Skip to main content

Madam, they're overdoing it!


Trees vanished from the forests that adjoined Sawan, thanks to the developmental activities of RSSB.

Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the godman of RSSB, visited Sawan only once. It was a couple of months after his people had taken over the school’s management. All the teachers and staff of the school were ordered to sit in the auditorium while the godman came with a retinue of policemen in many escort vehicles. The non-teaching staff like the gardeners and sweepers were all removed from the scene. Later on, Mr Tyagi told us that the godman was interested only in seeing how much area the campus covered. He refused to meet the students. When one of the little boys, unable to endure the suspense, succeeded in circumventing the teachers and prefects and moved out of the auditorium, he was chased back by a guarding policeman. I wondered why the godman was so afraid even of a little boy.

As trees vanished from the Asola-Bhatti forests, soon people started vanishing from Sawan too. Many members of both the teaching and the supporting staff were given quit orders on frivolous grounds. Many went to the court for justice. Others decided not to fight against such a monstrously powerful organisation as RSSB. Some searched for better alternatives in other schools and left on their own.

Even Ms Manimekalai chose to leave Sawan. She found a job in a better school. When she left Sawan, emotions choked me so much that I could not speak at the farewell function. I made some superficial utterances and ended my farewell speech quite uncharacteristically.

I chose to stay on. I chose to stay on recklessly in spite of all the bestiality I witnessed on the campus. The worst brutality I witnessed was an assault charge levelled against one of the house-assistants. A house-assistant looked after the hostel under his care. The house master, being a teacher, wouldn’t be able to pay attention to the details. So a house-assistant was appointed with fulltime duty in each hostel. This particular house-assistant had given a corporal punishment to a boy who was notorious for his recalcitrant behaviour. The boy was very shrewd and he knew one complaint from him was enough to get his house-assistant the sack because the new management was just waiting for some reason to fire any staff member. He rushed to none other than Ms Gurbuxani with his complaint. The grand dame asked him to give his complaint in writing which he did promptly. Within minutes the house-assistant got his marching orders.

The house-assistant was a man who had served the Indian navy for many years before retiring to take up a more relaxed job. He was good at the job as house-assistant though a bit harsh with his punishments. Notwithstanding the punishments, he loved students and would go out of his way to help when anyone of them was in genuine need of help. The punishments were his unique way of expressing his concern.

The boy who complained against him was quite a specimen. He was intelligent and had a rare interest in non-academic books of the kind which most students never took seriously. Because of that he had a cordial relationship with me. I counselled him to withdraw the complaint against the house-assistant. He evaded my counsel with a diplomacy that was sparse among students of his age. I understood that he had tremendous animosity toward the house-assistant.

When the house-assistant approached the manager with his explanation, the shrewd grand dame told him to give a written apology so that they could consider the repeal of his termination order. He gave the apology. The management instantly turned that apology against him. “You’ve admitted that you used corporal punishment and we have got the boy examined medically. He has serious injuries. We cannot keep a dangerous staff like you.”

RSSB had a close association with the Fortis hospital which was just a few kilometres away from Sawan. They owned the hospital partly. The boy had been taken there for a medical check-up and a medical certificate was produced to prove that he was seriously injured by the punishment. The house-assistant had no choice but to leave his job or go to jail. He decided to quit the job but requested for some time to vacate his staff quarters since his own house had to be renovated before he could return to it. The management refused to grant that request. But he continued to occupy the flat. One Sunday morning some women belonging to RSSB laid siege to his accommodation. They went inside and started throwing around his household properties. He called the police. When the police came, the women argued that he had tried to molest them and they were defending themselves. The police filed a non-bailable assault charge against him. He spent a couple of days in jail before his lawyer could prove to the magistrate that the whole thing was fabricated by RSSB. His daughter who happened to be at home on holiday from her engineering college had videographed the entire episode on her mobile phone. Later on, I watched that video clip and was shocked to hear our new principal, Mr Sanjeevan Bose, telling Ms Gurbuxani on phone, “Madam, they’re overdoing it.” That video clip saved the house-assistant. That video clip made me hate RSSB and all its staff including our new principal whom they had appointed.

