My School is Fifty and so am I!

Dhanada Kant Mishra (tt), 1983 (Sr)

About the Author

Dhanada Mishra (nick name tt) studied at the school from about 1977 to 1983. He finished at the
top of his class in 1983 in the Senior batch which is the year the Government decided to introduce
10+2+3 system in stead of the earlier pattern of 10+2+2 system of education. He has strong
attachment with the school having lived in the same area for last 14 years after almost 18 years
being away from Odisha for his higher education and career. This included a stint of 5 years each
in USA and Australia and four years in Tamil Nadu and 3 years in Mumbai. He is a Civil Engineer
and Academic who heads the KMBB College of Engineering and Technology set up by Sambad
group. He also has been very active socially and writes regularly for Sambad on issues of
education, public policy and other social issues mostly to do with Odisha. Currently he is based at
the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology as a Visiting Research Fellow for a year. His
wife Babita Mishra leads SPIC MACAY in Odisha and their only son Anish is studying Philosophy
at the Hindu College in Delhi.

Government Boys’ High School Unit 8 was the name of my school. I got promoted from
Agriculture Colony Upper Primary School to the High School and was some how chosen to be the
only one to go to an Odiya medium government school. All of my four elder brothers went to the
more prestigious English medium School in the town called Demonstration Multi-purpose (DM for
short) School which is run by NCERT. It's altogether another matter that my two younger sisters
also had to follow me into Odiya medium government girls’ schools closest to our house (3R/32,
OUAT Colony). May be my parents didn’t want to look like as if they discriminated on basis of
gender and therefore I had to go to GBHSU8 before hand! But then with a professor’s income, it
must have been tough managing a rather large joint family in those days. Even buying the fancy
looking uniforms and mandatory black shoes for four of my elder brothers must have been taxing.
Memories of hardships bordering on poverty from that era are still quite vivid in my mind. For
example, I remember when Prof Neilsen (my father’s Ph D advisor from) came visiting, most of our
household necessities including sofa-sets, fridge and even door and window curtains had to be
borrowed from our slightly better-off neighbours! Any how to assuage my hurt feelings about not
being able to follow my brothers to DM School I was always told that the head master of GBHSU8
(the ever stern late Chintamani Acharya Sir) made a special request to my father to admit me to our
school for reasons best known to him! I have never been able to check the veracity of the claim for
fear of canes that adorned the office of our beloved headmaster. We will get back to the canes a little
later in the piece.

Our school was a Boys’ school yet had girls in classes 6th and 7th. Then the name was kind of a
relic from Nehruvian socialist mindset borrowed from communist Russia. It was established in 1968
in temporary quarters. By the time I got admitted in 1977 I think we were still in OUAT Colony UP
School, but the next year we were to have class in the new two story building with a grand
courtyard. One of our favourite past time was to tease a couple of our class mates whose fathers or
relatives used to work for the Public Works Department by trying to scratch off cement or plaster
and estimate how much corruption was there in the mixing of sand and cement and thereby imply
how corrupt the PWD engineers were! While we never thought the school building would last very
long having been built at a time of great hardship, material shortages and corruption, it still stands
as strong as ever almost 40 years later!! A bit like my mother who after giving birth to seven of us
and managing a large unwieldy household all her life always down with some chronic ailment or
other besides being anaemic and undernourished. I am not sure how much of her under-weight
figure suffered from child rearing, regular fasting on all and sundry occasions and managing all of
us and sundry distant relatives who were always around. But like my mother, the school building
has proven to be durable and strong – at least till now. They probably equally share the credit and
the blame for who I am!

