Regulars

Welcome Sirs!

We welcome Pravin Gandhi to the Mathematics Department, Vidhukesh Vimal to the Hindi Department and Anuj Ray to the English Department. The entire school community wishes them a fruitful tenure.

Farewell

At the close of the last term the school bade farewell to the following members of the community:
Chandra Kant Dixit (CKD) - Physics
Kiran Singh (KRS) - English
Manu Mehrotra (MMR) - Mathematics
Surinder Pal Vijan (SPV) - Catering
We wish them the best in their new endeavours.

Holiday Happenings...

Over the summer vacations, while most of us were enjoying the break, several boys and masters took off on various projects and trips across the globe.

• A Round Square initiative in Chennai for tsunami relief was attended by Ashish Mitter, Rohan Gupta, Surya N. Deo, Akrit Soin, Gaurav Sood, Nikunj Nagalia, Rituraj Raizada, Mehul Goyal, Skand Goel, Ayyappa Vemulkar, Jaspreet Singh, Gurbaaz S. Sidhu, Nelson Kumrawat and Anirudh Gupta. They were escorted by AKC, ASH and AKS. A report runs in this issue.
   

• An art excursion comprising eleven boys, ATB and SJB travelled to Rome, Florence, Pisa and Venice to discover the rich heritage of Italian art and architecture. A report will be carried in a subsequent issue.
   

• Ankit Durga, Anant Johri, Rohit Khandelwal visited Scotland to work on a nature conservation project. DVS, PCH, AKC, ATB and DA attended an IB Diploma Programme Workshop in Athens, Greece from June 27 to July 1.
   

• Shoaib Ahmed, Shubham Gupta and SJB went to village Stakmo in Ladakh to work on an international Round Square Project. After three weeks of work, they went on a trek, visited Pangong Lake and did river rafting. A detailed report will follow soon.
   

• A road trip was undertaken by PBR, ANJ, VRW, SSM and Anju Mann and Salil Rawat (gym coach) on four bikes and one jeep to Leh, Ladakh. They made it to Pang (17,000 ft.) through the Lahaul-Spiti valley. However, due to some members suffering from altitude sickness, only VRW made it to the destination. We applaud their adventurous spirit.

Unquotable Quotes

My seat number is 4.5.
Kushagra Kumar needs more space.
I’m not light, I’m a light.
Rituraj fails to illuminate.
I’m a light-saving power pack.
Rituraj, the conservative environmentalist.
Take a piece of pen and a paper.
Shikhar Singh, going to pieces.
Please off these.
HMD refers to switches.
Let’s see if you can hear it.
HMD wants all senses to be involved.
Aditya Ajmani is a perfect.
Naushad Khan’s language attains perfection
 

It is never easy to discuss a student exchange. The plethora of experiences and impressions, when recounted, can sound incoherent to even the most interested listener. Anticipating this, I have chosen to focus on a particularly valuable memory - kick-starting a school publication at St. Edwards, my host school.
I will leave out the misery and mismanagement at the Delhi airport and a journey almost entirely spent in slumber as this makes for an uninteresting account. The unpredictable English weather is characteristic to anyone’s stay in England, as it invariably hampers one’s plans and commitments for the day.
While most of my classmates shuttled in and out of the examination halls, my housemaster, a highly articulate, concerned and well-travelled, middle-aged Englishman, advised me to plan my stay so as to accomodate all my interests and make it a wholesome experience. Having taken a tour of the entire campus, situated on the banks of a canal in residential Oxford, I paid a visit to the Warden (quaint though it may sound, he is our Headmaster’s counterpart!). In conversation with him, I explored a possibility that would dominate my stay there, eventually even become one of my most satisfying experiences in the UK. This was the idea of starting a student publication in their school.
The concept was excellent, and the school bought my arguments. However, for a viable project I needed to sell this to the students. In retrospect, I believe, this became a major platform for interaction with my peers. My English lesson worked as a wake-up call for me. It was in one of our ‘A Passage To India’ debates that I stumbled upon the keenness of certain students to start a publication. The rest became history. Samuel Jay and Ione Braddick took the idea instantly and were all up for the scheme, which, in due course, would be entirely dependent on their enthusiasm and willingness.
In a hastily organized meeting in the quiet, old, conservative library, amongst sudden outbursts of ecstatic emotion, the magazine was named Mayday and its first issue reached the readers on the first of May (celebrated as May Day in downtown Oxford with people diving into the Thames from one of the bridges at midnight). Of course this was entirely student-run and it was populous rather than literary. I left the onus of its contents on its future karta-dhartas. Everyone wanted this publication to cater entirely to student interests. So be it! We began rather professionally by taking a detailed survey of ‘who-wants-what’ and on allocating space accordingly. The Sun, it seems, was the most popular newspaper and obviously the regular Page Three gossip topped the popularity charts. And so we inserted gossip, rumours, and sensational revelations on our second page. That agreed, we decided to be magnanimous to our music fans, who constituted a significant chunk of the student population. In the weeks to come, I was made to chase Dave Bayley, who being one of the few students lucky enought to attend the Strokes concert at Hyde Park, had to provide me with a review of the event.
Teachers at St. Edward’s also had a fair share of laughter because we used the Weekly model of Unquotable Quotes to target the staff that was, in most instances, caught off-guard. The tendency of students to censure the actions of their teachers is universal, St. Edward’s being no exception! Other pages of the magazine constituted a psycho-analysis of a laughingstock, a rant highlighting the apparent atrocities committed by the administration against the students, and debate columns. In our second issue, it was my job to convince my housemaster to write for us on whether ‘Laser Printers are Better than Typewriters.’
For those of us, who think the English youth are driven by alcohol (beer, to be specific), premature relationships, beef and junk food, racist and shallow personalities, let me set the record straight. The British youth today, as much as I could understand, are an extremely health-conscious and progressive lot. They ally themselves with winners (except in the case of George W. Bush, whom they detest), debate on fatalistic notions like ‘Whether the sun is setting on the West,’ are keen on music and entertainment, accommodating and participating citizens of an assimilative hybrid society. Sachin Tendulkar gets his fair share of support in English stadiums, chicken tikka masala is the national dish (served twice a week in the school) and if they ridicule you for your third world mentality, they almost simultaneously see the danger of rapidly developing countries.
In my several efforts to sell India as a happening place, a global superpower, all the threats of outsourcing, nuclear weapons and technology went unnoticed. However, it took one of them to point out that, as it seems, some research concluded that if all the Indians spit in the ocean at one time, the rise in water level would be enough to wipe England off the face of this world. At least someone understood the potential of our human capital!