The Ex-SSGians' Reunion: Delhi Chapter underwent with superb success last Saturday (28th November 2009) at the Dhruv Army Officers' Mess, Delhi. The evening started with mild excitement as Ex-SSGians reached the venue and got themselves registered at the 'help desk' and pinned their name & number badge. Each badge had the strip of the owner's house colour. The evening progressed and the huge lawn was soon crowded with Ex-SSGians, each greeting each other, lifting and re-reading the other's badge. An inter-house Tug of War culminated with the victory of Lohit House followed by the 'house-songs' and wild 'war cries'.
Whatever little inhibition was left by then, was completely wiped out as the bar opened on one end of the lawn. Exchange of email ids, phone numbers, prmoises to keep in touch followed. Someone even got cooked pork, which we relished at the car parking (Apologies to the ex-ssgian whose car bonnet we had used as the table).
School songs, school videos, mime, Bihu and the 'Mimickry' of teachers followed. It bugs me no end that H.K. Jha stills remains in vogue, as far as the subject of mimickry goes. Without stretching it further, I would like to thank all who worked hard to make this event a superb success and not to mention the memento of a key chain with the school name engraved on it and a catalogue of all Ex-SSGians in the NCR region. Can't wait for the next reunion.
"Sarv Mein Saddham"
The SSGians' Reunion: Delhi Chapter
Holi in Sainik School
Holi in our school was celebrated in a great style; we used to assemble in the basket ball ground in civil dress with sweets placed in the table towards one pole of the ground. There were also colours (gulal) placed in plates for each house, all the teachers were also
present.
Our Principal used to distribute the sweets and colours house wise. Students would then proceed with the formalities by applying colour on the Principal’s face and the teachers. After a small sing song with dholak, the actual Sainik School holi unfolds inside the houses!
I remember how pits were dug inside the quadrangle of the houses and filled with water from the water tank used for Toilet. Volunteers for the pit digging weren’t spared, but their clothes certainly were from being torn, unlike the others. Very few students could manage to successfully evade from being thrown into the pit or the water tank itself, in spite of trying hard to hide. But it was fun; especially hunting for the ones who would be hiding and then chasing and dragging them to the pits.
There was also inter house attacks where the chasing and running took place in the roads covering the road in front of senior and junior houses, teachers quarters and near the pond. Few students were unlucky enough to be thrown in the school pond (fishery).This idea of throwing into the pond, pit or the tank was like a chain reaction, as the one
who was resisting, would then take the charge to find another, in a way of seeking revenge with fun. That was real fun which continued to last for the entire afternoon and ended with a community bathing followed by special food in the PWD or western canteen. Of course there were few who could manage to save themselves from all these by hiding in the areas of dhobi ghat, PWD and many such places untraceable by others. Although they could save themselves from the cow dung and mud but they could not save themselves from the buckets of water from the toilet tank which greeted them in their beds once they returned!
It was really great with all the friends, seniors and juniors. I miss that a lot.
Wish u all a very happy Holi…
Interviews: Sainik School Goalpara
The postman finally turned up one fine morning and brought the call letter for the oral and medical examination. I reached Goalpara on the decided date with my mom and my uncle. Some ambassadors, jeeps and FIAT Padminis, stood littered in the grass courtyard of the venue and a black board stood on an aisle that read, ‘Medical and Oral tests, Sainik School Goalpara’. A mixed sense of achievement and awe ran through me, as I heard guardians, prompting information to their wards.
The full form of DC is Deputy Commissioner, while another old man asked the height of the Everest to his ward. Waiting for my turn, I saw going to be ‘SSGians’ coming out of a half opened door, tugging in their Shirts. Parents hurried to them, as they breathlessly asked questions about the interview. By the time my turn came, I was aware that I might have to walk in my underwear, if they suspected of ‘knocking knees’. A panel of three middle aged men sitting across a table greeted me as I went inside. A candidate was walking to and fro across the two walls, in his underwear.
They shot some general questions and after being satisfied, one of them said, ‘So you are from Dhubri.’
