Lal Bahadur Shastri

Introduction

Subodh Mathur writes:

I completed my high school from St. Xavier's School, Jaipur in 1966. In those days, the school offered two different final examinations. One was the Indian School Certificates (I.S.C), which was a descendant of the older Senior Cambridge examination conducted by Cambridge University, England. The other was All-India Higher Secondary (A.I.H.S.), which was a national examination conducted by an Indian government agency.

Regardless of whether you took the I.S.C or A.I.H.S. examination, life in Standard XI - the final year - was focused heavily on doing well in the final examination.

Standard X was different. You were senior enough in the school, which gave you some freedom. And, the academic pressure was not so high. Every year, one of the activities of Standard X students was to stage a full-length play, under the supervision of a teacher.

As was the norm in those days, our school was for boys only. No girls. So, how could they choose a play that had a woman in it? There was simply no way that a Standard X boy would do a woman's role. Not in Jaipur in 1965. Anyhow, our teacher did solve this problem - read about it below.

The school used to publish a year book called The Blue and Gold. It included the photos and brief bios of all the students in the graduating class. I am using those photos - they show us as we were then.

Subhash Mathur is a resident of Jaipur after superannuation from Indian Revenue Service in 2007. Presently, Subhash is engaged in social and charitable work in rural areas. Subhash is also Editor of http://www.inourdays.org/, an online portal for preserving work related memories.

11^th January 1966 began as a cold overcast day in Jaipur.  For me, it was going to be like any other cold day of January in those days. Soon, a pitter patter rain started hitting the window panes, and the cold conditions consolidated. Mild surface winds added to the chill.

I was in my first year in Rajasthan College, Jaipur. And gearing up for exams around the corner.

Just then, the news filtered in via a phone call that Indian Prime Minister Shastri had died in the wee hours of the night at Tashkent. Shastri was in Tashkent to attend a summit with Pakistan to settle the issues arising out of Indo-Pak conflict of September 1965 under the aegis of USSR Premier Kosygin.

Those days, landline telephones and word of mouth were the only means of spreading the news far and wide. Once the news spread, largely via telephonic talks, our home (B-87 Ganesh Marg, Bapu Nagar, Jaipur)  started filling up to discuss the aftermath.  Mostly friends of Bhai Sahib (eldest brother P C Mathur) from the Rajasthan University started trickling in.

Editor's note: This article has been written by several people who were involved with the production of X-Rays, the newsmagazine of St. Xavier's School, Jaipur in 1965-66.

Subodh Mathur