SSC Students, the Pyjama Chaaps of the School Hierarchy System

“Did you study in the ICSE board,” a colleague once asked me while we were engaged in conversation for half an hour and fast running out of small talk. “No no, SSC board,” I replied back softly, with mild resignation. “Oh, your English is pretty good. I thought you must be from the ICSE board,” he said, with that arrogant confidence I had become too familiar with.  

The various boards that constitute the educational system in India are like the caste system. IB board students are the Brahmins. ICSE and CBSE students are Kshatriyas and Vaishyas respectively, and we State board students are treated like the lowest rung in the social hierarchy. Students from other boards look down upon us, the same way the internet looks down upon netizens who typ lik dis. SSC board students become Monisha Sarabhais to the posh and sophisticated Maya Sarabhais of the country. Our emotions were aptly captured by Shilpa Shukla in Chak De India when she asked Shah Rukh Khan, “Aisa kya hai usme, jo mujh mein nahi hai?”

Some people are born with an inferiority complex, some acquire it. And some have an inferiority complex thrust upon them. You see, children don’t give a fuck about your diction, syllabus, or your clothes – all they ever want to know is whether you have cream biscuits in your tiffin box. We didn’t even know what ICSE, CBSE, and IB was all about because everyone you knew in your little world was studying the same subjects as you. Children are innocent, they don’t distinguish people on the basis of intellect or language; they mock kids for being fat or thin, stupid or clumsy.

But as we grew into teenagers, murmurs about these kids who belonged to a different breed started to do the rounds. The things we were told about them almost made us think of them as mythical creatures. We were told these kids went to schools that boasted of huge grounds and swimming pools. When the hell did schools start coming with swimming pools? We SSC folks didn’t even have a decent computer lab. We were told they would have overnight picnics outside the city. We were taken to a garden in the next ’burb. We were told they had subjects like French and German. We were struggling with the Marathi barakhadi. We were told they were studying literature while we were still giggling over sex education diagrams in the Science-II textbook.

Everything about the other boards seemed better, even their books. Yes, the ICSE/CBSE books were frighteningly thicker, but they had colourful pictures. Our books… they were just plain black and white printed in the world’s lousiest font.

Their uniforms were smart, their shoes were perfectly polished. Our uniforms were shoddy, our shoes dusty. When they spoke in English, it seemed like they had been blessed by the Queen herself. We, we spoke, mostly in Bambaiyya Hindi.

They had hobbies – they rode horses and solved sudoku. We had hobbies too, they were lagori and saakli. They were veer bahadur Rajput boys, we were Model ke pyjama chaaps.     

If you had friends who attended ICSE or CBSE schools, you were doomed. If they started discussing As You Like It, it was best to keep mum and sneak away from that conversation. Because while they were studying Shakespeare, you were busy watching Sridevi movies.

ICSE students had weekly tests and seemed to be studying all the time. They never came to play in the building and help puncture everyone’s cycles just for a laugh. When the results came out, everyone you knew had managed to score over 90 per cent in their board exams. Were they superhumans? Not quite, as you later found out that scoring 90 per cent was a bit like delivering a TED Talk – every third person was suddenly doing it.

As school got over, the impossible forces met the immovable objects as students from all boards got together in junior college. It was the first taste of the brazen educational classism that state board students had to confront. During introductions, when you let your classmates know that you were from the SSC board, they wouldn’t showcase it openly but you could sense the dismissive undercurrent in their reaction, the subtext of which was “fucking losers”.

It wasn’t just some kids from the ICSE board hating on us poor souls from the SSC board; the dynamic was a lot more complex than that. Junior college also had a niche brand of students from the IB board, who would not only look down upon us, but also the ICSE and CBSE board kids. That was quite heartening, to be honest. The initial grudge, however, soon disappeared as people bonded over the timeline of their course, and everyone indulged in subtle jabs every now and then, but playfully.

One would think your educational board wouldn’t matter as you enter corporate life. And for the most part, it has no consequence, apart from the dreaded reaction you get when you tell someone you studied at the SSC board and they go…

“Oh!”

My Bambaiyya Hindi is Better Than Your North-Indian Hindi

Igrew up in the suburbs of Mumbai and apun ka childhood was really fatte. Kids would do a lot of bol bachchan on the ground but then had to back their shanpatti with kadak football skills. Those merely engaging in bhankaas were taken to the khopcha and given kharcha paani. One couldn’t go home and do panchayat about the lafda that happened on the ground because no one wants to be friends with a phattu who complains to mom. Also, because your bantai log wouldn’t be pleased, and tereko dho dalega. We believed in being bindaas and settling our nalla problems sumadi mein.

