XIB - Commerce

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The Cathedral Commerce batch of 1973 was class XIB under the shrill charge of the famous “ Cuckoo “ as Mr. Pande our Hindi master was fondly known. Mr. Pande was both strict and caring and, more importantly, totally unconcerned about disciplinary breaches in other teachers’ periods… in short the perfect classmaster ! Dr. Nahni Davar, (the father of our class’ fastest writer, speaker and bowlers Darab) taught Accountancy while his sister Mrs. Madan was our commerce teacher. Both of them found our class a lot less receptive to knowledge than their students at Davar’s College.

Atmaram Narayana Rao , a maths wizard and thorough gentleman had the misfortune of teaching us Commercial arithmetic. We paid great attention to the nuances of his pronunciations especially in Geometry class where he said “yem” for “m”, “yen” for “n” and “voh” for “o”. GETOUUUT was his favourite chant to many of us who spent more time outside his class than in it!

Miss Hallegua tried her hardest to make us proficient in English language and literature but most of us were busier speaking English than learning it. You could say that we found Blake boring, Steinbeck somnambulant and Shakespeare stupefying!

Mrs. Karat taught geography as confidently as Goh Cheng Leong wrote about the subject, sadly her interpretation of this fascinating subject was somewhere between simplistic and fictional and none of us mastered it! Manu Daftary topped our class with a paltry 67% in geography, rumour has it that the secret of his modest success was a tutor from outside the school.

Our classroom adjoined the main hall and our class had a special affinity for our location. ‘ The Bomb Squad” originated in XIB, a team of ferociously committed boys who spent our early mornings before school setting up time-delayed fireworks which would explode on stage during the senior school assembly. It was a delight watching Mr. Newton, the vice principal leap in fear on stage as one of our Son et lumiere shows would bring the assembly to a halt, the pain of recent canings by him was pleasantly replaced by the joy of watching him quiver!

XIB’s main claim to fame was its large population of incredibly raucous, long haired, indisciplined boys: Neville Sethna, Sanjeev Rajwar, Sanjiv Agarwal, Adi Jehangir,( all co-incidentally Savageites!) Rustom Jejeebhoy, Bharat Sheth and yours truly were the main members of the cast. Strangely all these hooligans finished the ISC exam with 1st class results, which was more than could be said for some of our more studious brethren.

Umrigar, Ahuja and Ganguly were the male prefects of our class and out of necessity became expert “artful dodgers” who ensured that others were nabbed for their crimes.

We had just eight girls in our class:
- Anna Thomas the Throwball colossus and Palmer house captain
- Amrita Matthews who played basketball like Kobe Bryant but looked like Halle Berry
- Geeta Andhare, who was Mrs. Karat’s pet
- Anahita Engineer a gifted elocutionist and pianist
- Binaifer who was superb at accountancy
- Falguni of the Chimanlals stationery family fame
- Madhulika who I have heard married an Italian and
- Kavita Sayal who was easily the most cheerful of the lot.

What, I sometimes wonder, do we all remember about things we studied; Bank reconciliations, South West monsoons, Blake’s “Tiger”, thirty seven years after we first learnt about these things? Not a whole lot I am sure! Yet, I remember every name and every face of every classmate from 1973!

As Keats wrote in “Ode to Autumn” which we dissected and learnt backwards, our school-leaving year was truly a “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness".

- Behram Gamadia