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| ashu |
Posted
on 06-May-04 08:43 PM
Taken from an ancient issue of the good old The Nepal Digest:
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Pratyoush Onta's "Remembering ASCOL" was one of the finest, yet subtle and witty, works of memoirs that I have read in a long time. I was particularly struck by its simplicity, humanity and a sense of humor.
I urge Pratyoush that, time-allowing, he put his other published-in-various-newspapers-in-Kathmandu satires, reviews, essays and pieces of reflection here on the screen for the benefit of TND/SCN readers.
A good and informed piece of writing is something we can all take joy in.
oohi
ashu
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Oh, by the way, after ASCOL, Pratyoush, who's years senior to me, majored in math and economics at a college near Boston, then went to the University of Pennsylvania
for a PhD in economics before, for intellectual reasons, decided to switch tracks to do
a dissertation in South Asian history. He lives and works in Kathmandu, and I am
always in awe of his knowledge and of ways of analyzing various social/cultural/historical issues.
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[The following was published in The Independent newsweekly of 22 June 1994 in Kathmandu. It was intended to be an autobiographical satire. Pls let me know if it also speaks for others who remember Ascol. ]
Remembering Ascol
by Pratyoush Onta
For those of us who grew up mesmerized by that noble dream of becoming doctors and engineers to serve the nation, Ascol was a rite of passage. The rite came in the form of two years spent in the premises of the campus located at one end of Thamel after you had finished high school but before you could go abroad in a 'seat' provided by some scholarship plan. I too was lured by the siren of physical engineering at the end of high school in 1981.
Suffering from the aftershocks of the pre-Referendum student movement, the Tribhuvan University could not find space for my cohort in its college campuses until April 1982. It was then that I first went to Ascol and for the next two years, I spent many an hour there steeping my brain with a variety of so-called scientific knowledge.
A dozen years later, many of the exciting moments that I experienced in Ascol have been trashed (in Macintosh-speak). Some have been relegated to the backwaters of my memory. Others are retained in a fragile montage. But if novelist Milan Kundera is right when he says life is a struggle against memory, then I must try to remember Ascol as a sign of life in me.
Each day in Ascol was a challenge for me. The first challege of the day started in my room. What to take for the classes was always a rather difficult thing to decide. All the books needed in a bag and be called a 'bookworm' by my close friends or a folded copy in the back pocket of my jeans and be labelled a 'tourist' by the Physics teacher? More often than not, peer pressure would get the better of me and I would only take a single notebook and a blue ball pen to Ascol.
The next challenge for me used to be: will the first teacher show up for his class? The bell used to ring at 12 noon, the teacher would show up and the Nepali class - necessary even for science padne wallas - would start. One day the teacher was telling us the tragic story of Basain.
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| ashu |
Posted
on 06-May-04 08:44 PM
As he was about to tell how Rikute and Jhuma fell in love with each other at first sight, he left the classroom for no apparent reason. It was only much later that we discovered that the teacher had left because of the annoyingly loud drumming of the desks by the students sitting in the second row. I could never be sure if the classes were meant for a full 45 minutes.
On another occasion the second period teacher was missing and nobody knew her whereabouts. How to spend the next 45 minutes then became a challenge. One option that was there was to guff with the pretty dames of the 'bio' group. However, the risks were great. The next day, the campus could be full of rumours about how Pratyoush was in love with a certain Mainya or how Shishir tried to win Priya's heart. Romance was hardly something that I excelled in.
On one such khali period, a friend suggested that we play hide and seek! Without asking if we are a bit too old for this game, we all thought that it was a good idea. However, before we could actually begin, Mahendra, the most practical-minded student of the class, pointed out that there were no places to hide in Ascol. The classrooms had open bars for windows, the laboratory was closed, the lavatory stank, and the library was being used for the teachers' meeting. If there was no place for hiding, there was no question of seeking. Therefore, the idea had to be abandoned five minutes after it had been conceived.
On yet another occasion, a teacher showed up in class a full 25 minutes late and started taking attendance. Roll number 141, a man who has now become the only engineer-hero in the Nepali movie industry, was busy talking to his friend.
