Friendship in Capsules

#Friendship rarely announces itself in grand gestures. More often, it arrives in the tiny moments of waiting, in a phone call, in a letter, in the easy familiarity that grows by meeting regularly and realizing eventually you are invisibly tied together. Else, what would you call the relationship between a care-taker and a terminal patient, both probably, fully aware, this won’t last. Or a Nanny and an infant. One, a mentally and emotionally balanced individual and the other who has just been pulled out from a really moist place into this big bad, painful and mad world. In between the infant and death, is life. To live we need to breathe. To keep breathing easy, we need peace and contentment. To have a contented life, we need healthy relationships. Usually, we call it a relationship if it has a longer time tenure. But, we can have small, yet rich and full relationships. Every relation has a life of its own. People need to know how and how much to nurture. We need to invest, for anything to grow – time, effort, energy, money, emotions, silences and words. Specially, in human relationships. after a point, it doesn’t matter, if both are contributing equal proportions. Because, the relationship is not measuring. The people in it are. And if people are counting, it will never be equal. We all want to win. If there is a winner, the other one is a loser. And the loser remembers. A friend doesn’t.

Friendship is a habit. It is the rhythm of the daily mundane life. In boarding school, we could play in groups, or walk with just one person. And it may not be even the same person, every day. It was the common habits and daily rituals that defined the relationship. Exactly why after school is over, the feeling transcends batches. It is no longer about the same batch anymore. Every girl and boy who passed out of that wooden gate had shared experiences, every day. We walked the same wild paths, sat on the same wooden bench, ate the same cold porridge, ran through the same echoing corridors, got ‘dhunned’ by seniors for the same silly mistakes, had the same teachers with nicknames living through centuries, loved the same monogram and sang the same school song. That kind of friendship is not for fun. It is made of survival. One friend remembers the dates, another the joke, a third kid remembers the real excuse but stays silent for the fourth to shine through the conversation. A batchmate may be the closest, but a schoolmate is an equal witness to the same skyline, buried in the memory of every alumni. It is important to mention here, it doesn’t matter, how many years have you spent together. Some people are not in touch even though they spent the growing decade together. Some have become real good friends, with the age difference qualifying well beyond mother-daughter or father-son and the other possible combinations!

Some friendships show courage without pretending to be heroic. They help a person face the world a little steadier. They make distance from loved ones manageable, the loneliness of being far from parents becomes softer, the bullying becomes a little less tiring, and the hospital stays a lot less solitary. They show that real character is not in how someone behaves when everything is hunky dory, but in the small, unguarded moments. That is the hidden architecture of friendship — not the big declarations, but the repeated kindnesses. There is also something deeply revealing about the people who disappear and re-appear again and again in life, or in ordinary situations. A batchmate always ending up paying that last Rs. 2/- short for the bun omelet, the one last movie ticket, or the full class contribution that you cannot afford this time. Then, there is a friend who does not ask for much, only an assured, silent evening walk. Today, do you listen to someone when there is nothing to gain from them? Do we remember names? Do we stay patient when the same story is told twice? True relationships, do not demand a dramatic answer. Just a humane presence.

Some memories stay, not because they were extraordinary. But because they were truly ordinary, in exactly the right way. They remind us that friendship is often less about being inseparable and more about the reassurance that there is someone who knows. S/he won’t judge me. Infront of whom, I can laugh, cry, shout or just sit without a word for hours. I can become and stay, the real me, always.

1996 Batch

 

#MusafirCafé Musings

If you have grown up in a boarding school, it lives in your mind not merely as a place on a map. It is engraved like a birth mark on the face that you just have to see every day in the mirror. Up to you, whether you love it or hate it. Tucked away in Mussoorie hills, Jharipani is nestled among groves of silver oak, where the leaves, when touched by the foggy winds, would shimmer and twist between green and silver like a secret breathing softly in the mountains. For those of us who grew up there, Jharipani was not a location. It was a rhythm, a story, a state of mind.

