The Days of Yore

The memory of what was...

When I think of St. Xavier's School, three separate incidents come to my mind.

The first was on the very first day I came to St. Xavier's School. It
was raining very heavily and I was desperately hoping that I would
miss the first day and might never have to go to school again
(childish eh? Well, it seemed convincing then ). But I did go
anyway. I was apprehensive (fine, fine I was downright terrified) in
an alien world- no one to call a friend and full of strange people,
when all of a sudden walked in Brother Ivan Fernandez with his ever
cheerful face and gaiety and said "Welcome to St. Xavier's !". And my
world changed forever.

The second incident was our final day in school. People were sobbing
miserably (yes, even boys of SXS cry) trying to comfort each other.
But then it seemed that all that we ever held precious in our lives,
everything to which we were attached to were going away. It felt like
what must be like dying. We did not want to go but we had to. Then
walked in Sir Uday Bhanu Roy (our beloved Jathababu) and in his calm
compassionate voice said, "this is an adieu, not a goodbye". And we
went out to fight the big bad world.

The third one was only a few days ago. I came back to St. Xavier's
after a very long gap. We were two old batch mates sitting in the old
gymnasium at 3 pm in the afternoon…no one in sight and only memory of
our old bustling gymnasium surrounding us. We sat silent, watching
those cricket ball marks that decorate the walls, trying to find the
ones we must have made sometimes. We were there for a long time and
when it was time to go my friend said, "The gymnasium will never have
more than three tube lights intact at any given time!"

So many years, so many people, so many incidents, so many triumphs and
so many frustrations that made us what we are today. Which one to tell
you, I wonder. The tokens of honour and tokens of conduct, the
punishments and the rebukes, the glory of sports day victories and
agony of messing the march pasts are all there in some special place
in our hearts. Some of our very dear people are no more. Many others
are now miles away without any connection. We miss being called chagol
by kaka, we miss Angana miss's speed and we miss Sandip sir's witty
humour. We wish we were still there…in those golden days.  And most of
all I miss my friends who have disappeared from our lives and only
linger on in our dreams. I wish I could relive those moments all over
again, just one more time…with all those special people there back
again in this very special place; just one more time.

Debotosh Poddar
Ex-Captain, Tagore House
2004-05 Batch

To My Alma Mater, With Love.

Tanumay Raychaudhury

What is Time? A fourth dimension or a flow of consciousness? I am neither an expert in Physics or in Philosophy to answer that; all I know is it keeps moving faster than the mind can grapple. Thankfully, Merciful Almighty allows the Lesser Mind to travel down the old lanes as I sit reminiscing the best gone days of Life.

A wistful, unfamiliarly fair countenance beamed a bouncer, a rather unexpected one at this five year odd “Who is this?” as he pointed at a photo. This kid was perfected with answers such as My name is…My father is.. This is a Kite. I hesitated for a moment, smiled and then said, bolder than ever, “Tanumay, that is Me.” Father Waveril seemed pleased with my effort. The next time I met him was in School, which was by then, mine. The last time I read on the website, he was Elsewhere. Only I knew what he had meant to me and the One who he was with now, because every time I can call myself a Xaverian, it’s because They had chosen me to walk through those hallowed portals of St.Xavier’s School, Durgapur.

I was taught by the likes of Moore Miss, D’Costa Miss, Lily George Miss, Temple Miss, Anita Mukherjee Miss and Pushpa Miss in my primary days. Barely I realized how much I would miss them in the days to come. Those were not merely moments of teaching but moments of Learning, not moments of frolic but of fearless unadulterated Fun, of not mere friendship but of Faith and Fealty. Our innocence with their motherly love had made schooling only more endearing. Love is not Time’s Fool. Never will Be.

Mathematics had a different taste and sense in Xavier’s. Parameshwaran Sir and his Mr.Butcher, Mr.Bambino, desks, chairs and cattle made mathematics so very easy and understandable in commoner terms that I always urged him to write a book to benefit a million others who were not as lucky as us. Nandy Sir, Our beloved Kaka, may have likened me and many more to the various forms of donkeys and goats, but Practice and Neatness are the forerunners of Perfection was taught by self-example. Jhunu Miss was an enigma, The Missing Link. Last but never the last, Sir Roy, aka Jethu, taught that the Keyword of  Maths was Concept. This Pillar was complete, and by far the best I have known till this day. No wonder I remain on the lesser trodden path of Xaverians when I chose to take up medicine and not pure maths or engineering.

