Day 19: Stickers

I don't think I was ever a fan of going to school. Yes, I did enjoy time spent with friends and all the time I didn't have to study, but these were overshadowed by my chronic distaste for tutorials and exams and general requirement of well behaviour etc. I can safely say that, if given a choice, I would've rather sat at home. So, by the end of the 2-month long summer holidays in May every year, I used to be pretty close to tears.

However, not everything was bleak. What I did love about a new academic year were the new books, the brown paper and the name labels. Am not sure whether the practice is still around, but my school (and I believe pretty much every school in Kerala), required its students to wrap their new books in brown paper. A simple, logical solution to prevent (or rather, extend) the damage that kids can do to their book covers. Then, to identify which book belongs to whom, the practice was to paste name labels on each book. These would read something like "Name: Shilpa V Krishnan, Class: 3 B, Subject: Maths".

I used to love bending over all those books and papers and labels, together with my mom, getting them all sorted out under the light of a candle in our house, while the rain lashed and thunder blasted outside. Because by the time this excercise used to happen, the monsoons would have arrived and electricity would be cut off since some tree would have fell over some electircity pole. It happened year after year after year and I used to love it.

But what used to also happen is that when I go happily with my new books to school, I used to be surrounded by kids with books covered not only with new, crisp, more expensive shiny brown papers but also, pretty elaborate, gilttery, colourful name labels. My brown paper used to be the cheaper thin non-shiny material and my name labels were the complimentary ones I used to get along with the children's magazine, 'Baalarama', which were honestly not the most happening. But that didn't bother me much. Instead, what used to awe me were the stickers that some of them used to paste on their books. These could be Disney characters or fruits or flowers or random phrases like "Hello" or "Friend". They came in all shapes and sizes and colours and materials and were simply amazing!

I was always a responsible child and since I couldn't think of a really rationale reason for wanting such stickers, other than that I really loved them, I didn't ask my parents for any. So whenever a sheet of stickers did come my way, mostly as a gift from a friend or a relative, I used to treasure it! I used to treasure it so much that I didn't, ever, peel off a sticker to stick it anywhere. Instead I saved them all up in a box and would look at them once in a while and be enthralled by all those wonderful pictures. I believe that box and all those stickers are still intact in a chest under the bed of my parents.

Today I sent a sheet of stickers to a girl am sponsoring in Assam. A pencil or an eraser would have been more useful to her for sure, but for all you know, she might also have a small box where she keeps some pretty useless but precious possessions.

981 more to go.