[Reader-list] 'Coming back to Dehra Dun has always made me nervous'

[Shivam]

Dear all,

This 12 years old speech by Vikram Seth gives you insight into the
relationship between a developing individual and society in an
Anglophile boarding school. An Outlook article pasted after the speech
suggests that Doon, for one, is trying to address these concerns.

cheers | shivam

o o o o o o


Founders Day Speech - October 1992

By Vikram Seth 
http://doononline.net/pages/info_features/features_spotlights/spotlights/seth/speech.htm


Headmaster, Members of the Board, ladies and gentlemen, and most of
all, boys and girls too. I should add, because the daughters of
teachers and staff are as much students here as the boys and in fact
seem to win half the art prizes, besides climbing peaks of over 20,000
feet. But for the rest of this talk I shall say boys, and the girls
will forgive me.

I have had a wonderful two days here and, indeed, a very varied two
days. From the athletics competition on the main field yesterday to an
informal tour of Jaipur House (my old house)-and that new house at the
end of Skinnner's field-now what on earth is its name? Ah, yes Oberoi
and a very attractive looking house it is too; architecturally as well
as in terms of its intake, I am sure. From a spirited meeting of the
Board of Governors to a spirit-filled dinner for the Class of '67-the
Old boys and masters at their most reminiscent, the wives yawning
indulgently; from seeing the excellent work of the boys in the art
exhibition and general exhibition this morning to the anticipation of
seeing my own Beastly Tales adapted and performed in half an hour if I
can keep my speech short it has been by turns entertaining and
affecting, fascinating and exhausting. I have generally enjoyed it and
I would like to thank all of you.

So much of my life is tied up with Dehra Dun that being back here
forces me to think of when I first went to Welham at the age of six. I
remember being left by my mother in the care of strangers, reassuring
strangers, suspiciously reassuring and feeling both indignant and
disbelieving that she could dream of going back to Patna without me.
But she did go away, and so did the mothers of all the other new boys,
and we were all in shock for several weeks. But the Welham authorities
were obviously practiced in dealing with the trauma of separation.
Just before dinner every day, we new boys would be led to a bench near
the hospital, and there overlooking the playing field, we would sit.
One boy would begin sobbing, and then another, and then we would all
join in, weeping in concert for half an hour until we were quite
hungry, and could be led gently away to be fed.

Since then, coming back to Dehra Dun has always made me nervous. 

But there are two other reasons why, though I was conscious of the
honour of being invited, I was uneasy about accepting. The first is
that I thoroughly dislike public speaking. But your chairman, Mr.
Lovraj Kumar, I s not only an old friend, but also an extremely
persuasive one, and he made it clear that I was to say yes; he never
said so in so many words, but I felt that it would be both churlish
and arrogant to refuse.

The second reason is more complicated, and I will try to explain it as
well as I can;

A few years ago, after a gap of about sixteen years, I returned to
Doon. I had avoided returning for quite a while: certainly, I had made
no particular effort to come back. But the family was taking a few
days off together in Dehra Dun, and I decided that I would visit my
old school again. I walked around the campus: from the main building
to the tennis courts with their bel trees; those green elephant apple;
those chaltas which made such lethal meteors: pas the hospital, past a
military airplane which I didn't remember from my time here, past a
small temple, the school panchayt, several signs describing the bird
life of the campus, the servants quarters, the backs of Hyderabad and
Kashmir House, at that time Oberoi house did not exist; the new
swimming pool, along Skinners' Field; past Jaipur house and the lichi
trees which I remember having raided from the balcony of my dorm, and
then back across the main field to the Main Building. It turned out to
be a whole parikrama full of new sights and old sights. And at the end
of the circuit, the school bell was ringing, tolling rather, in its
old familiar way and I was brought back to my own school days by the
last few fading notes, and especially the lightness of the last couple
of notes which one could never be completely sure would be the very
last. These last few strokes of the bell, I remember, used to cause me
particular anxiety when I was running a change-in-break and had almost
reached the sanctuary of the main building from the distant border
settlement of Jaipur House. It always seemed unjust to me that the
Tata House boys could virtually saunter through their changes
in-breaks, grinning away, while for us they were like mini-marathons.

