Taare Zameen Par

At long last, after the rest of the world has already finished watching and praising the movie, I watched Taare Zameen Par (TZP). I liked the movie. I thought the first half of the movie was very well made: it was natural and powerful. Most of the second-half however took on a somewhat larger-than-life hue. Still the movie overall made a very decent watch. Do watch it if you already haven't!

But this post is not about TZP. This post is about boarding schools (or hostels, the more common terminology), memories of which were evoked while watching TZP. In the movie, the protagonist, eight-year-old Ishaan (an aside: the child playing Ishaan in the movie is simply brilliant in the role), is informed that he is going to be put in a boarding school so that he will be forced to work harder. Ishaan reacts to this news with horror and pleads with his mom to let him stay at home.

I wondered how I would have reacted to such news at a similar age. It is hard to say for sure, but I kinda guess, my reaction would have been: glee. You see, when we were kids, my sister and me were brought up on a diet of Enid Blyton's Malory Towers and St. Clare's books. Each of the books in these series featured boarding schools where the young residents seemed to have a ball of a time pretty much all the time: having midnight parties, playing tricks on teachers, hanging out with friends - the works.

In all, sis and me got the impression that boarding school was some kind of heaven where children got to do all kinds of fun stuff with minimal adult supervision (we conveniently forgot the teachers, matrons and so on who also appeared in these books).

Besides, in the Enid Blyton (and other books by western authors) books we read, the kids featured in all the stories invariably went to boarding schools, typically coming home only for the "summer" or for the "holidays". Going to boarding school seemed like a very normal part of childhood. So much so that we were sometimes secretly disappointed that we had to remain day-scholars!

My sister finally got her dream of going to a boarding-school fulfilled in high school. From all accounts, the first few months were pure hell. She quickly disabused me of my romanticized notions of boarding schools and I dimly began to comprehend how lucky I was to be able to go to school from home. But being in the hostel grew on her and she went on to create quite a lot of wonderful memories there.

My first chance to stay in a hostel came during my first year of undergrad. My college was located in Chennai whereas my dad was working in a different city. While I was nervous about staying away from home, I was also excited. Midnight parties and fun times, here I come! The excitement lasted till the time I shopped for new things, met my future room-mates and most importantly, was still with my parents. Finally, it was time to say adieu.

The car was in front of my hostel. The last of my packages had safely been deposited in my hostel room. The hostel watchman watched while I said goodbye to my mom and dad. I was grinning weakly. Then, all of a sudden, the tears simply tumbled from my eyes. And just wouldn't stop no matter how hard I tried. Darn - all those stupid books about fun times in the hostel never described just how hard it is to wave good-bye to the dearest and most loved people in your life. Even if the good-bye and the separation is only temporary.

And I stood there and cried and cried as though my heart would break (had I known any better, I would have shut up and done my howling in private. Parents get so upset by their children's tears). At long last, the watchman intervened. He advised me to go inside, saying kindly, "Don't worry, child. Before you know it, four years will be up." To my parents he added, "We will take good care of her. The students here are very busy studying and barely have the time to miss home. Please don't worry." And with heavy hearts, the final farewells were said.

All this happened when I was a wise seventeen years old. I could only imagine just how much more terrible eight-year-old Ishaan in TZP would have felt. Which was why I could barely hold back my tears when I watched this song and listened to the lyrics:


Kudos to the director!

Though being away from home was initially very difficult, I haven't regretted staying in the hostel. Being the youngest person in my house, I was babied a lot while at home. Hostel made me more independent. But that was just a fringe benefit. What I remember the most: midnight parties with cakes and dancing, all night gossip sessions, champion-eater competitions, movie-watching marathons, hair-cutting cum beautification sessions, surreptitious omlette making in the room, concocting plausible excuses for arriving after curfew again, buying chai at midnight for "studying" .... and doing a million other fun things with hostel-mates, some of whom have become friends for life. All this in between our "busy studying" schedules. Hostel was fun!