Just outside the school stood an old British circuit house, which now in the last few days has fired into popularity. Jharipani Castle was once a British-era retreat, for British travelers and soldiers. Later, apparently gifted to the Patiala royal family and we remember it as Patiala House even today. In our days, it was still a locked, infested with wild flora and fauna, quiet and mysterious place. It was long before it acquired the cozy charm and popularity it now enjoys as a homestay-style hotel. Today, of course, it has found new life and new fame, especially because of the lovely web series on Netflix about love, love lost and love lived forever, named Musafir Cafe. In our years, the place carried an entirely different aura. Till the late 2000s, people spoke of it as though it were haunted. No one particularly wished to stop there, and certainly no one wanted to test the rumours that floated around it in the usual boarding-school way — half fear, half exaggeration, and all imagination. The place had an enchanting view nonetheless. One could not help but look up while crossing it and feel that peculiar thrill that only hill stations can give — that mixture of beauty, loneliness, and old-world silence.

@SudipBajpai & I would always talk about going to school on off-times, i.e. when its not a Reunion. When its only the two of us. Even if not the two us; two like-minded batchmates. We would name boys like Nitin Mishra, Ajitesh Das and finally saying actually any Tagorian would do! In 2010, the two of us had made such a sudden plan during an Independence Day long weekend break. We were not sure of the stay. But Mr. Dubey & Juyal ensured a room in the school Guest House. No visit happened till 2018. When a week before Sports Day dates in 2018, he called again. And we just went! And we ended up staying at Jharipani Castle. Don’t remember how we ended up getting a room. Luck favors the lusty boys! The nearly famous 19th Century Café, did not even exist back then in 2018. A casual plan that later reveal to be an emotional pilgrimage of sorts.

This trip, we decided to take the train from our destinations and reached Doon station by 730 AM and Jharipani Castles by 8:45 AM. Like the old school, proud, immature boys who just wanted to be in the vicinity of Jharipani, we reached, just managed to see the room, walked up to the edge of the property’s fence to see Doon Valley and plonked ourselves from 9 AM sitting like dead like rocks until 1 p.m. We did not move. Not even to pee. We stayed planted on that chair, facing the endlessly beautiful Doon Valley, as though the view itself were enough to nourish us. In a sense, it was. There were probably 7-10 cups of tea and coffee each— mixed, matched, repeated, and over-relished — some cookies too, until the bearer, who had clearly started the day with patience and ended it with regret, stopped serving after the fourth order. It felt perfect - unhurried, indulgent, and slightly absurd.

But, we had not come merely to park ourselves as dinosaurs. We had come for Sports Day. The wrist watch shouted - Rocky Sir (@anandsinghrawat) must already have completed his Torch Bearer lap! The realization filled us with that familiar boarding-school shame. Not from guilt. The awareness that the day is slipping away while you are busy admiring Doon Valley. Plus, another rocket by the name @sunnybakshi would be waiting to fire his terse torpedos of abuses and curses on us! We finally picked ourselves, took bath with the reluctance of people being dragged away from a beloved dream, and prepared ourselves for the descent. Halfway down, I still felt like a sitting duck trying to behave like a walking whale. Yet there is something about the path to a school ground in the hills that restores you little by little. The air changes first. Then the sound. Then, almost without warning, the slope gives way to the open field, and the whole world seems to brighten. We were in the valley — just as it always had been. There is a particular magic to Sports Day in the hills, a magic that cannot be manufactured elsewhere. The virgin winter sun falls on the sweaty athletic bodies of boys and girls with a kind of affectionate warmth. The spikes bite into the earth, and from them rises the smell of fresh soil, sharp and honest and alive. The grass looks greener than green. The stands tremble with cheers. The races unfold with the fierce innocence of youth. Winning screams break out one after another, and every child seems to be carrying not just speed or strength, but a whole little universe of pride.

If Founders’ Day was the heart of Oak Grove School, Sports Day was the soul.

