 | To be a Doon School boy is privilege enough, but to be invited to deliver the Founder’s Day Address – and that too on the Golden Jubilee of one’s Class, is surely indulgence in extremis. My grateful thanks to the Governor and the Board and to the Headmaster for this rare honour. |
A few years ago, a Doon School Old Boy, much more distinguished than I can ever hope to be, stood at this podium and explained why he had had such a miserable time at School. I think all of us would concede that five years here is not
“Roses, roses all the way/ With myrtle mixed in my path like mad.”
(I owe that quote to a poem taught me here by a great and unforgettable teacher, Mr. S.P. Sahi). For one thing, adolescence is a terribly difficult time and to have to cope with it without the reassurance of a familiar home and friendly parents is challenge enough. Add the army of tyrannical School Captains, House Captains, Prefects and Monitors, in descending order of tyranny, and one begins to sympathise with those burdened by cowering loneliness. With that, mix the agony of those like me who were hopeless at sports, in a stifling atmosphere where brawn was certainly celebrated over brain, and the poison of remembrance starts rising in one’s throat. And overlaying it all, the oppressive absence of girls just when all kinds of unknown hormones have started sloshing around one’s system – and one knows why any true recollection of one’s days at Doon cannot be those of Elysium remembered.
Then ask oneself how it is that if there was so much unhappiness, oppression, injustice and deprivation through those critical formative years, what is it that brings back so many of us to this Golden Jubilee celebration of our Class of ’57? Why do we talk so fondly of the years we spent in these sylvan surroundings – so “pleasing to the eye and soothing to the mind” as I remember Dr. Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan, later President of India, saying when he was Chief Guest at our Founder’s Day 1954 and I a wide-eyed 13-year old ‘C’ former? What makes us feel so special?
I, of course, came a cropper for feeling special when I went to a supervision (which is what they archly call a tutorial at Cambridge) wearing my Old Boy’s blazer. My crusty supervisor took one look at my badge and sourly asked, “What is that?”
“The lamp of knowledge,” I proudly replied.
“A pity,” he retorted “they didn’t light it while you were at school!”
I still think I had the better of the exchange; for, after all, I was a Doon School boy - and he a mere Cambridge don!
To return to my initial question: what is it that makes so many of us – I would say almost all of us - agree that we had a rotten time here, which has left us with so many fond memories and such sweet nostalgia that we have returned a la recherche d’un temps perdu – which, for those of you who did not attend Mrs. Sahi’s French classes, means “In search of a time gone by”?
I daresay there are as many individual reasons for this as there are Old Boys. But distilling the essence, I would hazard the suggestion that three or four causes are common to all of us.
First, the teachers. True, there were some bad `uns. I remember one particularly aggravated Hindi teacher screaming at a Hindi-hopeless Tamil classmate of mine: “Murugappan, I do not want to hit you. I want to kill you. Blood! Blood! Blood!” (All, incidentally, in impeccable English!) But apart from the occasional ink-pot, thrown but missed to the vast amusement of the rest of us who were not the target, there were compensations in going up to another Hindi teacher who had spent his holidays in the Gir Forest to ask what he had seen. “Loins,” he would reply and every one of us followed up with, “And how big, Sir, were the loins?” and got the innocent reply, “Very, very big loins.” He never quite understood why all of us wanted to know!
But, all in all, it was, in a word, the most outstanding assemblage of teachers ever gathered together in one place. It is, therefore, no accident that my Class immediately and unanimously decided that our first Golden Jubilee contribution should be towards commissioning a Doon School Old Girl, the sculptor Latika Katt (daughter of our Biology teacher, Mr.B.S. Sharma, who never quite understood our obsessive interest in the properties of Vitamin E – and if you don’t know what those are, you are no Doon School boy!) to do a bust of Holdy, pipe in mouth, to adorn the new pavilion that is coming up on the edges of this Main Field. Nor any accident that our second contribution is to honour the greatest Headmaster of our generation, John Martyn, in whose memory a school for the less privileged is being run on the lines of our own alma mater. Nor, indeed, any happenstance that our third contribution is to the Shivalik Fund for scholarships for the children of Doon School Masters and, unlike us the lucky ones, kids born with a plastic spoon or no spoon at all in their mouths.
This is the occasion for us to pay tribute to all those Great Teachers of our Time who are no more with us - Messers. Jack Gibson; Sudhir Khastagir; old Gombar (despite some curious goings-on) and Webb, the New Zealander who taught us English for a while; the ambidextrous S.K. Roy; K.B. Sinha, V.N.Kapur and O.P.Malhotra; Kunzru and Nair; Ghushti and Gupta of the chemistry class; Viji Hensman; Shirodkar and Deshpande at the Music School; Joshi at Kashmir House; Kishore Lal of the carpentry shop and Mumtaz, I think his name was, the bookbinder; Sister Gibbs at the hospital; Mela Ram, the photographer (“Ishmile Pliss!”); Darshan Singh in the boxing ring - and those I have already mentioned. As also those other Great Teachers of our Time who are happily still with us – the “paanwala gang”, chaired by Dr. S.D. Singh for the largest number of paans consumed in a single life-time; the Hindi litterateur who has made possible a career for me in our gravely Rashtrabhasa-tilted politics – Dr. H.D. Bhatt ‘Sailesh’ (some whose short stories I translated as a schoolboy into English and who, in turn, translated my melodramatic adolescent outpourings into Hindi); Rathin Mitra at the Art School, and many, many others; above all, the immortal Gurdial Singh whom I had the honour, as the country’s most unlikely and undeserving Sports Minister ever, to select this year for the Tenzing Norgay Award for lifetime achievement. For Indian mountaineering was born in The Doon School and made possible only because of the tremendous imagination, leadership and grit of the Great Guru.