I could detect a glint of mischief in his eyes. He was wearing a uniform with some stars, out of which I couldn’t figure out his rank. So he continued, after hearing a meek ‘yes’ from me. ‘Suppose you are strolling on park beside the Brahmaputra, and you know the DC and the SP’s bungalows are located there. You suddenly see a group of children falling into the river. Who will you go to?’
I projected a thoughtful image on my face and said, ‘the SP’.
The balding man in white shirt asked me to read some alphabets to test my eye sight and I saw the daylight once again as my Mom and uncle asked me how it went. The postman came to my house after a month or so, bringing the admission letter for me. The round semi-distinguishable postal stamp read ‘Sainik School Goalpara, P.O. Rajapara, 783133’
The Mid Night Cat:Ghosts in Sainik School Goalpara
I was allotted Udaygiri House and I did the shifting in my IXth standard. A sense of haunted-ness hung in the air, from day one. Seniors took our introductory rounds, while telling us stories about the ghosts that appeared in the House often. I never believed them until that fateful night in December.
I was in my XIIth standard and was preparing for my Board Exams. I used to stay up till late in the night studying. I was in room number 1 and on the other end of the house stood the rows of bathrooms and lavatories. None of the bathing rooms had doors except the one in the extreme corner. It was said that a student had committed suicide in that bathroom, unable to handle the pressure of the sainik school life. It was also said that blood came out from the tape in that bathroom for sometime (I am sure that was just a rumour). Nonetheless, the fact remains that, no one used that bathroom except to wash clothes during the day.
Habitually I always went to the urinal, before going off to sleep during the 1.30-2.00 am time period. During one such nights, I saw a black furred cat staring at me with its eyes glowing in the dark. It would lead me to the bathrooms everyday. This went on for sometime, until on that fateful night, when curiosity got the better of me. I came out of my room and found the cat glowing towards me as usual. I followed it and kept following until it went inside that locked bathroom. Brushing aside the faint fear, I opened the door slowly into that bathroom. The bathroom was dry and empty. The high walls didn’t have any openings for the cat to escape. The cat never appeared again and curiously no one ever spotted the cat in the House again.
There are many such incidents that hang between the real and the unexplainable; will certainly share them some other day.
Ghosts in Sainik School Goalpara 2
The campus of Sainik School Goalpara is a huge area consisting of thousands of acres of land, mostly unoccupied. Shrubs, animals, darkness and legends came to occupy those unused mass of lands. If gossips were to be considered true, the present campus was built upon an old burial site. Such gossips never mattered to me, until one day…
I had heard several stories about ‘ghost sightings’ in Udaygiri house, which happened to be our neighbours. Of the several such stories, the story about this particular cat was probably the most circulated one - A cat that appeared at a particular time of the night and went into a particular bathroom and then vanish. (I will wait to hear this story from someone from Udaygiri House).
I was in my IXth standard, and a day of hard labour put me off to sleep in the early hours of the night, at around 10pm. The sounds from my neighbours in the room finally subsided and the lights went out within sometime, probably half an hour. It was summer and most of us preferred to wear shorts over our sleeping night dresses, flouting the prescribed rules. With no exams in the next few weeks, the lights went out in quick succession across all the rooms, putting the entire house into a silent sleep.
It was strange how the dew drops used to fall even in the warmest of summers, finely putting dotted lines on the grass below the tin roofs. The night was filled with the lethargic moaning of the ceiling fans, in the room, amplified by the hollowness of the asbestos ceiling. The heat of the night gave way to slight chillness during the late night and early morning hours. I felt an urge to take a leak and woke up as I had to walk to the other side of the hostel, where the pungent smelling bathrooms were located.
Bathrooms in Sainik School Goalpara consisted of rows of Lavatories, a water tank, rows of bathing rooms, with doors at various stages of decay, some open and some closed and some missing, and then came the high walled urinals and then finally ending in an open bathroom. The open bathroom was a bare space, surrounded by high walls, with a steel pipe dangling from the top. It was meant to have wash basins, which probably existed for a few years, when the school was established. Nonetheless, it was a space meant exclusively for the seniors to bathe and shout sing.
