Man From Matunga

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March 23, 2000

Don Bosco, Matunga

I had gone to school last year, on an invitation from one of the teachers. It was an Annual Day function and the school had put up "Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamboat", an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. It was an amazing performance and it was easy to forget that the average age of the actors was around 10 years and that this was an all-boys school. The boys who played the mothers, sisters and other female characters and especially the one who played the belly dancer, were all amazing. It took me back to the time when I was part of the chorus in Oedipus Rex and all the characters, including Oedipus' mother and fiancee, were played by us. No one would ever have been able to tell the absence of girls in the cast. And if you think that playing female roles leaves lasting scars on the psyche of the actors, forget it!

This incident got me thinking.

Which is the best school in Mumbai?

I accept the fact that for most people, the schools they went to, are usually the best. Looking back nostalgically through rose-tinted glasses and seeing the teachers, classrooms and fellow students through sepia-tinted memories, generally clouds out all the imperfections and drawbacks that the schools might have had. We think back longingly of supposedly carefree days, forgetting the weight of the schoolbags on our backs and land up thinking fondly of our friends and colleagues, though many of them were, and probably still are, perfect assholes.

Thinking about schooldays makes the best people mushy, forgetful and stupid.

So please go through this rationally!

Which is the only school in Mumbai that
- apart from doing well academically, consistently outperforms other schools in hockey, football and basketball!
- has the largest grounds of any school in Mumbai and has its own hockey, football and cricket pitches, basketball, volleyball and tennis courts, billiards, table-tennis, carrom and badminton facilities!
- actively trains you in elocution, debate and public speaking!
- produces musicals year after year with lavish production values and performances that could actually be taken downtown to the theatres!
- consistently produces over-achievers!

When I sit and rationally talk about these things, people who have studied in other schools get completely carried away and start calling me "dabba batli" or "buggered boy-school product" and eventually the argument degenerates into more name-calling. The women, especially if they have studied in the neighboring girl schools of Auxilium Convent or J B Vachha or have been to Khalsa College, which is across the road, also have choice expletives reserved for our supposed boorish behavior towards them.

Let me list the drawbacks of the school to put things in an even better perspective!
- it is an all-boys school!
- the students are overconfident and proud!
- the school has not produced any toppers in the SSC boards!
- the stress on studies is less than in other schools!
- there is an excessive Catholic environment!

Are "all-boys" school bad? Are co-ed schools better? I am not sure. The freedom, especially in the latter years of school, of not having to watch your step and words all the time because of the opposite sex, is probably worth the loss of not having the other sex around. And I think the same argument would work vis-à-vis all-girls schools and co-ed schools. The only difference between co-ed and non-co-ed schools may be that instead of fantasizing about each other, boys from all-boys schools and girls from all-girls schools often land up with crushes on their respective teachers. Is that such a big deal?

Overconfident and proud? If a school produces well-rounded individuals, with a good, balanced academic and extra-curricular education, is it to blame if the students generally outshine and outperform their peers and show a level of confidence, a notch higher than others? This is also probably the reason why the school does not produce a large number of toppers in the SSC boards; the accent is on an all-round education not just a repeated mugging of an idiotic syllabus. Is that bad?

Catholic overtones run through the school, as they would in any convent school. I knew "Our Father in Heaven", better than my Jain prayers, and I still quake a little in front of the "fathers" and "brothers", but beyond that I don't think my religious beliefs or non-beliefs have been particularly affected by the school. And this goes for most of my friends and colleagues.

Don Bosco, Matunga has an amazing location. It shares a four-way crossing with Khalsa College, a decent general-purpose college, VJTI, a premier engineering institute, and UDCT, probably the best chemical engineering college in India. Students have actually jumped from Bosco to Khalsa to VJTI or UDCT and then to the US.

Situated in two huge buildings, with a lovely church in between, space has never been a problem. This by itself should make a major difference in Mumbai when choosing schools. Though the number of students per class has gone up significantly, keeping pace with the general trend in the city, the classrooms are still not congested and individual teacher attention still exists.

What more can one ask for?

Why am I indulging in such overt jingoism? Because I am trying to convince my wife to send our son to Don Bosco, which is a three-minute walk away from home, rather than to a co-ed school, which is a 15 minutes drive away. Unfortunately she is from J B Vachha, a nearby all-girls school, and has a poor opinion of Boscoites, stemming from the days when they would stand outside her school and whistle at her and her friends. As if co-ed students are saints.

And eventually, she did marry me, didn't she!

Posted by bhavinj at March 23, 2000 07:38 PM

Comments

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