Never a dull moment

  Our school requested us, old boys, for articles for school magazine. Only after penning my piece, I was told they need a 300 words one against my 1000 words piece. Why waste it when I can use it to make my friends suffer ! Here is the long piece. Walking down the memory lane Having spent six years from 1970 to 1976 across three sections, where do I start my memoirs ? After some thought, I have chosen our days in class XI as focal point. I had taken my own sweet time to switch to long trousers. I wore shorts till class X. So when I turned up after summer holidays in full length trousers in XI E, some friends made some appreciating noises to the effect that I was finally growing up ! Class seating was in strict alphabetic order and found myself sandwiched between Sasikumar and Suresh Thomas. The seating was a single seater row, two three seater row and a single seater row adjoining the windows. As befitting my name, I was towards to fag end of the class. There was a choice to ma...

  Train! Train! Cigarette packets and match boxes were my Lego bricks. From childhood, I have been fascinated by trains and buses. A wooden red and yellow bus with "Kottayam" in Malayalam was my favourite toy. I would suddenly feel thirsty on entering platform no 1 of Trichur railway station. My dad knew my thirst was induced by the stock at the shop at entrance - Coke and Fanta. Dad used to oblige me. I used to make trains out of match boxes and cigarette packets. My dad was a smoker and that helped me build up my railway rolling stock faster than my friends. I used empty biscuit cartons and LG Asafoetida packs to building stations and overhead walk ways. Longer the train, tougher it was to make it travel in a straight line. Out of curiosity, I used to assemble railway system well into my high school days whenever I could gather long slender empty packs for stations. Nowadays all cigarette packets have flip open tops. Till the turn of the century, only premium brands had fli...