Inglease ................

My first principal was an Australian.....He was a funny chap whom we lovingly called Uncle Sir.Now Uncle Sir was in love with the Queen's language and would go all the way to make us understand that a gerund and a giraffe were not exactly cousins !!!This was in those days when my mom went to drop me to school holding me with her right hand with no more respect than she did the Bazaar ki thaili in the other......I remember R.B stores ..the bakery shop where there was an uncle who used to give me free biscuits to munch ....Its fun munching free biscuits you know .Wonder why Manoj Bajpai said "Kya main kutta hoon kya" in the movie Road when Ms.Mali offered him a few ? Uncouth chap he was !

Haan so we were on the verge of discussing my Australian principal when another very interesting character comes to mind .This guy was from my second school ..No they didnt kick me out of the first ...my Bapuji got transferred and quite a few of my possible and prospective romantic comtemplations met an untimely death......I took it in a very manly way and did not shed a single tear..Within 27 days I had scratched a hideous S in my left hand with the compass expressing my enduring love for a female whose name i cannot fully recollect today. That Ms. S never gave me a penny's worth of attention were all bad rumours spread by jealous classmates.......This character's name,whom I wish to mention here, was Mr.Hajra and he was supposed to be our Physical education teacher ...By the way he never gave the education we wanted though and it was left to those magazines of the genre "They who must not be named" to be our guardians during those tender ages of 13 or 14. Now this guy carried a huge Danda with him (of the Udham Singh species but a little shorter )and especially targetted the soft bottoms of innocent children like us.His lack of respect for our bottoms however earned him no fame and soon there were cat calls behind his back with a minute grammatical modification of his name which disoriented his very sexual direction or lack of them.I learnt the first lessons of morphing in my school toilet walls.
Now there was a daily inspection in our school to see if everyone had dug their noses clean , to check if the number of lice in our hairs had not increased the school defined quota of 18 per male student head and 224 per female strand and quite a few other things one of which also included the particulars of the tie .
Now in the sweltering heat of the summers my tie on that particular day was just a little more attracted to gravity than as had been defined by late Mr Newton.
So Mr.Hajra blocks the school gate with his Udham and asks me " You boy !! Why tie not tie ?" and gave my bottom a shot which had brought out the choiciest of expletives from the poor thing...I read the following day that my Australian principal in Shillong had had a mild stroke at around the same time of this incident.

I traversed a few more years which brought me and my father to our first visit to Gujarat to get me admitted to an engineering college or thats what they had told me in the college brochure ....(Psst....its still says so...Ha ha ha )
The long journey had us ravished and craving for anything that barely resembled food to the Bengali tongue.Little did we realise that where we went in to pacify our stomachs was actually an illegal den where they smuggled the rarest of South Indian reptiles and sold them to KK (thats what every smuggler is named isnt it ?)
But I was very smart and told my Pops that we shouldn't indulge in such activities promptly showing him the menu which read in bold "SOUTH INDIAN SNAKES"
The goon looking guy with the moustache who sat for all transactions at the entrance said in Hindi...Are sir Snacks nahi maloom kya ..Naashta...South Indian Naashta !!! and gave us a comtemptous smile .......Son and father looked at each other ruing their lack of knowledge.My Australian principal who was critically ill after the afore mentioned incident of my school left us for his heavenly abode soon after.

Today here in England ,I feel the same as a Togo Island native would if he were asked to coordinate a conference of the Vogons of the Hitchhiker's fame.
I simply can't understand what they call English.It is more heavily accented than my Granny's pickles were with all that mustard oil. After four months here i have understood that " Venjacumhey " actually is a question which enquires about the time when i reached a particular place where the person asking this has already been present for some time prior to my being there.
Grammar that i never learnt from Mr Wren and Mr.Martin doesnt seem to have an existence here.

But at the end of the day you can just sit back and pat yourself saying "Awrite mate We savaieefd anotha day here.
May the soul of my Uncle Sir rest in peace for he was a nice person and never targetted the soft bottoms of 12 year olds.