Our school operated from three locations! One was the OUAT Upper Primary School in the
Agriculture Colony, the other was the Rajbhavan UP School near Gopabandhu Square towards
Stewart School and the third was the current building which is on the road from Sirirpur to Fire
Station Square. It was perhaps a bit like IIT Bhubaneswar operating from 18 locations in town
before they finally moved most of the operations recently to the Jatani campus!! Our school in 1977
had a brand new building, the most fearsome Head Master, a large student body and a reputation
that was starting to compete with the likes of Capital School, Unit 3 and other government schools
in the city. The memories carefree and innocent childhood years can easily provide fodder for a
novel from another era, but here I can only recount a few gems that one can never forget.
Arakhita was clearly the most important person in the school being the attendant to the Head
Master. You can take chances with the head master himself but not with Arakhita. Mainly because
among his various duties, the one we feared most was his selection of canes for the HM to mete out
capital punishment. The canes were numbered 1 to 10 in chronological order proportionate to the
diameter of their girth and length. While the No 1 was the slimmest and longest, the No 10 was
what we call as the ‘ruler’ was the shortest and the . It was like a club the policeman would wield.
When one among us was caught with an indiscretion, Arakhita was majestically called out to select
the appropriate cane proportional to the gravity of the offence. The slimmest was feared the most
and was reserved for the harshest of punishment where as the No 10 would be used for lighter
punishment. While I don’t recall ever having had the privilege to taste the effect of those ferocious
instruments of teaching-learning process in our school, but the mere sight of them and the stories of
pain heard from classmates was enough to keep most of us on the straight and the narrow.
I still struggle to recall the real name of our Physical Education Teacher (Dibyasingh Biswal) who
was simply known to us as the PT sir not even PET sir – since we wouldn’t even know the
difference between the two acronyms. I am not sure if maintaining discipline through the liberal use
of the cane was part of his job description or not, but essentially that was sir’s full-time role. He was
not a particularly big or imposing person to invoke any kind of fear or anything, but his deliberate
demonstration of the use of the cane on the usual suspects always helped to keep the rest of us fall
in line. I learnt about the British India principle of punishing the whole village to find a culprit to
admit his crime. Every day we would witness the live demonstration of this sacred principle. In the
beginning of every games period, PT sir would ask us to make ‘straight line’ or some times two
straight lines facing each other. Then he would choose one of us in turn to go and fetch a cane from
the nearest fence. This was the most arduous task and feared by all as the cane’s quality and
strength were to be tested first on the fetcher. If you get an ‘Amari’ which is a lightweight and
hollow jute like a weed, it would get broken just in testing, on the other hand, if you went for the
thorny and thin stick of a bamboo species, then you had it! Once the testing was over, our PT sir
would turn his attention to one of us at a time and check out our uniform, hair style, nails, feet with
or without sandals/shoes (none was mandatory as most of us couldn’t afford them!). Any thing
slightly out of place would invite a swish of the cane on our palms. After he had inspected the
parade to his satisfaction we would be ordered to form a circle or two if there were too many of us
present. Then would come the great moment of exhilaration as the only soccer ball that the school
possessed would be tossed in the circle. The drill would be to kick the ball from one to another at
random. If the ball left the circle by mistake being hit in the air or carelessly, then the particular
student had it coming! There were various forms of punishment on offer that were carefully
designed to prepare us for our foray into the armed forces or the para-military. Now that the
government in its infinite wisdom has declared the school zone as ‘Punishment free’ - many of our
juniors are struggling when trying out at the gruelling selections for even Odisha police let alone the
military!
I had also learnt that our teachers those days were experts at imparting education with the utmost
dedication and selflessness. Niladri sir’s love for me could have only been understood if I had been
a mind-reader. He was our NCC teacher and for one year – I think in Class X also the class teacher.
On top of that, he was also the Mathematics teacher. I can never forget the class in which he
distributed the answer scripts of the pre-test or test examination and went on a monologue of tirade
against me since I had scored only 60 out of 100 as opposed to the 100 out of 100 I was always
expected to score (I still treasure that mark-sheet with me). Some how, sir couldn’t address his
disappointment directly at me for reasons best known to me. With out taking my name he warned
me against over-confidence and slipping on my work ethic. It was a lesson for me and held me in
good stead when it came to the board examination in which I duly succeeded in excelling except for
getting placed in Best 10 in the state (missing by 4 marks)! I can not thank Niladri sir enough for
that day and those words which have always stayed with me ever since. It was shocking to learn
many years later that sir passed away at an unusually young age under very very unfortunate
circumstances.
Ambika - a classmate of mine passed away recently. Along with Girija, Ambika was the target of
most physical punishment meted out in the class and outside for innumerable mischiefs. I am sure a
few more of my classmates (Rajesh Behera - ‘Bapu’ being the latest) may have also called it a day
along the way. One I remember distinctly who is no more was Sadique Ahmed. We used to sit next
to each other and he was a fair and lanky chap and was a very decent and good student. He would
always attract the attention of Madhavi for not being able to keep still while reading a passage or
sitting next to me on the bench. Today on the golden jubilee year of the school and my own life, I
fondly remember those friends that fell on the way to cruel hands of fate.