Yet I decided to stay on. Recklessly.


PS. This is an excerpt from my latest book, Autumn Shadows.



Top post on IndiBlogger, the biggest community of Indian Bloggers


Comments

  1. Bro my brother was in the same hostel.. He referred me this article so i could corelate to his stories that he told me...

    ReplyDelete
  2. And my parents have faith in this rssb.. But me and my brother's eyes opened when we got to know this

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Most people are ignorant about the inner demons of RSSB. I too used to think it was a noble organization until i got close enough to them.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Florentino’s Many Loves

Florentino Ariza has had 622 serious relationships (combo pack with sex) apart from numerous fleeting liaisons before he is able to embrace the only woman whom he loved with all his heart and soul. And that embrace happens “after a long and troubled love affair” that lasted 51 years, 9 months, and 4 days. Florentino is in his late 70s when he is able to behold, and hold as well, the very body of his beloved Fermina, who is just a few years younger than him. She now stands before him with her wrinkled shoulders, sagged breasts, and flabby skin that is as pale and cold as a frog’s. It is the culmination of a long, very long, wait as far as Florentino is concerned, the end of his passionate quest for his holy grail. “I’ve remained a virgin for you,” he says. All those 622 and more women whose details filled the 25 diaries that he kept writing with meticulous devotion have now vanished into thin air. They mean nothing now that he has reached where he longed to reach all his life. The

Unromantic Men

Romance is a tenderness of the heart. That is disappearing even from the movies. Tenderness of heart is not a virtue anymore; it is a weakness. Who is an ideal man in today’s world? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas would be considered as fools in today’s world in which the wealthiest individuals appear on elite lists, ‘strong’ leaders are hailed as nationalist heroes, and success is equated with anything other than traditional virtues. The protagonist of Colleen McCullough’s 1977 novel, The Thorn Birds [which sold more than 33 million copies], is torn between his idealism and his natural weaknesses as a human being. Ralph de Bricassart is a young Catholic priest who is sent on a kind of punishment-appointment to a remote rural area of Australia where the Cleary family arrives from New Zealand in 1921 to take care of the enormous estate of Mary Carson who is Paddy Cleary’s own sister. Meggy Cleary is the only daughter of Paddy and Fiona who have eight so

The Ugly Duckling

Source: Acting Company A. A. Milne’s one-act play, The Ugly Duckling , acquired a classical status because of the hearty humour used to present a profound theme. The King and the Queen are worried because their daughter Camilla is too ugly to get a suitor. In spite of all the devious strategies employed by the King and his Chancellor, the princess remained unmarried. Camilla was blessed with a unique beauty by her two godmothers but no one could see any beauty in her physical appearance. She has an exquisitely beautiful character. What use is character? The King asks. The play is an answer to that question. Character plays the most crucial role in our moral science books and traditional rhetoric, religious scriptures and homilies. When it comes to practical life, we look for other things such as wealth, social rank, physical looks, and so on. As the King says in this play, “If a girl is beautiful, it is easy to assume that she has, tucked away inside her, an equally beauti

Yesterday

With students of Carmel Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving…? It was one of my first days in the eleventh class of Carmel Public School in Kerala, the last school of my teaching career. One girl, whose name was not Margaret, was in the class looking extremely melancholy. I had noticed her for a few days. I didn’t know how to put the matter over to her. I had already told the students that a smiling face was a rule in the English class. Since Margaret didn’t comply, I chose to drag Hopkins in. I replaced the name of Margaret with the girl’s actual name, however, when I quoted the lines. Margaret is a little girl in the Hopkins poem. Looking at autumn’s falling leaves, Margaret is saddened by the fact of life’s inevitable degeneration. The leaves have to turn yellow and eventually fall. And decay. The poet tells her that she has no choice but accept certain inevitabilities of life. Sorrow is our legacy, Margaret , I said to Margaret’s alter ego in my class. Let