Budhanilkantha School Died For Me On The Kanchenjunga Balcony
BOSS
In the Class 11 year, you got to organize a one day event for the workers at the school. The class gathered. There was a meeting. I was unanimously elected. Organizing that one day event was no rocket science. You delegate the workload and make it happen. It all happened pretty smoothly. I don't think anyone felt any kind of a Kanchenjunga-Nilgiri tension.
My O-Level year I took every possible subject. I actually managed to fail one: English Literature. There was zero emphasis on creativity. The entire emphasis seemed to be on turning you into a literature critic. This was also a year when I took many private flights of imagination in the domain of grand thoughts and knowledge. I wish I had taken notes as I went along.
The Pamphleteering
I think this happened sometime in my Class 13 year. I only learned about it after it had all happened. I was in the dark. But looked like most of my class, if not the entire class, had participated. They had published a pamphlet that made fun of or criticized or insinuated corruption on the part of most of the power holders in the school administration. If you did not get offended, it was actually quite entertaining. They had distributed all over the school overnight.
Like I said, I only learned about it after the fact. Obviously I had nothing to do with it. I would not have been part of it if I had known.
School Captain
When I got nominated, I got excited. That I will get nominated was a foregone conclusion. But within a few weeks I had been unceremoniously shunted aside. Sudarshan Risal played foul. Brian Garton played foul. The rumor that I did not want to do it is simply not true. The opposite was true. There was a part of me that wanted to do at the school level what I had done in Kanchenjunga a few years back. I had major plans. I asked for 12 prefects. The offer was for 8. I said there was too much work, I would like 12, please. It was not much of a negotiation. The fact I was even trying to negotiate I guess was offensive. And at some subconscious level I must have not liked the bad behavior on their part towards the end of my Class 10 year.
At one point I said to Garton, if I can get the committee to come on board with the 12 prefects idea, would you go for it? He said yes. So I visited everyone. Everyone said yes to me. 12 is fine.
I was never told I was no longer being considered. At one point they simply dropped me and moved on.
Wild Wild
You got your predicted grades based on the Final Exams before the actual A Level exams. They tended to be pretty accurate. Mine were BCC. Not stellar, but not EEE either. The day the actual exams were to start, that morning as I was on my way to the bathroom, Andrew Wild yelled at me so loud, he woke up people who were asleep one floor up. It was the most bizarre thing. That messed up my exams big time. My forecast grades were brought down one notch to CDD. I noted. My final official grades were EEE.
Three Strikes
What they did at the end of my Class 10 year threw me off course. Snatching away the school captaincy robbed me of my chance to reclaim lost territory. Wild's animal behavior was the nail in the coffin.
I guess word spread. Robert Shrubshall was now teaching in Bangladesh. He flew into Kathmandu. He got me and Wild to meet in Thamel. Wild said, "Don't you miss it when we used to rule over India!"
India is the new Britain.
