A Boy Called Granny — Part 2

Hollywood's response to the rise of television were the revolutionary widescreen colour film movie technologies of the 1950s: Technicolor, CinemaScope and Deluxe. However, the film reels of my school days need no fancy technology; they spin on neural projectors which beam the moving images on a mental silver screen. Everything is housed inside the theatre of my imagination and visualisation where I am the sole viewer.

In quieter moments and without Bluetooth ear-buds, I can also clearly hear the sounds from my past in true Dolby Stereo.

Special talents attract ‘special forces’

The above are dangerous admissions that could prompt the government to ‘use’ my talents to ‘serve the national interest’. I certainly shall not mind serving as long as the government displays fine taste by hauling me blonde-folded to a pink chamber with mirrors, and where men in black might ‘help’ mould the ‘free will’ using only that fizzy orange creation of the Nazis: Fanta.

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A Boy Called Granny — Part 1

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
—George Santayana (The Life of Reason, 1905)

The above is a celebrated quote but by George, my natural ability to remember the past in great detail almost always saves me from being condemned to repeat it but not before I pay a certain price: that of having schoolmates and class-fellows without an appetite for reading my 'lengthy' chronicles that often disclose details they would rather ‘forget and move on in life’.

Serious education

To an educated person, the formative years of school always remain the most important ones in life. Without ever spending two years in any class, I sailed from one to ten, section-B, within a decade to enter college.

This story starts at St. Anthony’s High School of Lahore in 1970. The class-teacher of seven-B was a stocky Anglo-Indian named Mr. Joseph and whose heavy punishing hand scared the trousers off the students.

His favourite instrument of torture was a 1/4-inch thick wooden foot-ruler that landed as flat on our palms as a bad joke did. Mercifully, he never used the ruler’s metal edge to punish us when things got out of hand. The photo here is that of the same ruler (without its metal edge) which I preserved for posterity.

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