Well, this time I was sauntering along myself under a chir pine,
though not exactly grinning, and I remember thinking how beautiful the
School was after all, and rebuking myself for having avoided visiting
it for so many years, and not having kept up with it at all.

The fact of the matter is that I had been pretty unhappy during my
school days and that was why I hadn't wanted to come back to visit. I
did teach here for one term a couple of years after I left, but this
didn't really change my feelings about my school days. People are
always surprised, sometimes even shocked when I say this, and most of
all ex-Doscos, but it is true. Part of it was my own fault-or,
perhaps, I shouldn't say fault, my own character. My brother Shantum,
who followed me five years laters had a good time in school, and kept
up with this school friends better than I did. I, for my part, just
wanted to forget all about School once I'd left; and since I went to a
school in England for a year after Doon, I did not even have to go on
to a college and bump into those who had been my contemporaries at
Doon and this, for me, was an unmixed blessing.

Now it's strange in a way to say that I was unhappy at Doon. After
all, I did well here academically, joined a number of societies,
edited the Weekly, and took part in debates and plays, many of them in
the Rose Bowl itself. Since my reports were good, my parents thought
that I was fine-and said nothing to the contrary. I was kept well
occupied from morning to night. And yet I had a terrible feeling of
loneliness and isolation during my six years' here. Sometimes at
lights out I wished I would never wake up to hear the Chhota Hazri
bell. For days after I left I thought of School as a kind of jungle,
and looked back on it with a shudder.

Now, part of all this- was of course simply the general stress and
strain of adolescence, but part o f it was also the ethos, the
atmosphere of the place. It was a place where sports were almost the
only thing that mattered as far as the boys were concerned. I was
teased and bullied by my classmates and my seniors because of my
interest in studies and reading, because of my lack of interest at
that time in games, because of my unwillingness to join gangs and
groups, because of my height as you can see from the adjustment of the
mikes and most importantly of all because I would get so furious when
I was bullied. No doubt, if in my teens I had been more relaxed about
things, or if I had more of a sense of humor, things wouldn't have
been so bad. But I wasn't, and I didn't, and they were.

Given all this, I had serious doubts about whether I should in all
conscience stand on this stage and so ungratefully talk about my
miserable time here. After a bit of thought and some struggle I
decided I should. For one thing, I learned a lot at Doon, a very great
deal indeed as I will mention later, and I am very grateful for that.
For another, I thought it would be interesting for you and by you I
mean particularly the boys to hear someone who has a somewhat
different view of things from the usual school days were the best days
of my life litany; it might give you heart when you're feeling low or
perplexed. I looked down the list of new boys in an old Weekly
recently, and discovered that about half the new intake consisted of
brothers or sons of Old Boys; so I imagine that many of you know from
experience the kind of gung-ho Old boy guff that I'm referring to.

One of the hardest and most harmful things about school – not just
Doon but any boarding school – is that boys are deprived of the love
and day to day company of their fathers and mothers for two thirds of
the year and possibly for longer, because when they do go back home
for the holidays, parents are often so unused to spending time with
their children that they don't quite know what to do with them even
when they share the same roof. The boys, while growing up, hardly know
what it is like to have a sister. The effect of this lack of family
life, of affection, is very difficult to assess, but I think it has
serious effect on their minds and hearts. It forces them to be more
independent of their parent, certainly, but it also makes them more
emotionally insecure, and as a result more eager, even desperate, to
conform to their peer group, to seek popularity among their
companions, and to appear as tough and cool as possible and as brutal
as possible to those outside the group or younger than themselves.
This culminates after a few years in the ridiculous concern for
privileges and seniority and sometimes abuse of authority that one
often finds among the captains and prefects and monitors; they
exercise authority in the way that one would expect of overgrown
adolescent who has been pushed around without recourse of justice for
years on end and them suddenly finds that he has been given the right
to push other people around. All this was bad enough in my time; from
my conversations with other old boys, I understand that this rampant
bullying by seniors became even worse some years after that. What it
now is like, I have no idea. I met the prefects at lunch today and
enjoyed the meeting greatly. But then, I am just visiting, and it is
impossible to gauge the atmosphere in School in a couple of days.

