Dhoni aur meri kahani (!)

Mahender Singh Dhoni and I were batchmates at school. I discovered that he too passed out of DAV-JVM in 1999 after reading an interview of his. But then there were 5,000 students in that school and I was there for only two years so I never saw him (after all he had neither long nor coloured hair at that point of time).
It was a surpise then when I happened to catch up with a batchmate after seven years and she told me that she had met him outside her home. He stays in Mecon which is where DAV-JVM is located. So she tells me, "Remember how all of us who were short of attendance used to have these extra classes close to the Board exams? He was also with us in that class." He was? I have no such recollection. She had been very unwell that summer and had missed the entire first term. Dhoni had been too busy with his cricket and I had just been plain lazy and hence, we were all short of attendance. The one constructive thing I could have done while sitting in those awful classrooms (since studies were not really my cup of tea) was too have struck up a friendship with him, par woh bhi nahi...
Dhoni has to be the only redeeming feature of that school where each one of the teachers was quirkier than the other and where students got good marks despite the teachers, not because of them.
The school's philosophy was simple. It was at that time just about the only school which had Classes XI and XII affiliated to the CBSE. So it would short-list all the students with 90% and above (and put them in with all the nincompoops who had studied there since KG) and at the end of two years claim, what wonderful students it had produced.
A post will perhaps not be able to do justice to the quirkiness of the teachers there, each one of them worse than the other, but I must attempt it. Here goes: Let me start with the principal Ram Iqbal who was never quite there. In my two years there, I saw him only a handful of times. He looked more like a sarkari babu in his safari suits than an educationist, but that's how things were there.
Next in line was D R Singh who started the assembly with a juggling act in one of my first weeks at the school. For a few mintes, I was left wondering if I had joined a new school or come to the new circus in town.
There was S N Thakur, whose girth would make boys discuss endlessly if he was carrying quintuplets. His son (don't remember his name) used to study with us and was the dumbest guy I have ever seen. His pet name was Mithu and that's what most teachers would call him (Come to think of it, he looked like a parrot too, but alas unlike a parrot, never ever opened his mouth).
Then, of course, there was S Roy who would walk around the entire class like he had a pendulum in his body and just say, "Shallow! Shallow! Your knowledge is very shallow.'' He never did anything to make it deeper, but then...
His namesake Ms S Roy was slightly better but only used to talk about Rockefeller's daughter having married a butcher (she could have married a gay man, frankly, do you care? I didn't and still don't.)
Our class was rather unfortuante in having children of two teachers among us. Apart from Mithu, there was Deepika, Chaubey's daughter. Chaubey is immortal. As is the apocryphal stories about how he had once told a student, "First you were lying with principal, now you are lying with me." Unfortunately, even when he let out gems such as, "Open the windows and let the atmosphere come inside,'' we couldn't laugh as Deepika darling used to sit right in front of us.
So, seven years after having left DAV and having tried my best to forget every single memory associated with that school, I suddenly find myself trying very very hard to remember which one of those guys was Dhoni. But try as I might, I have only a vague recollection... Even so, I am happy to finally have one positive memory associated with DAV.
I went to school with Dhoni and these days, that statement seems to command a lot of attention. I am not telling anyone that I didn't see him there (and you guys keep shut too, ok?)...

Tol mole ke bol

Moles are in news these days, thanks to Jaswant Singh's Call to Honour. And the brouhaha over the entire issue has brought moles of a slightly (actually, vastly) different kind into focus for me. As a child, I used to love them. I would sit and count them and get really excited whenever a new one would make its appearance. I had about 14 of them to begin with, and I would keep on praying to God to send some more.
And send, he did. By the bucketful, if I may say so. At last count, I had 27 of them on my face alone.
When I was about seven, I got one on the index finger of my left hand and everyone would tell me how that would make me rich. I was quite excited at the thought of a mere mole bringing in the moolah. Experience, however, has made me realise that the theory is not quite true. I probably have more moles per square inch of skin than anyone else in this part of the world and yet, my finances (or the lack of them) are nothing to write home about.
I never really paid much attention to them as an adult, but the other day when a photographer sent me my picture, I realised that moles are all I could see. Now, I have been thinking about them for quite some time and am wondering how to make them diasppear. Yesterday, a column by a new-age guru which said that people with moles were highly-respected in ancient societies caught my eye and so it was with a great deal of expectation that I started reading it. There has to be some comfort to compensate for their over-abundance, I thought.
After going through the entire column, it turned out out I have them all at rather insignificant locations. The one on my finger too has begun to fade so whatever little hopes I had nurtured of its resurrection, have also got to be given up.