AN OUT OF THE CLASS BUSINESS
We were the only group who got beatings even in our high school. Those days our language (Malayalam) teacher used to take rounds and rounds of questioning. It needs no explanation to understand how hard the Malayalam grammar was, where we have to identify in which meter a poem is written depending upon the number of short sounds (laghu) and long sounds (guru) used in a line. Usually we pass the first round of questioning. But by the second or third round we will be out. And in the last round there will be only one student remaining in the classroom (the class topper). She too fails. I think it is in those Malayalam classes we learnt the real sense of the Darwin’s law ‘the survival of the fittest’. And those students who failed to answer were supposed to go out of the class with their book to write the imposition of the whole chapter a hundred times. The process wouldn’t complete with one hour. So the very next day when the bell rings for the hour we all rush out of the class room with...