back to FLASHBACK !

My growing up years have been pretty traumatic and nerve wracking for me and to onlookers, pretty tame and ...lame !! As soon as I was put in school, seeing the sea of humanity was overwhelming for me and very very early on, i realized i was no Einstein !! I could have been blamed for many things, but being smart or intelligent wasn't one of them in school! I wasn't clever enough to sit in the front row and wasn't rebellious or daring enough to be allowed to sit in the back row with the adventurous boys who everyone admired for their being pulled up, scolded ,caned or dismissed to the principal's office !I started in 'OXFORD ENGLISH SCHOOL', a private school where everyone spoke Tamil (what an oxymoron for such a posh sounding school name!) I quickly became the butt of ragging and jokes by the tall boys and the fat boys who loved calling me 'vella kakka' (white crow) because I was fair skinned and I have never hated my skin as much as I did in school ! It was an all boys school and I was spared the embarrassment of being me ,probably because I blended in! ( I was awkwardly thin with a gangly walk and a chicken chest with narrow shoulders which my friends constantly reminded me of ...and my self esteem was uncomfortably below sea level !!)

Somehow i managed to pass (excel, in my book!!) by keeping my marks at a 40 + level and the only thing I did well was in English, thanks to my voracious reading! I read everything, from newspapers to comics to weeklies to novels to ....porn ! (that came later, but we will get there eventually !!) I used to read so much because i was bored out of my skull, being a lonely child! I had nowhere to go, wasn't allowed to go anywhere by my overbearing aunt and a scared mother who thought i was too good for the neighborhood boys who constantly bullied me! In the mean while my dad quit Devar films because he decided having 14 fractures in 6 years while acting with animals that threw you (elephants) mauled you( tigers) and scratched you (monkeys) and bit you (dogs!) was enough! He decided to go to Bangalore to become a director! btw he started as a camera assistant, assistant director, editing assistant, dubbing artiste, actor and then became a director and then promoted himself to a producer, where he lost all his money and some of my money which i would earn in the future, but we will come to that later!!

Before he left to stay in Bangalore for a few years, he decided to test my educational skills and took out my school bag and started asking me questions from my school books which i had kept for purely ornamental purposes and not to do mundane things like studying!.Needless to say, he was appalled, frustrated and angry with my stupidity and promptly proceeded to arm himself with a coat hanger (wooden, thank God!) and thrashed the living daylights out of me, with my aunt trying to wedge herself in between us and my mom keeping a respectable distance from the proceedings!! I was extremely relieved he was going to Bangalore and decided that very day i was going to be smarter...at not getting caught!, not studying or education !!

With my father safely and temporarily out of the picture, I continued my excellence in academics getting average to passable to 'almost pass' and 'barely pass' marks in all subjects..! My bench mates in Oxford English School were 'Puttanna' and 'venkat', now known as "ShivrajKumar' and ' kadalora kavithaigal Raja" ! I didnt think much of them and they returned the favor by thinking I was a complete loser!.We kinda bonded because of our below average scores in all subjects!. Ten odd years later we met each other...at the film fare awards where I received the best new comer award in Telugu, Shivraj kumar received the best new comer award in Kannada and Raja received the best newcomer award in Tamil ! We bonded again and were surprised to realize all us ' losers' (who have been written off by all the teachers barring none )had made something of our lives and it was a tearful and joyous moment in my life to see my school mates up there receiving awards and I was proud to be there with them !!

Life was going well (by that I mean being invisible, obscure and under the radar of teachers who completely underestimated me and rightly so !! )for this awkward 'almost' teenager when my parents had a brilliant idea of putting me in the next compound... Shrine Velankani School, a co-education school and my real troubles began ! My pathetic exposure to girls (no, i didn't expose myself to them like in my childhood, but showing my face to girls was enough to make me cringe then for this totally self conscious geeky pubescent boy!!)

All that and more in the next installment !!