The 70s boy was a fair game !
Any significant elder could thrash him.
There were two groups of significant elder to kids of those days. One were the parents and the other the teachers. The kid spent his entire day in the company of either group not knowing from which direction the next thrashing is going to come.
Most of the sufferers were boys. I am not sure if girls faced similar experiences.
The elders in Kerala lived by a simple, three phrase credo 'Cholli Kodu, Thalli Kodu, Thalli Kala'. It meant "Tell'em, Thrash'em, Discard'em"
The 'll' in 'Cholli' and the first 'Thalli' are pronounced as in 'Smelly'. The 'll' in second 'Thalli' is pronounced as 'll' in 'Pulley'. Unlike English, Malayalam has separate alphabets for these two letters. The first Thalli is written as 'തല്ലി' and the second one as 'തള്ളി'
The first stage in the credo is to 'Tell them'. Try to teach them. Educate them. If that doesn't work, move to the second stage of 'Thrash Them' and scare them into learning. When thrashing doesn't work, they move to the third stage 'Discard Them'. While this literally means 'to throw them out', in reality, in this stage the elders just give up on the children.
The half-life of first stage, the stage of 'Tell them' was minuscule, may be from the age 2 to 5. The second stage, the 'Thrash them' stage, lasted a life-time, or so it seemed to a 70s boy.
The perpetrators, as I said before, were the parents and the teacher. If either parent is also a teacher, then the boy had had it. My friend Manoj would vouch for that. His dad was also a teacher in the school where he studied. His buttocks still looks as if it has been through a sandwich grill (as per him. I have not seen it)
The teachers of those days had principles. They believed in the maxim 'Mata, Pita, Guru Daivam' which meant 'Mother, Father and Teacher are equivalent to god'. For the 70s boy the first three never did any of the positive stuff attributed to god, while the god himself seemed to have hidden somewhere most of the days. This principle meant that the parent who was also a teacher wanted to show his fairness to other children in school by punishing his kith and kin more than he did other children. He will justify this with the inane statements like 'relationship is at home, here all of you are equal'.
Is that so? then why are you caning me ten of the juiciest while the standard for not writing the homework is two?
Also, why did you not mention about this punishment yesterday when you send me out to buy potato sticks (to go with your beer) during my study time? Don't you remember I got delayed due to rain and had got drenched and was sick later?
I am kidding about the beer, of course. In those days only uber-rich could afford beer. The maximum a school teacher could afford was 'Toddy' a local brew made from palm trees.
And they never, never drank in front of their children. The power distance was very strong, you see.
The tool of choice for thrashing was 'Chooral' (called Rattan in English), a long thin reed that had the twin benefits of being snugly in the hand of the punisher as well as being a highly efficient tool of choice. Having had the opportunity to use the cane on many children, teachers were the runaway experts on using chooral. An expert caner uses four different effects nay forces applicable to chooral. First is due to the swing of the chooral as it came from a height (the taller the teacher, the more painful the thrashing). This is augmented by the speed at which the cane came down. The faster it came down, the more painful the thrashing. The third is the whiplash effect. Chooral is a flexible reed. On its way up the chooral arches backwards and straightens as it came down thus increasing the arc length and hence the punishment intensity. The fourth and the final effect was the wrist flick, where the teacher flicks his wrist at the point of contact of chooral and the palm of the student's hand.
The part of the body that got the thrashing was dependent on who was thrashing you. A father will ask his son to lower his shorts, called knickers in Kerala, and giving juicy ones on the buttocks. After a couple of thrashes the buttocks will start swelling and resemble a grilled sandwich. The inflammation will last a couple of days. During those days the child can't sit properly.
Chooral was truly a Weapon of Ass Destruction, if you see what I mean.
Now that his butt cheeks are inflamed, the student cannot sit on the wooden planks in the class, that go by a honorable name 'benches'. To overcome the pain in the ass (literally), the student will periodically shift his weight from one buttock to another, wobbling like a reverse pendulum. Seeing this the teacher will get agitated and accuse the student of disturbing his concentration by his 'drunken wobbles'. An agitated teacher is a caning teacher. Since the teacher cannot ask the student to lower his shorts, the his area of focus is the palm of the non-dominant hand. Early in the class year, before caning the student, the teacher, in a very kind and considerate manner, will ask the student about his non-dominant hand. As the year progresses, the teacher may not know the names of the students, but he is familiar with who is a right-hander and who is a leftie...
Teacher knows everyone by their hands, if you see what I mean.
A right-hander will be caned in his left palm and vice versa.
Due to that caning, his palm is swollen. When the student goes home, seeing his swollen hand his father will surmise that he got caned in the class. Now it is the turn of the father to get agitated and with no questions asked will cane him on the already swollen butt cheeks.
Dad's logic is that your teacher must have caned you 'because' you were naughty in the class. And I am not paying your school fees for you to be naughty in the class. I don't want my son to be caned by the teacher..
Man, talk about a vicious circle !!
Moms seldom beat their kids. They are lenient and want to play 'Good Cop' in front of their children. They will use their husbands to achieve their objective of punishing their children. The first thing that a tired Indian husband hears as he enters home will be a litany of the things that 'Jomon' did while the dad was away at work.
Depending on dad's mood, Jomon has had it. Or not.
Every school had a rack where they stack choorals. From a distance it looked like cue sticks stacked near a pool table. Before heading to the class a teacher will pick any one of them from the stack. They used to look like Indian policemen holding lathis going around on their beats. Some teachers had their personal chooral. They will tie clothes at one end of their personal chooral for 'better grip'.
Even though I got caned a lot in the school, my dad never beat us up as far as I can remember. Sometimes he will get angry. When he is angry, his entire body will reflect his anger. His eyes will become red, brows will be furrowed, lips will quiver and hands will tremble like crazy. It was scary. For him words were his weapons. While he is angry he won't know what he is saying, but it will always end with 'Nee nannaka mattai da', meaning 'you will never do well in life'.
After all these years, I sometimes wonder if a few thrashings would not have been better. At least I would have forgotten about them by now.
While chooral was the go-to tool, any stick would have done the trick. In Kerala of those days every house was surrounded by trees and plants. More trees means, you guessed right, more sticks to beat up kids with.
But they always went back to chooral. Nothing can beat (pun intended) its comfort and efficiency.
As you get into class 8 or 9, the caning will gradually stop. Maybe because the boys are old and big enough to react...
Childhood memories have a tendency to romanticize the positives.
But let us not forget chooral.
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