The Batch of 2021

Saturday, March 14, 2020 was like any other day for my son. He went to school, took his exam, and returned home. Some of them planned to celebrate the end of the exams on Tuesday by going out for a milkshake, so the good byes were rather hurried. Little did any of them suspect how long it would be before they met again.

That weekend, the Telangana Government declared that all schools would be shut for two weeks. The exam was hastily postponed to March 31, and my kid grumbled at having to revise Science for two weeks instead of two days. Then lockdown was announced, and extended. Somewhere, the school authorities decided to promote the entire class.

Grade 10 started with online classes. A few weeks dragged into a few months, and then into the entire year. There was a project they were working on, which lay in school abandoned. Even if we wanted to rescue it, we couldn’t have.

My son never really spoke about his classmates, but you could see he was missing school. “I wonder if someone is feeding the rabbits?”, he asked once. We concluded that it would be the goat that most missed the students and the staple diet of cold rotis and subji that they fed it.

Mid term exams came and went. The second semester began. There was talk of Practical Classes being conducted in school, but to the delight of the teachers, the parents vetoed it. Instead they were given substitute experiments they could perform at home.

We had to go to school to fill up the forms for the Board Exams. There was awkwardness when they met their classmates. It was as if the masks established barriers of formalness, and they could only be themselves while interacting online.

The curriculum got over. The online classes were for revision purposes only. This was the time when they should have been having farewells, both formal and informal. When they should have bunking classes and playing their last basketball games in the grounds that had been home for six years. When they should have been watching the last cycle of tadpoles metamorphosis into frogs in the lily pond. When they should have been reading the last books two books left unread in the school library. When they should have been reliving old memories and creating new ones what would last a lifetime. They were isolated at home, instead.

My son’s batch has been luckier than most. None among them tested positive for Covid. The parents that did were largely asymptomatic. There were no major upheavals in any of their lives. Very few of them lost family members from the extended family. But a year back, would we have considered that ‘lucky’?

The batch was supposed to have their Board Exams this year- that rite of passage that marked our graduation from kids to young adults. Despite an academic year like none other, the Board Exams were going to be as conventional as they had always been, with the addition of face masks and sanitizers.

Then the Exams were cancelled. People said they were ‘lucky’ because they passed the exams without having to take them. But is that really luck? Despite all the uncertainty, they worked hard throughout the year. They self-motivated themselves and attended the classes even though they knew the teacher would not find out if they didn’t. They adapted to a teaching methodology as unfamiliar to the teachers as it was to them. They figured out ways to seek help from each other, despite being miles apart. They were denied a ‘normal’ year, yet they did what they had to. They were also denied a logical culmination to the year- despite having prepared for them, they would have no Exams.

They should have been chilling after taking the Board Exams, trying not to think about the results. Instead they are at home, cut off from each other, unofficially locked down. They can’t bring themselves to put their books away, and to look at their ugly school uniforms one last time. They are worrying about COVID. They are trying to help connect people to resources. They are trying to distract themselves with the IPL. They try to escape reality, and they try to pretend this is what is normal.

As a batch, they have coped with more uncertainty than any other. They have developed a resilience which even many adults do not have. They have grown as people. If the Board Exams are a rite of passage, the Batch of 2021 didn’t have it, but they have learnt so much more.

They had a farewell party on Friday. They should have worn their sarees and suits. Taken lots of photographs. Eaten and drunk and danced too much. The party was on Zoom. My son didn’t attend.