Recollections

A bunch of teens with hopes and dreams

Forty years ago

Flew starry-eyed into the world

A wealth of courage to know.

Like coffee beans they had grown

Clustered on a stem

Awaiting change from green to red

Each one a budding gem.

The monsoon rains of learning did

drench and soak them all,

Their teachers held the taro leaves

When troubles did befall.

Amidst the vigorous study routine

that flowed like a mountain stream,

Bloomed puppy love and crushes too

The misty foggy dream!

Once blended, roasted, grinded

In a cup ready to pour,

Diverse and distinct the flavors were

All delicious to the core.

So off they went like a ginger torch,

Standing proud and tall,

Walking paths some steep, some flat,

Answering to their call.

Dispersed worldwide the clustered beans

Of Nineteen Seventy Six

Sought to strike convergent notes

Their divergence to fix.

Forty years later now,

Let us congregate

To share our journeys big and small

Our odyssey celebrate!

~Jhuma Basu Kanungo

It was the best of times…

 “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope…”Dickens, 1859, roughly about a hundred years before the batch of 1976, South Pointers were born, says it all.

It was the spring of hope indeed, as a herd of about 250 gawky teenagers would prance up and down the whitewashed corridors of a very well kept school, each morning, dodging their teachers, nudging each other, catching a glance here, tucking a shirt there, running fingers through carefully tousled hair, till the sharp electric bell would shoo each one of them into their classrooms with the smarter lookouts  prying out of doors to see if the teachers were approaching. The tough science teachers, mostly male, some in trousers , some in starched white dhotis would saunter down the corridors with enviably royal ease before knocking and tapping some precocious ones with their huge imposing wooden rulers. Sometimes a loud bark from one of them “Hey you there..What are you doing here?”would be enough to chase the toughest of the class hero to scamper back to desk and safety, while the girls would welcome him with sniggers and haughty airs.

It was the time of foolishness and naivety..it was our Wonder Years. Time when romance came alive through the pages of Oliver Twist’s Nancy and Bill Sykes, Arms and The Man’s Raina and her Chocolate Cream soldier. Time of belief when the ethereally beautiful English poetry teacher’s voice would mesmerize the class as it floated across the well-lighted room in the first period. “Tell them I came, that I kept my word’ he said.” Listeners. Walter de la Mare. Yes, the class listened. Spellbound.  Seeds of love for literature were sown. The gangling boys our still unclaimed heroes would scoff at our romance laden eyes after each English class, as if to say “Oh! you silly girls!” till in the fifth period’s English Grammar class would have our Prefect Ma’am diligently asking each one of them to stand up and work out the ‘Transformation of Sentences’ exercise from Wren& Martin. A whole line of those tall, healthy ones   remained standing without answering, till Aunty (teacher) would remark, “They also serve who stand and wait.”Yet another language teacher had once thundered at the class over some childish display of curious naivety with, “Your Old Curiosity’s shop must close its shutters down”. Lines from Milton and Dickens splattered  to chastise us !The class often remained gaping like goldfish while somebody’s data bank had stored each line to use on her own students a decade later!

It was the season of light. A time when teachers dropped into students home just to check on their progress, to have a cup of tea with the parents…and ours was not a Missionary  run school where the Jesuits are known to indulge in such community building exercises. South Point was one of the very few co-educational schools in a very sedate Calcutta of our times. Students from urban, middleclass families flocked the school for “good education.” Terms like holistic or quality were not much used in our homes. “Bhalo porashona “with “manush howa” was the primary goal. The fact that the batch of 76, the last batch of class eleven Higher Secondary, us, have spread all across the world as professionals in various disciplines speaks of our mentors, our teachers. Our reunion is therefore intrinsic to the spirit of South Pointers “Courage to Know”. We plan to get together to know ourselves once again, eager to see “The things which I have seen, I now can see no more..” as wrote Wordsworth.

 “Education’s purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one” words of Malcolm Forbes. Our teachers at South Point had tried just that. Today when all of a sudden a what’s App group gets formed the purpose is to get reconnected with our flashback years as much as to share our lives spent together in the very spring of our lives. Now at the autumn of our lives I see the late fifties boys getting rowdy and raucous once more, girls being cautious, almost coy, yet we seem to be many in body but one in mind when we recount our teachers and their contributions, their inimitable styles, their tirades and praises showered on us remain etched in our collective memory. In fact our awe and fear of them has blended into fondness and reverence…almost  matching the emotions we share over our parents. Irrespective of their presence or absence in our lives now. Many of our parents have passed on, so have some of our teachers, but we cherish their hardwork, their memories and the sheer undiluted love they had for us. Need we then mention “why” we are meeting? We, the batch of 1976, South Pointers  are meeting to honour  LIFE.!

