According to a hero of yore: School life is the best part of one’s life. His antagonist, not impressed, said: The School as a means of education to me was simply a blank. Today, as I sit in my dingy-basement classroom, listening to my science teacher droning away, I realize the depth and verity of this statement.

From a reviewer’s reminiscence, school is a place where normal, sane kids undergo an incomplete metamorphosis. You may already know the over-whelming number of students in your small, backyard-room class who, in an attempt to exacerbate the greatest feelings of pain in the intellectual intelligentsia, give vent to the flood of queasiness swelling in them, imitating in the process natural fauna on the brink of extinction. As in “My Class, My Zoo”, the epic tale written by Funky Fire, of which this article is a namesake, a classroom is a hub of skirmishes between cats and dogs, puppies and kittens, crows and pigeons, starlings and jays, pajocks and the odd, elephant, who adds his voice to the noisy din. And in such a class, every child undergoes a metamorphosis (from instars to barmy adults), a process wherein kids born to parents representative of the last sane race on earth are exponentially, almost spontaneously in some cases, converted to other life forms that proceed, with unmatched vehemence and vigor, and indubitably loud and distinguishable voices, to explain the basic purpose of their transitory transformation. In the absence of the teacher, you’ve got people howling and people yowling and literally, there is no distinction between a human voice and the frequency of vibration produced when a cat mews.

Then enters the teacher, the person who is all a flurry and before you can say twitch (I don’t know why you would like to say that!) everyone gets quiet. Guys chattering about who’s macho and who’s a slob summon the pugnacity to sit quiet and listen to His Reverence. Girls gossiping about the latest edition of the Vogue separate their heads to listen to him/her (just in case!). After a stilted lecture on good behavior and the merits of debonair-ism in the society, and how actions are supposed to be based on one’s social status, he is ushered out of the room by the clamor of the end-call. And then you realize what’s happening: they are at it all over again. The game is definitely on…