How many subjects, their respective books and not to forget the staff that handled them, have given us company, right from the day we all stepped into our schools... From the "English Rhymes" book that had a 'guitar & "pussy" cat' picture in it to cursive writing to formulae to political-physical maps to chemical equations to Mughal dynasty to Thamizh seyyul padalgal to third language as Hindi and what not. Quite a rich (re)collection!
My toughest time, I would say I had, was with Maths. Oh, I hated it with all my heart. Why should I be interested in some snail crawling up the stick or when the two strange people (or for that matter trains or cars) meet covering some distance in opposite directions? And dont even ask about memorising the multiplication tables! I remember my maths "classwork" notebook to be full of striken out pages and blots of ink screaming out that something went really really wrong then! oh, that was a bad time in fifth or sixth class. But somehow I grew to ignore the 'why' part and just concentrate on the 'what's - the formulae, the problem, the same old standard approach... It was easier then to score marks. Life becomes easier when you donot question or think, isnt it? Strange!
Then came the social studies. The early morning exam preparations, the writing down and memorising the "capital of Jammu and Kashmir" to "folk dance of Assam and Bihar". As if this was not enough, I had to read about everything around the world too. Mississippi - how much I struggled to get that spelled right to my dad then! Phew!! When it came to maps, I was quite happy with the colors and symbols :) I liked History for the great things we studied about but felt Civics to be more dry and full of rules and procedures! The preamble... aggggrrrhh!! We used to play "book cricket" with history books as it had the maximum number of pages!
My neighbour aunty's favorite passtime was to read my Tamizh classwork and homework notebooks! This subject had great many trouble makers in groups like "na,Na; la,La,zha; ra,Ra" and so on. Actually, even I do the same now, when I get hold of my younger cousin's tamizh notes. Once I asked my cousin (studying second standard) to read what he had written. Instead of "Oosai" he read it as "Onach" ROTFL! I should admit I liked the seyyul songs- the kambaraamayanam, puranaanooru, aganaanooru, abhirami andhaadi... anything I missed out here?
English - This always topped the list whenever I putdown all the subject I had, but I never felt any special affection or disgust towards it. Pretty non-aligned, I should say. Well, in nineth class, when we had the group activities like presenting a radio show and stuff, I quite enjoyed it and thats the only memory ever left for this subject.
First of my favorite subjects is Science, more specifically biology and then physics when it was later split into 3 separate books. Chemistry again was such a dry mystery. Too much to remember without making any sense to yourself. Anything with living things, the cells, the body parts and their operation, the brain, the diagrams - everything was so much fascinating and nothing else made somuch sense. I never felt any inclination to Computers in school except that it was very easy- the binary, hexa, octa arithmetic & generations of computers and such. So here I'm, a software professional, who was very passionate about biology until fate decided otherwise!
The third language, Hindhi class, was more like a recreation class than any serious learning. Luckily or otherwise, our Hindi teacher happened to be our music teacher too. She was pretty old lady and would forget what subject she was to take during that period. She used to enter our class for Hindhi period and start singing :D Great fun we had, especially in confusing her out and getting cute scoldings from her! "Naalu naalaiku uppillaama kanji oothina elaam sariya poidum!", she used to say. (
If you are given saltless starch food for four days, everything would be alright!) Very cute, indeed! By the way, after thinking and writing about all this, I felt so good to find
this!
