A visit to one's old school inevitably unlocks the floodgates of memory. Pensively strolling down the corridors of my Alma Mater in Tiruchi recently, I was transported back to the heyday of corporal punishment in the 1960s — so feared and resented by students then as now but, in mature retrospect, so indispensable to discipline unruly boys and keep them from running amok.
Considered an effective panacea for any form of delinquency, physical punishment was always the first choice of our prefects and teachers rather than the last resort. And it came in handy for just about anything — from planting pins in classroom benches with the business end up, to sneaking out of the dormitory for a late-night movie or naively proclaiming one's undying love in a passionate letter to the lass next door.
The traditional ‘cuts' that left our palms numb were then gradually giving way to more innovative forms of punishment. The boarding master, a veritable martinet, excelled in administering what were euphemistically termed “benders” in school parlance — a caning on one's posterior that raised red welts and left one with a fervent resolve never to be mischievous again. Even more dreaded were his “six of the best” on one's behind — guaranteed to permanently reform the most incorrigible mischief-maker. Indeed, for sheer deterrent effect the boarding master's “benders” were unbeatable!
Another ardent believer in the efficacy of caning was the forbidding warden. He stalked the school's corridors with a cane tucked up his sleeve, spying through classroom windows on unwary students fooling around behind the teacher's back. Pranksters would be promptly summoned out for a thrashing on their trotters that left them squirming and hopping around painfully on one foot like demented dervishes. Oddly enough, to the warden, a boy's legs were his Achilles heel.
Novel methods
When he wasn't preoccupied with hiking his sagging trousers up to his armpits, our Hindi teacher strove unsuccessfully to instil a love of the language in us. Never one to give up, he plied us with homework and every morning dutifully lined up those who had botched theirs for a novel punishment known as kottoos in Tamil — a couple of sharp thumps on the head with his clenched knuckles, in an apparent bid to reactivate our dormant brains. The fact that he sometimes came close to bruising his fingers on our armour-plated skulls never deterred him. Indeed I recall two classmates who sometimes attributed their short stature to the regular receipt of these “growth suppressors” as someone jocularly termed the punishment!
Saddled with a bunch of dim-wits like us, our dapper mathematics and geometry teacher's patience was often similarly taxed. Indeed he sometimes lamented that trying to explain Pythagoras' theorem to us had reduced him to a pythiakaran (Tamil for ‘lunatic'). His favourite punishment for misbehaviour and miscalculations tended to hasten the onset of premature arthritis of the fingers: a series of sharp raps on the knuckles with a ruler that raised a jarring chorus of agonised “Ouches!” and “Aahs!” and all but immobilised one's digits.
On the other hand, our stentorian-voiced Tamil teacher and NCC drillmaster often came pretty close to tweaking our ears off our heads for ungrammatical Tamil sentences, misspellings or marching out of step at parade. He loved to latch on to one's ear like a limpet, making it appear as if he was trying to hoist one by this appendage. Needless to say, the lingering redness of one's flapper eloquently reflected the none-too-tender nature of his ministrations.
Mild-mannered though he was, our geography teacher was an avid practitioner of the crab-like pinch expertly administered to the fleshier part of one's upper arm, making one writhe like a contortionist. What lent comic relief to the situation was that he would grimace, most funnily, as though he was experiencing the searing pain he was inflicting!
Moulding minds
Looking back, in those distant days our well-intentioned teachers did readily resort to several variants of a well-known dictum: A whack on the back administered hard enough, often enough and low enough develops character. However, their underlying aim was to tame, rather than maim, irrepressible and over-exuberant spirits. In the process I suppose they moulded not only a student's mind but also perhaps a bit of his anatomy!