As we got into school, I turned out to be an average student who ended up scoring below average marks in Hindi. “Tereko kitna aaya?” I would ask my friend who also barely managed to scrape through. “Yaar apan to poora din Hindi mein-ich baat karte hai, sala phir locha kya hai?” we would wonder, staring at our paper, where we’d scored so less that our paper had more red markings than the US map after the 2016 Presidential Election. And just like that, we cleared school with thakela marks and never had to deal with Hindi in academics again.

All this while, no one ever told us that something was wrong, ki apunke Hindi mein jhol tha. How could they? The Bombay around us only validated and legitimised our tapori bhasha, because that is how everyone spoke all the time.

The rickshawallah wouldn’t look at you unless you addressed him as boss, we just assumed that the entire world had cutting chai as well, and no one ever questioned the use of the word rapchik as a compliment. It is like our little internal code that only we understand and are comfortable with. We Mumbaikars can be simultaneously impolite and find beauty in it. In my view, it is a generous dialect; polite, even though it doesn’t sound it. But being the language of the street, it is all-encompassing, temporarily bridging in the span of a conversation, unbridgeable divides.  

As I grew older, in a quest to earn hari patti and make some khokhas, I joined a corporate office and had to travel to every khopcha of the country. One of these happened to be Delhi. I was already a chapter and totally in on the eternal Mumbai vs Delhi fight, ready to give as good as I got.

On my first day in the city, I was in a restaurant with a senior from work, who must be at least 20 years older than me. We were both going through the menu, and he asked me, “Aap kya lenge?”

“Aap?” What the fuck? Was this a prank video? Do I have to look into the hidden camera now? Itni respect? Mumbai – Delhi, we are supposed to hate each other! Man, you’re 20 years older, what is wrong with you? Oh, is he talking to me about Arvind Kejriwal?

It took me a few minutes to cotton on that he wasn’t making fun of me. Within moments of him referring to me as “Aap”, I felt guilty about every person I had spoken to in my life. As a self-respecting Mumbaikar, I don’t believe in aap, hum, and tum. We are from the land of tu, tereko, mereko, and apan.

Through our short conversation, I discovered a new and politer way to say things every 12 seconds and realised how – all these years – apan Hindi ki vaat laga raha tha boss. To ensure that I don’t embarrass myself on the trip again, I just avoided speaking in Hindi altogether as everyone around bombarded me with the sweetness of shudh Hindi. Ah, the disgust! I felt like I’d been thrown into this world and everyone else knew the secret, while I was the only ignorant fool around. Eventually, I overcompensated by trying to be extra polite with people. I didn’t want them to think “Ye kaun yeda aa gaya?”

Yet, I was a bit befuddled with Delhi, where a sentence could begin with the polite tum and could end with a madarchod. How could one be so polite and so rude, so quickly? I was mesmerised by its poetry.

As I spent more time at work, I interacted with several more people from North India, and was more than happy to adopt the sweeter version of the language. I adapted to their tone and words the same way Virat Kohli adapts to a seaming pitch in South Africa. But we all know Mumbai and Delhi aren’t supposed to get along.

So I now have to keep switching between the dialect I speak with my Mumbai friends and the one I adopt for my North Indian friends. Linguistically, I’m always in a constant state of confusion. Until the very last moment, I don’t know whether to reach for an aap or a tu. God forbid, I ever mess up. It’s a bit of a machmach – with consequences.

While interacting with a bantai once, I committed the sin of giving him some respect and referring to him with tum instead of tu, and the horror on his face said it all. It was almost like I’d insulted him, by being polite. “Abey saale!” he retorted, “Job mil gaya to ab pateli marega?” Don’t be formal, he meant, we only get along well when we’re being frank and rude to each other. It’s beautiful too – and personally, this kind of beauty is more than skin deep.

Whenever people start the debate around making Hindi the national language of the country, I’m always amazed. Forget the hundreds of languages and thousands of dialects that we can debate over, we will probably even struggle to come to terms with a mutually agreed version of Hindi. That’s something to celebrate – not struggle over.

PS: Sorry North India, but it’s not gol gappa. There’s puri, there’s pani. It’s pani puri. Chal, ab hawa aane de.

Kitne Attempts Huye? What Failing CA Exams 8 Times Taught Me About Life

I’ve been an average student throughout school and college. The guy not nerdy enough to be in the front bench but not naughty enough to rule the back bench either. I was strictly mediocre, like Akshay Kumar, of whom not a lot was expected but he just seemed to keep doing fine. I scored just enough which ensured that my parents had to never visit college but not enough to avoid comparisons with Sharmaji ka ladka. I never ever failed. And then I enrolled for the chartered accountancy course.