So I slipped into my pair of slippers and opened the door. A gust of moist air rushed in, leaving me cold and numb. The stairs were moist and gleaming with the dew. It was dark all around as I walked towards the bathrooms and my footsteps echoed in the silence. I looked away from the doors of the lavatories, as I hurried towards the urinal. I hurriedly released myself and paced towards my room. I kept turning my eye balls to inspect if I was being followed. As I stepped on the corridor, I saw someone in shorts going to my room. My half sleepy eyes couldn’t recognize who it was. He was walking slowly, in fact very slowly. He entered the room, as I reached the door, and as I went inside, I saw him walking to the end of the room, to the window in the end and then pass through it. I walked up to the window and looked outside. There stood a cat staring at me! The curled body suggesting that it just landed.
A later enquiry revealed, no one else had woken up on that night, other than me.
Selection for Camp: The Last 20
1400 hours: Many of us are availing the precious half an hour break between lunch time and the prep class (which have been replaced by the selection process for my batch), snoring, or simply lying down, or reading some magazine dog eared and tattered by excessive use. Finally the ominous mess bell went off announcing the dressing up time for the selection and prep class for the rest.
Most of us reached for the selection on time. And our instructor/punisher wasn’t surprised that none of us were late, as we were all eager to buy that precious opportunity to go out of the school, in the form of the NCC camp, held at various parts of the country (in this case, 20 would be selected out of 150, for two different camps. One was to be held in Arunachal Pradesh and the other was yet to be disclosed). The top ten will get to go to Arunachal Pradesh, while the next 10 would have to wait.
All events started with a head count, and we counted 144, 2 sick in quarter (SIQ in our lingo) and 2 were admitted in MI ROOM. The instructor inspected us through his dark sun glasses and declared the first test. We had to run to a nearby landmark, Kodal Dhuwa Pukhuri (the literal translation would be ‘the spade washer’s pond) and come back to where we stood, and make it in the first hundred. The approximate distance would be 4 kilometers in total.
The blow of the whistle marked the beginning of the test, as we ran like there was no tomorrow. By the time, I made it back; we were drowned in our own perspirations. I made it within the first hundred and the last 44 were allowed to go and attend the prep classes. A wooden structure stood where we were standing. Coloured in stripes of black and white, it resembled a dwarfed football goalpost. The next test involved 20 chin ups, where one jumps and hangs from the bar, and lifts the body, till the chin cross the bar. Some more fizzled out, after failing to perform the task. A tired bunch of around 90 students now looked up at the instructor, eager to perform the next task.
Two ropes stood dangling from a tall post. And we climbed like monkeys on the rope, some using their legs and some solely with their hands. No one fizzled out on this task, though many of us came down with bruised palms from the speed with which we descended, rubbing our palm with the coarse rope. We were taken on the gravel road, for push ups. For the next few minutes all I can remember now was the constant ‘up….down….up….down’. From my inverted view, I saw more students fizzling out, or simply collapsing on the ground. After what seemed like hours, around 50 of us stood the ground, looking extremely tired and the scorching sun seemed to have dimmed, probably due to the tiredness, rather than the actual onset of the evening which was still an hour away.
After a humanitarian break of 5 minutes we laid on the ground on our back and folded our knees, all set to start the next task – sit ups. The constant sound started all over again… ‘up…down…up…down’, constantly multiplied by the groans of many of us. Some more fizzled out. As they got up and collapsed on the green grass of the ground nearby. The sight of those sitting on the grass was tempting, but the hope of getting to go out of the school kept most of us performing the task. The sound of the bell in the school building across the road was followed by students rushing out juggling various balls, football, handballs, volley balls, basket balls, running to their respective grounds/courts. The whistle from the instructor meant that the test was over and as I struggled to get up, I saw my fellow mates for the first time in the entire afternoon; some were incredibly red and sweaty, while some stood there with pain written large on their face. Yet, we were the last twenty standing. The day light fast disappeared, as we limped towards our respective houses for a glass of water and a much deserved shower.
