Given all this, I had serious doubts about whether I should in all conscience stand on this stage and so ungratefully talk about my miserable time here. After a bit of thought and some struggle I decided I should. For one thing, I learned a lot at Doon, a very great deal indeed as I will mention later, and I am very grateful for that. For another, I thought it would be interesting for you (and by ‘you’ I mean particularly the boys) to hear someone who has a somewhat different view of things from the usual ‘school days were the best days of my life’ litany; it might give you heart when you’re feeling low or perplexed. I looked down the list of new boys in an old Weekly recently, and discovered that about half the new intake consisted of brothers or sons of Old Boys; so I imagine that many of you know from experience the kind of gung-ho Old Boy guff that I’m referring to.
One of the hardest and most harmful things about school—not just Doon but any boarding school—is that boys are deprived of the love and day-to-day company of their fathers and mothers for two-thirds of the year—and possibly for longer, because when they do go back home for the holidays, parents are often so unused to spending time with their children that they don’t quite know what to do with them even when they share the same roof. The boys, while growing up, hardly know what it is like to have a sister. The result of this lack of family life, of affection, is very difficult to assess, but I think it has a serious effect on the minds and hearts of the boys. It forces them to be more independent of their parents, certainly; but it also makes them more emotionally insecure, and as a result more eager, even desperate, to conform to their peer group, to seek popularity among their companions, and to appear as tough and cool as possible and as brutal as possible to those who are outside the group or younger than themselves. This culminates after a few years in the ridiculous concern for privileges and seniority, and sometimes abuse of authority that one often finds among the captains and prefects and monitors; they exercise authority in the way that one would expect of an overgrown adolescent who has been pushed around without recourse to justice for years on end and then suddenly finds that he has been given the right to push other people around. All this was bad enough in my time; from my conversations with other Old Boys, I understand that this rampant bullying by seniors became even worse some years after that. What it is now like, I have no idea. I met the prefects at lunch today and enjoyed the meeting greatly. But then, I am just visiting, and it is impossible to gauge the atmosphere in school in a couple of days.
The concern and care of teachers and housemasters is no real substitute for the security that comes from the affection of one’s parents. When I was looking down that list of new boys, I asked myself this question: if I ever get married and have children, would I send them to Doon—or any other boarding school for that matter? My answer was that I am not sure.
Now after all that I have said so far, you might think that my answer would have been a resounding ‘No.’ But the fact of the matter is that there is another side to things—and one which is just as important. I owe a great deal to my years here, and it is necessary to acknowledge this. Two things that Doon gave me—and I will mention just the two most valuable things—were a sense of equality with boys from very different backgrounds (the Headmaster has already touched upon this) and a wide range of interests outside the purely academic. I’ll deal with the first, first.
The sense of equality was something that Doon never laid any oppressive stress on, and it was all the more effective for that. It just happened. Boys dressed in the same uniform regardless of their parents’ wealth. They got the same amount of pocket money. Caste did not matter, religion did not matter, the part of the country you came from didn’t matter, the social status of your family was unimportant. It was a considerable sacrifice for my parents to send me and my brother here, and it was even more difficult for other parents—but it did not matter to us that the boy next to us might be the son of a millionaire. Nor did it matter to him. Our friendships and enmities had almost nothing to do with the world outside Chandbagh. This was a wonderful lesson, and a rare one: one that could not have been taught in a day school. For though in a day school we would have had the company and affection and example of our parents, we would also have absorbed their social prejudices, and after school hours we would have mixed largely with children of the same social background, locality, and economic class.
I hope that this sense of equality still holds at Doon—though I am informed, again through the Weekly, that the dress code has lately been shaken to its foundations by the invasion of fancy sports shoes; the boys will know what I am talking about. More seriously, I also understand that the geographical mix of boys is much more restricted than it once was, which is a pity. (Something, I understand, is being done about this). On the other hand, there is a greater range in terms of family income because of the larger number of scholarships and part scholarships that the Headmaster has mentioned, and that is excellent news. In general, it is good to know that differences in wealth continue to count for little here.