My dad’s a chartered accountant and a lot of my uncles are CAs, and naturally I was going to be a CA. That’s just how Gujarati and Marwari CA families roll. Dad, of course, didn’t tell me that. He told me that if you like math, you should pursue the CA course. This bullshit sales pitch was right up there with the time he convinced me to have paracetamol because it looked just like Polo.

I cleared the entrance exam (CPT) in my first attempt and felt that I could conquer the world. Like Narendra Modi after the 2014 elections. Then came my demonetisation moment: I failed for the first time in my life; I could not clear the IPCC, the second-level exam. And then I failed seven more times while attempting IPCC and the final exam over a torturous period of six years.

As brutal a course CA is, it helps people prepare for and deal with failure in a way that very few things in life do. I will never forget the first time I checked my IPCC result online. My hands were shivering when I had to feed in my roll number and click on the submit button on the ICAI website. And there it was, the cruellest word in the English dictionary – “FAIL”, in all caps. The scores on my marksheet resembled India’s batting scorecard from the fourth innings of the Cape Town Test match. Too many 20s and 30s, not enough 40s and 50s.

Mind you, I had given it all. This was after a year of attending coaching classes for seven hours a day, followed by four months of study at home for 12 hours a day. My schedule was the educational equivalent of Milind Soman’s gym routine. The only other people who follow a timetable so rigorously are cyclists doping at the Tour de France. While I was engrossed in studies, my friends were living the Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara life and posting pictures of Northern Lights from Iceland. After all that sacrifice, I had managed to score 19 out of 100 in the paper on costing.

Failure is a bit like watching porn, the first time is the hardest. It feels awful, and you are ashamed of yourself. You wish you could borrow that invisibility cloak from Harry Potter and hide from this frightful world. When someone would ask me my marks, I would exaggerate them a bit the same way the government exaggerates GDP figures. I couldn’t believe this was possible, it was like watching a Scorpio blow up in a Golmaal movie. I suspected something was fishy and even sent the papers for rechecking. There were no counting mistakes, and no, the Russians didn’t hack anything.

CA may not teach you costing, but it teaches you a lesson in acceptance. You have to pick yourself up and just get on with it. Reflect on your mistakes, and look forward to correcting them with the same syllabus, same routine, same number of hours, all over again from scratch. When you take out the books (thinking you were done with them) and sit down again for the first time, you realise how soul-crushing the cycle is. I solved many additional papers and got specialised coaching on my weak subjects, the same way Sanjay Leela Bhansali had historians to help him on Padmavaat. I would conquer costing if that’s the last thing I did. When the results were announced I was stumped. I scored 17 on 100.

When you fail a couple of times, the dynamic changes. Many friends who were studying with you have already cleared and by now your juniors have become your peers. There is a deep fear at some level that they might clear and go past you as well, the very people who were asking you for advice just a year back. It’s a bit like being Parthiv Patel, and watching eight other wicketkeepers debut after him while he still struggles to cement his place. Self-doubt starts to creep in and you think perhaps you’re just not cut out for this course. Maybe you’re the Shraddha Kapoor of the CA course and you will only star in movies called OK Jaanu. This is the point at which the course becomes a test in character.

As failures continue, you can now count marks on your fingers but need a calculator to count the number of attempts. The pressure starts to mount. Your family starts questioning your hard work and effort, everyone doesn’t have the luxury to be Rahul Gandhi. Most friends have cleared their CA exam and are out of touch, you are bruised and alone like James Franco in 127 Hours. Your battered ego doesn’t allow you to celebrate the success of friends and relatives who have cleared the exam. At times, you become petty and wonder, “How the fuck has that guy cleared the exam and I have not?” The three words that are asked at every family function and social gathering start to haunt you: “Kitne attempts huye?”

I take heart in the fact that CA is one of those exams that most of us fail, and some even go on to attempt the exam for over a decade, well after they are married and in their 30s and 40s. These guys have to manage their  job and also prepare for an examination that demands long hours. The sensible thing is to quit, but some diehards continue their endless pursuit of that esteemed degree.

These people may never clear the exam but all of them have learnt how to deal with something as important as failure right from their young student days. An argument could be made that the syllabus is a bit outdated or the exam encourages mugging up, but what’s beyond doubt, is that CA is a course that prepares you for life.

There is an old adage that students live by that is as true for life as it for CA: “If you fail, do not fear. After May, there is always November.”