I was on the telly with Kala the other night, and I was, for some reason, reminded of Subburaj saar. Anand and only Anand among the Idlies would know who this man is. Others, like my lovely wife, may have been initiated into the Ordnance Factory Trichy life. Nevertheless, I just had the urge to write about this man, and get the itching off my chest once and forever. Every student worth his or her English-speaking salt who passed through the annals of Kendriya Vidyalaya, Trichy, would bear a lifelong grudge against this man. Subburaj saar. Wasn't a tall man Subburaj saar was, standing at 5 ft 0 inches. With that height that was just about enough to intimidate a toad, he tried to make the rest up in attitude. He made negligible impact. He then tried to make the rest up by being the most bad-ass NCC (National Cadet Corps) master there was. That entailed yelling at poor clueless students such as the author (who with chicken finger legs attached to 10kilo marching boots, resembled a broomstick stuck to an anvil) who in turn had joined for the free soggy puri and aaloo and masala dosai.. Got it up a notch more. But still had his pupils sneering and jabbing at him, both behind and in front of him. Not being able to bear the ignominy of his students, who he wanted to shiver in his presence, making fun of him, he hatched an ingenious plan of making them suffer and remember him for the rest of their lives. He decided to teach them English. I am the last person to take offence to someone named Subburasu teaching me English. At that time, I hardly knew enough to know better. And to think he was the substitute teacher, who VOLUNTEERED to fill-in while the replacement was being moved in from some other waterless paradise. Class X, the 1st big barrier a student faces in India, he decides to put forth his plan into action: Subburaj saar started to teach English. Half the time, I remember him yelling "Elei Nayee!". (To the non-tamil souls in this group: ask your spouses what that means).
The coup-de-grace came in the form his version of the tenses. "Pasangala: There are 4 types of tenses", he used to preach. "There is the present tense. There is the past tense.There is the future tense." And the moment of truth ,"And then there is the past future tense". For the whole year, he preached there were 4 tenses. "Johnny came. Johnny is coming. Johnny will come. Johnny would have come. Johnny would have come is the past future tense students!!" He would bellow out.
A whole year of past future tense later, that INCLUDED mid-term exams that asked us to write the past-future tense of "Ram is driving the car", we were indoctrinated into the Subburaj school of English. The class X CBSE exams, mercifully, did not ask us to write versions of tenses. We had no clue. Then we decided to migrate to another CBSE school in a neighboring town. 10 of us, band of brothers, went to RSK Higher School, wherein taught English a tyrant Lloyd Gonzales. He was funny, he was articulate, he was the cynosure of the beautiful doe-eyed girls of RSK, and he was Anglo-Indian. Did I mention he KNEW about us new-world enlightened English-speakers from the neighboring town? And he looked forward to skewering these poor, unsuspecting souls from KVT. First day in class, after a couple of jokes and quips that relaxed the entire class of 75 (more than half of them girls), he suddenly assumed a dour demeanor and announced "Are here any KV students here?". Caught unawares, we stood up, 10 of us quivering introverted souls and I were among them. Also present among us was Rakesh, a stocky pimply kid who desperately sought to blend in with the cool kids of BHEL township (that's where RSK was. An up class neighborhood). Then Lloyd Gonzales made his move: "Can anyone of you who are standing up tell me how many tenses there are in English?". Wanting to impress and thrill the audience with his new-found wisdom, Rakesh blurted out "4 saar". Then the mayhem started. First there was stunned silence. Shock hung over the classroom like the cloak of a New York socialite. Then there as murmuring in one corner. Someone laughed in another. This caught on, like a virus, spreading along the aisles, all the way to the back-benches. The sleeping students in the back, awakened by the sudden noise, woke up, asked around what the brouhaha was all about, and jumped right in. There we were, 10 of us out to prove a point that we are as good as anyone else there, standing stupefied among a snickering crowd of 65 students. Then Lloyd chimed in with his "Wren and Martin" version of text-book grammar enlightenment. It went on for 30 agonizing minutes. There were examples he quoted. Then he wrote down a sentence and rewrote it in the different tenses, as we looked on in horror, regretting coming there. Regretting to admit that we were from KV. Over anything else, vowing to strangle Subburaj saar when we met him. Some of us were craving to meet him in a dark alley to do a number on him. It never happened. Those 10 grew up. Many became engineers. Some became doctors. There were clerks, scientists. But no one became a teacher, definitely not an English teacher. Guess Subburaj saar got his wish after all. We could never forget him. We all have a dark past ladies and gentlemen. The students of Subburaj saar are an accursed lot. Don't ever ask us how many tenses there are. You might not like the answers you get. We all lost our innocence the day we learnt about his dubious 4th type of tense.