Sports Day, belonged to the children in a more intimate way. It was noisy, breathless, imperfect, gloriously human. It was where rivalries were born and dissolved, where house loyalties became sacred, where one cheer from the stands could make a runner believe he was destined for greatness, and where one glance from the field could make a girl in violet shorts seem like poetry itself. It was not merely about medals or rankings. It was about belonging. It was about honor. Honor of the House. It was also about - teachers pretending to be calm, boys trying to look athletic, girls carrying grace like a second skin, and the cheering party trying to be part of the same youthful symphony. You long, almost childishly, to go back and run that one race, cheer one more time for your house, or simply stand by and watch your childhood sweetheart in those violet shorts, as if the whole purpose of the day had secretly been that one fleeting glimpse.

After all the hulla of Sports Day ended, Bajpai and I sat on Covered Shed steps till it turned dark and silent. We then trudged back slowly to Jharipani Castle. But the day had not ended. The hills had one last trick left for us. Just as we were on the gates of Jharipani Castles, about twenty meters away, two young Bagheeras (Black Panthers) suddenly appearing from the hillside, leaped out on the dark grey slopy road coming from Nepal Palace. With the easy confidence of creatures who know the terrain better than any human ever will, the young cubs waved their tails at us in their own royal fashion, and vanished into the dark of the green bushes sliding down into the valley side. Before we could fully collect ourselves, they were gone. It was the kind of moment one never quite forgets. Not because it was dramatic, but because it felt so perfectly in tune with the place. The hills, time again reminds you that you are only a visitor in their world. That night, the conversation was Bagheeras, Lions, Tigers and Jim Corbett. We sat in the dining hall of Jharipani Castles, had fresh five cups of coffee. Finally, the bearer, with the weary resignation of a man who had seen enough of us for one day, said, “Sir, 11 baj gaye. Coffee, milk aur mera enthu — sab khatam.”

That is how boarding school remains in the end — not as a web series that starts and may be have a few seasons. It is a permanent weather living inside you. Our lives have become like web series, full of episodes, edits, and endless scrolling. Somewhere beneath all of this, we miss the 70 mm life - the hills, the virgin spirit, our Valley Green, the laughter, the longing, and the pure, unfiltered magic of Jharipani and its small castles.

1996 Batch

 

Pahaadi Protests!

 At the halfway crossroads of life, whenever the rain falls a certain way, I am carried back to the slopes of Jharipani, where Oak Grove School sat amid real oak groves. It was almost too real, as if the hills had been placed there on purpose just to tear the fog out of the clouds. We lived high enough for mornings to arrive in pure gold, and low enough for the skyline to turn from sunflower yellow to the deep purple of jamun whenever October climbed in.

As the country simmers yet again in the protests of the young and the restless, I am reminded of the crackle of arguments in our Mussoorie days. The Mandal Commission storm of the early 1990s, and later the early calls for a separate hill state in 1994–95, which eventually became Uttarakhand in 2000, were the big background noises of our childhood. As kids, all between 8 and 18 years of age, we had little inkling of what happened outside the school gates. Newspapers arrived 24 hours late, television was a weekly entertainment box. Current affairs, for most of us, meant the imaginary affairs boys carried around in their heads with a girl, usually chosen and thrust upon them by batchmates. We had barely heard of government policies, laws, bylaws, acts, or any such serious adult business. Political anger was a completely alien concept. And yet these two waves changed the air in the hills forever. We began to sense the mood of the mountains. I believe it was around early 1990 when the Mandal Commission became the rage across the country. As the recommendations were announced/implemented, the country erupted into protests and counter-protests. Those undercurrents, and the over-estimated emotions that came with them, reached Jharipani too. Since we were mostly not allowed to step out of the building, and certainly not out of the campus, we overheard things knowingly and unknowingly. Teachers spoke in hush-hush tones of protestors coming to the school, passing by, or pausing outside the campus gates on their way to Mussoorie or down to Doon. We were far too young to judge anything happening around us. In fact, we were so blissfully oblivious that Protestors were not our celebrities! Anyone who had seen protestors crossing the road became our Superstar of the Day! And if someone had actually interacted with a protest group, that person instantly became Super Human.

