scorpions, tadpoles or the most popular Pon-vandu (metallic wood boring beetle in English)

Coming back to snake-pit tennis, it involves two players taking positions inside the pit on opposite sides, having first cleared the pit of scorpions if any. The net is formed by the flip flop slippers that is generally taken off during such games. A tennis ball , generally bald and worn out , is hit with bare palms in table-tennis fashion. The score is also kept like in Table Tennis and one could go on and on , the whole Sunday.

Button – Carrom is a simple indoor game played on the mosaic tiled floor . Buttons of assorted colors and sizes are used as coins and a button from the rain coat is plucked out to be used as the striker. The game starts with the ‘coins’ thrown on a tile so that all coins fall within the area of a single tile. Since there are no pockets, just hitting a button out of a tile was considered good enough to earn the coin. The catch was that each button was to be hit without disturbing any other button. Coins were given values based on its color and size.

Slipper cricket was played in the Shoe-room in the junior houses. A tennis ball is hit with a flip flop slipper worn like a glove on one hand to form a ‘bat’ . Bowling was done under arm and the opposite wall was the boundary. A hit on to the opposite wall without touching the floor qualified for a six. For anyone following only the sound from outside it would seem like a lively game of squash. This was a game very hazardous to the health of window panes and tube-lights ; so generally one had to keep a watch for the warden.

There were many such improvised games , I am sure each batch would have come up with new ones or improved on the existing ones.

This account may give an idea that it was all fun and frolic at the school. Nothing could be far from truth. Inspections were scheduled generally on Mondays ; which could be dress inspection or house inspection. A dress inspection meant working on the shoes and brass buckles of the belt ,for the whole Sunday, till you could see your face on it. House inspection meant removing every speck of dust from every nook and corner, to be inspected by the whole hierarchy from house-prefect to house master before the final inspection by the Principal on Monday.

My adult avatar says, these whole gamut of improvised games only served to mitigate the existential suffering faced by young boys cooped up in dormitories , away from homes, away from civilization for five long months at at time.

Whatever be ,while recalling, it does sound we had a hell of a great time, after all.

When you look back to your school days , normally you tend to look at the events as once seen through the eyes of a child. I have had two unique opportunities that prompts me to look at the events simultaneously as a child and as an adult, a part of the management at that. The first one was about day to day management of an Army Public School. As it happened this school was about seven years old, the same age as that of of Sainik School Amaravathinagar , in the year I joined.

This school had everything in terms of funding and infrastructure but it badly lacked the vital force that makes an institution a live , throbbing entity. Despite the subsidized fee for army children, there were very few applications for admission. An institution is like a living organism and in the early years it does go through the pangs of growing up. There is the energy of the young and at the same time lack of stability that comes only with experience.

The second opportunity was overseeing the NCC activities in our school as part of NCC Group Headquarters , Coimbatore. I came across a lot of new information about the history of the school. To put it briefly, the school was original planned to be set up at Kodaikaanal , and Amaravathinagar had been selected as the interim location as the place had a lot of temporary constructions made by PWD for personnel working on the Amaravathinagar Dam. As it happens , land acquisition efforts at Kodaikaanal had run into trouble and Amaravathinagar came to be the permanent location for the school.

That is how the School had to start functioning with excess of temporary constructions and very few buildings designed and built for the purpose of running a boarding school. The first meal I had in the school in the year 1968, was in the boxing ring; yes, a boxing ring that doubled as Junior Boys Mess. The Seniors Mess doubled as an auditorium and on movie days / special functions , the dinner was served outside.

What the school lacked in infrastructure was more than made up in the quality of staff ,both teaching staff and Non-teaching or administrative staff. Almost the entire staff was in the age group of 25 to 35, all young, dedicated people who had staked their own future in the future of the school.

If an institution can be looked at as a living being, the brain certainly would be the academic staff. It was the administrative staff including office staff, mess staff, laboratory attendants and whole gamut of class IV employees that formed the all important back bone. Infra structure could be seen as arms and legs and Funds as steroids or tonics. When the body is weak, tonics and steroids can strengthen the body but without the solid back bone ,no organism can grow and without the brain there would be know directions for growth and evolution. I think, in this aspect of brain and the backbone the school has been very very fortunate.

Almost every part of the huge campus can be identified with a dedicated individual taking care of the facility. When I think of the Arts class, it is not the class room that comes to mind but the then young art teacher who retired from service from that place. So is it with crafts class ,Library or PT. While teachers no doubt played a great role ,it is the unsung heroes at each facility or place that , I think , played as great a role or may be even a greater role. I simply cannot visualize the physics or chemistry labs without recalling the lab attendants who were as much part and parcel of the lab as the Bunsen burners and Colorimeter.

The MI Room had a compounder who was more than a doctor for us. With the kind of out door activities including horse riding and boxing ,the school always had a number of walking wounded in all kinds of plasters and bandages . That one person with an assistant handled all kinds of injuries and quarantines. The doctor was only seen very rarely.

We had two NCOs from army who, I always thought were part of the school. Only twenty years later did I learn that they actually came under the NCC Group Headquarters at Coimbatore. The bonding was so complete that these two gentlemen lived in the school campus and participated in most of the school functions including hikes and excursions .

The picture I have of the sports stores in the swimming pool complex is that of a groundsman issuing stores, receiving the stores during games period . At other times he was busy repairing the foot balls, basket balls or cricket gear that the boys just used or misused and dumped in the store after the games period. I find it difficult to believe that a even personal item of sports kit like a hockey stick was actually provided to boys on the house. Boys are boys . Some of us took mighty swings with the hockey stick at pebbles . Today, I feel ashamed that some of us even pilfered twine that is used in the handles ,for personal use. As for foot balls and basket balls the casualty rate was rather high . Unlike the present times, those days everything was repairable and was repaired and re-used till the item lost its original shape completely. It is these grounds-men who ensured that a punctured bladder was fixed,leather re-stitched and the ball inflated and kept ready for use the next day.

I realized the importance of this kind of dedicated staff only when , at another school, I saw a huge pile of broken rackets and deflated balls just dumped in the store to be charged off and destroyed during the annual stock taking exercise.

As for the cadets mess we had such waiters who were permanently affiliated to a house and considered themselves part of the house. They knew the likes and dislikes of every boy and did what they could to make a simple meal great. Some of the boys, of course were smarter than others and could use their charms to wheedle a larger piece of chicken or an extra mysore pak. These waiters worked from morning bed tea, through every tea or meal till dinner time and I wonder what motivated them to keep going on and on. Today, in most places we hear of outsourcing and contract labour where attrition rate is very high and customer satisfaction is very low.

During the later part of our stay , many of our teachers moved on to better appointments in other schools as there was a growing demand for principals in Navodaya Schools and Private Schools. But most of the administrative staff stayed on till superannuation.

A thing I noticed only very recently was that our Feeder House photo of 1968, includes not just the House Master and House Tutors , but the whole team of Matron, Warden, Barber, Washer-Man and Sweeper . I have not come across such group photos in the recent times.

I feel, these are the small things that goes into making a great institution. A positive aspect of this entire teamwork is that it is not an exploitative relationship between the employee and the institution , but a kind of symbiotic relation. The employees and their families grew with the school. Today many children from these families are holding high positions in our defense forces and in other walks of life.

Those days HR was not studied or talked about much as a subject , but sure they did practice it. As alumni we owe a lot to these unsung heroes of our school.