~ Subhalakshmi
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Small white threads emerged out of a box. 

Gentle hands pick them up and put them in other boxes, where they picked up a gentle hue , and strength and then they are wafted out by the winds of change to the whole wide world.

Each a simple thread , but they find their places in the mosaic of things. Some threads retain a frail connection, and some float far away. Each gain in colour and character and become an entity.

Some threads get lost on the way, leaving behind faint and fond memories.

Each a simple thread – they come together again after four decades to reminisce , to look back and to feel how it was as those simple white threads .

Each a simple thread, but what a complex and colourful tapestry we weave. Together.

~ Bijit Sarkar

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The year was 1976.

 Pol Pot becomes the Prime Minister of Cambodia, Israeli soldiers raid the Entebbe airport, Nadia Comaneci wins three gold medals in the Olympics with seven perfect 10 scores and there were two billion fewer people in this world.

 Closer to home, Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed was our President and Indira Gandhi the Prime Minister. It was the peak of the coercive family planning policy in our country at that time. Mrinal Sen released Mrigaya and we got to know of a maverick young actor named Mithun Chakraborty. It was the year Baichung Bhutia was born.

 And for the rest of us, the last batch of Higher Secondary students of South Point High School, it was the best of times and the worst of times. On one hand the impending freedom from the shackles of a high school and on the other hand the uncertainty that awaited each of us, a life changing event that would define the rest of our lives through the prism of a career.

 If one has to define school life I think the first word that would come to mind is friendship. Yes, college does provide more of that in later years but the kind of friendship one experiences during school days is beyond compare. It is simple, funny, silly, messy, uncomplicated, and above all everlasting.

 The wheels of time kept churning meanwhile. The boys and girls of South Point were trying to be the future dentists, economists, lawyers, architects, journalists, poets and geologists. Some made it, some got close and some ended up doing something completely different. Strains of friendship came floating from far flung places across the globe. And just like that, one fine morning, someone on a social media platform said, it has been forty years since we graduated from South Point. Let’s meet.

So on a chilly December Sunday evening in Kolkata, we will try and ensure as many of the two hundred plus who passed out the last batch of HS in 1976, get together to finally acknowledge that the intervening forty years was merely a passage of time. It will once again be a testimony to our national creed of unity in diversity. There is no denying the fact that we are all very different from each other today. We have traversed different paths in all these years, some ravaged and some celebrated, and yet when we look back at 1976, we were all the same. Come December 2016, forty long years from that fateful day, when we wrote our last exam paper, we will be together again, in spirit and soul. Amongst us, there will be grandmas and grandpas, singles and childfree, rich and famous, not so rich and not so famous, marathoners and ICU veterans, taciturn bureaucrats and flippant limerick composers, all signing up to celebrate the very essence of what binds us together and that is our years spent together in Mandeville Gardens and Ballygunje Place. No matter how diverse our lives are today, when we pull back the curtain of these forty years, we will rediscover those pony tails and skirts, ill-fitting trousers and bags laden with Bangalipi exercise notebooks, tiffin boxes and water bottles.

 Sadly, we have already lost a few from the batch of ‘76 who are no more. We will salute them and celebrate on their behalf too. So here we come. The best, the brightest, the handsomest, the cutest, the sexiest, the funniest South Point has ever produced.

~ Pradip Dutta

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My thoughts on SPHS '40' years Bash - 1976 - 2016

Trideep Anand - Class XI Sec C.

Is it true or am I dreaming! This must be a miracle!

I cannot even imagine that the day will come when I will meet my schoolmates as well as classmates to celebrate 'THE MOMENT'. The moment when I will come close to my dear friends once again after forty long years. 

My thoughts!

As we say, ' there are many things more precious than money and money cannot buy friendships' - I value 'friendship' as the most precious one of all. And if the friendship lasts as long as it did for us, then there is nothing better in this world. 

It is without doubt one of the biggest events of my life after 40 yrs when we all will be each others 'Bondhus & Bandhobis' as we were forty years ago. 

I cannot even believe and it gives me jitters to even think that the 'MOMENT' is just round the corner and the event is actually happening. 

My earnest gratitudes and thanks to all my friends

I owe a million thanks and gratitude to all my schoolmates for spending & sharing so many wonderful moments and sleepless nights and also for sacrificing their most precious time & energy to help me whenever I needed it. 

I remember, there were childish fights, meaningless arguments, meaningless mudslinging and  insults and there were tears of sorrow and happiness but at the end we were friends again. 

As the day arrived when we unwillingly got separated from each other and were forced to drift apart, since each one of us had different dreams & plans for the future. 