8pm. All houses assembled in the mess for dinner and we all had the same story to narrate. Our elbows won’t bend enough to lift a glass to our mouth or to take off the vest. We helped each other, as some roamed around asking for pain killers. What happens next? How did the camp go?
OBA, Ex SSGians Reunion
The Ex students of Sainik School Goalpara had their reunion in Delhi, in Dwarka on 14th February, 2009. With commendable efforts from our super senior (Indranil Roy, 1934 and some more), the dream of hoisting such a get together eventually materialized.
Willing to contribute in whatever little ways, I decided to pick as many of my batchmates on my way to the venue, while forcing others to reach there. By the time we reached there, the hall was partially full with old students, their wives and children running around. The sight of our chemistry teacher, Mr. R.A. Khan was indeed a great surprise. Sitting beside him was Mr. R.P. Yadav, about whom I cannot write much, as he retired the same year when I joined school (1994). His farewell dinner was the first regimental dinner that I witnessed in school and the last being the farewell that my batch got in 2001.
Mr. Indranil Roy
Highlights of the evening included the signing of the school song, ‘Oxom Oxom’ graced by Mr. Indranil Roy, followed by introduction rounds and some cultural extravaganza. Mr Jyotin Sarkar, a senior bureaucrat also delivered a memorable speech highlighting the challenges of developing Assam.
The event offered a great atmosphere, bonded by common experiences from school. With liquor being served, the formal chit chats gave way to memories from older days, as a classmate of mine performed push ups and drills, in a fit of SSG spirit. The conclusion of the evening was marked by a sumptuous buffet and a small speech by Mr. Indranil Roy, where he urged us (the still student looking ex SSGians) to take initiatives and conduct the next get together sometime in October this year.
As we departed, a group of my ex classmates, thanked me for bringing them to the event. Perhaps those thanks need to re directed to Mr. Indranil Roy and others, who made it come true. Or just to wind it up in an SSGian's way,
“I would like to offer my vote of thanks, to Mr R.P. Yadav, Mr. R.A. Khan and all the seniors for having found time in spite of their busy schedule, and making the event a grand success”.
Aniruddha: rolling & crawling
N.N. Kannangoo terrorized most of the hours that we happened to stay in the house, with his famous saying, ‘I will take you for a high jump’. P.K. Jena, our able house master added spice to our lives by elongating after dinner house assemblies running into hours.
That was the year, I learnt to sleep, like a horse standing and ruminating what was being spoken by my house master – his sentences mostly starting with ,‘I have a plan’.
A rare feature of Aniruddha House unlike others was that the building did not pair up with another house to form an enclosed space, termed Quadrangle. Of the seven different Houses, it was Aniruddha house that remained open on one side, countered by barbed wire fencing…Needless to say that it was meaningless for us.
It was just another night in the summer of 1996. Our phase tests were being held and the next day, we had our second language test. Some had Assamese and some had Hindi. I was in room number 2 – a mixed and noisy group of students having either Hindi or Assamese as their second language. The outer most room was room number 1, beyond which the meaningless fencing started. On the other side of my room was room number 3.
A classmate (Rishikesh, 3342) happened to be from room number 3 and he was the only one in his room having Hindi. He came across to my room to discuss studies with other classmates studying Hindi. He happened to sit on a make shift chair made out of a black tin trunk and lean on the iron grills of the window on the ‘jungle side’ (facing the jungle).
I was never good at Assamese and it made no sense to study on that warm and humid night. I went up to Swahi Swamam Jonse, 3257, who happened to be the door keeper and shared my plan to create some fun.
As a precaution, we told everyone about it, excepting the guest (Hrishikesh, 3342), who we wanted to scare. There was another exception named Jyotirmoy Sharma (3299), who was sleeping. So we went ahead to execute the plan. I crossed the barbed fencing, aided by Swahi Swamam Jonse and tip toed towards the backside of the window where Hrishikesh was leaning and let go my hand around his head, through the grill. After a momentary shock, he figured out the prank, and suddenly there was a SHRIEk…..AAAAAAAA, from someone. The first thing that came to my mind was Mr. P.K. Jena and his N.C.C. cane. I turned around and saw my mate climbing the barbed fencing. By the time I crossed it, I could hear P.K. Jena screaming. I couldn’t make it to my room and sat beside Amar (3288) in room no 1, with semi audible heart beats.
