I had a piteous Hindi then. Studying in Kendriya Vidyalaya we got to have some knowledge of our mother tongue. I did struggle conversing to my class mates(in the initial 1 year), especially to the North Indians since not everyone would know English. Every time i needed a translator, i used to pester my mallu friends on a regular basis over this. All i knew was this, if someone asked "tumko Hindi maloom hai" and i would deplorably say "Thoda thoda" and try escaping from any further conversations. I could also answer questions like "Naam kya hai?" and "Ghar kidar hai?".
I used to sigh away from people who would come and criticize and say "Isko Hindi bhi naheen aata." . And i would remember the story of the Chor-Kallan. Soudamini teacher narrated that to me. I (even many in my batch) were actually too lucky, till that year KV's followed a Hindi medium but then just that year they switched over to English, thank God.
The Hindi classes were even pathetic, my Hindi teacher was a North Indian. I don't remember her name(blame it on poor memory of mine). She used to converse in only Hindi(woh toh Hindi class hey,she had to do just that), as always i(we) seldom listened to what she said and being regular back-bencher(s) she used to give us more care as well. But we kept ourselves busy with some mischievous activities, and got caught very often. And i can never forget this incident.
I had a slam book that day and i wanted Ali and Kannan to fill it, and Ali wrote first. We didn't really know what a slam book was all about then, i just saw one in my nearby shop and bought it. We didn't even know what a sun-sign meant. Ali just signed in that place which said sun-sign(he changed it later on after knowing what it really meant and i changed it for the rest of them verifying their b'days later on). He wrote his weakness as beautiful girls, it was interesting since we were doing this during the classes. Then it was Kannan's turn and he wrote all about his love to Divya and everything. And then we 3 sat together and were comparing their answers, we got caught. My Hindi mam snatched the slam book from us and threw us out of the class. Oh we 3 in front of the whole class it was miserable, and even more miserable was that the slam book was with our teacher, what if she opens and tries reading it. Arey she is a Hindi teacher and hence doesn't read any English, we could have said to ourselves but these KV's have quality teachers with good English as well. She returned it back after some 2 days, did she read it? It remains a mystery.
We would plan of the cricket match and talk of sports and stuffs or about girls as well. But then the topic on girls never took the priority over others then, it was just another topic to gab with. My friend Ali would then start unwrapping his philosophical talks. Oh God, its so damn boring that we never let him carry on with those talks for too long. Once we did and it would have no limits, he definitely had a wide knowledge of variety of subjects . And Kannan always used to be the first to start the conversation on girls, he would complain of Ali saying "Ali tends to be too humble in front of girls" being the gigantic guy he is, it never looks nice on him.
We considered Ali to be the strongest in the class, and every-time we played Kabadi* the team in which Ali played was sure to win. But the other team always gave a good fight. I was a good cricketer(then). At KV a lot of importance was given to sports. We did make the most of that. Every free period meant that we would direct ourselves to the ground to play some games.
And the days of inter-school sports used to be really nice, we had a national level athlete in our school and i remember the whole school crowding around the ground to see him stride. He was literally jumping around and not running, with such a long stride. We played an array of games from cricket, football and even Kho-Kho*. One of the best things about our school was the humongous ground that we had, it could easily carry the entire strength of our school so easily.
And next is the lunch hours, unlike many other schools we had the freedom to bring any eatables, let it be veggie or non , everything chalega. I didn't really enjoy that freedom in many schools i studied, most of them don't let us take non-veg to the school, not as if i followed that i hated to hide it from those spies in my class who always wanted to act as the good kid at school. Every school will have those kinds of people, they study a lot, (mostly)wear glasses, never play any sports, are teachers pet and just look for an opportunity to complain of others and even call the teachers everyday. And we had the liberty to go out and have the lunch, initially(few weeks) we had lunch from one of my friends houses next to our school but later on we found a place under a tree inside the campus.
The lunch group consisted of me,Ali, Kannan, Manoj and Rithesh initially but later on a few more came along. I can never forget Rithesh's roti with pickle, his mom was good at that. And Ali brings some non-veggie often, his mom is famous among us for the cholesterol free fried rice she made. My mummy made good chicken, everyone liked it. More than the taste of the food, the feel of having it in such a place made our lunch a lot better. We anxiously waited for the lunch hour to come so that we could go out and have fun. It feels nice even now when think of those moments we had. We were lot good friends then but everything has changed now, i am only in contact with Ali and he seldom calls many of them as well. Our mechanical lives have won over us. Those moments would never be back.
