The way I see it

I belong to a middle class family. My father is in defense personnel and my mother is a housewife so it's safe to say that I have spent major part of my life travelling due to his transfers. It is exciting as well as painstaking in equal measures.
I did my initial nursery and kindergarten and few months of my 1st standard in Punjab. I can't exactly say that I remember about those days, I mean who remembers about their diaper days huh?
But there were some faces and some names that made their mark on my memory. Perhaps that's why even today when I think about my K.G days, I can still see their faces in front of my eyes.

Bhatia mam........
I don't remember her full name, but there is a faded picture of her in my mind. A bang on Punjabi. Very strict teacher who used to lock kids in the 'dark room' even for smallest of mistakes. The dark room being the store room adjacent to our class which had never experienced what a bulb looked like probably from the time of it's construction. Hence the name 'Dark Rom.' Very original!
I remember being scared of her, hell I remember every kindergarten student peeing in their pants on seeing her as well as her best friend, the dark room.

I think she is the one who taught me the meaning of word iron.
"Iron your clothes. They should be neat and tidy. I don't want to see any crease on it." She used to say. Or yell more likely.
Anyways, I always used to pester my mother about ironing the clothes properly so that she didn't lock me in the sunlight deprived room. I was so bloody scared of her that I never used to sit at all before the morning assembly in case I got any crease on my goddamn skirt.
Huh, good old days! Now I hardly give a fuck if I have a ketchup stain on my shirt. Take that, you child-locker.

Well, how much ever I tried to never cross her path and stay away from her, I found myself landing exactly in the middle of my kindergarten darkest fear.
I don't remember much about that day. Well you can't exactly blame me, the Horlicks in those days weren't exactly advanced and the day wasn't exactly remembrance worthy too. I will just give you the outline.
So, I had not done my homework.....................
(cue the silence and crickets chirping)

Okay sue me but I was just a 5 year old kid who hadn't done her homework. What's the big deal? It wasn't the end of the world. But Oh no.......In her eyes, I was the biggest criminal, even before Al Capone, Hitler and Jack the Ripper. (select your order of preference please.)

So she locked me in the dark room where I cried my heart and eyes out but it had no effect on that frigid lady. God, what was wrong with her?

I remember being scared of dark for days and sleeping with my lights on. I stopped locking the doors of bathrooms completely just because I was afraid that someone would turn the lights off. My mother tried asking me what was wrong but I didn't stay anything fearing that it would upset the teacher more and she would lock me in again.
But as time passed, slowly and steadily, everything became normal. I forgot about that dark room and I forgot about her. But I never really forgot about the experience. The way the cold wind touched my body, making me shiver with fear. The way I was standing in the middle of the room with all the broken furniture, standing there and taunting me, the way I screamed at her to let me out but she didn't. And finally the way I
closed my eyes just because I didn't want to face the ghost that I was expecting  to jump out from the corner and gobble me up.

Even today, when I find myself in dark, for a few seconds that feeling comes back to me.
I just want to ask this valid question to anyone reading this.....was it a right way to punish a child? What point are you trying to prove? That being a teacher gives you the right to lock a kid in a room just because he or she didn't do his/her homework? Do you think that it will teach the child to do his work properly in the future?
There is this age old proverb - Spare the rod, Spoil the child. And no way in hell I am an advocate for this.

Anyways, the moral of he story is that if you are a parent please do not admit your child in the school if the teacher is-
a) A woman who applies lot of red lipstick and wears a lot of red because frankly speaking, the only proper thing that I remember about her is her red clothes and lips.
and,
b) if you notice a store room without any source of light adjacent to your child's classroom. Believe me, teachers are the most frustrated creatures on the planet and a dark room is like aspirin for them. You don't want your kid to return home only to find him/her sleeping with lights on with teddy's clutched so tightly between their claws that the poor thing is almost going to die of suffocation.

At the beginning.........

When I first started school my school life in the year 2000, never in a million years I had ever imagined that my life would end up like this.
Now it is 2014 and in this span of 14 years, I have without a doubt learnt some of the most important lessons. Some of them belong to English, some to Mathematics, some to Biology and million other subjects, which no offence, never really appealed to me. But there have also been lessons that are credited to my friends, to my enemies, to my teachers, to some strangers, to a basketball....

All those experiences and lessons made me what I am today.

So, here I am, lying in front of my laptop at 1:30 am of Wednesday night writing this blog to honor not only mine but the life of millions of students out there who wake up every morning to face a new battle to survive in this competitive world, trying to make their parents proud and happy and get their pesky relatives off their backs. Believe me, nothing is more annoying than to answer your uncles and aunts and grandparents about how much you scored in your exams and whether you got more than their child or less. Seriously people, get a life!!!

You can read it and weep or chuckle or gasp or anything depending upon the bullshit that I will write but I will tell you one thing in advance...........every bullshit is true.