The hostel stay also prepared me for coming abroad. I think I adjusted much faster to being so far away from home than the poor souls who were doing that for the very first time in their lives. After all, I had already had a peek at the brighter side and knew that no matter how bleak the world looked at the time of farewell, it would not end and could only get better from there!

****
Bonus:
This is the best (according to me) picturized song from TZP. You can feel the child's wonder.


Enjoy!

Hair today gone tomorrow

This weekend, at long last I went to the salon to get a long pending haircut. The hair stylist was mercifully not one of those chattering kinds (I am pretty poor at doing polite conversation) and I had all the time in the world to think and observe as the stylist went about her job. This stylist was different from the other stylists I have been too - after cutting each side, she would not look at my hair to compare if it was even, instead she would hold the ends with her fingers, stare at the ceiling and feel if it was even or not! Wow, how much experience she must have to achieve that (needless to say, she did a good job and I am happy with my haircut).

As with all my other sudden career aspirations, I suddenly started wondering how it would be to work in a beauty salon. But it was not as if this was so totally out of the blue.

You see, since childhood, me and my sister have found tons of outlets for our creativity in the make-up area - mainly because, on both dad's and mom's sides of the family, we are either the eldest or near to the eldest among all the cousins. So we always had an entire brood of younger cousins at our disposal on whom we could try our "talents".

Since childhood, we have polished lots of nails, applied lipstick to lots of lips, lined a lot of eyes, dressed up lots of "kings" and "queens" - either because the younger cousins asked us to do so or more often, because we felt like experimenting (of course, us being the honorable akkas (big sisters), our younger cousins were only too delighted to be the models - unfortunately, now they are all grown up and don't have quite the same adoration for us any more :-(). Anyways, dressing the cousins up was a good pasttime for us. We were reasonably okay at doing it and as we grew older, we sometimes even helped the "elders" with their make-up and clothes.

However, it was only after reaching the hostel that I discovered my flair with hair (ah, that rhymes :-)). I don't quite remember how it happened but it was during the first semester of my first year in hostel. AD, one of my first year hostel mates, whom I hardly knew, somehow decided that I should cut her hair for her. I was thrilled to get a volunteer for my experiments with hair and agreed immediately.

AD wanted it shorter than her present just-above-the-waist length hair but did not specify just how short. I started off with great enthusiasm. There were five other girls in the room as audience. They all sat on the cots to watch while AD sat on the floor in the center on a bunch of spread out newspapers. I knelt behind her with the scissors.

Initially, the process went off pretty smoothly. But then I realized that one side of AD's hair was slightly shorter than the other. So I chopped off some more hair from the longer side. And, you guessed it, now that side was shorter than the other side. So snip, snip, snip I went on the other side. Oh no, now the other side was shorter than the previously shorter side.

At this point, word had gotten around the hostel first year students that someone was getting their hair cut and that it looked as if it was going to be lots of fun. The number of girls in the audience had now swelled to a dozen. More wanted to come in but there was no space and I was getting distracted with all the attention.

Finally, the doors to the room were closed but people continued to peer in through the windows - I guess everyone was betting about whether AD will have all her hair shorn off or not with my monkey and the pie act or not :-(.

Anyways, the bright spot was, since AD could not see her hair herself, she cheerfully asked me to continue doing what I thought was right. Eventually, when her hair had reached shoulder length, both sides had finally equalled out and I was done. AD marched to the mirror - everyone held their breath to see what her reaction would be to her considerably shortened hair.

AD took one look at herself and went "Oooooooooh, thank you so much - this looks so nice". And actually, it was true - AD has really fine hair and the free flowing shoulder length hair instead of her usual single thin pigtail made her look cute. Ta da - success by accident :-D!

After that, requests poured (okay, a few of them came) in for the miracle hair-stylist ;-) - I once even cut someone's hair using a pair of ultra tiny foldable scissors as we could not find the regular sized ones (ah, the things we did in hostel). After that word got around that I could help with other "make-up stuff" too. So during the final year of undergrad, during college functions, I helped with eye-liners, drawing elaborate free hand bindi patterns etc. - it was fun to experiment on different people :-)!

