The Extra-Curricular Extravagance

As I watch my little cousins and nephews engage themselves in a host of extra curricular activities in their school, I feel a slight pang of guilt. During my school days, though we did not have as much opportunity or encouragement for such activities as the kids today, the opportunity was not absent. It is just that I was too lazy to engage myself in anything that was not strictly within the realms of school curriculum. In other words, the term “Voluntary activities” never existed in my dictionary. When the routine curriculum itself is taking so much toll on those precious grey cells, where was the time and resources for such profligacy? The fact that I realized that I was not the only one who belonged to this school of thought, did not help matters much.
So our headmistress came out with a strategy to counter the likes of me – she introduced the word (which later became her favorite word in English language and the one I hated the most in school), “COMPULSORY” to anything and everything associated with school. She started chanting this word so frequently that I used to imagine that she even keeps mumbling this word during her sleep and in casual day to day conversations such as:
To her 3 year old daughter: “Honey, here’s your COMPULSORY lolly-pop. Now please stop crying COMPULSORILY”
or to her house maid , who was asking for an off on the Sunday: “I leave it up to you, but it would be really helpful if you could come this Sunday, COMPULOSRILY”
or to the hawker selling vegetables: “You are not bringing tomatoes nowadays. I wish you could bring them next time, COMPULSORY”
To me, the word COMPULSORY only meant one thing – faking of illness – an endeavor that required a lot of effort – and a letter signed by my dad the next day. Things became easier for me when my younger brother grew up and he learnt to forge by dad’s signature.
He would invariably refuse, but then I always had some cards up my sleeve. “Poor Rahul had his shirt torn today during the fight in the school bus. Do you want me to discuss it with Mom?”, and sure enough I would have my letter ready next day.

Things went on like this until my 9th grade. It was then that the school introduced compulsory participation in extra curricular activities in the form of various activity clubs during school hours (every Friday 2 hours in the afternoon) and every student was asked to associate himself / herself with one club or the other. There was no escaping this one! There were a number of options available: -
1) The athletics club – would have been fun if not for the obsessed PT instructor who wanted to make Olympians out of us. I had no intentions of participating in Atlanta 1996, so the athletics club was out of the question.
2) The science club – Since I didn’t intend to blow up the chemistry lab or experiment upon Toads and Tadpoles, this too was not an option for me.
3) The environment club – responsible for maintaining clean environment at school meant that I was naturally disqualified.
4) The speaker’s forum – on stage, I wouldn’t be heard over the racket created by my knees banging against each other, so I did not even consider this option.
5) The debate club – knowing karate, kung-fu or martial arts was a pre-condition since that is what the debates always ended up in.

Since none of these options suited me, I went in search of like-minded school-mates to start a revolt. Finally, our class teacher relented and gave us an option – to form a new club provided the minimum quorum of 20 members is achieved. If we were not able to form the minimum team required for the club, then we would have to join one of the above clubs.

So along with two of my class-mates, I floated the “Socio-cultural club”. In order to get approval from the head-mistress we had to present the proposed activities of the club. Since we did not intend to actually perform any of the activities, we made up a huge list of proposed activities that included almost everything short of mission to Mars. Sure enough, our headmistress was extremely impressed and gave her immediate consent for us to start canvassing for our club.

We started with our own class – the 9th grade, the idea was to get as much seniors in the team as possible so that the club would get its importance. However, after much canvassing we found no takers there. But we were not discouraged. We decided that we would keep going one grade at a time downwards- the 8th grade, then the 7th grade and so on to find our minimum quorum.

Two weeks went by and when finally we met one Friday afternoon, I looked pompously at the class, proud of having influenced the young minds and commending myself over my leadership abilities, I stood in front of the class looking at my team. Eighteen pairs of innocent, yet mischievous eyes stared back at me. We had managed to impress a few first and second graders to join our club!! The little things did not even have a clue about what they had got themselves into!!
I was made the President of the club and my two classmates the secretary and the treasurer.

Since planning for activities was always exciting especially when you know that you are not going to implement any of them, at every meeting, we planned a lot of things for the club. The discussion was always limited to the three of us while our younger friends would run around the class room hopping from desk to desk, screaming and fighting. We would just let them be unless things went too far. We sometimes had to quickly spring into action, chase down our younger team mates, pounce and grab them and get them seated before the headmistress comes visiting our class during her regular rounds. Things continued like this for a couple of months and then one day, the class teacher suddenly came to our class and announced that we would be required to show results of activities of the club to the headmistress soon. We began to panic. We had to do something! Now was the time for some practical ideas. Finally we decided upon a project for ourselves. We would build a landscape on a tray. The next 2 months were spent in gathering resources for the project – money, materials etc. We spent the next 3 months on implementation, and our mischievous team members did not make matters easy for us since they would want to make their contribution to the project which meant that two of us had to stand guard on either side, while the other worked on the landscape.
Finally when just two months remained for the academic year to complete, we had finished our grand project and I looked proudly at our achievement – the fruits of our relentless toil and hard work. We were exhausted at the end of it all but we thought the effort was really worth it. We had a beautiful landscape with hills, plants, grass, a painted river flowing down the hill, and a couple of miniature huts near the river bank.
Our class teacher suggested that we present our creation to the headmistress. So myself and one of my classmate carefully held the tray between us and walked down to the principal’s office. We set it down at the table in front of our headmistress who studied it carefully. As we sat expectantly, she looked up at us and smiled. We were relieved. We were about too seek her permission to close the activities of the club for the academic year, when she said, “That is a nice model. I really like it. But you have very less time now. Anyways, I suggest you start working on it immediately. There is a square plot of land just behind the nursery section. You can build the actual landscape there.” We looked at each other and then at our headmistress. We were trying our best not to burst out laughing. We managed a quick “Yes ma’am” and made our exit. We were rolling in laughter as we made our way back to our classroom. The class teacher looked at the two of us with raised eyebrows as we entered the classroom. It took us few minutes to stop laughing, catch our breath and explain to our class teacher what the headmistress had suggested. She too broke into a hysterical laugh…