Some even left India, as I, in pursuit of higher studies, new and exciting challenges and to gather new experiences in our life. 

The thought of meeting my schoolmates once again on this wonderful occasion and share all the fantastic experiences of our lives makes me even more curious and excited.  

I have no words to express my feelings right now but to wait eagerly to meet them in person after forty long years. 

My sincere condolences for friends who lost their lives so early and left us forever.

My hopes and wishes!

I hope to meet my friends with an open mind, without the simplest of doubts and fear and try to celebrate the reunion together and make it the most memorable moments of our lives. 

I am looking forward to this 'Day' to bring back the long lost memories and the days of togetherness and to tie the band of friendship for the rest of our lives.

~Trideep Anand

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Ahh. My alma mater.

I dreaded facing the heartless box

Each day.

Preconceptions, categorizations.

Coached to success, and

Even more success.

Knowledge, understanding took a back seat.

Creativity stilted. Imagination frowned upon.

Courage inevitably had bad consequences.

That was my South Point.

Couldn’t wait.

to get the hell out of there.

Except for my friends.

Forty years later,

Effortless picking up connections

Of love, friendship, laughter and sorrows.

As if yester-decades never happened.

Forty years later, I cannot wait.

Anymore. To see you, my friends.

My class mates. For life.

~ Kunal

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FORTY YEARS AFTER

Forty years is a long time in the life of an average person. With great strides in medical science, eighty is the new sixty but even for an eighty-year-old, forty years is half of one’s average lifetime. To understand that better one has to look at people like Abhishek Bachchan, Baichung Bhutia, Mallika Sherawat, Smriti Irani. Yes, these famous Indians were all born in 1976, the year we passed out of school – forty years back. In our time, school finished after the completion of class eleven. Not ten, not twelve but eleven. As strange as it may sound to today’s kids, there must have been some reason for the educationists of our time to choose the number eleven. Well, most popular field sports also have eleven players. Perhaps, eleven years made us special – a well rounded person capable of performing like a full team of eleven!

1976, was a special year like every other year. But for those who finished school that year, it had to be extra special. It was the first feeling of Azadi – freedom from going to school in a uniform with a clumsy big school bag! Wow, that feeling was like Shah Rukh Khan standing at the edge of the cliff with his hands spread like a Boing and the breeze kissing every single strand of hair, making it fly like fine Chinese silk threads. Yes, college was meant to be the first intoxicating taste of adulthood – like the song “Pehla Nasha, Pehla khumaar...”. Bunking college was cool. Not getting stopped at adult films was cool. Oh, in our days we didn’t say cool – ‘groovy’ was the in-thing to say, as prescribed by Simon and Garfunkel. So, college was groovy. Little realizing that in 1976, we were exiting the cocoon of our school, marching like little ants towards the challenge of graduation. It was one more step away from uniforms and exams – straight into the big bad world where each day would be a test.

Yet, 1976 was special. Amitabh Bachchan had already built a Dewaar between his world of the angry young man and that of the romantic Rajesh Khanna. Even if we were not exactly tall dark and handsome with a baritone voice, it was okay for us to say in our heads – “Mein aaj bhi phenke huye paise nahi uthate...”. For young girls too, the Indian-goddess-sati-savitri look was out. The un-conventional Jaya Bhaduri and Shabana Azmi – bespectacled, cotton saree ‘thinking’ woman was in. Even cricket – the only known international sport for Indians was not giving us any pride or joy after Gavaskar’s first ODI World Cup in 1975 when he mysteriously scored 36, not out in 174 balls! Can’t blame Bachchan for being the angry young man. If there was something common between the boys and the girls it was this phase of anger, anxiety and thinking about the road ahead of us. And yes, this road was running through uneasy

times. We were supposed to find wings in the troubled times of a national emergency. I remember being reprimanded by our English teacher for writing a poor paper for the prelims. He had this superior smirk on his face when he said “For you, young man, this is a dire state of emergency!” As a young lamb, I had lived through the Naxalite Movement with veiled ignorance and as a naïve teenager, the sarcasm of our English teacher about the Emergency failed to get an applause from me. It was many years later that M J Akbar’s words sank in - “The emergency of 1975, imposed by Indira Gandhi was like mumps or chicken pox on the body politic of India”. Ouch! If that wasn’t enough of a curb on human liberties, ’76 also saw the infamous compulsory sterilization programme to curb the burgeoning Indian population. It caused havoc across the country but I have to shamefacedly admit that it led to a few silly giggles amongst our friends when someone described ludicrous scenes of target- hungry government officials running with scissors behind hapless villagers with their pants down. How much more puerile can one get... Sorry, we were kids then!