There were splendidly intelligent seniors and classmates who made the environment rich with their knowledge, wisdom and above all, their friendship. Whether we went for quizzes or football tournaments, we triumphed. Whether the board exams then or the ones later, our students have had enviable records. Its all due to the ones who taught us the difference of right and wrong. My class, the Millennium ICSE batch of 2000 from the school had joined immediately after the Silver Jubilee year, went on to produce 6 six pointers, the benchmark of per School Success, if Angana Miss, our Economics teacher would have defined. Bhowmick Miss, who could chalk the world map, while still talking to us, touched us all. She even went on to invite us all home for lunch after the exams were over. “Child,” rolling the chalk sticks between her palms, casually thoughtful as ever, Malini Miss would keep a class spellbound as she would reveal secrets in Physics. Rajada was great to follow up in her shoes, very difficult to fill I…. thought in those days. He not only went on to teach relativity and NTSE training after class hours, he even joined us in football in the evenings. Talking of Dedication in off-school hours, Nandini Miss would be there early faithfully every day to revise Chemistry a million times with the entire bunch. We had our share of rebuking too. Madhumala Miss was barely happy with our Biology, neither was Rita Pandey Miss with History. Sandip Sir and Suvro Sir, being from the school themselves, probably realized better and dealt with us in their own style! I hope, looking back, they all feel happy and similar in the way things turned out and with what they worried most about, our performance.

Being an English school where the mother-tongue was Bengali predominantly, we had to be polished in senior school by Chaitali Miss, Lawrence Sir, Moore Sir, Madhumita Miss, Sandip Sir, Suvro Sir, Nita Banerjee Miss and lastly, Nandita Dasgupta Miss. It was a long-drawn beating with the Merchants freaking out with the Jews all the way in Venice, and concentration was, in those days of frolic, little. Nevertheless, we didn’t fail the School Motto. Not because we were like Gold. But because these of these Goldsmiths in the Furnace.

My love for my mother-tongue was flamed by Anita Mukherjee Miss, Sumita Miss, Anita Pal Miss and then, Gita Mitra Miss. I loved reading Bengali literature, the yearning of which comes with comprehension of a language that’s so rich and sweet. I am not sure how many of students today read literature, but my suggestion to them all will be to read, to seek, to find and you will yield to that harvest whose saplings were planted by our own forefathers.

School is not only about studies. It’s about the Making of A Complete Man. Santi Sir, endearingly called P.T Sir, would allow a sixty odd to have a go at a single poor football and then went on to win Inter ICSE Football tournaments like he was taking a stroll to the Gymnasium. The one day, when we got to see our alumni was Sports Day, where they would tug us, fair and square, to their end. The Sands of Time had changed places, and I could not, when I myself became an alumnus, to attend Sports Day, thanks to administrative vigilance. The Sands where we ran, chased and played, remain. Just like our Memories. Upturned now and then once. Thinking of The Light of Other Days.

Our lesser and fairer contemporaries (Read Carmelites) who unknowingly with their lesser volumed brains( Nature’s Design) made sordid comments and were sore at the end. School life, without those mindless quarrels, with them, was not complete. From tamed monkeys whose abode was amidst the sal and teak forests for half a day everyday, We did evolve into The Highest forms.

Looking back through the Looking Glass, I salute all my friends, juniors and seniors and bow with utmost regard before all my teachers with all humility, thanking for such a wondrous life that was gifted, that was blessed and that is never to come again. Knowing that wherever We are, those are unfathomably deep in those same Sands where I played yesterday. Our Roots.

   The author can be contacted at tanumayrc@gmail.com.

He belongs to the ICSE Batch of 2000.He completed his schooling from DAV Model School,Durgapur and joined MBBS at CMC Vellore in 2002.Having graduated in 2007, he completed internship in 2008 in the same institution and is presently a Junior Resident in Dermatology at CMC Vellore.

St.Xavier's ---- As Sourav Sees It

‘Those were the days, my friend,

We thought they'd never end,

We'd sing and dance forever and a day.

We'd live the life we'd choose,

We'd fight and never lose,

For we were young and sure to have our way.’