Jonse having reached his desk, and with very little time to think, couldn’t come up with a valid excuse when Jena asked him (as he was the door keeper) about the noise. He fumbled as he said ‘Sir chutkule suna raha tha’ (was narrating a joke, sir). The entire room number 2, went over to the quadrangle like sacrificial goats, as I watched them rolling and crawling, sitting in another room.
A later investigation, brought to my knowledge, that the scream came from Jyotirmoy (3299) who was the other exception, and who was asleep when we carried out the prank. How he explained his situation, I reproduce in verbatim:
I opened my eyes and saw a pair of hairy hands coming in through the window from the dark. The scream went off, unknowingly.
Many of those who got punished that night, knows where the prank went wrong. Of those who still do not know, this story might help.
Sainik School Terms (A to M)
Bhaiti: Its literal meaning is ‘younger brother’ in Assamese. The word defines an idea where a senior forms a ‘bhaiti’ from amongst the juniors and apart from chit chats and conversations, often endows the ‘bhaiti’ with generosities like, rights to visit ‘out of bound’ canteens and shielding from punishments.
Bhokla: The khaki shorts that we are issued as part of our uniforms. Perhaps the term comes from the enourmous size of those shorts.
Big Tarzan: The highlight of the obstacles course. Two planks of wood separated by a long rope, each standing on abnormal heights and the aim is to reach the other plank swinging on the rope. After overcoming the fear of heights, the second challenge is when you almost touch the ground while swinging, only to fly upwards towards the other plank. Many drop to the ground, and several of those who reach the other plank, still end up hurting themselves in the groin. Many of us use the term ‘Omlette’ for such injuries.
Crawling: One of the few forms of punishment, which actually helped us in survival. Crawling often entailed that we lie on the ground on our belly and move forward using the elbow. A great way of moving without being detected, most of us have used this technique while on our way from PWD and WESTERN canteens.
Cream roll: When front rolls and back rolls, go out of vogue, some tormentors came up with the idea of a cream roll. While its unthinkably difficult to reach from one point to another performing either front or back roll, cream roll makes it worse. Here one has to do two front rolls, followed by a single back roll and the cycle continues.
Chair position: a form of punishment, where a person is asked to sit on the air, as if he was sitting on a chair. This form can have accessories like, having to draw your hands parallel to the ground and some weights being placed on the hands. It hurts the thighs. Also see ‘Maharaja Position’ below.
Frog jump: A relatively easy form of punishment, where a person jumps like a frog. The real pain comes after a few happy jumps when the thigh starts hurting. People often have difficulty walking temporarily for the next 2-3 hours or even less.
Gandhi position: Perhaps the most ‘un interesting’ and least innovative amongst all forms of punishment in Sainik School. It mostly happens during the initial introductory sessions, when juniors are shifted to their respective senior houses once they are promoted to IXth (in some cases VIIIth) standards. Here one has to climb and stand atop the green steel cupboards and stand like ‘Mahatma Gandhi’ leaning on his walking stick. The only pain from this exercise is the extreme sense of boredom.
Hair cut: A good way of avoiding the ‘dreadfully sleepy’ prep classes in the afternoon. The khaki clad, cycling barber would often be bribed to spare them of his rusting scissors.
Hanuman Chal: A personal favourite of Mr. P.K. Jena. It’s a from of exercise, where a person runs like a mad man throwing both his hands upwards alternately towards the head without bending the elbow, complimented with similar movement of the feet, with minimal bending on the knees. I am not too certain if the mythological Hanuman actually ran like this.
Mess duty: It’s a once in a life time kind of opportunity in Sainik School, where a student (or two) do not have to attend classes, and gets to spend the entire day in the mess. Though the primary aim was to check the quality of food being cooked, it was mostly a day to eat for the resourceful students, esp. if non-vegetarian food was on the menu! Don’t know if it still exists.