Schooling on the Move

Due to my father's transferable job as a civil engineer of the state, we had to move every two or three years to a new town. So, we children had to be enrolled in a new school every time my father was transferred, usually in the middle of the academic year. Fortunately, we didn't miss a single year throughout these moves though we had to get admitted in the school in our father's village one year due to a transfer in the middle of an academic year when all admissions had closed in the schools of the new town.

We would have just moved into a new place, got admitted in a new school and would have started making new friends and just getting comfortable in the new surroundings when a transfer would loom in the horizon to make us all dread the heartwrenching parting from our friends. We all got used to this process as we grew older but when we were very small it looked like the end of the world to leave a known place and try to grow roots in a new place.

But this experience helped us learn to adjust to any new place as we all knew that we would make new friends real soon just as we did in the last town. Had we stayed at one place we would have moved only in the limited geographical area and would not even have been aware of the wide world outside. You have to live in a place, for sometime at least, to get the feel of what makes the inhabitants what they are.

Moving from one end to the other end of the state so many times gave us an opportunity to observe the differences in the varied cultures in each place though we all spoke the same language. (After all, our state had been three different kingdoms in the ancient times and even as late as before the arrival of the British, had been ruled by smaller kings or chieftains.) So, each area had evolved its own customs and dialects. This experience helped me a lot when I had to move from state to state after my marriage and had the opportunity to observe and appreciate the cultures of people speaking different languages, as no two states speak the same language in India.

Those days there were no English medium schools through the state except in big towns and metros. As my father could be posted in smaller towns too, we all had our schooling in our mother tongue Tamil, with English as second language (from third standard onwards). When I started High School the Hindi agitation had happened and so, we did not have Hindi as a subject. In entire India, our state was the only one where Hindi could not be imposed due to the citizens' opposition. However, children who wanted to learn the language could take private tuitions and sit for the Rashtra Bhasha exams conducted by the Central Government. Many of my friends living in bigger towns did this too, which helped them when they had to work or live or travel in the North of the country.

In the smaller towns, there was no need to learn the language at all and people couldn't be bothered to learn it and they didn't miss much, they felt! Anyway, we were taught English by teachers whose teaching methods were different in each town depending on the pupils. When I started elementary school, my father had been posted in a bigger town (where a factory was being built) which had a very good school. Thanks to the teachers there, I had a very strong foundation in all the subjects, especially English. By the time I came to the fourth standard there, I was using cursive writing for English (which was taught in special 4-lined notebooks as they do now in kinder garten classes even now) and had become good at writing full sentences.

Two years later, my father had been posted to a small town, rather a big village, (to oversee irrigation projects). I was admitted to the sixth standard in the Girls' High School there. I still remember my parents telling me 'see you have come to High School, a real grown up'!) Imagine my shock when I was admonished for using cursive writing and was asked to print the letters! The teachers were starting the basics in this town as the High School where I studied was the only High School catering to the needs of all the girls of the nearby villages.

There was a Boys' High School too in this town as in many of the small towns. The villages had only the elementary schools, which had classes up to fifth standard. The children from the villages did not even know the alphabets of English, let alone words! For the people of these villages the world had not progressed at all. Some of my classmates from these villages dropped out of the school just as my aunts (of my previous generation) did when they reached puberty.

Luckily, I could weather the schooling in these small towns because of the strong foundation I had. Besides, my father had the habit of buying the Readers' Digest in addition to his English newspaper and this helped me retain the vocabulary I had learnt so far (even though I could read only the jokes like Life is like that and Humour in Uniform etc.,!) In between these schools, I had my fifth standard education (which was similar to the small town school in many aspects but for the number of students there) in a small village school which I enjoyed very much from a child's point of view and which deserves a separate write-up in the sequels to this post! Through all these years, I was growing up into a young girl learning not only the school lessons but valuable life lessons too. Schooling was fun indeed as it had the magic of childhood which saw everything with the wonder of seeing it for the very first time!

Our Entertainment-the Radio

When I think of my school days I remember them as a daily routine for ten months every year where I spent eight hours or so with persons other than our family and neighbours. Except for the three examinations that interrupted the routine, all the other days were filled with lessons taught during school hours, homework done in less than an hour and the rest of the time spent in eating, playing and sleeping. Then there were the quarterly, half-yearly and annual exams and the holidays that followed them. The routine was different, the one during the exams filled with hectic school work and the ones during the holidays filled with nothing but playing, listening to the radio and reading story books.

There were no televisions then, only radios. By the time I started school, transistor radios had become popular. Every house had a radio or transistor radio. I remember that some groups of gypsies too possessed transistor radios as they could be played on the move, with batteries! We could trust the AIR to play film songs some three or four times a day. We knew the time table by heart and used to wait eagerly for them. They were the only light music easy on the ears and easily available to us.

The rest of the time we used to fiddle the shortwave radios and listened to the Voice of America and the BBC and sometimes Moscow radio too (Moscow radio broadcast Tamil programmes every day for some half an hour or so.) We became familiar with the latest Beatles songs and groups like the Carpenters etc., thanks to the Voice of America. My father liked listening to English songs and so, we also developed a liking for them. (Of course, as he grew older he switched over to Carnatic music but he must have been in his late twenties and early thirties when we were small and had retained the influence of his hostel/college life in developing a taste for Western music and continued listening to them over the radio.)

Whenever we were in our native Thanjavur district we could listen to Radio Ceylon which broadcast Tamil film songs non-stop with commercials in-between, all through the day. So we used to look forward to the stay in our father's native village where my as-yet-not married teenage athai (the last daughter) lived with my paternal grandparents and who was an avid fan of Radio Ceylon. She kept the lyrics for all the songs, old and new, painstakingly hand-written in notebooks and we all used to sing along with her even as we were assisting her in the preparation of the breakfast, lunch, evening tiffin and supper for all of us.

When AIR introduced their commercial broadcasting for the first time, with the promise of non-stop broadcasting of film songs, we were all sitting in front of the radio in our house waiting for the first song of 'Then Kinnam', a program for popular film songs (It is being broadcast even now). The first song was, I remember, 'Pournami Nilavil' rendered by the still popular SPB. We were so delighted and thrilled to have our own commercial channel for film songs regardless of where my father had been posted, without depending on Radio Ceylon for our aural entertainment. This was actually during the time when man had landed on the moon and the Americans were watching this event live on their TVs! Anyway, economic 'Progress' had started to happen in our country too, I guess, with the first commercial ever broadcast by the state owned radio!