When I contrast this Galaxy of Greats with schools that I know where the Principal comes drunk to Assembly, the Headmaster turns out to be a serial molester, and the Housemaster a thief, one knows that what makes the Doon School the Doon School is, first and almost last, its Masters and Staff. Thank you all for the great start in life you gave all of us.
The other great institution that has a left the mark of a lifetime on each one of us and rough hewn the destinies which we have been later left to hone for ourselves is morning Assembly. If secularism is the hallmark of a Doon School education its origins lie in the eclectic collection of non-denominational prayers and songs with which we started every working day, the thanks we were taught to give:
For hills to climb and hard work to do
For all skill of hand and eye
For music that lifts our hearts to heaven
And for the hand-grasp of a friend
Remember? And can you hear over the waves of time the deep and sonorous baritone of Headmaster John Arthur King Martyn subtly imbuing us with all that is of the best and the brightest in our tradition and the heritage of humankind? More, I think, than anything we were taught from text-books, it was the profound and eclectic lessons learned through our pores, as it were, in Assembly that have lasted longest with us, permeating our thoughts and action with those instinctive values which make us the good and responsible citizens we have, by and large, turned out to be.
Third, I believe, is the lessons we were taught in the dignity of labour. We all came from extraordinarily privileged families. Few of us were required to look after even ourselves at home. It was an era of servants by the dozen and pampering for the asking. The School could easily have degenerated into a Haven for Neo-feudals, as so many sister institutions in India and Pakistan had indeed become. I think it was making our own beds, polishing our own shoes, compulsory labour – “quota work” as we then called it - and Tunwala that saved our souls. That - and fending for ourselves in the midst of mindless bullying, petty tyranny and the proud man’s contumely – that gave us the inner strength to face the world outside. It is a tough world outside – and the fact that it was even tougher at School made for a successful launch. I wish there were gentler ways of doing it but I wouldn’t know of any.
Fourth, a sense of community – a sense of community that is both exclusive and inclusive. The exclusion is the sense of superiority over all those who fall outside the walls of Chandbagh. It gives us Doscos our well-deserved notoriety for snobbery and conceit. It also gives us our inestimable self-confidence, the belief, not unjustified, that the world is ours for the taking. (When I went up to St. Stephen’s, some guy said he couldn’t stand Doscos. When I asked why, he said, “You chaps walk around this place as if you own it.” I replied, “We don’t. Neither do you. So, why don’t you walk around as if you own it?!”) The inclusivity comes from there being perfect equality of treatment and opportunity within these sacred walls. For there were among us, and I daresay still are, ridiculously rich scions of princely families and fattened calves of industrial magnates, children of the powerful, the famous and the merely vainglorious. But because we all received the same pocket-money and had to do for ourselves the same menial tasks and competed with each other on a level playing-field with no favourites and no nepotism, it bred in us, I think, a belief in equality and equity, of justice and fair-play, the enduring conviction that
“It matters not who won or lost/But how you played the game.”
It also inured most of us from the temptations of corruption. If success has come to so many Doon School boys – and I think we can claim over the last 72 years to have produced more men (and a few women) of distinction in a wider variety of fields of human endeavour per capita than any other School in the country, I think that has a great deal to do with the rigours of our adolescence and the timeless and universal value system pumped into our blood stream by the best Masters the country and our generation had to offer.
Can any one of us forget Holdy’s injunction to cultivate the “bold, inquisitive Greek spirit” or his astonishment at finding our class, one month before our Senior Cambridge exams, failing to react to his remark,
“Let the punishment fit the crime/ The punishment fit the crime.”
On learning that none of us had heard the verse, he put aside all our books and over the next three days sang for us in his cracked voice the whole of Gilbert and Sullivan’s opera, The Mikado! Or Sahi reading out from some poor unfortunate’s Sunday essay on “Water”: “Human beings need water to live. So do animals. Without water, we would all die” – and more in the same vein, then throwing the note book back at the author crying, “Hai paani! Hai paani!”
I have but one recommendation to make as the School veers towards its Platinum Jubilee. When I was here, girls were a rumour. The cruellest irony was that Welham Girls started up only in my last term – and I had to wait till the 4x400 girls relay on this Main Field to discover what made them so deliciously different to us. When I eventually founded my family, I had three girls – all of whom went to a co-educational school, inferior in every respect to The Doon School except in that they learned about the opposite sex when they needed to. Our deprivation distorted all of us. I am glad none of my daughters is slated to marry a Doon School boy. For all the Doscos wives here would agree that we are totally mixed up inside! So my final plea to you is: make the School co-educational. I think this complex of Hyderabad and Kashmir House would make for a perfect girls’ hostel – besides the incidental advantage of reducing the number of H-House and K-House boys! (My T-House fellow, the Headmaster, would agree that this would considerably raise the tone of the School! (boos and applause!) When my eldest was born, I wrote to Headmaster Marytn and asked him whether I might expect Doon to become co-ed by the time she reached the age of eleven. He replied to say he hoped it would. Now, three long decades later, the School still remains a unisexual Victorian relic. I hope the Board of Governors will summon up the courage to make the Great Change by the Platinum Jubilee! I urge them to do so.
I emerged from School a red-hot Marxist (– like Mukul Chhatwal in yesterday’s Hindi play). Others had a more intelligent reaction. I have since moderated my views (again like Mukul Chhatwal in yesterday’s play). So, I am sure, have my classmates. But on one point we are all agreed: it was great to have been here, a miracle to have survived, and a trauma we recall with affection and gratitude.
“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive
And to be young were very Heaven!”
Thank you, School. And thank you to all who made this possible.
Jai Hind!
