Formative years.......

I was born on the 13th day of September, 1975, barely 3 pounds of pink flesh, but was a cause of great joy to my parents. I wasn't all that noisy a kid and spent most of my time gazing at people and watching the antics of my sister, which I guess was good for me for she indeed had a temper and didn't mind losing it one bit!!!

As far as I remember, I was quite an ordinary kid at the beginning of my school days, the dimwit who would always come second in class, because the teacher was against me, or so I thought!! I could never understand how I could lose inspite of putting my best efforts, and so in some recess of my naive brain this persecution complex took shape and I fought hard to get even with this unfair world...It was all kiddish stuff really, but then at that age you don't really expect any maturity, do you??

I must say, though, that my father's job really helped me in getting into grips with the world around me. Him being in Defence was the best thing that could possibly happen to me. Frequent change of school meant that I always had to try harder than others in my class to academically remain on the top...It was a sort of obsession really, trying to be always on the top, and it was fanned, in no small extent by my big sister who nearly always came first in her class.....

The break came quite unexpectedly, when I was in class six and our madam announced that I had topped the class. I was quite stunned and didn't really know how to handle this windfall....It felt nice to break the jinx, but also meant that now I would be in that never ending loop of competition for quite a few years...

I had the good fortune of studying in different schools spread over the length and breadth of my country India, interacting with people who were culturally very different from each other. There were all sorts of people, arrogant, diffident, friendly, extroverted...you name them and prototypes immediately spring to my mind. It was so easy to classify my friends in school......I still remember quite a lot of them....Bhupinder in Bangalore, Chitra at Delhi, and *THE GANG * at Gwalior(M.P). Perhaps, I would indulge in describing these three places coz I guess it was in these places that I really matured as an individual.

The Garden City, Bangalore

How apt did this description fit Bangalore during my first sojourn to this garden city....It was way back in 1983 when Texas Instruments had put its first baby steps at Bangalore. I was in Class Four then, without a care in the world . Telelcommunications was a word I had never heard, and bulbs were always something which you would put on to get light..... To say the least, I was ignorant, and it indeed was bliss!!!!

I played a lot of cricket in those days, with guys whose names come to my lips even today, Varadarajan Rajagopalan, Giridhar Shanbag, Nachiket Garde...were a part of the team that played its heart out in the bylanes of Jalahalli. The wicket's insignia that we made stands as a tribute to us indomitable cricketers even to this day. Wow! doesn't that sound good, the pioneers of cricket at Jalahalli......

The school life was altogether a different cup of tea. It was no fun, and we really pulled up our socks during exam time. Bhupinder Singh Khichi may sound like a dacoit's name today, but it wasn't so funny back then, when he really used to give me sleepless nights...And there were a lot others, Sumit Jain, Jyoti Mishra...Wonder where all of them are now??

Meri Dilli Meri Jaan

I have heard a lot of people say a lot of bad things about Delhi, it's pollution, the corruption and the general problems facing a middle class family at India's capital city, but believe me, I consider it to be total balderdash. Not that it isn't polluted, it really is, not that it doesn't have slums, it has and I was living right next to one of them, not that the summers are not very hot, the temperatures do touch 50º Celsisus and sunburns are quite common...yet Delhi remains an essentially beautiful place with beautiful people. Connaught place, Karol Bagh were places we used to frequent quite often, and since I wasn't staying in any defence colony I had first hand experience of what civilian life could be, and I wasn't exactly thrilled.....

Distances which were never a problem at Bangalore, suddenly became a big issue. Father used to drive from MotiaKhan(where we were staying) to Safdarjung.....a distance of around 13kms everyday.....and Mom was always worried until he actually got back home. For us it was far easier, we hopped into the school bus and hey presto! you're at K.V. GoleMarket

School at Delhi was competitive, and by competitive I mean really really competitive......The trouble was, unlike Bangalore where my competitors happened to be my best friends too, at Delhi they were either girls with whom I could not interact coz I was by nature too shy, or guys who prided themselves in psyching out competitors. So yours sincerely was virtually lost for the first two terms of Class eight, and then the coup happened!!!

It was perhaps the most joyful moment of my life, moments which I would treasure forever when I came from behind and defeated a charming lady by the name Chitra Gera and for the first in my life I felt that I was being unfair to her by denying her the first rank for she had worked harder than me for most of the year and really deserved to top the class. She congragulated me and I could do nothing but nod my head.......The next year saw the arrival of a guy bearing the name of Sujit Pillai and I understood what the term snob meant. He kept to himself, often deriding people whom he perceived as nothing more than thrash......He beat me in Class X by a few marks, but by then, I had stopped bothering too much about ranks. I had beat him soundly once and that is all that mattered, to me at least.......

Looking back at those years at Delhi, I really feel I should've been a lot more different than I actually was, but then I had so many complexes, fears of my own that perhaps I could never break free.....I really miss that crowd and if names like Chitra Gera, Sujit Pillai, Neerja, Anuradha Ganguly, Baljeet Singh, T.S. Raghunathan, Sandeep, Rinku, Ekta, Satleen, Shaahzaad mean anything to you, please do contact me....I have managed to track down a few friends like Anuradha (who's a high profile lady having finished her B.S. from the University of Maryland) and Indrajit, but then if my name means anything to you, please do contact me and don't forget to sign my guestbook......

Gwalior.......

It was a place I shouldn't have come to.....Or maybe I'm wrong.....Gwalior was a place where I actually discovered that there's a lot more to life than mere academics.....and I was indeed very happy!!!

Friends..there were lots of them...all of whom thought that the ultimate thing in the world was getting through N.D.A., and pilots were looked upon as Gods....At such a place, it was, but natural that I should lose my inclination towards academics, which was in a way very good, because I had ample time to discover myself as a person.....Guys like Rohit Oniial, Amit Vij, Sukesh Ganda, Daljeet, Gaurav Rathore, Alok Singhal and ladies like Nidhi, Shikha....well it was great while it lasted!!!

Too much of masti and I barely scraped through my Class XII and before I knew it I was in Kerala, in Trivandrum, a place I had detested thus far......

(Last updated on 16th June 1998, at the express request of Mr. Vaidyanathan Anantraman)