14/10/21, 10:32 - Messages and calls are end-to-end encrypted. No one outside of this chat, not even WhatsApp, can read or listen to them. Tap to learn more.
14/10/21, 10:32 - Arnab Ganguly: Busy?
22/10/21, 16:53 -
Bajwa: Missed voice call
02/01/22, 10:31 - Balwinder Bajwa: Wishing you tons of Happiness & Prosperity in the Year ahead. Happy New Year 🙏
02/01/22, 15:36 - Arnab Ganguly: Congratulations. Yours is the first story that I have decided to compose completely online and on the mobile phone. Wish me the best of luck so that I do not get distracted by the other groups and messages in the whatsapp groups.
02/01/22, 15:37 -
Arnab Ganguly: You deleted this message
02/01/22, 15:44 - Arnab Ganguly: Title : How the Bengbi football team lost its only match thirty years ago
I met Bally in the summer of 2021 at Starbucks over a cup of coffee. It was one of those tough corona times when absolutely nothing seemed to be going right for anybody. The government did not have to warn people to stay off other people, the people were scared enough to stay away anyway.
02/01/22, 15:47 - Arnab Ganguly: We were meeting after almost 26 years since we had parents who had transferable jobs and the kids had to be satisfied with barely 3 years in any one school in a particular location
02/01/22, 15:58 - Balwinder Bajwa: 👍💪
02/01/22, 17:25 - Arnab Ganguly: Bally wasn't the tallest, fastest, the most agile or the heaviest player in the school team in those days. But he had the tenacity of a fox hound to stick to achieving a particular target right from the beginning of time that we could recall.
We, the people of the country and the world would have been pleased to term this property of a human being (read Bally) as sincerity were it not for his enormous Dad who never failed to remind us that the fox hound was a dog after all.
We the people, comprising chiefly of his classmates or more accurately "fellow conspirators" were compelled to look down at our Muddy toes since the implication of Bally's father's insinuations were crystal clear ; friends, teammates classmates etc of a dog had to be dogs as well.
In a way, he wasn't really wrong. Bally would get into a frenzy once he had decided on attaining a particular target.
One time he broke every piece of crockery and utensil that wasn't made of steel in his neighbor's kitchen trying to catch a rat that the neighbor's kid bragged had evaded every form of rat catching technique, equipment and chemical known to mankind till then. The rat, now shorn of the shelter of every nook and corner of the house which Bally had broken into with the help of a sharp metal rod obtained by a "fellow conspirator" from a military truck standing next to his house, did the only gentlemanly thing possible....he left the house never to be seen again.
But before that conclusion could be arrived at, Bally's father had already given a rather uncomfortable and highly vigorous back massage aka thrashing to his illustrious son on two successive days. The first of course was due to the ungrateful neighbor who hadn't yet realized that the rat had left its kingdom in his kitchen for good. The second since the iron rod had been "borrowed" without permission from the military truck rendering it virtually immobile. Bally was to learn much later that it, "the iron rod", was the gear shaft of the truck in question. And "it" was infinitely more important for changing gears of the vehicle than digging the corners and rat holes in the neighbor's house.
The borrowing and stealing of the rod proved to be a double whammy as the act had actually been carried out by Prass of the adjacent Colony, popularly known as D zone. Prass's father was a rather high ranking senior officer which helped Prass, Bally and the rest of the football team in escaping the noose as Prass whispered with stealthy looks but in a voice loud enough to be heard by the school Principal who took rounds of the school corridors at the most inappropriate of times on any given day. Prass was reported upon again, this time from the school. And Prass's father, without the apparent advantage of Bally's father's big hands, used his wide, shiny belt to massage some sense into his son.
The rat had successfully claimed two victims from Class XI 'B' without even having filed a complaint anywhere. The rest of the gang, which meant almost all the boys of the class came to the conclusion that it would be a good idea to shift to an independent country like Brunei where Dads in other countries like ours were unlikely to have much influence in getting back the kids. And consequently no further victims for the rat.
02/01/22, 17:26 - Balwinder Bajwa: Will read when Iam back at home at night
02/01/22, 17:29 - Arnab Ganguly: No need to hurry. This is just the first draft. बस ठान लिया कि यहां कहानी लिख दूंगा
02/01/22, 17:30 - Arnab Ganguly: The English will have to be softened down as well.... Shorter sentences, simpler words
02/01/22, 17:43 - Balwinder Bajwa: 👍
02/01/22, 17:51 - Arnab Ganguly: The only issue with Bally's frenzies as he and I would realize much later in the years was that they didn't extend to his studies......at least so far in his "long long" life of nearly 15 or 16 years, they hadn't. That would come sometime later after being rejected by a girl who the entire gang to the last man had convinced Bally that she absolutely belonged to him by virtue of being his longest classmate across three schools and two transfers that the families had faced in course of the fathers' military duties.
