When was the first time you held an ink pen? They taught me to hold an ink pen in class 4. Blue “chelpark” ink with an “artic fountain pen” with a big silver-golden coloured nib. I didn’t even know how to hold it, sometimes I would grip it too tightly lest it fell from my hand and as a result I came back home with perforated pages in my notebooks and a broken nib much to my mother’s desperation. And sometimes I would grip it too lightly resulting in faint cursive lines which I myself would be unable to read by the time I opened the notebooks at night! But learning to write was fun.
We possibly were a class of … I don’t really remember, there were 4 double rows and 7 benches in each row, so possibly a total of 56 boys and girls – oh yes, we had boys till class 4. We had the entire boy brigade right from kindergarten and there were regular outflows from both the sections each year into the don bosco school nearby. But a handful remained with us till class 4, and then like dinosaurs they disappeared without much reason and rhyme J my class teacher Miss Connie Francis was very strict.
The sweetest teacher I ever had was Miss Neeta Choudhury in KG, and after she left school , I never saw her again. Class 4 was a time for terror, because the class was in the senior building and the feeling ran high that we were already into the senior block…only house colours remained to be distributed and then after, we were to be dedicated soldiers for our houses alone. but deviating from the ink part, I suddenly remembered that each day after amateurish ink attempts most of us, except the goody goody ones, (and oh there were some very dis-likable good kids in class) Dear God , how I despised them.
It was precisely because of this tiny horrendous population, I was scared to sit beside my mother in front of the scrutinizing eyes of the teachers at the “parent- teacher’s meetings”, where poor mum was tortured with tales of me which turned her ears red. Kids my age, if they weren’t naughty, well… I wouldn’t like to be all prim and proper… There’s an age to be naughty and an age to be all prim and proper, now that I’ve been there and done that I know) had a sizable amount of ink on their clean white shirts, on their ties, on their handkerchiefs ( though Miss Connie was very particular about ink erasers and blotting papers, the quickest way was to blot it with your own hanky or anyone else’s a girl called Shakuntala Pathak had an enormous supply of blotting papers somewhere in her magnetic pencil box, and by the time she had finished blotting her leaky pen and her equally leaky written class work before submitting, the entire class helped themselves to her supplies, and few of us helped ourselves to extra pieces to make proper fighter planes)
The palpable proof of rigorous hard work and studious effort was seen by the parents when the kids went home stained from finger to shirt with blue ink, who would have the heart to shout at these innocent Angels drenched in ink ??
We possibly were a class of … I don’t really remember, there were 4 double rows and 7 benches in each row, so possibly a total of 56 boys and girls – oh yes, we had boys till class 4. We had the entire boy brigade right from kindergarten and there were regular outflows from both the sections each year into the don bosco school nearby. But a handful remained with us till class 4, and then like dinosaurs they disappeared without much reason and rhyme J my class teacher Miss Connie Francis was very strict.
The sweetest teacher I ever had was Miss Neeta Choudhury in KG, and after she left school , I never saw her again. Class 4 was a time for terror, because the class was in the senior building and the feeling ran high that we were already into the senior block…only house colours remained to be distributed and then after, we were to be dedicated soldiers for our houses alone. but deviating from the ink part, I suddenly remembered that each day after amateurish ink attempts most of us, except the goody goody ones, (and oh there were some very dis-likable good kids in class) Dear God , how I despised them.
It was precisely because of this tiny horrendous population, I was scared to sit beside my mother in front of the scrutinizing eyes of the teachers at the “parent- teacher’s meetings”, where poor mum was tortured with tales of me which turned her ears red. Kids my age, if they weren’t naughty, well… I wouldn’t like to be all prim and proper… There’s an age to be naughty and an age to be all prim and proper, now that I’ve been there and done that I know) had a sizable amount of ink on their clean white shirts, on their ties, on their handkerchiefs ( though Miss Connie was very particular about ink erasers and blotting papers, the quickest way was to blot it with your own hanky or anyone else’s a girl called Shakuntala Pathak had an enormous supply of blotting papers somewhere in her magnetic pencil box, and by the time she had finished blotting her leaky pen and her equally leaky written class work before submitting, the entire class helped themselves to her supplies, and few of us helped ourselves to extra pieces to make proper fighter planes)
The palpable proof of rigorous hard work and studious effort was seen by the parents when the kids went home stained from finger to shirt with blue ink, who would have the heart to shout at these innocent Angels drenched in ink ??
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