The concern and care of teachers and housemasters is no real
substitute for the security that comes from the affection of one's
parents. When I was looking down that list of new boys, I asked myself
this question: if I ever get married and have children, would I send
them to Doon – or any other boarding school for that matter? My answer
was that I am not sure.

Now after all I have said so far, you might think that my answer would
have been a resounding no. But the fact of the matter is that there is
another side to things and one which is just as important. I owe a
great deal to my years here and it is necessary to acknowledge this.
Two things that Doon gave me and I will mention just the two most
valuable things – were a sense of equality with boys from very
different backgrounds; the headmaster has already touched upon this
and a wide range of interests outside the purely academic. I'll deal
with the first, first.

The sense of equality was something that Doon never laid any
oppressive stress on, and it was all the more effective for that. It
just happened. Boys dressed in the same uniform regardless of their
parents' wealth. They got the same amount of pocket money. Caste did
not matter, religion did not matter, the part of the country you came
from didn't matter, the social status of your family was unimportant.
It was a considerable sacrifice for my parents to send me and my
brother here, and it was even more difficult for other parents but it
did not matter to us that the boy next to us might be the son of a
millionaire. Nor did it matter to him. Our friendships and enmities
had almost nothing to do with the world outside Chandbagh. This was a
wonderful lesson, and a rare one: one that could not have been taught
in a day school. For though in a day school we would have had the
company and affection and example of our parents, we would also have
absorbed their social prejudices and after school hours, have mixed
largely with children of the same social background, locality and
economic class.

I hope that this sense of equality holds at Doon though I am informed,
again through Weekly, that the dress code has lately been shaken to
its foundations by the invasion of fancy sports shoes the boys will
know what I am talking about. More seriously I also understand that
the geographical mix of boys is much more restricted, than it once
was, which is a pity. (Something, I understand, is being done about
this.) On the other hand, there is a greater range in terms of family
income, because of the larger number of scholarships and part
scholarships that the Headmaster has mentioned and that is excellent
news. In general, it is good to know that differences in wealth
continue to count for little here.

As for my second great debt to Doon-an-all around education, not one
confined to one's studies – one only has to look around the Rose Bowl
to see what I mean. This wonderful theatre was built many years ago by
the boys themselves, some of whom are sitting here, under the guidance
of a master. For me it is a symbol of all that is best about the
School. The shape is inspired by the models of ancient Greece, the
plays acted here have ranged from the dance dramas of Tagore and a
play based on Nehru's Discovery of India to the great plays of
Western, not just English literature: Twelfth Night and Becket and The
Government Inspector and even a lively dated musical version of The
Frogs by Aristophanes where if I remember Elvis competed with the
Beatles and supermen glided down a rope to where the Mushrooms are now
standing. The surroundings too are beautiful. The bamboo there burst
into flower one year before dying and later sprang up again. The skies
provided us with genuine thunder and lightning for the storm scene in
Julius Caesar on the night of the performance. Ther e were quite a few
birds and snakes in that khud over there. But this natural beauty can
be found all over the school: as I mentioned before it was, after all,
the old Forest Research Institute. Living for years in these
surroundings bred in me an unconscious love of nature which was
reinforced by mid-term expeditions to the hills and rivers around, and
which has never deserted me even amid the polluted drabness of large
cities.

