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Special thanks to David MacDougall for sending this to Doon Online. The speech was first published in The Doon School WeeklyHeadmaster, Members of the Board, ladies and gentlemen, and most of all, boys and girls too. I should add, because the daughters of teachers and staff are as much students here as the boys and in fact seem to win half the art prizes, besides climbing peaks of over 20,000 feet. But for the rest of this talk I shall say boys, and the girls will forgive me.
I have had a wonderful two days here and, indeed, a very varied two days. From the athletics competition on the main field yesterday to an informal tour of Jaipur House (my old house)-and that new house at the end of Skinnner’s field-now what on earth is its name? Ah, yes Oberoi and a very attractive looking house it is too; architecturally as well as in terms of its intake, I am sure. From a spirited meeting of the Board of Governors to a spirit-filled dinner for the Class of ’67-the Old boys and masters at their most reminiscent, the wives yawning indulgently; from seeing the excellent work of the boys in the art exhibition and general exhibition this morning to the anticipation of seeing my own Beastly Tales adapted and performed in half an hour if I can keep my speech short it has been by turns entertaining and affecting, fascinating and exhausting. I have generally enjoyed it and I would like to thank all of you.
So much of my life is tied up with Dehra Dun that being back here forces me to think of when I first went to Welham at the age of six. I remember being left by my mother in the care of strangers, reassuring strangers, suspiciously reassuring and feeling both indignant and disbelieving that she could dream of going back to Patna without me. But she did go away, and so did the mothers of all the other new boys, and we were all in shock for several weeks. But the Welham authorities were obviously practiced in dealing with the trauma of separation. Just before dinner every day, we new boys would be led to a bench near the hospital, and there overlooking the playing field, we would sit. One boy would begin sobbing, and then another, and then we would all join in, weeping in concert for half an hour until we were quite hungry, and could be led gently away to be fed.
Since then, coming back to Dehra Dun has always made me nervous.
But there are two other reasons why, though I was conscious of the honour of being invited, I was uneasy about accepting. The first is that I thoroughly dislike public speaking. But your chairman, Mr. Lovraj Kumar, I s not only an old friend, but also an extremely persuasive one, and he made it clear that I was to say yes; he never said so in so many words, but I felt that it would be both churlish and arrogant to refuse.
The second reason is more complicated, and I will try to explain it as well as I can;
A few years ago, after a gap of about sixteen years, I returned to Doon. I had avoided returning for quite a while: certainly, I had made no particular effort to come back. But the family was taking a few days off together in Dehra Dun, and I decided that I would visit my old school again. I walked around the campus: from the main building to the tennis courts with their bel trees; those green elephant apple; those chaltas which made such lethal meteors: pas the hospital, past a military airplane which I didn’t remember from my time here, past a small temple, the school panchayt, several signs describing the bird life of the campus, the servants quarters, the backs of Hyderabad and Kashmir House, at that time Oberoi house did not exist; the new swimming pool, along Skinners’ Field; past Jaipur house and the lichi trees which I remember having raided from the balcony of my dorm, and then back across the main field to the Main Building. It turned out to be a whole parikrama full of new sights and old sights. And at the end of the circuit, the school bell was ringing, tolling rather, in its old familiar way and I was brought back to my own school days by the last few fading notes, and especially the lightness of the last couple of notes which one could never be completely sure would be the very last. These last few strokes of the bell, I remember, used to cause me particular anxiety when I was running a change-in-break and had almost reached the sanctuary of the main building from the distant border settlement of Jaipur House. It always seemed unjust to me that the Tata House boys could virtually saunter through their changes in-breaks, grinning away, while for us they were like mini-marathons.
Well, this time I was sauntering along myself under a chir pine, though not exactly grinning, and I remember thinking how beautiful the School was after all, and rebuking myself for having avoided visiting it for so many years, and not having kept up with it at all.
