The golden period of my life

The Golden days of my life :

                Those were the golden days of my life. My high school days. My lovely high school days. Really, really beautiful days. I was a village boy. My high school – New English School, Jaitapur - was also situated in a village. It was established in 1902. I was borned in 1960. I was there because my father was in service in the same village. I was very fond of my father. I went where he was. My mother was in another village from where I came. My father's mother was with us. I was very fond of her too ! In my high school education, I got nice teachers and also my classmates were very nice. Satish, Sai, Uday and I were very close friends. Now Satish and Sai are in Mumbai and Uday is somewhere in Sindhudurg district of Maharashtra State in India.


                 I can't remember the first day there. But, as I continued, I went on to like the village as well as the high school building, which was built in E shape. In my primary school days, I was a shy boy. In high school, I was slightly improved. Sometimes I went on to even lead the students ! In the eighth standard, satish's father, who was one of the teachers in the high school, taught us how to read poems. Since that day I liked poems. Not even poems, but I started to read every prose which came across me. Shankar tatya, one of our neighbour, shown me how to read the newspapers. He told me that the most important part of newspaper is its editorial and it must be read first. Because of him I started to read newspapers like Maharashtra Times and Loksatta, in eighth standard.


               At that time Mr. Ashok Jain was writing (probably "delhi vartapatra") in Maharashtra Times (one of the leading newspapers in Marathi language). I liked his articles most. In nineth standard, Sai's father whom we called as Aaba, gave me his prescription pad. He was a doctor. He was very nice to us . The prescription pad consists of many pink colored pages, which I liked most. One night, after finishing homework, I started to write on those pink pages. I wrote on Nature. That was my first article. I named it Nisargache Avalokan (Observation of the Nature). In the nineth standard, I wrote my first poem which I can't remember now. But it was on a beautiful girl walking on a road in the afternoon heat. I was under shadow in a well covered boat near the bank of a creek. In fact, I was reading Geography book. I felt the heat under which the girl was walking and I was in a shadow. I felt the difference between our situations. This difference was the subject of my first poem. It gave birth to the poem and me as a poet ! Later on, I went on to write many poems, most of them on social subjects. But the roots of writing were in those golden high school days.