Bale Balle Srinagar to Amritsar!

As i stated in my previous post, we left Srinagar as my dad got posted to Amritsar(Punjab).

I was quite anxious to see what my new school would be like. I was admitted to the Army School inside the Army Cantonment. The first day in class wasn't very bright. Although I knew no one, I made friends quickly with a few people. They seemed nice to me. Others were a bit rowdy and looked much older than me. As usual I had only one aim in mind, to top the class.

Amritsar is a nice place. We were given a flat in the army colony. I made friends with some of the people in the neighborhood. Me and my little brother used to go to the club and play badminton and table tennis. But since we had shifted in mid year, we had to cover up a lot of portion of our respective courses.

The mid term exams came, and I topped them. Although the next best wasn't far behind, it was a good feeling. The thing that struck my mom was that i had done poorly in maths. She advised and later forced me to join a tuition for the same. A teacher in our school used to teach a group of students after school time. He used to take maths and science for a very nominal fee.

Till that time I had been totally against tuition. My dad had once told me that he never studied an tuition. Also when my grandad forced him to take extra chemistry lessons, my dad asked him such difficult doubts that his tutor left the job. This made me think that tuition was for slowpokes and duds. But i wasn't a dud. I resented but eventually had to give in to my mother's sayings.

In the meantime, i made a very good friend. His name was Navjot. He was a very friendly person with a very good sense of humor. We used to laugh in class irrespective of the fact whether the teacher was present in the class, or not. One day it got too far. We were caught laughing around 10-12 times in a gap of 10 mins by our maths teacher. She was furious and to make the situation worse, we were hysterical with laughter. Even her threats of taking to the principal couldn't wipe the grins off our faces.

It was towards the end of the year that we got to participate in the much talked about "Limca Book of Records Quiz". It was hosted every year by Mr Barry O' Brien. I was very excited. There were three of us, myself, Dipanjan and Anjani. The latter two were 2nd and 3rd in class respectively. We mugged all sorts of books for the quiz. The day of the quiz arrived, we were a bit nervous but we knew we couldn't do much. The quiz had an elimination round from which only the first 8 teams would get a chance to go on stage. We were all the more releived that we didn't stand a chance now that we were competing with 250 schools from all over the country.(we didn't want to get on stage and look like dumb people.) Anyways, the quiz started and we started searching the answers on each other's faces. We hardly knew anything. Finally the tormenting elims was over. We were almost ready to go, but the teacher accompanying us wanted us to look at the results once. So we stayed back. We were shocked to hear that we were the third team to qualify for the finals. But on stage we couldn't hold on. We came 7th out of the 8 teams on stage!

The year came to an end and I topped the finals too. This time much more convincingly than before. I was contended with myself and my studies. My parents were happy. I also started to take the tuition more seriously as it helped a great deal. We were about to be promoted to class 10th but then, a rumor went around that good students were going to be equally divided between two sections. This hurt me and many other students. As i had made a lot of friends which would go into the other section if this sort of thing was implemented.