End of Part 1

I just finished schooling. And I feel like Harry Potter at the end of The Deathly Hallows.

My school life had been what I believe it should have been. A perfect platform for life, a nice learning experience, and a lot of exposure.

To my juniors,

Here are some of the things I’ve learned from school.

• Do 5 stupid things per day.
• Ask 5 answer-less questions per day to 5 different teachers (or to 1 teacher if you are willing to take that risk)
• Do not laugh inside the room of the principal.
• If you don’t actually have an illness, do not skip the morning assembly. Vice principal will be patrolling.
• Never note down the time table. Teachers never follow it. Just keep all your books at school. You wouldn’t be opening them at home anyway.
• Know what day it is, every day. You don’t want to go to school on a Sunday. Nor do you want to be in bed at 10 o’clock on a Monday morning. And always wear the right uniform, if you don’t want to be standing out from the crowd.
• Never be absent (unless you have conjunctivitis). Everything happens on the day you are absent.
• Participate in every competition. Just tell your teacher you’re attending without asking what the item is. If it’s a quiz and you don’t know what the answer is, create the funniest answer. If it’s a literary item, make the most of the free time and paper you’re given. If it’s a stage item, just set the stage on fire.(In fact, preparing for some of these items will make you competent for situations that you may face later in your life)
• If you don’t play at least two games, you’re good for nothing. The ground is one place (after the loo) where you’re the king and you rein free. 
• Everything that can go wrong, will go wrong. But fortunately at school you’re always safe.
• Some nights, life sucks. But it’ll be alright by next morning.
• Some days, life rocks. But it’ll be over by the time you open the textbook.
• If you are ever going for an excursion, make sure there are no temples in the area where you’re going.
• Find many reasons why parents meeting is canceled this month.
• If you want to score 100%: Just chill out. If you can learn well, you can score cent.
• If you really want to score 100%: Forget every word in this post. Our exam system is pretty much screwed up (as on the 22^nd of March, 2011) that scoring 100 is impossible unless you waste a considerable amount of time mugging up the slightest details of your textbook. Stop enjoying creative pursuits in the core subjects (or extracurricular subjects). Learn what you’re being taught. Repeat that again and again till you can easily reproduce portions of your textbook.  
• Set realistic aims for your projects. If you really could make that 3 idiots helicopter on your own, you’d be in a special school. Nobody ever did a project that their seniors hadn’t done.
• Exams are designed to be hard. If you’ll surely pass, write only what you know. If you’ll surely fail, copying is fair, provided you learn what you copy.
• When you need help, call someone.
• When you feel really down, call your best friend.
• Try to schedule your birthday on a holiday. It’s a lot more healthier and cheaper.
• Don’t make the following birthday resolution “I’ll start learning properly from today onwards”. It never works. 
• Don’t think about the future. There’s only the present.
• If you break test tubes, just throw the pieces away before anyone sees. If you break the burette, you’re dead.
• Be active in house activities. But know when to slip out of teachers’ sight. You seriously don’t want to be ‘Maveli’ (or worse, his assistant) in the theme show. 
• Choose what your heart says when you are alone, choose what the teacher says when one’s around.
• Play a lot of “truth or dare” games because you’ll soon realize that life’s a big dare
• Learn from your mistakes.
• The best part of volunteering is the food. Ask for it.
• Always eat from your friend’s plate. Your mom’s food, you can always have.
• Be sure that the unexpected will happen. If you’re singing, the mic won’t work, if you’re dancing, the song’ll stop in between, if you’re playing tabala there’ll be a gaping hole in its face.
• If you don’t have a love or at least a crush there’s nothing to worry. It just means that you haven’t attained puberty, and you have a lot of time left. If you are in love, you know.
• Never lose hope. One day she’ll say “yes”.
• But friends, if you don’t have friends, at least a handful of them, it means you’re not learning one lesson that school must teach you – to connect with people. Remember all those friendship forwards you receive everyday? Make them meaningful.
• Do not keep anything for the future (Except may be homeworks, they may be forgotten by the teacher). Because time flies, and you may miss things for ever. If you have nights when you lose breath in your bed thinking of how dear your friends are to you then please, for the sake of love, tell them that.
• Finally, have fun. Have a lot of it.
  Shatter window panes
  Break benches (in teams)
  Start a fight (for fun)
  Do no pay vehicle fee. Enter the bus without a bus pass
  Miss the bus, walk home, try to earn a suspension en route
  Hack the main computer in the lab, copy all official photos to your pen drive, put up a status update as proof (remember to log out and clear history)
  Sit in another class and see whether the teacher notices you
  Increase the volume of the song gradually till its barely audible for the teacher
  Push others into the swimming pool. (Keep your watch inside the bag before doing so)
  Swap class name boards
  Pass chits asking about the teacher’s love bite
  Conduct polls and debates on who’s better – Mammootty or Mohanlal
  Form circles and conspire
• And do every imaginable thing on earth. If you can’t do it in school, you can’t do it anywhere else. (From doing business selling pirated version of kaspersky, to digging hole for planting your own tree sapling)

And then, one day it’d all end. All your friends excluding none will wave you bye and go away. Some may even go without a glance at you. May be you’d meet them again some day. Hey, that was the story my father wrote. Everyone will be on facebook. If not, they’d keep texting. If they don’t you can. And then you’ll join a nice college (if you’re lucky) and make a lot of friends there. And then you’ll decide the climax of the story – you can forget everyone, or do keep in touch.