1996

Standard Seven, in my opinion (Also proven by a kick-ass scientific study. Sacchi, meine padha hain), is the most challenging year in a student’s life. The reasons, as I will soon put forth, are a handful. Let’s start by looking at what happens on the ‘educational’ front.

Normally, anyone who has ever bothered to check the syllabus when s/he entered standard seven must have at least for once played with the thought of exterminating the author and his next five generations. If you ask me, I think such a thought process comes pretty naturally to anyone who 1) happens to share my levels of interest in anything remotely scholastic, 2) hero worships the Chainsaw Massacre guy and owns a pet python or 3) both.

Thus, unless you were immune to all forms of pain or happened to drool over things like empirical formulae and the Pythagoras Theorem, you too will probably recollect going "Photo what frigging synthesis?!!" when you first turned the pages of your syllabi, seventh standard and every standard.

The second and perhaps the most important point is the fact that by the time you reach standard seven and happen to be a guy, the world seems to be a lot lesser nice place to live in.

Apart from the thing with the hormones that is constantly playing havoc with your age old beliefs about girls being a source of unbridled nuisance, you suddenly find yourself uncomfortably placed in a 'semi-kid' kind of a state, a lawless territory where its residents are labeled by the degree of confusedness on their sparsely moustached faces.

Contrarily, this does a world of wonders to the female population, especially for someone on M34I26S34’s growth path. Thanks to the hormonal thing (which works totally in their favor) that I briefly touched upon in the paragraph above, they are suddenly inundated with buying-your-bus- ticket and helping- you-with-your-homework offers.

Hence considering the fact that I carried fairly normal tendencies and was as hormonized as anyone else, it shouldn’t go against me if I told you that I happened to be one of the guys in the class who steered their attention towards the door, when they stepped into our classroom… the exchange students... from a formerly alien part of the world called Canada.

Pink looks hot on girls. This is probably the other thing to learn by the time you hit standard seven. I learnt this when I saw her wearing the color, partially eclipsed by our class teacher and the other girl she was accompanied with.

Standing amidst her escorts, she looked visibly shy and mildly perturbed by the hustle she had generated. Perhaps, she had planned to coolly walk into the class and hope no one would give two hoots about it. So much for wishful thinking, ha!

This is India, young ladies. You come from anyplace minutely foreign and you WILL be stared at!

“Hello children! Please join me in welcoming S14X17C and E12X17C! They have come from Canada and will be studying with us. I hope you will make them feel at home!” the teacher announced to our largely awestricken class.

Her wish seemed to have been heard rather instantly, as some of us dived into the task of wiping the dust and our partners off their seats, making place for the Canadian goddesses. While others, including me, restricted by the lack of courage than anything else, only managed to construct inviting expressions which bordered on the risk of appearing lecherous if overdone and pray earnestly that they might sit in the adjacent row or perhaps the row adjacent to the next two rows.

Feel at home? Hell yeah!

PS: Thanks to my teacher's rather vague form of introduction, it didn't strike me at first which one of X17C sisters was the girl in pink. I, of course, did manage to figure that out eventually.