As for my second great debt to Doon—an all-round education, not confined to one’s studies—one has only to look around the Rose Bowl to see what I mean. This wonderful theatre was built many years ago by the boys themselves under the guidance of a master. For me, it is a symbol of all that is best about the school. The shape is inspired by the models of ancient Greece, the plays acted here have ranged from the dance dramas of Tagore and a play based on Nehru’s Discovery of India to the great plays of Western, not just English literature: Twelfth Night and Becket and The Government Inspector and even a lively dated musical version of The Frogs by Aristophanes where (if I remember) Elvis competed with the Beatles and Superman glided down a rope to where the Mushrooms are now standing. The surroundings too are beautiful. The bamboo there burst into flower one year before dying and later sprang up again. The skies provided us with genuine thunder and lightning for the storm scene in Julius Caesar on the night of the performance. There were quite a few birds and snakes in that khud over there. But this natural beauty can be found all over the school: it was, after all, the old Forest Research Institute. Living for years in these surroundings, bred in me an unconscious love of nature which was reinforced by mid-term expeditions to the hills and rivers around, and which has never deserted me even amid the polluted drabness of large cities.
I needn’t list the other areas outside the classroom where the school allows one to expand one’s interests: debates, art, Indian and Western music, chess, photography, woodwork, special groups and societies for those interested in science or mathematics, sports of all kinds from cross-country running to cricket, and social work in the community—including, most particularly, helping out in times of crisis such as the recent earthquakes. So many schools in these academically competitive times have narrowed their focus to grades and exams, and college admission requirements. Doon has not.
Nor was this breadth of interest merely a question of the facilities available here. What was crucial was that certain teachers—I won’t say very many, but certainly a few—themselves embodied this wider vision of a full life. I was very lucky indeed to have, both as housemaster and as teacher, a man whose active interests ranged from mountaineering to Mozart, from the poetry of Ghalib and Tennyson—perhaps I should say Tannyson—to the social habits of what he chose to call ‘that delightful bird the rad-vanted bulbul.’ In fact, if one wanted to avoid a scheduled test on sheep-farming on the Canterbury plains or some other unexciting but exacting topic, the most promising technique was to look out of the first floor window of his classroom in an abstracted way, raise one’s hand, and say, ‘Sir, please sir, what is that bird, sir, the one that just made the sound gu-turr, gu-turr?’ While perfectly aware of our tactics, Guru was entirely unable to resist telling us about the bird, and its call, and its habitat, and its mating season, and its Latin name and the average length of its beak; and twenty minutes later, we boys, wiser but unconscious of being wiser, would be smiling to ourselves,
secure in the knowledge that we had flown safely over the Canterbury plains without being forced to crash-land.
People sometimes ask me whether in addition to these two great gifts, Doon didn’t teach me lessons of leadership and character building and independence of mind. My answer, in a word, is ‘No.’ I don’t think I have leadership qualities anyway, and I certainly don’t think that the system of authority that I talked about earlier leads to great qualities of leadership. As for character building, I suppose it could be said that there is a sort of make-or-break aspect to boarding schools. You learn to cope or else you collapse. I finally learned to cope with my solitude; but any real strength or warmth of character came to me later and in surroundings where I could choose my company and was more at ease with myself. As for independence of mind, I don’t think Doon helped me. As I explained, the ethos was one of conformity, of fear of public opinion, of hostility to anyone who was eccentric or odd in any way. I very much hope that this has changed or is changing.
