SH-Issue 8: 960728

Hi Cathedralites

Thanks for the great turnout in casting your votes about which book I should serialse for the web. Due to a technicality (Finns have been on holidays for the last two weeks) the poll is going to be open for another fortnight, so if you have not cast your vote, please do so now.

I think most of you have been in a holiday mood, as besides filling in the poll form, I did not get a single email comment from any of you out there.

This week I want to share a few thoughts about a couple of very nice teachers.

Mr. Jagdish Pande

Mr. Pande on the right with other retired staff members

Mr. Pande joined the Cathedral School staff after I joined. He was a great guy. I think that of all the teachers of my day, he survived the longest after I left in 1959.

Mr. Pande was taken on by the school sometime in the mid-fifties to introduce Marathi, as the four language formula had just been introduced. He was not very successful at teaching us Marathi, but he was a wonderful badminton player and he also took over in charge of the hockey First Eleven. He played a rough and good game of hockey. I will in a future issue tell you some more about his hockey training methods and a couple of great games.

In our time we had to study Marathi up till the Standard X. It was not important to pass the ansnual exam. Hence, Mr. Pande had a difficult time holding our attention. I think I just about managed to learn the Marathi alphabet in my 4 years. I did go to the house of a good friend, Vinay Dabholkar, to study Marathi, but usually we all ended up playing games like hide-and-seek in his large rambling residence overlooking Horniman Circle!

Our level of school badminton was especially good, not only because of the interest shown by Mr. Pande, but because we had the two Ruia cousins, Ashok Ruia and Anil Ruia, in our class. Mr. Pande organised the quad badminton championships besides our Inter-house competition. I enjoyed a good game, even so that today, with my portly figure I am still able to give my 23 year old son a tough fight when we have a turn.

The father of Anil Ruia was the President of the All India Badminton Association at that time. As a result, we did get to see all the great foreign and Indian players that came to Bombay (Mumbai) at that time.

Both Ashok and Anil were natural players and with the good encouragement given by Mr. Pande, they performed extremely well in the competitions of those days. If I remember right, the younger brother of Ashok, whose name was Bharat, was a tiny little fellow, but he too was a wonderful badminton player.

From what I hear Ashok is now more active on the Bridge and Golf front these days and Anil has busy running his industries. However, I wonder what happened to Mr. Pande?

Mr. Timmins


The late Mr. Timmins, Savage House Master

When I shifted from Bangalore to Bombay in 1954, I was supposed to join Standard VII, but there was just no room. The luckiest thing that happened to me was that Mr. Gunnery gave me a place to repeat Standard VI.

The class teacher in Standard VI was Mr. Timmins. He was also House Master for Savage. As Bala put it in an email to me, all newcomers were shoved into Savage, so I too was shoved into that House. I have no regrets as I did become the House Captain.

Mr. Timmins was a good maths teacher and a very good class master. Thanks to him, I fitted into the school without the slightest hitch. Within a week I felt as I had never been to any other school in my life. Our classroom was next to the Physics laboratory on the first floor.

Well I guess that is all for this week. Do write as I need some needling and prodding once in a way to keep up this tempo.

Some items to come

Probably next week I will tell you some of the interesting events that made me, and my brother, popular within the short space of a month at the school and also about the visit of Olympic star Jesse Owens to the school.

Regards
Cathedralite Jacob Matthan
1959 Savage House Captain

SH-Issue 7: 960714

Hi Cathedralites

Thank you Bala (Bala Parasuraman - Savage House, Senior Cambridge 1959, A Levels 1961) for putting me straight about the late A. Glynne-Howell. Glynne-Howell was his surname (to be expected) and his initial was A for Alan.

Bala also provided an interesting memory which I too do recall:

* I remember that he used to like me because my map drawing skills were quite good. I also remember a funny incident that took place one day. Farouk Kanga and I used to sit close by in class. We happened to be talking one day, when old Glynne-Howell spotted Farouk trying to pass me something (it might have been a post-card or something). Anyway, Farouk realized he'd been spotted and his hands froze under the desk. Glynne-Howell then remarked in that dry, wry voice of his "Mr. Kanga, remember, all good sailor boys keep their hands above deck!"

And this comment came from Kashinath Dandekar (1957):

Apparently Mr.Glynne-Howell (Geography and Football - Ed:???) carried four handkerchiefs with him. Their purposes were as follows:

One for show,
One for go,
One for any other use, you know
And one for emergency.

This week is not time for anecdotes but for some planning. I had a very nice letter from 69er Rohet Tolani in Bombay: Date: Tue, 02 Jul 1996 23:49:21 +0530

From: Rohet Tolani
Subject: Cathedral Connection

Hi Jacob

Heard about your site from (94er) Vikram Somaya. It has been delightful going through your anecdotes from years gone by. I am involved with the Cathedral Alumni Association in Bombay. Last week we decided that it would be a good idea to set up a permanent official Cathedral Alumni Website. Consequently I started to look around for what already existed on the web and came across pages by (93er) Sikri and (94er) Somaya. I think all of you have done a great job to try and bring together web surfing Cathedralites and we would like to complement that with a site which is supported by the organizational infrastructure we have here.

As starters we would like to make available on the site the entire alumni directory, the association's newletter - "Catcall", news of happenings at the school, news of alumni, profiles of prominent alumni, etc.