The fact of the matter is that I had been pretty unhappy during my school days and that was why I hadn’t wanted to come back to visit. I did teach here for one term a couple of years after I left, but this didn’t really change my feelings about my school days. People are always surprised, sometimes even shocked when I say this, and most of all ex-Doscos, but it is true. Part of it was my own fault-or, perhaps, I shouldn’t say fault, my own character. My brother Shantum, who followed me five years laters had a good time in school, and kept up with this school friends better than I did. I, for my part, just wanted to forget all about School once I’d left; and since I went to a school in England for a year after Doon, I did not even have to go on to a college and bump into those who had been my contemporaries at Doon and this, for me, was an unmixed blessing.
Now it’s strange in a way to say that I was unhappy at Doon. After all, I did well here academically, joined a number of societies, edited the Weekly, and took part in debates and plays, many of them in the Rose Bowl itself. Since my reports were good, my parents thought that I was fine-and said nothing to the contrary. I was kept well occupied from morning to night. And yet I had a terrible feeling of loneliness and isolation during my six years’ here. Sometimes at lights out I wished I would never wake up to hear the Chhota Hazri bell. For days after I left I thought of School as a kind of jungle, and looked back on it with a shudder.
Now, part of all this- was of course simply the general stress and strain of adolescence, but part o f it was also the ethos, the atmosphere of the place. It was a place where sports were almost the only thing that mattered as far as the boys were concerned. I was teased and bullied by my classmates and my seniors because of my interest in studies and reading, because of my lack of interest at that time in games, because of my unwillingness to join gangs and groups, because of my height as you can see from the adjustment of the mikes and most importantly of all because I would get so furious when I was bullied. No doubt, if in my teens I had been more relaxed about things, or if I had more of a sense of humor, things wouldn’t have been so bad. But I wasn’t, and I didn’t, and they were.
Given all this, I had serious doubts about whether I should in all conscience stand on this stage and so ungratefully talk about my miserable time here. After a bit of thought and some struggle I decided I should. For one thing, I learned a lot at Doon, a very great deal indeed as I will mention later, and I am very grateful for that. For another, I thought it would be interesting for you and by you I mean particularly the boys to hear someone who has a somewhat different view of things from the usual school days were the best days of my life litany; it might give you heart when you’re feeling low or perplexed. I looked down the list of new boys in an old Weekly recently, and discovered that about half the new intake consisted of brothers or sons of Old Boys; so I imagine that many of you know from experience the kind of gung-ho Old boy guff that I’m referring to.
One of the hardest and most harmful things about school – not just Doon but any boarding school – is that boys are deprived of the love and day to day company of their fathers and mothers for two thirds of the year and possibly for longer, because when they do go back home for the holidays, parents are often so unused to spending time with their children that they don’t quite know what to do with them even when they share the same roof. The boys, while growing up, hardly know what it is like to have a sister. The effect of this lack of family life, of affection, is very difficult to assess, but I think it has serious effect on their minds and hearts. It forces them to be more independent of their parent, certainly, but it also makes them more emotionally insecure, and as a result more eager, even desperate, to conform to their peer group, to seek popularity among their companions, and to appear as tough and cool as possible and as brutal as possible to those outside the group or younger than themselves. This culminates after a few years in the ridiculous concern for privileges and seniority and sometimes abuse of authority that one often finds among the captains and prefects and monitors; they exercise authority in the way that one would expect of overgrown adolescent who has been pushed around without recourse of justice for years on end and them suddenly finds that he has been given the right to push other people around. All this was bad enough in my time; from my conversations with other old boys, I understand that this rampant bullying by seniors became even worse some years after that. What it now is like, I have no idea. I met the prefects at lunch today and enjoyed the meeting greatly. But then, I am just visiting, and it is impossible to gauge the atmosphere in School in a couple of days.
The concern and care of teachers and housemasters is no real substitute for the security that comes from the affection of one’s parents. When I was looking down that list of new boys, I asked myself this question: if I ever get married and have children, would I send them to Doon – or any other boarding school for that matter? My answer was that I am not sure.
Now after all I have said so far, you might think that my answer would have been a resounding no. But the fact of the matter is that there is another side to things and one which is just as important. I owe a great deal to my years here and it is necessary to acknowledge this. Two things that Doon gave me and I will mention just the two most valuable things – were a sense of equality with boys from very different backgrounds; the headmaster has already touched upon this and a wide range of interests outside the purely academic. I’ll deal with the first, first.