- A popular 60’s song

My St. Xavier’s

St. Xavier’s for me, as it must have been for almost half of all its students and alumni till recently, has always meant two different schools – one being the primary section on Mirabai Road, and the other in the ABL Township. The former, as I found out not very long ago, has ceased to exist altogether. The building still stands as before, but the writing over the entrance porch, as I discovered to my great sorrow very recently, has been changed to something which I have not cared to remember. The grounds are no longer maintained, and the general ambience gives the feeling of a lifeless and deserted building. Such a situation is very rare in the experience of any ex-student and I wish it had not come to pass, for it is not the physical building and location which matters to ex-students like me, but the many memories attached to it. I can not revisit the two short years I spent in Mirabai Section, but I would have liked to have the satisfaction of assuring myself whenever I pass by that building that the ‘furnace’ that forged ‘gold’ thirteen years ago is still at work within its walls and in the playing fields. To make my point clear, I will only add that when I, along with my friend Kunal Lal (also of my batch) tried to enter the grounds of Mirabai Section sometime last year in order to refresh our faded images of times long past, we were denied access by the guard, something inconceivable had it been the friendly and smiling Gurung at the gates like the old days, always recognising a Xaverian when he saw one.

When we were small, we would always refer to the two campuses of the school in Bengali as ‘boro Xavier’s’ (big Xavier’s) and ‘choto Xavier’s’ (small Xavier’s), and those of us who had to shift from the small school to the big one in the fifth standard were initially apprehensive of the latter, as if it were some unfamiliar and overwhelming monster. The relative merits of the ABL and the Mirabai Sections would be subjects of heated debate between the students originally hailing from each, with the ABL boys always trying to take an upper hand in matters of seniority. Ironically or otherwise, the big monster has had the last laugh, having assimilated its smaller cousin unto itself, for better or for worse. Regretful as I am of this fact, I shall always remember Mirabai Xavier’s as the place where I met those few people who are till date my best friends, notwithstanding the fact that none of us today live in even the same city. I still fondly remember teachers like Shiela Chatterjee and Krishna Miss. In particular, I shall never forget Sunanda Miss of Class 4, who refused to give me an autograph when I passed out of Mirabai, saying that I would be worthy of it only if I remembered her and came back for the autograph after Class 10. Like most others, I did not come back, but if she be reading this, I would like to put on record that even without the autograph, she claims a permanent place in my memory.

One of the most vivid images that I retain of my days in Mirabai is of the portrait of Gandhiji  that used to hang on the wall of the staircase, and which read “I shall develop in the child his hand, his head, and his heart.” Those words perhaps best describe the Mirabai experience for me, though I did not realise it back then. Needless to say, that portrait no longer hangs in the stairway of the now-deserted Mirabai building.

Life in the ABL section was altogether different and more eventful. It is there that I met some very good teachers, and gave some of them really bad times! I wonder if the punishment bench that was instituted for me in 5C for being talkative is still in place. Out of the many random images that flash before me as I think of my St. Xavier’s experience, Lawrence Sir’s resounding declamation of Kipling’s ‘If’ in the morning assembly, the same man in a lighter vein likening his unruly classroom to a ‘piggery’, Jhunu Miss dictating problems from Jadav Chakravarti’s Arithmetic from halfway down the corridor – some of which were full length essays in their own right, Fr. Peter D’Abrew coming down to our homes and teaching us magic tricks over evening tea, Bhowmick Miss drawing a near-perfect outline map of India on the board, her eyes fixed on the class all the while, Dasgupta Miss trying to convince the class that Brutus, in spite of being a murderer, was an honourable man nevertheless, Roy Sir lapsing into thoughts on literature in the middle of a class on statistics, Brother Hyde, complete in his cassock and collar even in the heat of the afternoon sun shouting orders into his portable loudspeaker during Sports Day practice with PT Sir insisting that we maintain the ‘discipline and decorum of St. Xavier’s Institution’, the long bus rides, the forays into ‘Fr. Wautier’s woods’ (portions of which I hear have given way to buildings) during the ‘second-trip’ stay-overs,  are but to name a few. Most of the people I have mentioned are perhaps not associated with the school any more. In particular, the school shall miss Dasgupta Miss and Roy Sir, two of its best teachers of all time, and I hope that their successors live up to the standards set by them. The inimitable, though much imitated Nandy Sir too, I hear, is about to retire soon. Other committed teachers like Nandini Miss and Dorothy Miss who are still there, represent to me the last bastions of that old guard who really made differences to our lives, and present generations of Xaverians must cherish their presence as long as it lasts, for they will soon realise once they leave school that teachers whom they can look up to are rare to come by in life.

