Confessions of a Middle-Bencher: My Life in St. Joseph E.T. High School

Even today I dream ( quite literally)  of entering St. Joseph High school building on a monsoon day. I still dream of being admitted to the  school and studying in the class. I can clearly see Maniar madam, our English teacher, threaten us with her 'high' English if we did not behave properly. I see late Mr. Prajapati, our Math teacher, holding his own left shirt collar with his right hand and zealously teach us Math. " Is this the way we are going to study?", he asks me angrily and flings my notebook on my face. He had a curious way of using ' we' for you. He was a tall, dark and stern man who sent shivers through the spines of many. His zeal for Math bordered on fanaticism and whatever minuscule math I have in me, is because of this man. He was not ' nice'. He was a brilliant teacher. He proved that you don't have to be 'nice' and 'friendly' to be an excellent teacher. I still see Mr. Khurshid Pathan, our then Physics teacher demanding the I complete my Physics experiment journals. My palms still sweat at the thought. Mr. Pathan, in total contrast to Mr. Prajapati was nice and friendly, and very popular with girls. I still see Mr. Gupta,  our jolly roly-poly Hindi teacher (who I discovered today is also a poet and astrologer) getting stuck on the descriptions of food in Hindi lessons and struggling to leave them behind. He got struck at the description of baked potatoes in Premchand's 'Kafan'.

I can still remember Mathew Kotnani, my friend, tell me with excitement that one of my sarcastic poems have appeared in the local youth section of the Indian Express. This was my first publication. After that I became a public nuisance, and with the advent of the internet and blogging in the twenty first century, I became a global infliction.

I can still see the chloroformed frog meant for dissection in the Biology lab regain consciousness  and jump on the screaming girls. Today, I suspect, one of the pretty girls from our class must have kissed it and it must have turned into 'fully awake' frog instead of a prince. Women, those eternal optimists, seem to keep on kissing frogs for a long time in their life, and by the time they realize that the frogs will be frogs forever, they have their own tadpoles to nurture. Talking of princes, I also recall one of my classmates whose surname was Champaneri, who often used to come to the school on horseback!

I joined St. Joseph English Teaching High School, Valsad, in 1988, for my eleventh and twelfth standard because I did not have a choice and it seems, St. Joseph's admitted me because they did not have much choice either. I studied in Bai Avabai High School for most of my life and there was  no English medium eleventh and twelfth standard for science stream in Bai Avabai school and St. Joseph's was the only school which had this facility in those days. St. Joseph's was the only 'convent' school in our area in those days. My sister had studied there till her tenth standard and it was located at a stone's throw from our residence. The principal Sister Clara Fernandes in St. Joseph was not very happy at the idea of allowing 'desi', ill-mannered ruffians from Avabai to run freely in the more disciplined and elite school. I remember her giving a very stern piece of mind to the entire classroom for bad behaviour,  and her focus was on certain girls who talked 'inappropriately' with the boys.  Till I entered the 'convent' I associated 'Sisters' with people who either tied rakhi on your hand or jabbed a syringe into you. I was an awkward outsider who even did not know how to tie a tie. 

I was a committed middle-bencher. Unlike backbenchers and front benchers, I lived in the grey no-man's land of 'averageness', both in terms of intelligence as well as in terms of capacity for naughtiness. I was in the same place as far as looks were concerned and I marveled at my friend Abhay Thosar's wicked coolness at his being one of the handsomest and smartest kid in the class. He hardly got carried away by girls doting on him. Many of my friends from Avabai were there: Chinmay and Hoshedar for instance. I made new friends with Abhay, Sanat, Rajesh Jainval, Vivekand Pandey, Amit Purohit and Mathew Kotnani for instance. One of the good things about St. Joseph's was that unlike my one year at Kendriya Vidyalaya, Ordnance Factory, Chandrapur, I was not bullied or humiliated.

This was the period when asthma became more chronic, and started to pervade my life. I remember this was the period, when on insistence of  one Shri Prabhuji, a family friend and a local holy man, I started doing all sorts of trick to get rid of asthma. He suggested that I wake up very early in the morning, study for the twelfth standard with my friend Chetan Patel, go for jogging, or go cycling to Tithal Sai Mandir some five to six kilometers from my house, do ' alni' fasts or salt-free meal days , count beads chanting Gayatri mantra, chant Hanuman chalisa, water basil plant or go to Shiva temple on Mondays. Obviously, all this did not work. I remember sitting on the veranda in the afternoons on the days when I could not attend schools due to asthma attack and watching students of St. Joseph, especially the girls, return home.