We were made to believe that it only mattered if they came very near to us. I think some of us secretly wanted that to happen. Most of us were just ignorant and quite happy with life being delightfully uneventful. We had no idea we would somehow become part of the story. But, we did. School closed, and we were sent home. For the first time in my living memory, I experienced the Lucknow Durga Puja of 1990. Those ten days deserve a story of their own. They were life-changing for me. More of that later.

Jharipani sharpened every feeling. Dormitory beds were always cold. Quilts and blankets were only warm enough if you stayed frozen in one single position all night like a museum exhibit. Sweaters were warm, but mufflers itched. Shoes stayed polished only until the last step out of the dormitory, after which they immediately became honest again. Every boy learned to carry loneliness with comic pride. Jharipani made everything easier to bear. The people of Jhits could tell from a child’s face whether he or she was hungry, missing parents, had been dhunned by a senior, or had been caught red-handed doing something and was now waiting for the final punishment verdict. Then there was the weather. The mist would roll into the classroom so thickly that we could almost gulp its wetness. The fog would swallow the Doon Valley whole. Rains would fall without pause for days and weeks, and yet nothing ever felt gloomy. And then the sunshine — freshest, sharpest, and warmest in the most completely unfair way. I could go on forever. Jharipani was our secret, the one the mountains kept from the world below.

The next great commotion came in 1994–95, when we were the senior-most batch on campus, in Classes XI and XII. By then we knew a little more than before, though not nearly enough to pretend we were wise. We still had our daily superstars and superhumans, and we remained gloriously ignorant for a while. But not for long. We ended up shouting slogans over trucks and buses arranged by local Mussoorie protestors, driving up the hilly roads, and having the time of our lives. We reinvented our sports cheering cries into pro-Uttarakhand slogans. “Water-Water Steam Steam — Pull Together Uttarakhand Team!” was the best one I remember. There were many more. I think one ran to the tune of “Uttarakhand do, Vikas lo!” We would laugh ourselves breathless at our own brilliance. It was nonsense, of course, but it was our nonsense, and we shouted it with the confidence of people who believed they had discovered the language of revolution. We became deadly serious the moment outsiders were around.

Best of all, and a full-length movie story material – As per curriculum, senior boys who chose Arts would walk to the Girls’ School for Political Science and Geography classes. We staged a magnificent story about what those passing protestors had supposedly done to innocent boys, our batch. That, naturally, led to immense tension and life-scaring possibilities. Eventually, school closed down, yet again! Am pretty sure, the lead actors will be reading this bit soon. Let us connect, offline, my bouyzzzz!

Children do what children always do: we turned history into child’s play. Still, even in all the mischief, something serious entered the mind. We did not understand the full meaning, but we could feel its shape. Teachers and staff spoke of identity, fairness, pride, and the right to be seen. These were very large words for 12- to 14-year-olds. Jhits, once again, taught us to digest big feelings in small doses. What remains strongest in me is not the politics, but the beauty of those days. The early winter sunlight falling across us. The monsoon paths turning slippery and dramatic, every step a negotiation. The evenings arriving shyly, and the sky seeming almost within touching distance.

Oak Grove gave us not just schooling, but memory with altitude. It gave us the hills, the hunger, the cold mornings, the broken slogans, the first stirrings of civic life, and the strange, beautiful lesson that childhood sits playfully hidden in the corridors of our lost and forgotten stories. We remember those years with tenderness, because though we are no longer boys and girls, and though the slogans have faded and the country has entered yet another wave of change, the hills remain. In their silence, I still hear the echo of our voices — half play, half protest, fully alive.

