Living The Life (part 2)

Hey guys, my name is Rishabh and for those who don't know what I am doing kindly read the previous part of this series!

Coming back to my life. I had lost my talent hunt competition with a two year streak and 6th grade was pretty much the same. I had grown to be popular, some of my peers didn't like me, some befriended me and some rarely became my best friends but that was expected. What was unexpected was the coming of newbies in 6th and it was raining cats and dogs.

I think at least ten new students took admission into 6th that year and most of them came to our class 6th A. It was a class of toppers but no one used to say that out loud, especially the teachers. They couldn't and if they wanted to they'd just slip it into our personal conversations but when they did it was a whisper and mostly the talks were related to academics and other problems which were to come in the following years. And trust me you will not be disappointed in the next few parts!

So, it was a normal first day of 6th at school and we did expect a few new admissions but boy were we wrong. It happened so that most of the students came, took off the next year and frankly speaking I don't know why. It was a good school, sure we had our disadvantages who doesn't. Life ain't perfect and when you realise that you'll live it to the fullest.

We had Sans, Tanishi, Darya, Aiwik, Atharva and some others also but these were in our class. Some of these guys got shuffled into the other two sections, B and C to be on the point. We had Sans, Tanishi, Bani and Yash in our section but the other two moved out in the first few months.

Sans was a dancer and was competition to our best female dance and she was amazing. She knew moves that only the big guys could pull off like twerks and scissor steps but Sans, oh here is where it gets interesting. Sans, I think was better than Bhavini but he couldn't math the female skills she had, instead he openly flouted what the male could do. He used to pull of stunts like it was nothing and it shook us to the bone.

Aiwik was a guy who didn't perform well in academics but was very social and most of the time joked and went over the line, he was a little aggressive also.

 Atharva was now the tallest guy in the whole of 6th and continued to be for the coming years.

Tanishi was a chotta packet bada dhamaka, she blabbered a lot. I mean I used to think how much can a person talk until his or her jaw gets tired but she surpassed my imagination exponentially every day and since she was my partner for most of the year, my ears were experienced. She had an interest in a lot of pop songs and it was infectious. It spread to me and I don't know how many students but I was grateful because it developed my interest in songs by ten fold. Whenever my stationary fell down and I reached to pick it up she used to bless me with a long life by saying Aayushman Bhava with a hand over my head, as if I had asked for her Aashirvad. Overall she was amazing and we had performed a few songs together in front of the whole class and when she went away I missed her.

Darya was the tallest girl in all the sections and my first impression of her was that she had an extremely heavy voice and looked like a tall watch tower but that impression was soon lost. She was from the Sikh community and had long hair which stretched below her waist. She was a vegetarian and we all used to tease her by showing her non vegetarian food which made her gag and run away from it. She soon became a part of our small tola which increased from four to five. I personally had developed a huge crush on her over the course of a year but didn't have the courage to tell her. She was perfect to me. I could go on and on about her but that would take too long.

So all of them came into our class but many things changed during 6th. Most of our teachers got changed because they left the school. We had to change ourselves to the different teachers who came in but none of them used to teach us to our liking like our first original set of teachers. Our academic and extracurricular teachers changed and were soon replaced by new ones. Our Maths, extracurricular head, French and Theatre teachers changed.

Most of the new teachers were good and fun to work with but that attachment with some teachers like those of French couldn't be made again as they kept changing throughout the year until one came and stayed.

6th was a changing year for all of us lots of new things and this year we were given marks and not grades. It was a little different as we now had all of our exams in shuffled rooms so that we couldn't cheat, at least I hadn't started yet and had no plans also.

Our class teacher had changed as the previous one had left the school and so that year was all about how we handled changes. This part is short because there wasn't much to tell about 6th. It was a year well spent with friends and good marks.

Oh I forgot one thing when I was in 5th I had my first and last annual day in the school and it was a blast. All academics were almost stopped for the students who participated and all that was being done was practice, practice and practice. It was like the whole school was alive with songs, dancing and acting.

 When it happened and my part came, people told me I had done great but I knew that I had messed up the last line. I had improvised and made it through the worst part but the time that was to come was even worse. we had to sit in a humid hall packed with children from all classes. We were served chips and a drink but we had our own tiffins to gobble up before we reached home.

This reminds me of one more thing. Whenever I used to leave some sabji or roti I used to get a strong beating from my mother. She used to tell me what almost all mothers tell to their children that people don't get to eat food and you being privileged waste it, but  it is true to the last letter. Our country does have a lot of homeless people and beggars who don't get to eat and that makes me wonder, I should do something. It made me feel guilty and they way my mother tells it made me feel sorry for myself but now, none of that happens anymore because I finish my tiffin on time and all of it!

Living The Life

Hello everyone, my name is Rishabh and today I'm gonna tell you all about my life! So, it all started when I shifted from Pune where I had lived for 4 years of my life. We had taken a plane to Delhi and were staying in our house with minimal furniture and other stock. We had shifted on the 7th floor and it seemed pretty high to me compared to our house on the 4th floor in Pune. 

When we first came to our new society, I was scared because I had a fear of lifts and this lift was shaking when it went up. I held on to my mom for the first time when we got in but then I got used to it. I had to.

It was like beginning afresh, like a second chance to make a lasting impression on the people of my school. I was very excited to go to my school because we had left at the end of my holidays in Pune but since different states have different plans for the year I had to wait till the holidays in Delhi were over. I was desperate and couldn't wait for my new life to begin, I could be a different person here and nobody would know because everyone I was to meet didn't know me.