Sitting at the salon that day brought back all these memories.That's when it struck me - being a beautician would give me a lot of subjects to experiment on and what's more, actually get paid for it - cooool :-)! Is it too late to start learning to be a beauty specialist?

Acknowledgement: Thank you Saranya for acting as the initial catalyst in bringing up the memories :-)!

Of cakes and hostels

One of my favorite dialogues in the movie Dil Chahtha Hai happens when the trio of Saif, Aamir and Akshaye take Dimple to a restaurant to celebrate her bday. After the celebrations, Dimple thanks them for having come. To which Saif brushes aside the thanks and earnestly says, "Hum cake khaney ke liye kahin bhi ja sakthey hain." (We can go anywhere to eat cake). To appreciate the full humor of that dialogue, you should have been in hostel at least once in your life.

Students staying in a hostel are a perpetually hungry lot. The crummy food from the hostel "mess" can never satisfy anyone's appetite. And when you don't earn, you cannot afford luxuries like always going outside to eat. So anything which makes its appearance in the hostel and appears to be food-like is immediately up for grabs. I learnt this the hard way in the first year of my hostel-life.

My parents had just come down to visit me. After a few delightful days, it was time for them to leave. Hearing my sad stories of my under-nourished state, they bought me a whole collection of goodies to keep my company after their departure. It was a LOT of food and I was thrilled. In my excitement I rounded up friends, neighbors, people-in-the-corridors etc. and asked them to help themselves to the food when they felt like it and not feel shy about it. And with a glow of contentment, I left for my classes. When I returned in the evening, of my huge food-bag I could see no signs. All I could find was a big bag with one last measly half-finished bag of snacks left in it! My friends and neighbors had taken me at my word and finished *everything*!

Lesson #1: Unless you really want to finish off all your snacks in one go in the hostel (if you are a sane hosteller, you will not be having any such desire) do not broadcast that you have food in your room to the whole wide world.

Having been brought up to believe that every day should feature at least three square meals, I was initially upset to find that some of the days I simply couldn't eat breakfast because the food was too tasteless. On such days I had to drink the white colored water (oopz, milk) that was a part of the breakfast and rush to my classes. But slowly I realized that it was a privilege to be able to miss the sorry semia kichdi and the atom-bomb like idlis.

Lesson #2: Bread can become your all time favorite breakfast item. I used to simply love the bread-kurma combination that we got on Friday mornings!

After my first year in the hostel, I got the chance to shift back home - only to return back to hostel in my final year. The first few days were a traumatic re-introduction to the hostel food. I remember that one of my day-scholar friends, A (bless her), brought me lunch from her house *every day* for a week till I was ready for the hostel food. But being a senior in the hostel has its own fun. I knew many people in the hostel, the resident tutor liked me and my gang of friends and we had the run of the hostel. When the food was horrible, we could laugh about it - when it was good, we had contests to see who could eat more. I remember that my friend P once ate a baker's dozen (13 slices) of bread in one go :-))! On another occasion, when the dosa and sambhar tasted exceptionally good, we had dinner for a whole 2 hours...

Lesson #3: Even hostel food can taste very good at times.

Most birthdays had midnight-parties arranged by the friends of the bday girl. These parties typically consisted of cutting cake, chatting and then dancing to the latest hit tamil/hindi songs. The cutting cake part always attracted the biggest crowd. Being of a shy nature, I initially went to a bday party only if I knew the bday-girl. However, as the year went by, I lost my inhibitions. I think the lowest point came when I attended the bday party of a junior. I think I had spoken two words to her till that point. Add the "happy birthday" and it was a total of four words. Nevertheless, me and my roomies joined the thronging crowd and lustily sang "happy birthday" and got our share of the cake.

Lesson #4: Hum cake khaney ke liye kahin bhi ja saktey hain!

Now you know why I laugh especially hard whenever I see that scene in DCH :-D!