The sense of equality was something that Doon never laid any oppressive stress on, and it was all the more effective for that. It just happened. Boys dressed in the same uniform regardless of their parents’ wealth. They got the same amount of pocket money. Caste did not matter, religion did not matter, the part of the country you came from didn’t matter, the social status of your family was unimportant. It was a considerable sacrifice for my parents to send me and my brother here, and it was even more difficult for other parents but it did not matter to us that the boy next to us might be the son of a millionaire. Nor did it matter to him. Our friendships and enmities had almost nothing to do with the world outside Chandbagh. This was a wonderful lesson, and a rare one: one that could not have been taught in a day school. For though in a day school we would have had the company and affection and example of our parents, we would also have absorbed their social prejudices and after school hours, have mixed largely with children of the same social background, locality and economic class.
I hope that this sense of equality holds at Doon though I am informed, again through Weekly, that the dress code has lately been shaken to its foundations by the invasion of fancy sports shoes the boys will know what I am talking about. More seriously I also understand that the geographical mix of boys is much more restricted, than it once was, which is a pity. (Something, I understand, is being done about this.) On the other hand, there is a greater range in terms of family income, because of the larger number of scholarships and part scholarships that the Headmaster has mentioned and that is excellent news. In general, it is good to know that differences in wealth continue to count for little here.
As for my second great debt to Doon-an-all around education, not one confined to one’s studies – one only has to look around the Rose Bowl to see what I mean. This wonderful theatre was built many years ago by the boys themselves, some of whom are sitting here, under the guidance of a master. For me it is a symbol of all that is best about the School. The shape is inspired by the models of ancient Greece, the plays acted here have ranged from the dance dramas of Tagore and a play based on Nehru’s Discovery of India to the great plays of Western, not just English literature: Twelfth Night and Becket and The Government Inspector and even a lively dated musical version of The Frogs by Aristophanes where if I remember Elvis competed with the Beatles and supermen glided down a rope to where the Mushrooms are now standing. The surroundings too are beautiful. The bamboo there burst into flower one year before dying and later sprang up again. The skies provided us with genuine thunder and lightning for the storm scene in Julius Caesar on the night of the performance. Ther e were quite a few birds and snakes in that khud over there. But this natural beauty can be found all over the school: as I mentioned before it was, after all, the old Forest Research Institute. Living for years in these surroundings bred in me an unconscious love of nature which was reinforced by mid-term expeditions to the hills and rivers around, and which has never deserted me even amid the polluted drabness of large cities.
I needn’t list the other areas outside the classroom where the school allows one to expand one’s interests: debates, art, Indian and Western music, chess, photography woodwork, special groups and societies for those interested in science or mathematics, sports of all kinds from cross-country running to cricket, and social working the community-including, most particularly, helping out in times of crisis such as the recent earthquakes. So many schools in these academically competitive times have narrowed their focus to grades and exams and college-admission requirements, to the difference, as the Headmaster mentioned, between 92 and 93 percent, and very little else. Doon has not.
Nor was this breadth of interest merely a question of the facilities available here. What was crucial was that certain teachers, I won’t say very many, but certainly a few themselves embodied this wider vision for a full life. I was very lucky indeed to have, both as housemaster and as teacher, a man whose active interests ranged from mountaineering to Mozart, from the poetry of Ghalib and Tennyson perhaps I should say Tannvson – to the social habits of what he chose to call “ that delightful bird the Rad-chested bulbul.” In fact, if one wanted to avoid a scheduled test on sheep-farming in the Canterbury plains or some other unexciting but exacting topic, the most promising technique was to look out of the first floor window of this classroom in an abstracted way, raise one’s hand, and say, “Sir, please sir, what is that bird, sir, the one that just made the sound gu-turr, gu-turr?” While perfectly aware of our tactics, Guru was entirely unable to resist telling us about the bird, and its call, and its habitat, and its mating season, and its Latin name and the average length of its beak; and twenty minutes later, we boys, wiser but unconscious of being wiser, would be smiling to ourselves, secure in the knowledge that we had flown safely over the Canterbury plains without being forced to crash land.
