This is a blog entry for the DW-Womentalkonline blog competition.  Sudipta Mahapatra, an Indian software professional working in Bonn, writes about her heartfelt experiences and feelings of nostalgia for her years at school.

Blasting crackers so you get punished and get to bunk one whole day of classes or faking illness in order to get out of that deathly boring history class or sticking chewing gum on the teacher’s chair so that she struggles with it while you run away without handing over the homework that you never did…maybe you want to read up the latest Nancy Drew case files and drool over the Hardy Boys’ novels you hide under your school books. And just when you thought the teacher was not looking at you, you played “name, place, animal, thing.”

Did you ever look forward to the annual functions with a fervor that would put the enthusiasm of an Oscar winner to shame? Do these incidents remind you of a far-away land called school? Then bingo! You have been one of those very normal people like me who had a blissful childhood.

School was a place where we went in looking like you were going into a dungeon and came out as if you were leaving the best place on earth. Sooner or later, every body falls in love for their school-hook, line and sinker.  School buddies are still our best ones even though we have met thousands of people ever since we graduated.

Those years that we spent dreaming about fairies or pondering over the globe to find out if  Peter Pan’s Neverland did exist, shaped us into being what we are today. I would like to consider myself a responsible individual with, maybe, the little heart of a child. As I see little toddlers passing by my window, crying as they take the first step towards school, I laugh and say to myself, “In a decade, you would be crying when you leave it!”

Sudipta Mahapatra