People expected me to do well in the exams. I scored fifty-odd percent. Baba believed that a person who knows a bit of English and knows stenography will never die of hunger and there was no point in doing B.Sc and work in a factory  in Vapi as a chemist from eight in morning to six in the evening. On his suggestion, I took up B.A with English course from Valsad. People were shocked. Arts was seen as the lowest rung of the educational Varnashrama with medicine and engineering at the top. I never even dreamed of doing doctorate and teach in one of the best universities in India. The middle-bencher was basically a day dreamer, and not a dreamer. He sat in the ambivalent middle of the spectrum, and doodled away cartoon characters in his rough work book. He is not difficult to find, just look around you.


( St. Joseph English  Teaching High School, Valsad, is celebrating its Diamond Jubilee in December this year)

Remembering Vignan Vivek Vartul, Valsad

Spare a thought for a short story of Vignan Vivek Vartul, an ephemeral movement to popularize science in a small coastal town in the Southern Gujarat called Valsad in the nineties. Vignan Vivek Vartul literally means the Circle of Discerning Science Lovers. It organized talks of renowned scientists like Dr JJ Rawal, a famous astrophysicist from Science Centre, Mumbai, on 24 November 1998 and Prof P.C. Mehta, a well known physicist and mathematicians on the subjects like 'Life of Stars' on 28 April 1999 .

It arranged sky watching programs at the time of eclipses (1995 and 1999), comets like Hyakutake (26 Feb 1996) and Hale-Bopp (1997)and meteor showers like the Leonids. It also carried out a survey on the cause and effect of stress on the students of twelfth standard (science) in the schools in Valsad. It collaborated with Science Centre in Dharampur and organized various events for school and college students. The Circle met occasionally and discussed things like the relationship between science and spirituality. The movement fizzled out towards the end of the millennium. 

It was started by motley of young science enthusiasts sheerly out of their interest in science. The spearhead was Vikas Upadhyay, a bright psychology student, amateur astronomer, who presently works as the chief editor of a local Gujarati daily and the spear chiefly consisted of people like Satish Kulkarni, a chemistry graduate, Hitesh Parekh, an economics graduate, Kalpesh Desai, a chemistry graduate, Kandarp Trivedi, a lawyer and poet, Sunil Agarkar, an amateur aero-modeller and professionally a legal consultant, and Sachin Ketkar, a not-so-bright writer among others. These men were in their twenties or thirties then.

The unusual assortment of animals that constituted `V4’ had only two things in common: friendship and an unceasing itch for discussions on just about anything under the sun- and very often foraying into the things that lay beyond the sun too. The discussions were the usual young collegians’ discussions which frequently began with the Special Theory of Relativity and ended with sex. Very often the discussions were triggered off by the writings of a renowned Gujarati columnist Raman Pathak in the daily called the Gujarat Mitra. He called himself a 'rationalist’ and was an inspiration for an organization named Satya Shodhak Sabha in Surat. The work of this Sabha was eradication of superstitions by exposing the all too common 'miracles’. Pathak’s column ' Raman Brahman’ (literally 'Rovings of Raman’) consisted of sweeping, outrageous and often silly generalizations. Nevertheless it managed to be provoke and challenge the traditional thinking. He is a communist, a rare thing in Gujarat, an atheist and proponent of science and his writings propagated atheism. Unfortunately, his megalomania and arrogance usually got better of his ' rationality’. Science was presented as counter-traditional and anti-religious,which it very often is, but not always). Therefore it perturbed most of the intellectuals of southern Gujarat. Many of the 'intellectuals’ were Gandhians, who saw 'spirituality’ as something unproblematic and given. There was a lot of resistance to Pathak and Satya Shodhak Sabha and there was lot of verbiage regarding ' Synthesis of Science and Spirituality’. Spirituality, for most of the intellectuals of region meant Hindu Spirituality and more specifically Brahmin Spirituality. Gujarat, lest we forget it, is also the laboratory of Hindutva. I have witnessed how some version of Gandhism merges seamlessly into Godseism.