I needn't list the other areas outside the classroom where the school
allows one to expand one's interests: debates, art, Indian and Western
music, chess, photography woodwork, special groups and societies for
those interested in science or mathematics, sports of all kinds from
cross-country running to cricket, and social working the
community-including, most particularly, helping out in times of crisis
such as the recent earthquakes. So many schools in these academically
competitive times have narrowed their focus to grades and exams and
college-admission requirements, to the difference, as the Headmaster
mentioned, between 92 and 93 percent, and very little else. Doon has
not.

Nor was this breadth of interest merely a question of the facilities
available here. What was crucial was that certain teachers, I won't
say very many, but certainly a few themselves embodied this wider
vision for a full life. I was very lucky indeed to have, both as
housemaster and as teacher, a man whose active interests ranged from
mountaineering to Mozart, from the poetry of Ghalib and Tennyson
perhaps I should say Tannvson – to the social habits of what he chose
to call " that delightful bird the Rad-chested bulbul." In fact, if
one wanted to avoid a scheduled test on sheep-farming in the
Canterbury plains or some other unexciting but exacting topic, the
most promising technique was to look out of the first floor window of
this classroom in an abstracted way, raise one's hand, and say, "Sir,
please sir, what is that bird, sir, the one that just made the sound
gu-turr, gu-turr?" While perfectly aware of our tactics, Guru was
entirely unable to resist telling us about the bird, and its call, and
its habitat, and its mating season, and its Latin name and the average
length of its beak; and twenty minutes later, we boys, wiser but
unconscious of being wiser, would be smiling to ourselves, secure in
the knowledge that we had flown safely over the Canterbury plains
without being forced to crash land.

People sometimes ask me whether in addition to these two great gifts,
Doon didn't teach me lessons of leadership and character building and
independence of mind. My answer in a word, is no. I don't think I have
leadership qualities anyway, and I certainly don't think that the
system of authority that I talked about earlier leads to great
qualities in leadership. As for character building, I suppose it could
be said that there is a sort of make-or-break aspect of all a taste
for power, perhaps, boarding schools. You learn to cope or else you
collapse. I finally learned to cope with my solitude; but any real
strength or warmth of character came to me later and in surroundings
where I could choose my company and was more at ease with myself. As
for independence of mind, I don't think Doon helped me. As I
explained, the ethos was one of conformity, of fear of public opinion,
of hostility to anyone who was eccentric or odd in any way. I very
much hope that this has changed or is changing.

It is difficult even at the age of forty to think for oneself, to take
an independent stance, to speak one's mind, to accept that one might
make oneself unpopular by doing so, in short to trust in oneself. At
fifteen it requires great courage, and I just did not have it. I lay
low and muttered resentfully and thought that perhaps there was
something wrong with me that I didn't fit in. I hope that you boys
have an easier time of it. Remember, there is such a thing Life After
School. I hope that later you will treat your school days in
perspective, and not get obsessed by tem one way or another. There is
nothing sadder than someone who has done nothing solid or independent
in life clinging to his old school tie for a sense of his own worth –
or, more absurdly still, for his sense of superiority over others. On
the other hand, it would be a pity if you allowed a few unhappy or
traumatic incidents of your school years (which now form such a large
proportion of your life) to haunt you down the decades. If they do
haunt you, so, I hope, will the redeeming beauty of the fines of our
assembly prayers one of which we heard earlier this evening. The only
way you can come to balance the good with the bad is through the habit
of independent thought.

Both now and later, and whether or not your environment encourages to
do so, try to think things out independently. Just because someone in
authority says something does not mean you should believe it. Think it
out. Think it through. Don't take important matters on trust.
Obviously one does not have the time to think out everything but
important matters one just has to think out by oneself; examine public
opinion, especially that part of public opinion that you have almost
made your own. Ask yourself when necessary what it is that you want to
do in life – perhaps for yourself, perhaps for the world around you.
If there is something deep within you, whether personal or
professional, that pulls you one way, and you have discussed the
matter with yourself and come to a clear conclusion, don't let the
wish to be thought of as a good chap force you in the opposite
direction. You may not be successful or popular in the eyes of the
world – or you may be successful only incidentally but you will have
lived your own life, the only one that is to a fair extent in your
control, the only one that you have. It passes far too quickly, and
soon it is over. I myself can hardly believe that I have reached the
conventional halfway mark.

