Kaleem Omar - An OS in Pakistan?
Kaleem Omar is one of Pakistan's most prolific journalists and 
one of the country's leading poets in English.

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Copied from - Daily Times (Pakistan)


POETIC LICENCE: Of schoolhouses named after outlaws


Many years after leaving Sherwood I happened to meet the film director David Lean on a sea cruise from Karachi to Hong Kong aboard Lloyd Trestino’s "M. V. Asia" in January 1962. We got to talking one day, and he was hugely amused when I happened to mention that I had been at a Church of England mission school in Naini Tal which had schoolhouses named after English outlaws.


Sherwood College - my boarding school in Naini Tal, a very pretty hill town in the Himalayan terai and the summer capital of the United Provinces in the days of the Raj - had four schoolhouses. They were named after members of that famous band of outlaws of yore: Robin Hood, Friar Tuck, Alan a Dale and Little John.

Many years after leaving Sherwood I happened to meet the film director David Lean on a sea cruise from Karachi to Hong Kong aboard Lloyd Trestino’s “M. V. Asia” in January 1962. We got to talking one day, and he was hugely amused when I happened to mention that I had been at a Church of England mission school in Naini Tal which had schoolhouses named after English outlaws.

In 1982 Lean was in India, scouting locations for “A Passage to India” - the movie version of E. M. Forster’s novel, which Lean had been commissioned to direct. Taking a break from his scouting, Lean decided to go up to Naini Tal for a holiday. There, he checked into a small hotel run by Mr Hotz, a Swiss hotelier who had settled in the town in the 1920s.
Mr Hotz’s son Mike was at school with me at Sherwood. Mike had a youn-ger sister named Sandra, and Lean ended up marrying her. She was the much-married film director’s fifth wife.

Founded in 1849 as the Diocesan Boy’s School and renamed Sherwood College in 1895, the school was one of six mission boarding schools in Naini Tal.
Jim Corbett, the world-famous author of the best selling “The Man-Eaters of Kumaon” and other classic shikar tales, whose family had settled in Naini Tal in the 1860s, was at Sherwood in the 1880s (when it was still called the Diocesan Boy’s School). Its most famous student of later years was the Indian movie star Amitabh Bachan. He was at Sherwood in the 1950s.

Boys coming to Sherwood could choose the house they wanted to be in. When I arrived at Sherwood in March 1944, I chose Robin Hood house, assuming that because Robin Hood had been the leader of that band of outlaws, the house named after him would also be the best, under the rules of the fiercely competitive annual inter-house championship.

In the event, Robin Hood turned out to be the worst house - last in sports, last in debating, last in academics. In Sherwood slang, the house coming last was known disparagingly as “Jhug House”. In March 1947, at the start of the new school year, I switched to Friar Tuck - Champion House for the previous three years.

During my first year in Friar Tuck, all went well and the house ended up as Champion House yet again. In 1948, however, my last year at Sherwood, Friar Tuck got beaten into second place at the very last stage of the competition, courtesy of my cousin Ajaz Anis, who was in Alan a Dale house.

On Founder’s Day in July 1948, Ajaz won five track events in the under 15 competition, pulling Alan a Dale up literally by its socks from last into first place. Because he was my cousin, the boys in Friar Tuck blamed me for the defeat. That’s when I realised that life can sometimes be very unfair.

The boys in my class at Sherwood included Ravi Dayal, Salman Haider and Manmohan Malhotra. Ravi was the school yo-yo champion, and held the record for the highest number of “Round the Worlds” - a tricky manoeuvre involving spinning the yo-yo round and round one’s finger in a continuous loop. Ravi broke the record by doing 4,000 Round the Worlds on the trot.
Ravi married the daughter of the well-known Indian writer Kushwant Singh, and went on to become head of Oxford University Press in India. After retiring from OUP in 1988, he set up his own publishing firm in New Delhi. Whether he still does Round the Worlds, I don’t know.

Salman Haider, the son of the famous Professor Haider of Aligarh University, joined the Indian Foreign Service. Following stints in Cairo, Kabul, New York, London and Bhutan, Salman became foreign secretary. After retiring as foreign secretary in 1996, he did a short stint on contract as India’s high commissioner in London, quitting when the BJP government took office.

Manmohan Malhotra was the cleverest boy in our class. He joined the Indian Administrative Service, but resigned in 1977 when Indira Gandhi imposed her infamous emergency. In 1978 Manmohan joined the Commonwealth Secretariat in London, eventually becoming No. 2 to the then secretary-general, Sonny Ramphal.

When I met Manmohan at his splendid office in Marlborough House in London in 1980 (our first meeting since leaving Sherwood in 1948), he took one look at me and said, in his best pucca voice, “My dear fellow, what have you been doing for the last 32 years?”

Try though you might, you can never make new old friends.

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