Many youngsters who started V-4 were dissatisfied with the polemical and negative approach of Raman Pathak and his followers. They rightly felt that this approach was only interested in ideological quarrels and was doing absolutely nothing about science which was something far more wonderful. They thought science was too important to be labelled as being merely a counter-traditional ideology of promoting atheism. Science, obviously, is not counter traditional for sake of being counter traditional. It is counter-traditional because the traditional framework very often fails to come up with a satisfactory explanation of phenomena under consideration. The term 'Vivek’ or 'Discernment' was an ingenious way of distancing itself from the Raman Pathak-Satya Shodhak Variety of looking at science

The Upadhyay-Kulkarni- Ketkar crew decided to make the organization more formal by making late Dr. BG Naik, a very retired lecturer and the principal of the science college, Valsad, the president of the circle. Late Prof Naik was a respected figure in Valsad. He was a veteran Gandhian and a science teacher. Interestingly, people hardly noticed a contradiction here. Gandhi was extremely allergic to things like Science and Technology and considered them as symbol of the Evil Western Civilization. Hence, Gandhian Scientist is in many ways a contradiction in terms. However, he was elected as president for many reasons. He had a background in academic science as well as certain reputation in the town. Both these things, we hoped, would make things smoother for us to gain access to the schools and colleges in the town. He had also written on various topics like the clichéd  ' Synthesis of Science and Spirituality’ etc.

The senior members of the group consisted of people like Mr Meghraj Bhatt, a senior teacher of mathematics in Sheth RJJ School, Valsad, Mr. Sikligar, a retired science teacher and an amateur radio expert, Prof Lipsa Adhvaryu, a lecturer in Psychology in the Chikli College and Mr Bhatt of Dharampur Science Centre among others. The group met infrequently and discussed and planned the programmes. This went on for around almost a decade or so.

The movement fizzled out due to various reasons. The first and foremost reason was that it was a movement in a wrong place. Valsad, being a small town, displays a typical small town mindset consisting of laziness, complacency and careless self-contentment. 'Cultural Activities’ are mostly evening pass time entertainment, comparable to going to the Tithal Sea Beach. Valsad has never been very enthusiastic about genuine intellectual activity. Many people used to call it a 'quiet town for retired people’ and most of its cultural and intellectual activities were of 'retired people’ variety. Vibrant youth culture was largely absent. As a result except for the team that started V-4, other youngsters did not involve themselves with the movement. Science requires some sort of intellectually keen, passionate and rebellious spirit which was absent among the young Valsadians. Hence, as soon as the group that had founded the movement was scattered in all directions , it was not replaced by another young group of science enthusiasts.

The second reason as I see it is that the lack of interest in pure science, as opposed to applied sciences like engineering etc, is a characteristic of the Indian society. Thousands of years ago, Indian society was keen on theoretical as well as applied aspects of science. One has only to think of celebrated names like Varahamihir or Aryabhatt or Charaka. The intellectual traditions in India dried up with time and were replaced with cynical anti-intellectual outlook which is characteristic of most of the educated Indians today. The decline of interest in science coincides with the rise of religious fanaticism and bigotry in the nineties.

The third reason is that though V-4 ideologically distanced itself from the Leftist leaning Satya Shodhak Sabha, it did not categorically distance itself from the hegemonic Brahmanism (read Hindutva). Most probably because the nuclear group of V-4 consisted largely of middle class Brahmins. Brahmins are fond of speculations and debates, but science is not merely speculation and debate. Its nucleus is the spirit of critical inquiry, experimentations and actual physical involvement in the laboratory. Arm chair science cannot go very far. The group was not really very 'counter traditional’, though it opposed the things like 'superstitions’ etc. Brahmanism too is not very sympathetic to 'superstitions’ which are mostly non-elitist and folk traditions. The movement would have greater significance had it been openly critical of Brahmanism.

However, the most important thing about this movement that it actually happened in an unlikely place and it was fuelled by unlikely people. It carried out many interesting activities which others would not have taken up in those times. Valsad, however, is not likely to remember such things. And more importantly for me- I was part of it and I cherish the memories.