I hope to meet with Vikram soon as he is in Bombay for the summer. I would like to get ideas and inputs from people like you and him who are quite a bit more "web aware" than we are in India. So please do give us your thoughts, suggestions and advice how we can set up a really successful site that can help bring together the old boys and girls,

Regards

Rohet Tolani
Class of 1969 (ISC)
Wilson House
Mailing address et al
10-A Bakhtawar, Nariman Point, Bombay 400 021
Tel: 202-6878 (Off); 386-1818 (Res)
Fax: 287-0697 (Off); 387-2429 (Res)

My reply to Rohet was that we should not duplicate what others are doing but to bring it together as a composite under one banner, and that this is very easy to do on the web. Someone should take the responsibility of maintaining the index page of Catcall (Web Version) and have the links to all the web pages with introductory summaries so that they form the pages of a great web magazine.

For instance, instead of starting up another Alumni Directory, the Cathedral School page which already exists on the World Alumini Directory would probably be the best to have as a page in our Catcall. Several of us are already registered there and they have a Bulletin Board, etc. already established - and it will cost no-one any time or money.

Editors for each 5 year period could be established with the responsibility of putting up pages of their period - so that people can go straight to the pages of their greatest interest. Bombay could concentrate on putting up pages about the history of the school, bio-datas about principals, present activities, etc. Some of the pages would be permanent while others would be magazine style like mine.

The web offers so many possibilities to develop this concept and I am sure that we can have the best web magazine up with very little stress and effort on the part of anyone. And it will not be dependant on any one person or organisation - it will run for time immemorial.

In this vein I had a message from 82er Moshin Ahmed

Date: Tue, 2 Jul 1996 18:36:42 -0700
From: Mohsin Ahmed
Subject: Hi, Cathedral

Hi Jacob,

I read your columns about Cathedral school with great delight. I was there around 1977-1982 (8-12th), also taught there around 1986. I liked your style of writing, though I was from a different era. I could imagine the things that happened then.

I am planning to add similar material sometime on my page at:

http://www.cs.albany.edu/~mosh/

~mosh/Cathedral is just starting out.

Did you know, a friend of mine here (a few doors from my office) played the school song on his flute. I wish I could record it and put it on my home page. Did you have the hymn book then? I have one at home in Bombay and I miss it here.

- Mohsin.

This characterises my point that his page would form one stone in our Catcall magazine. A student and a teacher, Moshin will certainly have a lot to contribute in his web page.

On the other hand I did have a message from Hormuz Minina:

Date: Thu, 4 Jul 1996 05:11:00 -0400 (EDT)
From: Hormuz Minina
Subject: Re: Cathedralites - Issue 6 of Seventh Heaven is UP

Hi Jacob,

Well as feedback I suggest you e-mail the news letter.

Cheers,

Hormuz Minina
(http://www.eyedrum.org/index.asp)

I pointed out to Hormuz that mine was not a newsletter but a webletter to which he replied:

Date: Thu, 4 Jul 1996 06:03:30 -0400 (EDT)

From: Hormuz Minina

Yeah, but I don't see the difference. You are mailing everyone to tell them that the new Web letter is out... Well, then why not just insert it? ;-)

Cheers,

Hormuz

Well I do not want to get into an argument, but maybe someone can explain my reasons for keeping it as a webletter rather than as a newsletter - I am sure many of you are more competent at that considering what I have suggested above. I would like to stop sending out those annoying reminders, which would be possible if all of you used some good reminder service as URL-minder.

However, the opinions expressed, both by Stephanians and Cathedralites (as well as my hundreds of regular readers of Findians Briefings) was almost unanimous and is summarised in this letter from 90er Vinay Jayaram:

Date: Thu, 4 Jul 1996 02:29:08 +-100
From: Vinay Jayaram
Subject: RE: Cathedralites - Issue 6 of Seventh Heaven is UP

Hi Jacob,

Well, here it is, perhaps your first Cathedralite reply. Unfortunately, I am walking out of the door as we speak, so I cannot talk. But here are my vital stats:

Vinay Jayaram
Completed 10th in 1990
. Wilson House
Famous teachers who taught me:
Kuriakose, Hallegua, Lewis, Nepali, Kapur (Geography), Chatterjee/Singhal (Hindi), Paulose/Sharma (Chemistry), Nagia, and many others.
My new e-mail address is vinay@ibm.net

Please continue to send me updates.

Vinay

So the web is the meeting place, the communication point, the information point - and not just a dumb one-way newsletter as we can interact so much more on the web.

Please do not forget that I am an old foggy and my views may be archaic - so, you can just stop reading my web page if you do not like my style and never know anything about us on crutches, or you can join us by sharing your experiences.

I am hoping that Vinay will tell us about all those great teachers as I do not recognise a single name in his list.

I seem to have overrun my space quota for this week, but I think we have got the system of Seventh Heaven working thanks to all of you who do take the trouble to communicate. And do visit my main page if you have some time to spare. Please also take some time to visit and register in GOPIO - the new link is now operational as Professor Thomas Abraham from Columbia University was pestered by me so much so that he changed the site address and put up the page where it works. The register button was not functional but you can register by email.

Regards
Jacob Matthan
Savage House Captain 1959
Oulu, Finland

P.S. How many of you feel I should change the name of the page from Seventh Heaven to something else - it has a lot of meaning for the 1959 crowd - but not to anyone else. I would appreciate your comments on this.