It is difficult even at the age of forty to think for oneself, to take an independent stance, to speak one’s mind, to accept that one might make oneself unpopular by doing so, in short to trust in oneself. At fifteen it requires great courage, and I just did not have it. I lay low and muttered resentfully and thought that perhaps there was something wrong with me that I didn’t fit in. I hope that you boys have an easier time of it. Remember, there is such a thing as Life After School. I hope that later you will treat your school days in perspective, and not get obsessed by them one way or another. There is nothing sadder than someone who has done nothing solid or independent in life clinging to his old school tie for a sense of his own worth—or, more absurdly still, for his sense of superiority over others. On the other hand, it would be a pity if you allowed a few unhappy or traumatic incidents of your school years (which now form such a large proportion of your life) to haunt you down the decades. If they do haunt you, so, I hope, will the redeeming beauty of the finest of our assembly prayers, one of which we heard earlier this evening. The only way you can come to balance the good with the bad is through the habit of independent thought.
Both now and later, and whether or not your environment encourages you to do so, try to think things out independently. Just because someone in authority says something does not mean you should believe it. Think it out. Think it through. Don’t take important matters on trust. Obviously one does not have the time to think out everything, but important matters one just has to think out by oneself. Examine public opinion, especially that part of public opinion that you have almost made your own. Ask yourself when necessary what it is that you want to do in life—perhaps for yourself, perhaps for the world around you. If there is something deep within you, whether personal or professional, that pulls you one way, and you have discussed the matter with yourself and come to a clear conclusion, don’t let the wish to be thought of as a good chap force you in the opposite direction. You may not be successful or popular in the eyes of the world—or you may be successful only incidentally—but you will have lived your own life, the only one that is to a fair extent in your control, the only one that you have. It passes far too quickly, and soon it is over. I myself can hardly believe that I have reached the conventional halfway mark.
And whatever you choose to do, don’t give up too easily. Accept that acceptance will be slow in coming, if indeed it comes at all. The Headmaster has said very generous things about my work, and I am delighted that my Beasts, despite their strange ways, have been so well received here. People tell me that I am a successful author, and I suppose in a sense it’s true. What people notice, however, is the successes; how many failures and near-failures I have had, no one knows. But in life and in work, one must take failure as not just acceptable but inevitable. As a writer you may wrestle for weeks with a single page of a novel, or a single stanza of a poem, and it may still not come out right. Or you may send out a manuscript that you have sweated over for years to one publisher after another, and be turned down again and again. The rejections come, and they hurt, but what is more important than any of the rejections is the one acceptance that may possibly arrive. I am sure that in other fields, whether scientific or academic or industrial or political, the same is true. In love, too, it doesn’t matter how many times you are rejected; it’s that one acceptance by someone you love that matters.
I admit that that is not a very romantic or indeed poetical thought to end with; but I am off duty as a poet today. Anyway, I reckon that you will find my Beasts more entertaining, and certainly more poetical, than me. And in addition they have the advantage of succinctness in speech; they are confined to their rhyming couplets, their rhyming iambic tetrameter couplets—and their author can (and does) cut them off when they’ve been talking too long.
To their relief and perhaps to yours, I shall end here. I do wish you all the very best.
Doon School Founder’s Day address (Dehra Dun, October 2007)
MANI SHANKAR AIYAR (1941–)
When this book was first published, Mani Shankar Aiyar, speaking at a function organized around this book, expressed his regret that none of his speeches had been included in the volume. His speech at the Doon School’s Founder’s Day had just missed being included since it was delivered after the work on the book had been completed. It is now included especially as it is a kind of riposte to Vikram Seth’s speech delivered on a similar occasion. Mani Shankar Aiyar’s speech reflects the joys of his school days in contrast to the pain that Seth tried to record.
Governor Dhruv Sawhney,
Members of the Board of Governors,
Headmaster Kanti Bajpai,
My young friends and spiritual successors at the school,
My fellow classmates,
Parents, ladies and gentlemen,
To be a Doon School boy is privilege enough, but to be invited to deliver the Founder’s Day Address—and that too on the Golden Jubilee of one’s Class, is surely indulgence in extremis. My grateful thanks to the Governor and the Board, and to the Headmaster for this rare honour.
