National High School (NHS) Basavanagudi
It will be 50 years since I joined this revered institution. The year was 1975, and during those days we used to have a public exam (conducted by the education department of the government—as I remember, at a district level) for seventh standard it was called the LS or “Lower Secondary” exam. The school that I studied till then, had classes up to 7th and, for pursuing higher secondary education, we had to seek admission to another school. The Fear Fear is a strong motivator, and my mother used that effectively. We had the best of institutions—the National High School or the NHS, where only the very best got admitted. At the bottom of that list of schools was a school called “The Fort High School” (or that’s what we were made to believe, not that it was bad), a government-run school which was near to NHS and on the same road (more towards the Bangalore Fort and hence the name). So, my mother literally “made me an offer that I couldn’t refuse”—NH...