People sometimes ask me whether in addition to these two great gifts, Doon didn’t teach me lessons of leadership and character building and independence of mind. My answer in a word, is no. I don’t think I have leadership qualities anyway, and I certainly don’t think that the system of authority that I talked about earlier leads to great qualities in leadership. As for character building, I suppose it could be said that there is a sort of make-or-break aspect of all a taste for power, perhaps, boarding schools. You learn to cope or else you collapse. I finally learned to cope with my solitude; but any real strength or warmth of character came to me later and in surroundings where I could choose my company and was more at ease with myself. As for independence of mind, I don’t think Doon helped me. As I explained, the ethos was one of conformity, of fear of public opinion, of hostility to anyone who was eccentric or odd in any way. I very much hope that this has changed or is changing.
It is difficult even at the age of forty to think for oneself, to take an independent stance, to speak one’s mind, to accept that one might make oneself unpopular by doing so, in short to trust in oneself. At fifteen it requires great courage, and I just did not have it. I lay low and muttered resentfully and thought that perhaps there was something wrong with me that I didn’t fit in. I hope that you boys have an easier time of it. Remember, there is such a thing Life After School. I hope that later you will treat your school days in perspective, and not get obsessed by tem one way or another. There is nothing sadder than someone who has done nothing solid or independent in life clinging to his old school tie for a sense of his own worth – or, more absurdly still, for his sense of superiority over others. On the other hand, it would be a pity if you allowed a few unhappy or traumatic incidents of your school years (which now form such a large proportion of your life) to haunt you down the decades. If they do haunt you, so, I hope, will the redeeming beauty of the fines of our assembly prayers one of which we heard earlier this evening. The only way you can come to balance the good with the bad is through the habit of independent thought.
Both now and later, and whether or not your environment encourages to do so, try to think things out independently. Just because someone in authority says something does not mean you should believe it. Think it out. Think it through. Don’t take important matters on trust. Obviously one does not have the time to think out everything but important matters one just has to think out by oneself; examine public opinion, especially that part of public opinion that you have almost made your own. Ask yourself when necessary what it is that you want to do in life – perhaps for yourself, perhaps for the world around you. If there is something deep within you, whether personal or professional, that pulls you one way, and you have discussed the matter with yourself and come to a clear conclusion, don’t let the wish to be thought of as a good chap force you in the opposite direction. You may not be successful or popular in the eyes of the world – or you may be successful only incidentally but you will have lived your own life, the only one that is to a fair extent in your control, the only one that you have. It passes far too quickly, and soon it is over. I myself can hardly believe that I have reached the conventional halfway mark.
And whatever you choose to do don’t give up too easily. Accept that acceptance will be slow in coming, if indeed it comes at all. The headmaster has said very generous things about my work, and I am delighted that my Beasts, despite their strange ways have been so well received here. People tell me that I am a successful author, and I suppose in a sense its true. What people notice, however is the successes; how many failures and near failures I have had no one knows. But in life and in work, one must take failure as not just acceptable but inevitable. As a writer you may wrestle for weeks with a single page of a novel, or a single stanza of a poem, and it may still not come out right. Or you may send out a manuscript that you have sweated on for years to one publisher after another, and be turned down again and again. The rejections come, and the hurt, but what is more important than any of the rejections is the one acceptance that may possibly arrive. I am sure that in other fields, whether scientific or academic or industrial or political, the same is true. In love, too, it doesn’t matter how many times you are rejected; its that one acceptance by someone you love that matters.
I admit that is not a very romantic or indeed a poetical thought to end with; but I am off-duty as a poet today. Anyway, I reckon that you will find my Beasts more entertaining, and certainly more poetical, than me. And in addition they have the advantage of succinctness in speech; they are confined to the rhyming couplets, their rhyming iambic tetrameter couplets and their author can (and does) cut them off when they’re been talking too long.
To their relief and perhaps to yours, I shall end here. I do wish you all the very best.
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