Whenever in Mysore I drive around the school campus - have done this a couple of times. Great feeling.

    I was a student at DMS from 8th to 10th standard. Joined in 1965 after an 'entrance exam'. Two and a half years of 'Central Syllabus' education; Half year of SSLC subjects; 8th A, 9th Science and SSLC section. Ou...r class was the second (or was it 3rd?) batch of the school.

    The star studded ‘Top table’ : Head Master TGS with his measured walk and talk; HKVM - Math teacher and assistant HM who decided whether we could play or go to library on the rare occasion when the teachers bunked; HK Ramachandra teaching us English apart from rhymes (Bonnie was a warrior....) and KR - with his profou...nd English; NSS with her ghost stories in Kannada; Ever smiling Ramanath with his poetic Kannada; and a spell of serious RLA with Kannada Grammer; KN Nagaraj riding in the rare ‘Jawa bike’ and his agriculture coaching; Ramprasad heading commerce (I had wrongly understood that commerce was all about knowing how to use a typewriter); Saroja madam and her Hindi classes;

  

 VM at our prayer and PT spots; Stern looking Hebbar in his track suit and taking care of those who stepped out of line (me - many times); Sampath Iyengar in his suit, transiting in his bicycle to teach us 'Technology'; A Nagaraj also in suit, flashy banana leaf sized ties and bristling mush - teaching us chemistry an...d helping us during the National science talent exam and the science exhibition; Vatsala Madam trying to make us understand why alternate angles are equal and that Rhombus is not an exotic automobile; Nirmala madam as the ‘drawing’ teacher; Pillai busy with counseling the students; Madhav Rao and Begum madam at the Library; Ever grinning Sabastian driving the new school bus; Jaidev manning the old bus, being even handed with all students except those who did not wear skirts !!!

    CGN : fresh from (or was he still in) RCE (we used to see him walk across

from the college, or may be, he used to frequent the canteen which was in a thatched roof hut half way between the school and the college); our class teacher for two and a half years until I migrated to the SSLC section; letting us have a small... science lab in our own class room; wearing jacket with leather patches at the elbow; donning ties that would make a self respecting rat rue the thickness of its tail; announcing that his unmarried days were numbered - in the midst of a class; his capability to use either of his hand to write on the Board; his experiment of forming six groups in our class of less than 30 students to do self study, and making us put on display shortcomings in our self learning ability and communication skills; and quietly steering us to the path of learning and self dependence;

    Great confluence of people in our class : Ravichandra, Vijayendra, Guru Datt, Balasubramanya, Rajashekar, Subbarama Setty, Dayananda, Kishore Chandra, Muttanna, Somaiya, Verghese George; and Radha Achar, Rekha Sapre, Geetha 1, Geetha 2, Pushpa Iyengar, Sucharita Punja – friends and classmates of a higher order (Jaidev... principle ?!). Apologies to those whose names I do not readily recall.

Isn’t nostalgia a pleasant pastime?

Incidentally, I am a CA practicing at Bangalore for the last 34 years

Swamy - Class of 1968