We had a subject named Value Education in our school. What values it imparted on us need not be discussed here. At the end of each semester we had to present in group some type of activities.
Tenth Std. (2004-05)
Everyone was at the height of craziness. Studies had taken a backseat and we were enjoying our last days of our school life till the value education activity came in our path. Mine was the last group. In today’s lecture, we had to sing a patriotic song on which our final grades would be decided. The activity started and slowly all the groups sang patriotic songs. Mrs Mini Mathew, our teacher who would be evaluating us sat on our bench. She was visibly pissed off due to our erratic behaviour in the last year of school and was ready to take revenge of harassment that we had given to her. She got this opportunity via a non-academic subject. Some seven patriotic songs were sung by groups preceding us. When our turn came, all the members of our group knew songs that were already sung. We didn’t want to repeat the same song once again as it would bore the class. We kept wondering that only seven patriotic songs were taught to us from our school life and tried hard to come up with something.
Then Aakash T. mooted the idea of singing ‘Mera Rang De Basanti’ from the recently released movie ‘The legend of Bhagat Singh’. This song was unanimously decided to be sung as a part of activity. We started the song completely out of tune, out of sync, in our broken puberty voice. It was just short of donkeys singing odd at night. We barely completed song singing just four lines and stopped. We began to look at each other, we had no idea what are the further lyrics and sung again the same old four lines. This is analogous to writing same answer two times in engineering exams which I did ‘n’ number of times in my four year of engineering life.
The song ended with a big thank you. Our class was speechless with what we had sung. The teacher was busy correcting books of students unmindful of what we had sung. I bet she didn’t know Hindi properly and she was doing her duty of painfully correcting books and hardly listened to what we had sung. Then a boy went up to the teacher and said it was a Bollywood song. Then the whole class started to shout in chorus that it is a Bollywood song. The teacher, Mrs Mini Mathew raised her head to realize what has happened. She sensed that we had taken her advantage once again and quietly told us to take back our seats and the bell rang and she left the class.
24th June, 2005: Our results were out and all people in our class had B grade written on our mark sheets while rest all were A. I even had an A grade in Physical training (P.T.) which was the weakest point in my non-academic subjects. She had taken a sweet revenge and I have no qualms that I sang ‘Mera Rang De Basanti’.
:D