The fact that the girl saw almost nothing of him sitting diagonally across the classroom full of 63 kids and an even larger number of desks and chairs didn't make much impression on the class gang who were learning Venn diagrams and logic that conclusively proved that if A plus were to be equal to C, then C plus D definitely had to be E. And that there were no exceptions to the rules in Maths, physics and chemistry. Bally's feeble protests that he had biology in place of maths where exceptions were the norm rather than the rule were swept aside.
I guess I'll have to come back to this A plus B stuff and the girls in Bally's life at some other point of time.
02/01/22, 18:21 - Balwinder Bajwa: Read these. God the depth of imaginative world your brain can traverse is absolutely unmatchable. My wife kept laughing aloud while reading it through. Need to talk you lot more
02/01/22, 18:23 - Balwinder Bajwa: Jokes aside, don’t let this great quality of yours to just be discussed in a fried circle. It can turn around fortunes for you
02/01/22, 18:33 - Arnab Ganguly: I must confess that when I know that a pretty lady like your wife has laughed at the story so far, it's an enormous compliment.
Of course, the credit is completely yours. I haven't yet reached even the beginning of the story that you told me this morning.
This is just the introduction to Bally ; a bit fictional and a whole lot true.
Can you guess who Prass is and who the Principal was 😃?
02/01/22, 18:37 - Balwinder Bajwa: Nasha and Venky
02/01/22, 18:39 - Arnab Ganguly: 😁😁👍🏻
02/01/22, 19:46 - Arnab Ganguly: The story so far....
Anyways to discuss a football season anywhere requires the declaration of the loyalties of the participants first. In this case or rather in those years, the Venn diagrams were found incapable of describing the loyalties of the players and the participants of the discussions. The primary reason was the existence of three army cantonments and a huge airforce station within a radius of less than 20 kilometres. That meant some kids from Cantonment A were studying in the same group of schools in Cantonment B, some from Cantonment A and B were studying in Cantonment C and vice versa and many students from all A, B and C were studying in the Air Force school and the Air Force ran five busses full of kids because the airmen found it too easy for their kids to get admitted to "their own" school and so had a lower opinion of the school. Never mind that teachers and Principals were rotated every two years amongst these schools within the same which meant that the PT teacher with his penchant for teaching the 27 ways of frying potatoes was back with a refresher course in six years in our school. Of Course, nobody was paying him much attention this time except Bally who had progressed from the fifth grade to the eleventh while he was away for six years. The concept of loyalty in the school wasn't as simple as one would like to believe. The first loyalty of a kid was to his Football team A. There had to be a team B too since in a class of 42 boys, there was no way one team could accommodate all. Kids were free to choose and play for their own team, the only bit of democracy permissible in the era where a boy could be thrashed by a teacher for groaning too loudly from the thrashing that he had just received.
Consequently, the teams could be of very unequal sizes at times, with one team comprising of 19 players and 2 goalkeepers while the other one would have just 15 players and no goalkeeper. The team members shared strong bondings which was chiefly demonstrated by the preference of one member to copy (a euphemism most unjustly referred then and now as stealing) homework from another member. The smartest stealers could copy fast and efficiently during the lunch breaks, yoga classes or if lucky during the period when a teacher had suddenly called sick and the management had forgotten all about it in the midst of a meeting to discuss the growing menace of school gang formation, reformation and deformation. Evolution in schools can take place much faster than Darwin could ever have predicted.
Also, loyalties of kids were like priorities chalked out in the little of what they were exposed to in their not to long lives. There were cricket teams too to be a part of come winter and democracy would work very differently then. A good batsman, tough to be gotten out could find himself very lonely indeed. The rule was that nobody could bat more than 2 overs at most and would have to commit the batsman's suicide by hitting his own stumps while playing the last ball. Loyalty was thus a seasonal affair, but it was a dead serious one nevertheless for all that.
Bally of course had his own axe to grind. He was entitled to leaving the previous class a few minutes early by virtue of being the games monitor. The games monitor is supposed to keep the equipment for the kids ready so that they don't waste time issuing and collecting the goods from the games Bally liberally misused this liberty by
02/01/22, 23:37 - Arnab Ganguly: Pardon me, I must get back to the subject of team formation and loyalty.
Balwinder Bajwa: Missed voice call
19/11/21, 09:33 - Arnab Ganguly:
02/01/22, 10:31 - Balwinder
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