Back to School ! :)

The other day, while my Mum was busy purchasing vegetables in Reliance Fresh Store, I was wandering around, seeing the objects in the offering. I moved past a rack dedicated to stationary. I then realized that this is the time when the schools are about to re-open after ‘the Summer Vacations’. What followed was obvious...... I tripped over the cliff and went rolling down the memory lane...... :)

• What a delight it used to be to have a new school bag, a new Pencil box or a new Lunch Box! And if you had an entire new School kit, you were on cloud #9. :) We went around flaunting our newly acquired fortune in style. As for me, I would find weird reasons to open my new bag or the pencil box 100 times. :P
•  New books! Whenever I went out to ‘Ajay Pustak Sadan’ or ‘Krishna Books and Stationary’, I was super excited. It was a treat to see the shopkeepers collecting all the text books and presenting them in front of you in a bundle. All you had to say was ‘Christ Church, Class xyz’ and they knew what to offer. And often you would bump into another classmate. (* I am sure all of you would agree, though we spent 300 days of an year together in the same class, meeting a classmate outside school was ‘out of the world’.) :)

• Back home, the first thing I would do, was to flip the pages of the new books. My first choice was the English Reader. From The Gulmohur Reader to The Oxford University Press Books to Shakespeare and Charles Dickens......I loved them all. Next book used to be the colourful Science Textbook (till the time it was split into the more complex Physics, Chemistry and Biology) :/
• The night before the school, Mum would sit and cover up all the books, (which I never liked) with the brown or the Orange covers. We later found a way to escape that by covering our books by transparent Cellophane sheet. Putting up name stickers on the books and notebooks. (The stickers were sometimes Disney or Fido to sometimes plain red and white ones) and writing our names on them in our best hand-writing. :)
• On the first day, no matter how much your parents tell you to leave some books behind, you would insist on carrying all the books and notebooks in your bag......just in case! (as if you would cover half of the syllabus on the first day itself)
• The lovely welcome by our beloved School Principal Mrs. W. Nair, in the Assembly. And ofcourse, singing The School Hymn in the first assembly of the new session. 

• Then to check if our new prefect was a nice and kind senior or a strict and rude girl who would thrash us on seeing our long finger nails or if we forget to bring our Hymn book! :/

• What could beat the feeling of writing in a new (fresh) notebook for every new subject! :)
• I can never forget the excitement all of us had when we first moved from Pencil to Pen! It was in Class IV as far as I remember and we were supposed to start writing in ink. (Most of us had atleast 1 fountain pen with a green body and golden cap). Then we later moved on to ‘Auto pens’......Pilot pens...... and finally Ball Point pens, mostly Cello Grippers!

• Writing the ‘Class Time Table’ in your extremely precious ‘Rough Notebook’ and then copying it down on the best Time Table (format) you had. (By the way, I hope all you Christ Churchians remember how we used to collect these time tables on the last day or rather the ‘Result day’ of a school session, when representatives of various stationary shops of the city flocked outside our school with colourful Time tables for publicity!)
• Eagerly awaiting the distribution of the School Diary. :P (I wonder how many of you remember that)
• While we tried to sit with our best friends on the first day, our Class Teachers would declare that we would be given our seats in accordance to our heights. We would crib and complain if we are separated from our friends, little knowing that we are sitting with a new ‘friend-to-be’.
• And ofcourse, checking out the ‘new admissions’, if any and trying to act smart in front of them, being the older inhabitants of our second home. :)

Well, when it comes to our dear ol’ School, this can never be all. There are many more posts to come, because our school memories are the fondest of them all!  :)

P.S.- I would like to give the credit of this post to Aditi who literally ‘drags us’ back to our school memories through her blog! :) That is the reason why I love her Blog.