We were a gang of four. From the village of Idigarai, we cycled along a narrow mud road to PSG College of Arts and Sciences, everyday. We were alone for the most part of the 20 kilometres — sometimes, we came across a lone farmer tending to his fields or a passing traveller. When it rained, the road would be covered in slush, there were no tar roads back then. On Sundays, we watched football matches at Park Gate Grounds. There used to be a team called ‘Peelamedu Blues'.
The four of us started a reading room for students in our village. We called it ‘Bharathi padippagam'. We went door to door, asking for old books, magazines and the previous day's Dinamani . We collected about 300 books and set up the reading room in a temple.
A lot of students made good use of the place. It was open from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. We also brought out a manuscript magazine (a hand-written magazine) called Thendral . Our village can be called the ‘Oxford of Coimbatore'. In 1926, Karivaradha Rajalu Naidu initiated the opening of a middle school in Idigarai. It was the only school in the vicinity. People came in droves to admit their children there. In the mornings, the village resembled a thaer kootam — bullock carts, cycles and horse drawn carts thronged the school. Imagine, there were children form 45 villages studying there! It is said that Rabindranath Tagore visited the school when he came to Sarvajana High School in the city.
Those days, people dressed in veshtis , irrespective of their economic background. The only difference was that those who were well-off wore pure white ones. Though we wore shorts to school, at the end of the day, it was the veshti we changed into. It was comfortable and modest.
Long journeys
Nobody thought twice about long distances — be it four miles or five, we either walked or cycled. It was to college that I first took a train. I would walk two miles from Idigarai to the Puthupalayam railway station to board a train to Coimbatore. I can never forget the station at Puthupalayam — it did not have a station master, let alone a single structure that one would associate with a railway station. Every time the train stopped there, a station master would hop off the train, dispense tickets from a rundown shack in the platform and hop back in to the train!
The Gandhi Memorial Library in VOC Park was the biggest library in the city. We spent a great deal of time reading there. The Arthur Hope College of Technology on Avanashi Road (relocated and renamed Government College of Technology) was the first engineering college in the city, built by G.D. Naidu.
In the year 1950, I remember having lunch one afternoon in the college hostel with my brother, who belonged to the last B.E. batch that passed out form the college.
In 1958, I joined Mani Higher Secondary School as a Math and English teacher. Students, those days had few distractions. There were no televisions and mobile phones. After school, every child would be in the play ground. There was a craze for football back then. In the evenings, children were either playing or watching a game in progress.
Those days, engineering and medicine were not the most-sought after courses. Students chose subjects that they were interested in. Parents rarely pressurised children to study — the obsession for high marks was not there. When I was the class teacher for the ninth standard in Mani High School, my students put together a manuscript magazine. Such magazines were in vogue those days. Students would contribute drawings, poems and essays which would be bound together and passed around in class.
Celebrating leaders
Special occasions such as school days and Independence Day were celebrated at Thiyagi N.G. Ramasamy Memorial High School. Classes were named after leaders such as Gandhi, Nethaji and Nehru, and each class took turns to organise cultural programmes around their leader.
For instance, the theme of a school day celebrations would be Nethaji if Nethaji House was in charge. There would be kummi , kolattam and dramas about Nethaji's life. In all my years as a teacher, one student stands out. The other teachers had branded him a ‘problem child'. Though not particularly bright, he was extremely good in football. When I was teaching degrees of comparison in class one day, I used his name to illustrate the point. I said: ‘He is the best football player in the class.' That day on, he became my pet student!