A few years ago, a Doon School Old Boy, much more distinguished than I can ever hope to be, stood at this podium and explained why he had had such a miserable time at school. I think all of us would concede that five years here is not:
‘Roses, roses all the way/With myrtle mixed in my path like mad.’
(I owe that quote to a poem taught me here by a great and unforgettable teacher, Mr S.P. Sahi). For one thing, adolescence is a terribly difficult time and to have to cope with it without the reassurance of a familiar home and friendly parents is challenge enough. Add the army of tyrannical school captains, house captains, prefects and monitors, in descending order of tyranny, and one begins to sympathize with those burdened by cowering loneliness. With that, mix the agony of those like me who were hopeless at sports, in a stifling atmosphere where brawn was certainly celebrated over brain, and the poison of remembrance starts rising in one’s throat. And overlaying it all, the oppressive absence of girls just when all kinds of unknown hormones have started sloshing around one’s system—and one knows why any true recollection of one’s days at Doon cannot be those of Elysium remembered.
Then ask oneself how it is that if there was so much unhappiness, oppression, injustice and deprivation through those critical formative years, what is it that brings back so many of us to this Golden Jubilee celebration of our Class of ‘57? Why do we talk so fondly of the years we spent in these sylvan surroundings—so ‘pleasing to the eye and soothing to the mind’ as I remember Dr Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan, later President of India, saying when he was Chief Guest at our Founder’s Day 19541 and I a wide-eyed 13 year old ‘C’ former? What makes us feel so special?
I, of course, came a cropper for feeling special when I went to a supervision (which is what they archly call a tutorial at Cambridge) wearing my Old Boy’s blazer. My crusty supervisor took one look at my badge and sourly asked, ‘What is that?’
‘The lamp of knowl
edge,’ I proudly replied.
‘A pity,’ he retorted, ‘they didn’t light it while you were at school!’
I still think I had the better of the exchange; for, after all, I was a Doon School boy—and he a mere Cambridge don!
To return to my initial question: what is it that makes so many of us—I would say almost all of us—agree that we had a rotten time here, which has left us with so many fond memories and such sweet nostalgia that we have returned a la recherche d’un temps perdu—which, for those of you who did not attend Mrs Sahi’s French classes, means ‘In search of a time gone by’?
I daresay there are as many individual reasons for this as there are Old Boys. But distilling the essence, I would hazard the suggestion that three or four causes are common to all of us.
First, the teachers. True, there were some bad `uns. I remember one particularly aggravated Hindi teacher screaming at a Hindi-hopeless Tamil classmate of mine: ‘Murugappan, I do not want to hit you. I want to kill you. Blood! Blood! Blood!’ (All, incidentally, in impeccable English)! But apart from the occasional ink-pot, thrown but missed to the vast amusement of the rest of us who were not the target, there were compensations in going up to another Hindi teacher who had spent his holidays in the Gir Forest to ask what he had seen. ‘Loins,’ he would reply and every one of us followed up with, ‘And how big, Sir, were the loins?’ and got the innocent reply, ‘Very, very big loins.’ He never quite understood why all of us wanted to know!
But, all in all, it was, in a word, the most outstanding assemblage of teachers ever gathered together in one place. It is, therefore, no accident that my class immediately and unanimously decided that our first Golden Jubilee contribution should be towards commissioning a Doon School Old Girl, the sculptor Latika Katt (daughter of our Biology teacher, Mr B.S. Sharma, who never quite understood our obsessive interest in the properties of Vitamin E—and if you don’t know what those are, you are no Doon School boy!) to do a bust of Holdy, pipe in mouth, to adorn the new pavilion that is coming up on the edges of this Main Field. Nor any accident that our second contribution is to honour the greatest Headmaster of our generation, John Martyn, in whose memory a school for the less privileged is being run on the lines of our own alma mater. Nor, indeed, any happenstance that our third contribution is to the Shivalik Fund for scholarships for the children of Doon School Masters and, unlike us the lucky ones, kids born with a plastic spoon or no spoon at all in their mouths.
The Great Speeches of Modern India Page 44