And whatever you choose to do don't give up too easily. Accept that
acceptance will be slow in coming, if indeed it comes at all. The
headmaster has said very generous things about my work, and I am
delighted that my Beasts, despite their strange ways have been so well
received here. People tell me that I am a successful author, and I
suppose in a sense its true. What people notice, however is the
successes; how many failures and near failures I have had no one
knows. But in life and in work, one must take failure as not just
acceptable but inevitable. As a writer you may wrestle for weeks with
a single page of a novel, or a single stanza of a poem, and it may
still not come out right. Or you may send out a manuscript that you
have sweated on for years to one publisher after another, and be
turned down again and again. The rejections come, and the hurt, but
what is more important than any of the rejections is the one
acceptance that may possibly arrive. I am sure that in other fields,
whether scientific or academic or industrial or political, the same is
true. In love, too, it doesn't matter how many times you are rejected;
its that one acceptance by someone you love that matters.

I admit that is not a very romantic or indeed a poetical thought to
end with; but I am off-duty as a poet today. Anyway, I reckon that you
will find my Beasts more entertaining, and certainly more poetical,
than me. And in addition they have the advantage of succinctness in
speech; they are confined to the rhyming couplets, their rhyming
iambic tetrameter couplets and their author can (and does) cut them
off when they're been talking too long.

To their relief and perhaps to yours, I shall end here. I do wish you
all the very best.

o o o o o o o

The Doon School, Dehra Dun

Outlook Magazine: December 4th, 2001

ARIJIT BARMAN
http://www.doononline.net/pages/info_features/pressroom/press51.htm

Doon is now chalking out a blueprint for the future with its most
ambitious aim: to carve a place among the 10 best schools of the
world.

Think of a 65-year-old residential school nestled in the Shivaliks
that strives to serve the individual talent of every boy against an
age-old system of regimentation. Think again of an institution
modelled on the much-hallowed British public schools but doing away
with the usual draconian regimes. That's Doon School. In its
democratic environment, students take key decisions on various issues
and learn to combine freedom with responsibility. More importantly,
they develop a bond, the essence of a family that transcends
hierarchies and set rules. It's indeed a home away from home for all
the 500 boys who spend six crucial years of their adolescence amidst
sylvan surroundings.

"We encourage all our students to believe they are stakeholders in the
school. They are groomed to participate in the business of life
working in a community," says headmaster John Mason. It's not
surprising therefore to find a student waking up a housemaster for a
midnight snack.

Handling so many adolescent boys is a challenging proposition and the
housemasters, matrons and the tutors double up as guides, focusing on
the various facets of personal development. Moreover, a discreet
counselling service also delves into personal or inter-personal
dynamics of living in residence.

The personal interaction—be it in the classroom or in the dinning room
or even on the cricket field—nurtures the student-teacher
relationship. Every class has a maximum of 24 students which makes it
easier for the teacher to personally monitor individuals. "We prepare
hand-written notes on each of the boys and invite parental feedback...
It's like an extended family," says deputy headmaster Jayant Lal.

It's only after Class 6 that a child can get admission to Doon after a
national-level written test and interview. Failing which you get a
chance to sit for an exam again at Class 7 level. Annual fees amount
to a little over Rs 1 lakh. The school's management also spends Rs 35
lakh annually on need-based scholarships from a Rs 4-crore corpus to
make it accessible to all and is now also keen to look beyond
scholastics and admit budding talents of the performing arts.

It has been a long endeavour to produce a youthful corps d'elite—from
Rajiv Gandhi, Karan Singh, Vikram Seth, Arun Bharatram to Suman Dubey,
Prannoy Roy and Roshan Seth. Doon is now chalking out a blueprint for
the future with its most ambitious aim: to carve a place among the 10
best schools of the world.