Ruminations & Reverie

Before the big, bright, blue, yellow multi-storied buildings that identify my school today, Padma Ratna English School had humble structures spreading out the hillock and the green pastures. That is the school I remember. That is the school I studied at. Not the current edifices but the modest classes of the yesteryears are where my memories haunt. Like stumbling upon an unfamiliar, marvelous palace in a dream, the gates of memories enchantingly unveil themselves. Crossing the threshold of our old school gate, the drooping vines and the deep bowers of the thick grove on either side of the path gradually revealed our concealed classes. We would quickly drop our backpacks and join the long, neatly organized rows of morning assembly. The early mountain winds blushed our faces while the aromatic air sweetened by the fruit-laden trees around us enthralled us. The assembly commenced, and all of us, following Oja Randhoni, merrily sang our school song in unison “Bells, Bells, PR School Bells...

Brylcreem and Jeet Leishangthem’s Angel defined our introduction to puberty. With wet hair done in weird shapes, humming and whistling “Lonely oireneko nangbu”, we began our day attending Oja Khunjao, our Mathematics teacher’s tuition, at the break of dawn, risking cold just to fashion the latest style. It was a time when our closest proximity to technology was with the Chinese mp3 and mp4 players. The Internet was as strange to us as it would be without to the new generation. What we listened, what we fashioned were a poor attempt to replicate our elders who bought new CDs and watched new music videos. Mind you, I use new not to denote the latest but novelty, for we were listening to Hybrid Theory for the first time in the late 2000s, singing Mike Shinoda’s rap in In the End with all the wrong lyrics. Thus, when Jeet Leishangthem’s Angel came out, nothing could contain our excitement. It combined all the things we craved for compacted into “Western music” , and that too, as a rap ...