One hears too often that winds of change have been blowing in St. Xavier’s in recent years. I too had felt this change in my final years at the school. The Xavier’s that I left in 2003 was very different from the one I had joined eight years before. For me, the change was evident in some seemingly unimportant practices, one of them being the termination of the simple system of giving books for prizes. Though I never won a single medal on Sports Day, I was lucky enough to have received a book almost every Proclamation Day, and each used to have my name inscribed in the class teacher’s own writing, making it a personalised autograph of sorts for Old Xaverians like me. But for the discontinuation of this excellent system of awarding books when I was in my ninth standard, this prized collection of mine would have been a complete one, and this is one change that I would like to see reverted among others.

Having said this, I must add that I have an unflinching faith in the spirit of Xavier’s, and I would like to believe that it will resist winds of change unless they portend a change for the better. This spirit is larger and stronger and more potent than the frivolities and caprices of any one individual, and will prevail in the long run. It pervades the hearts of all who have worn the grey-and-white colours with the red-and-black badge for any length of time, and the truth of this is substantiated by the fact that come the 8^th of February, Xaverians from all over the world will converge on a small town, with very little in common to bind them but a shared schooling.

It is very difficult for me to express what ‘St. Xavier’s School, Durgapur’ means to me. Perhaps the best way to put it would be to say that it is much more than just the sum of its campus, students and teachers. It is not a thing of my past, but a part of my present. It is with me each living moment, and is, without a shade of doubt, responsible for every good thing that I have ever done or shall do in my life. I am sure it is the same with every Xaverian attending the reunion this February.

Sourav Sengupta

Class of 2003

Email: sourav.sg@gmail.com

A note: This article was written in January 2009 for a souvenir that was to be released in the reunion on 8^th February 2009. Since the souvenir did not see the light of day, I am posting this on this blog two years later, with the hope that Xaverians will be able to relate to it.

Pictures

Memories of Reunion 2011

Kolkata Chapter Meet

The Alumni is considering the idea and prospects of having a Chapter Meet in Kolkata on 12th June 2011 evening (tentatively). The modalities are being thrashed out. Kolkata St.Xavier's has offered all help in this regard. We need exstudents based in Kolkata to come forward with suggestions and help in organising the gathering. We also need to know how many of the old boys would be available for the gathering. Please send in your response through comments or email at xavex.dgp@gmail.com 

                                                    A  VERY   HAPPY  HOLI   TO  ALL 

Sad Demise of Ravi Prakash

2005 ICSE pass out Ravi Prakash is no more. Ravi was a final year student in KIIT, Bhubaneswar and had recently got a job offer from HCL. A few nights ago he met with a fatal accident in Bhubaneswar while riding a motorbike.He sustained serious head injury and was immediately admitted in the Apollo Hospital Bhubaneswar. In spite of the sincerest efforts of the doctors Ravi did not respond positively to the Life Support Devices. After battling it out for a few days he finally succumbed to his injuries.

In school he is popularly remembered and loved by all as Santa Claus, for he invariably played the role to perfection in all the Nativity Plays that were staged when he was a student. The news of his end came as a bolt from the blue to all in school and his neighborhood ---- for he was loved by one and all. Besides the bereaved world, Ravi has left behind his stricken sister and his dumbstruck parents.

Ravi will be remembered by the Xavex family as a very smart, polite, intelligent, capable and handsome ex-xaverian. We pray that his soul may rest in eternal bliss.

DOROTHY MISS AND MALIDADA RETIRE

It is said that that every good thing has an end. This is sadly true about our most beloved teacher Dorothy Miss and the silent worker at the school gardens Mr.Pariyag Paswan, popularly nicknamed Malidada by the student community.On the 29th of January 2011, the St.Xavier's family bade a tearful adieu to both Dorothy Miss and Malidada who retired from active service on achieving superannuation.

The Biology and Science classrooms in our school will never be the same again in the absence of Dorothy Miss.---- although we are sure the walls, benches and boards would resound with the memories of her vibrant teaching. Even with our Malidada, the Biology Lab and the gardens will forever cherish the sincere devotion and love with which he attended every leaf, flower and plant.He will continue to be an inseparable part of our institution through the blooming flowers 

The students and staff offered their farewell gifts to the duo amidst a charged atmosphere. On behalf of the ex students, Mr  Suranjan Kar offered them our parting respects.

The day also saw the farewell of the ICSE 2011 batch ----offered by the present students. The Alumni Association presented each out going student a token gift of an etched key ring and a pen set welcoming them into the fabulously beautiful world of the Old Boys!!