Well, that was us – forty years back. And more than the superstars and suppression of rights, what mattered most to us was our school and our friends. Our school – South Point High School was certainly famous and special too. Ours was the last batch of ‘Higher Secondary’ – school leaving examination and our batch of 1976 had 244 students! An average South Point classroom had about 40 students and there were three Science, two Commerce and one Humanities sections for every final year batch. At one point we were told we were Asia’s largest school by way of number of students and we wondered why not the largest in the world. South Point wasn’t famous for quantity alone. Even in quality terms we were the best when it came to consistency of our academic results and our teachers. There was this rumour that our school’s excellent results were facilitated by Board questions being leaked to us. Being a rich and successful school we were the target of many such allegations. It seems, we had not only created an unfair advantage of having the best of teachers but also the might to manipulate the system. With this half notion in mind we all hoped that our Higher Secondary exam would be a cake walk – we would only need to prepare for the set few questions and get very high marks. That unfortunately did not happen for any of us. Then we heard that some of the students would get ‘special’ tuition in school to ensure that they get the Board ranks. I was not invited to one such special class and I don’t know a single person from my batch who got any special class or favour.

Having said that, the batch of 76 did get one special favour. In the final year our batch went for this famous Darjeeling trip. A first of its kind in many years when South Point boys and girls would be travelling together for an ‘excursion’. Looking back, I would say that we were an extremely well behaved lot with a healthy appetite to play pranks on each other and do all the mischiefs that well meaning kids are known for. It was in this spirit of adventure mixed with a dose of naughtiness that a few of our group members took a detour near the Mall for a few sips of cheap whisky at a dingy local bar. Nothing worth talking about but as luck would have it, the gloomy interiors of our hotel, the Louis Jubilee Sanatorium was so sterile that even the slightest whiff of cheerful high-spirited aroma would get detected. Yes, the batch of 76 was shamed as some of our well meaning young boys had sipped the forbidden malt. And what could a good school do to maintain its high standards but to throw these boys out? While that would have made certain teachers who enjoyed corporal punishment very happy, better sense prevailed. Even to this day I am grateful to those teachers and the senior management of the school who took the right decision to keep them in the school but made them attend a special class in the evening, after the normal school was over. It was an embarrassment for our friends who were segregated but it was really our teachers who took the burden of those special classes. Every day, after they had had a full working day with us, they would give equal care and attention to our dear friends. All of them finished school with honour and some of them with distinction. I believe those were the special classes of South Point that made our school so very kind and egalitarian, even if a few whacks of the meter ruler was in vogue those days.

This amazing batch of ‘76 will be meeting after forty years this December 18 for a gala get-together. The enrolments are filling up fast and the enthusiasm in the chat group – “Forty Years After” is so up-beat that the plan is on to have a pre-party picnic, a day earlier. It is likely that a majority of these batch mates will be meeting each other for the first time after 40 years. 40 years – that’s one helluva long time. In the meanwhile, few adorable buck teeth may have been orthodontically altered. Some cute ponytails may have given way to matronly French knots. The pleated skirts may no longer fit and the bell- bottoms may not be as flared as they were meant to be. And those jealous moments when your best friend managed to get that special smile from the girl that you secretly died for – they will all come rushing back but this time with no regrets or malice but with peals of laughter. I am sure, for all of us, many names have faded and faces blurred. For me some of these names are faces trapped in their teens. Then when I look at myself in the mirror, I realize I will be meeting friends who will look forty years older – just like me. Not so young to look at but surely just as young at heart. Yes, there will be a few wrinkles on some beautiful faces that my mental anti-aging cream will happily erase. The greying hair will be magically darkened with the special hair colour filters in my eyes. And if in case there are some baldpates, worry not my friends – my mind is good at hair weaving too. Yes, when we meet we will be young again – naïve and perhaps still a little wet behind our years. For what is “Forty Years After” between old friends – its going to be groovy again!

~Kaushik Roy

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1976 was 40 years ago

in 1976 we were 17 or  18 - in 2016 we are 117 or 118.

battle scarred, weary and hopefully, wiser !

we met in this chat group and with incredible ease picked up threads severed decades ago
our spirits rising with each interaction, we recall, with amazing clarity, all those little incidents and instances from an era which shaped us, helped to define ourselves and prepared us to fight our battles and battle our demons

thank you for being you and remaining so, my friends from school and companions for life .

40 years is a longtime. a lifetime long.
we have moved to far away places, finding new roots and discarding old ones.
we have seen life from far too close and have rejoiced, laughed and cried.

we will meet to share these experiences, rejoice in each others triumphs and shed a silent tear at our losses. we will, once again, use the words we and us and revel in the unique camaraderie which only shared schooling can give.

40 years will become only a measure of time, a memory.

~ Ganapati Iyer