School is no fun

And you thought you were the only one who hated formal education? A new anthology shows us how everyone from Gandhi to Vikram Seth fared ill in adolescent worlds full of teachers, bells and bullies.

MK GANDHI
From An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with Truth
“My own recollection is that I had not any high regard for my ability. I used to be astonished whenever I won prizes and scholarhsips. But I very jealously guarded my character. The least little blemish drew tears from my eyes.”

RABINDRANATH TAGORE
From My Life in My Words
“As for that teacher, I can never forgive him. He was so inordinately conscientious! He insisted on coming every single evening, there never seemed to be either illness or death in his family. He was so preposterously punctual too.”

R K NARAYAN
From My Days
“She (grandmother) would place an easy chair in the garden for herself and a stool beside it for me, fix up a lamp, and attempt to supplement with her coaching the inadequate education I got in school.”

AMIT CHAUDHURI
Four Days Before the Saturday Night Social
“The stage was not always such a profane site. At nine o’clock, the Principal stood upon it and took the lead in folding his hands together and, uncharacteristically, closing his eyes to say, rather haltingly, the Lord’s Prayer. Gautam knew only some of the words — ‘vouchsafe’, ‘Almighty God’, ‘daily bread’ (when he involuntarily pictured a white Britannia slice) ...

NAYANTARA SAHGAL
From Prison and Chocolate Cake
“For being a good girl I was from time to time given a ‘holy picture’ illustrating an incident from the life of Christ, and I collected a number of these. But still I hated school and longed to get home every day.”

HARIVANSH RAI BACHCHAN
From In the Afternoon of Time
“Not that I recall actually having been beaten for failing to learn a lesson properly; but if I turned away from my book while reading — and sitting there in the open there were hundreds of tempting distractions — he (Maulvi Sahib) would grab my ear and slowly turn my head back to the book.”

VIKRAM SETH
From a Doon School Founder’s Day speech
“These last few strokes of the bell, I remember, used to cause me particular anxiety when I was running a change-in-break and had almost reached the sanctuary of the main building from the distant border settlement of Jaipur House. It always seemed unjust to me that the Tata House boys could virtually saunter through their changes-in-breaks, grinning away, while for us they were like mini-marathons.”

FARRUKH DHONDY
From Boomerang
“Between the boarders and the day scholars there was constant rivalry. We had bicycles which they yearned to borrow. They had access to the scandal and dirty stories about masters’ wives. They were good at running and boxing and football and the best of them could probably beat the hell out of the best of us in hand to hand combat.”

TENZIN TSUNDUE
From My Kind of Exile
“When we were children in a Tibetan school in Himachal Pradesh, our teachers used to regale us with tales of Tibetans suffering in Tibet. We were often told that we were refugees and that we all bore a big ‘R’ on our foreheads. It didn’t make much sense to us, we only wished the teacher would hurry up and finish his talk and not keep us standing in the hot sun ...”

SUKETU MEHTA
From Maximum City
“Shortly after the state examination results were out, the photographs of the toppers would appear in the newspapers, in ads for the coaching classes where they had toiled night and day. They wore thick glasses and looked enervated from frequent masturbation. None of them were smiling at their triumph. They didn’t look like they’d smiled in a month.”

RECESS
The Penguin Book of Schooldays
Editor: Palash Krishna Mehrotra
Publisher: Penguin
PAGES: xx + 354
Price: Rs 450