'Hence, when I was tipped off by my friend Alfath about the arrival of Navjot Sidhu, I was so excited...'

30 August 1994 | Ol’ habits die hard!

(27 years ago) 💛

#memoriesfromdiaries 💕

Today woke up at 5.30 am. After the customary jogging time for all of us, we gave our roll call!

Had Coffee (as usual) with my friend Mani.

From my personal diary entry, 30 Aug 1994

One beautiful habit that I’d picked up during the course of my hostel life, all thanks to our hostel wardens, (and something that I’ve tried sustaining thus far in my life) is that,

before we left our hostel (home) for school we had to make double sure that our cubicle (our space) including our wardrobe, our book shelves, our shoe stacks etc have all been neatly done!

And this i did, as usual, with a host of my fellow hostelers giving me company!

Another habit that’s tagged along with me thus far, is - 

the habit of reading the day’s newspaper.

On this particular day, I had joined a little band of readers in reading the day’s The Hindu before leaving for my classes!

Coming back, 

During English class, we had our usual quiz time, and our group won with a thumping majority.

So we received our long-delayed, often longed for honours today - a royal salute from all the other groups!

Came back to my cubicle (my sweet little space) and rested for a while, before getting back for afternoon classes by 12.35 pm.

You see, football matches were a rave and a rage in our school.

The battle was usually between MCC School and Don Bosco!

With any other school, it woulda sure lacked the punch and the pinch!

But with Don Bosco - all of us – right from the Headmaster till the juniormost hosteler were there in full attendance.

That’s because Don was one unbeatable Don on the football front!

[Prof. Lakshminarayanan, Retd Professor of Physics, MCC has shared these fond memories with me - of the sweet rivalry between Don Bosco & MCC, he being a Don Bosco-ite!]

And I hope you could visualize our joy unbounded, when we gave a sweet thrashing to our opponents by a phenomenal margin of 4 – 0!

Coming back,

Today I got a letter from Amma!

Today I also posted four letters to my friends, kith & kin.

‘School-given letters’ here would mean that, our School had subsidized Postal covers with the name of our School emblem embossed on them!

We just had to write our thoughts on a foolscap paper and place them inside this cover! That means we didn’t need a postage stamp at all!

Added, that was one beautiful way the school encouraged us all to write!

[How we all wish that the art of letter writing is back in vogue yet again today!]

On this particular day I wrote four letters and went on to post them [without a moment’s delay] at the Hostel office, where we had a postbox waiting to give wings to our words!

Coming back,

Today, Navjot Singh Sidhu, our Indian team’s test cricketer visited our school.

You see, we had the MRF Pace Foundation in Campus, which had almost all famous cricketers visiting our Campus on a regular basis for their coaching.

A current snapshot from Wikipedia

[On an aside, I should add that, we were all so blessed to have those occasional glimpses of Sachin, Srinath, Zaheer, Jonty Rhodes, Hanse Cronje, Azharuddin, Mongia, among others whenever Madam Luck smiled her gentle smile on us!]

Hence, when I was tipped off by my friend Alfath about the arrival of Navjot Singh Sidhu, I was so excited.

Alfath, one of those rare few to have a ‘foreign’ camera on him, got ready his camera to click some shots with the legend!

But carelessness cost me dearly. Couldn’t have a glimpse of the great Sidhu.

However, compensated for it, with an unexpected and sweet win in our night-time chess, well into the eighth game, and that too, over the unbeatable Girish!

This takes our final tally with three wins on either side, and two, drawn!