Just about when the teacher was finished recording the absence of number 185, a big voice was heard in the classroom, "141 sir." "Write it on a piece of paper" said the teacher and so did 141. By this time, 38 minutes of the class was over and Mr. Gravity, as the students called this rather overweight Physics teacher, began his lecture: "Archimedes' principle states that when..." The rest of the lecture was straight out of pages 46 - 49 of The Advanced Level Physics. Therefore there was no reason to pay any attention to him.
Late during the first year, a group of my classmates went to the chemistry lab to do their practicals. To their surprise they found it closed. "For what reason?" they asked. "Today is Women's Day and all the madams are absent. There isn't any gas either. Therefore, there will be no practicals today" explained the lab boy. "Hurrey" said my friends as they went home. However, those of us who had practicals in physics had nothing to rejoice over for the majority of the teachers there were
'sirs.' We went to our respective tables and began the experiments. At 5 pm, the practicals were over and the students had gathered around the teachers to receive their invaluable signature on the practical sheets. Everybody seemed to be busy justifying the large errors in the results of his/her experiment. "The conditions are so terrible that we got the value of the latent heat of fusion of ice as 43 as against the correct value of 20" explained Sangita. A veteran teacher, commenting on Pramod's cooling curve graph for wax said: "The melting point shows a constant temperature till infinity." Pramod had no excuse for that.
The viva-voce questioning started. Rajendra was asked: "What is the difference between the focal length and the distance between the pole and the principal focus of a spherical mirror?" He quickly replied: "There is as much difference between the two as the difference between you and your face in a plane mirror." Ever figure that out? I had no time to do so. It's time to go home then. Science could wait but my stomach could not.
I guess I still remember Ascol - in fragments - as a sign of life.
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| Biswo |
Posted
on 06-May-04 10:27 PM
ashu,
tks for posting the piece. I guess this was the piece Rajeev was talking about in another thread about Ascolites. I remember the labs where if we were asked to find out some wellknown coefficients, we tried to manufacture the data so that the result would be close to known value [eg: g=9.8 kind of things]. It was only later that I figured out that even if g=9.5, it was ok, but g=9.8 would in fact arouse suspicion about data manufacturing.
On the other hand, a lot of watchmen were really enlightening. One day, a watchman told me how the first floor of my hostel was filled with blood during 2036 aandolan.
The hostel cafeteria food was so bad: the first day I moved in and ate there, I vomited in the night, and by the next afternoon, I was in Chitwan eating the homemade lunch: class be damned. My roommate was so surprised at my 'childishness'.
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| gsubedi |
Posted
on 07-May-04 12:37 AM
Ascol Hostel, how can I forget? My fragmanted memories only reminds me of few events of four years of Chhattis Saale batch but I can not forget that one day I was on on second floor balcony away from the entrance to warm myself up( Ghaamtapna) with sun. One of the twin watchman started screaming saying " YE RAATOSARI LAUNE DIDI, KAHA JAANA LAGEKI,TYAHA THINGAI UBHINOHOS HOS BHITRAJANA PAIDAINA". He was screaming louder and louder and when I turned around see what was going on, I found to my surprise it was my own sister and her husband who were unaware of the rule had came to visit me and entered the hostel when the guy had stepped out for something.They were already three qurters down the hall by the time the watchman had got to stop them.
She was so embarassed at the time first by unknowingly entering the boys hostel where females were not allowed in and second to be called Didi by someone who was at least twice her age.
It was been a piece of fun memory for both of us for very long time.
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| rauniyar |
Posted
on 07-May-04 04:47 AM
Ashu ji,
dhanyabad!
Great piece of composition, as per my expectation.
Cheers!
Uhi Rajev,
CT, Amrika
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| Kale_Ko_Chartikala |
Posted
on 07-May-04 05:35 AM
Ashu,
On TND you had written [Like Oliver Twist, I ask "more"] some 8-9 years ago... and it is really impressive to see that you still have saved (or somehow recovered) the piece you asked "more" for. Great!
Just 1 curiosity: Do you save (or remember) all the pieces you read? What is the size of your hard drive? :)
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