SeaFever by John Masefield

I studied in Municipal High School, Proddatur. The school was privilaged to have Saraswathiputra (meaning, Son of the Godess of Learning) Sri Puttaparthi Narayana charyulu (సరస్వతిపుత్ర శ్రీ పుట్టపర్తి నారాయణాచార్యులు గారు) as a teacher in the past. I was in my 9th class in 1963-64. The current generation of youngsters will not understand what an Annual School Inspection means. Those days, schools were inspected every year by inspectors sent by the District Education Officer. The school gets generally about a week's advance notice about the imminent process. Then, there will be a feverish activity on the part of both students and the teaching staff to get ready for the inspection (event). Everyone wants to earn a good name for the school. An Inspector could walk into any on-going class as a part of conducting Inspection. The selection of class room was done randomly by the Inspector himself with an element of sudden surprise attached to it. He would assess the ability of the teacher as also the standard of the students.

BN Narayana garu, our teacher, was teaching English Poetry on that day. With a probability of an Inspector walking into our class room, we were all attentively listening. Even as the teacher read out the title, Sea Fever (Poem by John Masefield) a back bencher, Syed, murmured "సముద్రానికి జ్వరం" (verbatim translated as fever to sea) Due to the deafening silence and rapt attention that existed at that moment in the class (again due to the Inspection going on in the school) even the muffled murmur sounded very loud. Hearing it, usually a cool teacher, he lost his temper, tense as he was due to the school inspection. The teacher pounced on the unsuspecting Syed shouting "సముద్రానికి కాదు, యిప్పుడు నీకొస్తుంది జ్వరం" (fever not to sea, now you will get fever) He landed his hand hard on the cheek leaving an imprint turning Syed's very fair skin red at all the points of contact. As all this was happening in our class, we could see through a window, an inspector walking in the corridor to our adjacent class room, bypassing ours.

Moral of the story:

Humour is not on when school inspection is on.

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