NP Days & NP Memories

THOSE WERE THE BEST DAYS….

“The bird a nest

the spider a web

the human friendship.”
-William Blake

There is perhaps no better or stronger kinship than with your schoolmates. Last month I happened to visit my old school North Point and casually snapped some pictures on my mobile cam.

After downloading them on my Facebook profile I was suddenly flooded with comments from classmates, seniors and juniors alike who all had so much to say and remember.

Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: "What! You, too? Thought I was the only one." - C.S. Lewis

Some have not been back in school for almost 20 years, some even more but even then, trivial recollections were made almost as if they happened just yesterday.

And for the ones reading those comments, just a phrase or sound, which possibly hadn’t been heard in decades, brought back such fresh memories it was almost like we were back in school again.

And what memories….

Mount Hermon was a co-ed school just below ours and they had a open swimming pool which our boys used to visit sometimes when our old indoor pool used to spring a leak. NP now has a second outdoor pool and there is no need to walk down to MH but as Binay Shrestha helpfully pointed out it also has its disadvantages. No more chick-seeing?

I don’t know if that word exists in the English dictionary but who is there from that period who cannot understand what it means? Such is the secret codes of schools.

Why is it that our memory is good enough to retain the least triviality that happens to us, and yet not good enough to recollect how often we have told it to the same person? -Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Binay, as I mentioned to him too, was a sweet guy while in school and not quite given to bursts of wit but that seems to have changed.

Socials, is another of those convent school words whose inferred meaning is greatly different from its grammatical one and which brings with it visions of coy dances with the ladies of Loreto Convent.

However during the Rector-ship of Fr. Peter Pappu it was discontinued.

Sadly for Binay this was also the period when he was in school.
No wonder now when he says ruefully “Pappu cant dance saala.”

But going by his FB pictures, Binay saala, has thankfully learned how to dance. Just FYI.

Great Education is not only about books. It should also prepare you for practical life later. Even business maybe.

At NP the boarders got early practice at this. Young children running between tables every morning during breakfast shouting egg for chips, egg for chips is probably what is now helping run the economies of most south east asian countries.

Just as running towards an empty bench in Fraser Hall and shouting “Capturedddddddddd” is what helped many boys, bag a bride later in life.

When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years. - Mark Twain

The long aisles between the beds in the dorm used to be laid with an equally long carpet. And as Subu Shrestha remembers (and probably with good reason too) after lights out every night, the boys (not sleepy at all and with too much time on their hands and mind) used to roll the carpet half up and leave it in a bunch for some poor sod to come and trip on his way back to bed from the bathroom. The falling thud sound that followed would be further followed by (in Subu’s own words) "some of the choicest curses ever heard this side of the Kanchenjunga."

Now that’s something you’ll never learn in a classroom.

If you want to know the exact details then call Subu on his mobile today, while he is sleeping and you will get a sample of it.

When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not. - Mark Twain

And Freedom restaurant just outside the school boundary.
Tempting the kids to sneak out and bunk for a quick round of momos and chowmein.
Has there been a café more appropriately named? I don’t think so.


Tenzing wrote in to remember “ those times when he used to attend the friday mass in the school chapel so that he could bunk the study period” and all around the world, a thousand non-catholic North Pointers sighed in unision “Aah Yes”


Conservatives say teaching sex education in the public schools will promote promiscuity. With our education system? If we promote promiscuity the same way we promote math or science, they've got nothing to worry about. - Beverly Mickens

We now have access to the best restaurants and choicest cuisines but mention Boss’ Canteen and the keema paratha and keema buns and our mouths all begin to water.

I think it was all best summed up by Arjun Nevada who wrote:

“Thanks for the pictures. I still remember how I cried when my parents dropped me off the first time and how I cried more when I was leaving after giving the ICSE.”

Amen.

Ciao

Vish


It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations -Winston Churchill