Our school was a natural destination for the children of our colony – the Agriculture Colony
uniquely named after the Odisha University of Agriculture and Technology or OUAT for short. The
staff and faculty of OUAT lived in the government quarters of OUAT Colony. It was small self-
contained community between Siripur – Gopabandhu Square – Jaleswar Mandir Square and Delta
square near our School. May be around 200-300 families – a total of 2000 – 2500 residents
including the slums that had developed to accommodate migrant families from villages all over the
state who would provide the manual labour in our homes. Our childhood consisted of simple
pleasures of life quite unlike what one sees today. After school hours we all would play together in
the afternoon in the nearby open spaces. It started from assorted home-grown games like and kho
kho and graduated to football and cricket as we grew older. Our schoolmates - seniors, classmates
and juniors like Tulu and Dilu, Chandu (Sibasis Maity – MD CTTC), Silu (Sanjib Rout Chairman
of CV Raman Group), were regular play-mates as well as role models. Then there were the Sahu
brothers – five sons of late Sri Madan Sahu – Manoj, Surjit and Satyajeet whom all went to IIT
Kharagpur. They were the role models for most of us who had some academic bent of mind. So
many afternoons we used to spend in surreptitiously hunting for guava and mango from various
neighbour’s gardens! There were no cable TV or smart phones to keep us home and away from
friends. Friendships with classmates like Rabi, Bibhuti, Devdas among so many others that endures
till today.

Some experiences and opportunities provided by the school are never to be forgotten. Looking
back, the opportunity to qualify and secure merit scholarship in Class VII, NTSE scholarship in
class X, attending state level Science Elocution competition on Space Technology and most
remarkably the opportunity to attend the all India Redcross camp in Salem, Tamilnadu which was
critical in my choice to go to REC Trichy for engineering. Whether it was leadership in the NCC
(Air wing) or playing in school football team or leading the morning prayer class and reading the
day’s newspaper headlines, the school gave me ample opportunities to grow. These were critical
moments in my life in those formative years for which I shall for ever remain obliged to my alma-
mater.
Finally, I can never forget Gadadhar Mahapatra sir who gave me the mission in my life in the
couplet he would recite almost at every opportunity to make a point. It went like this...
ଶଶାଢ଼ଢ଼ ବଶାବାଂଧଧ ମମବାଂଡ଼ଡ଼ ଜଧବଧ ରଶାଜ ଦବାଂ|ଡ଼ଡ ଡ଼ଦଖଧ ଜଶାତଧ କମଳ ନଶାଶ କଧ ରବାଂଡ଼ଗ ଚଧତଧତ୍ରିବ ଏ ଜଘନନ ଛବଧ ଭବଧଷନତ
ଇତଧହଶାସ |

Saddhi bandhi munde jibi rajadande dekhi jatikula nasha; Ki range chitriba e jaghanya chhabi
bhabishyata itihasa.

Much later I realised the meaning ingrained in those immortal words attributed I think to
Dharmapada who jumped from the top of Konark not able to contemplate the future that would
befall on his community of sculptors for not being able to complete the Sun temple. Even now
Gadadhar sir comes by my house once in a while. Still wearing his slightly worn dhoti and kurta
and riding his old bicycle. We usually have a cup of tea together and chat about school days. He
invariably makes it a point to recite a sloka and give an elaborate blessing with his hand on my
head. It's those sentiments of a teacher always wishing the best for his students, that makes the
relationship so special and precious. I gratefully remember the blessings of all my teachers past and
present and dedicate this small write-up to them as a humble tribute.

Dhanada Kanta Mishra (tt), 1983 (Sr)