And so there began my first day of school. My mom had dropped me off at the gate and I went in. I had remembered my class because before the school closed for the holidays I had met my class teacher at PTM. So I went to my class room and found that it was empty but the lights were switched on.

It was a totally different classroom. There were six batches of two tube lights each for illumination, all of them equidistant, There was a big window at the other end of the class which was covered in an orange curtain and there were wood and steel chairs and tables in five rows with six in each. The floor was covered in seemingly random arrangement of mostly white and less of yellow tiles which was new to me, the teacher's table was in an 'L' shape with one end against the wall and the other was in the open. Attached to the table was the teacher's cupboard which had a big compartment and one small with two and one door respectively. At the bottom of the cupboard which was made of wood was another compartment of two doors which housed the subwoofer and CPU of the projector.

Not far away was a wooden frame outlining the two white boards which was also new to me because I had always seen the black boards on which we had to write with chalk till 4th and now I was in 5th. The frame was a lot bigger than the boards themselves and in the shape of a rectangle which almost covered the whole of the wall. The student's tables were positioned facing this frame. A third of the walls were covered with white tiles and the next third was covered with wood and the last third was plain white plaster along with the ceiling. 

As I entered the class room I found out that the door was also made of wood and right next to it was a metal dustbin with a garbage bag fitted into it. This was exciting, a new class meant new friends, new teachers, new enemies and new lovers!

I looked around to my right and chose the last table in the first row to sit on. There was a lot of wood work in the class, I noticed as I sat on the yellow wood and steel chair which had a slightly inclined table for easier writing position. The table had a small but long depression in the front which served as a holder for pencils and other quick access stationary. I was impressed.

So I sat down quietly with my head between my hands on the table, waiting for my new classmates to walk in through that door any moment. To me it seemed like a long time before someone actually came in, let alone notice me. Two girls walked in through the door chatting with one another like they were best friends from a long time. One of them was short and the other was taller than the other, both of them had curly dark brown hair and they were in skirts which went a little ways below their knees, exposing their calves which were bare and half sleeves shirts which were buttoned up except the top ones. Later I found out that it was the summer uniform and this was new too as we had only two uniforms for the whole year. One for regular wearing and the other for sports.

This school was one of the branches of the same school I went to when I was a child. I was born in Delhi, Sarita Vihar and I had spent my first two years living with my nani at her place. When I came back to live with my parents, we had shifted to Indrapuram and there I used to go to a feeder branch for my upper kindergarten and later I went to the main school.

So back to the class room, the girls sat down on the first table and kept their bags on the table while I kept mine hanged on the side hooks. They continued to chat for a while and then when they looked back they saw me. It came to them as a surprise because I had come after the holidays and generally the newbies come at the start of the term. The expressions on their faces were priceless and worth capturing. Their expression was like girls in a party who didn't notice the man behind who was trying to move through the crowd.

Anyways, once they noticed me they came over to my table and asked me the general questions like, "What's your name?" and the rest of the 'w's in English. I never knew that these girls would become my best friends in out group of five friends, especially the taller one. There was something about her that intrigued me. That day I was introduces to the rest of the class and these two girls spread the news of coming of a new student and it spread like wild fire.

That day I was seated with the topper of the class or as her name meant the flute of lord Krishna, Vanshika. I was also informed that the language which I wanted to take as a third language, 'French' was taught here from 4th and I was a year behind. Luckily the French teacher was nice and she helped me out. 

I was taken on a tour by the girls I had met in the morning of  the school and they showed the whole building during the break. I got to know their names Jia and Chitrangdha. They had one more best friend who was Manvi. I was surprised that on my first day of school I had got three best friends who were girls! 

It was the best first day of new school that anyone could've asked for and the first year went by like this. I had gotten straight A's in all of my subjects through out the year and I had even surpassed the topper.

It was the reputation that anyone could've asked for but that wasn't it. I was performing amazingly in my extracurriculars also. I had chosen to do Theatre out of Music and Dance. The extracurricular periods were called MDT with respect to the three extracurriculars. The most amazing thing I loved about this school was that we had something called 'Talent Hunts' in which you could showcase your skills in MDT. I had registered for my first Talent Hunt and I had forgotten about it except the day when it was supposed to happen. As we moved to the stilt area which was basically an open ground floor which had a wooden stage at one end.

Luckily I was creative and was watching a lot of Charlie Chaplin episodes with my sister during the recent days. I had a black woolen cap with me and I was in my uniform which was trousers and half sleeves shirt with a red sweater which I was wearing. We also used to get newspapers of ToI and Hindustan Times student editions everyday. 

I combined all of them to form my outfit. I stuffed my cap with newspapers and wore it as a tall hat which Charlie Chaplin used. I set up my set for the act which was basically a table and some newspapers. I took the essence of mime and humour of Chaplin and performed one of his episodes with out any former practice. Fortunately everyone laughed and I won a certificate saying that I held and Outstanding position in the competition. I was surprised and happy that I had won but it was until 6th grade that I told everyone that I had won it just like that.

From that day onwards I had got so many offers for participating in competitions which our school never really won but it was fun to participate for the experience and I was happy doing it. I had won the talent hunt of 6th and 8th from then. It was in 7th that I made a mistake of switching my performance to singing 'Heathens' by Twenty One pilots and I lost. That day I realised that I should do what I'm good at and happy with because I had switched to singing just for a change and little did I know that the singers who were my competition were pretty good at doing what they did and inevitably I lost.

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Hey readers, hope you liked it as this is just the first of a series!

yours, Author.