1996 Batch

Founders’ Day

As with every passing year, the first morning of June arrives—bright, golden, and gently warm. Yet, unlike any ordinary lazy summer dawn, boys and girls are already astir. There’s a quiet urgency in the air: fresh faces, nimble movements, small preparations for the grand finale. Every step carries a spark, every child brims with anticipation, eager for their moment to shine. Parents gather with pride, some with an extra gleam of triumph if their child graces more than one stage. Their confidence in sending their little ones to this secluded hillside sanctuary feels reaffirmed today.

This day is the culmination of months of toil—sweat, tears, and sometimes even blood—all converging into one magnificent celebration. The first sight that stirs the heart is the long stream of white uniforms, punctuated with maroon, as children descend from the three slopes—GS, JS, and BS—into the Valley. Soon follow the costumed performers, guided by their mentors: GS with bamboo dances and special acts, JS with vibrant, multicultural spectacles, and BS with their daring pyramids, yoga feats, and fiery leaps (where boys, sometimes bleeding, wore their wounds like badges to impress the girls!). From above, the Valley is a breathtaking canvas—lush green, adorned with decorations, the Pushtas cleared for the parents’ pavilion, and the entire Jharipani community gathered to cheer. Every applause, every encouraging shout, even for a stumble, carries warmth. The dignitaries’ canopy gleams, the children’s seating polished, and at the heart lies the pitch—precisely marked, shimmering with Choona.

This is the moment to honor the unsung heroes behind the spectacle. Foremost, the 4th Class Staff—rising before dawn, preparing the Valley, working tirelessly without supervision. Their devotion is pure, driven only by the joy of watching us shine. The younger BS classes shoulder heavy tasks too—lugging benches, hauling props, arranging the Valley with strength and spirit. Gratitude flows to Classes VI, VII, and VIII. And then, to the Principal, the Office, the three Heads, the Organizing Committee, and every teacher—whose meticulous planning, flawless execution, and tireless dedication ensure perfection down to the last second. From welcoming the Chief Guest to bidding farewell to every parent and child, they orchestrate it seamlessly, year after year. A salute to them! And a heartfelt nod to the Alumni, who return for Founders, Sports Day, and reunions—you are cherished.

Between the Valley festivities and the awaited Evening Cultural Program lies a pause. JS children retreat to dorms for rest; I recall the Bhangra troupe being pampered with massages by Aayajis. By evening, the Auditorium brims—Chief Guest, dignitaries, teachers, families, friends, and once again, nearly all of Jharipani. The stage bursts alive: JS and GS with spirited group songs, dazzling dances, GS and BS with stirring dramatics, BS with their orchestra, and finally, JS with the thunderous Bhangra. Tomorrow, we leave for home. Yet tonight, no one remembers departure. This is home. This soil is ours. This display is worth the year-long wait. This showcase is worth every drop of sweat, every tear, every scar. It is a spectacle, a testament to talent, a celebration of each child embodying their parents’ pride, their teachers’ guidance, and the Spirit of Oak Grove, on this Day.

 

1996 Batch

Boom Boom Banga!

He remembered each and every boy who passed out

Didn’t matter if you were a star or went without a shout

In his eyes every boy was the same

He would tell you every incident with the exact name.

 

A man who lived to love all his boys

For him there were no Brigadier and no Vice Roys

You will remain a student whom he helped grow

His affection for his boys was always a grand show.

 

If angry, he was a blind warrior,

But when in mood, Boy! no one was merrier.

He could tell you stories - grand and untold,

But his present boys were best, mind you - not the old.

 

He had no favorites; everyone was his own

Everyone was “bhondu-paattha”, though a difference in his tone

Clear in his heart and straight with his talk

By God, if he is pissed, you are in for a shock.

 

Don’t look for a horse or a taanga

If behind you with a bat is Baanga

Run for your life and get out of his sight

So what if you are the school captain, kick he might!

 

We love you Sir, for the man you are

We love you Sir, you are the best by far

We miss you now on visits to the Oak

People like you made a man out of a wild bloke.

Q/`1996 Batch