The all -important event of any high school calendar- Inter-house Dramatics

If you live in India, and are studying in a CBSE school, you will relate with my present situation when I say that ‘Oh! You’re in Class 12, Have you started preparing for the Board Examinations?’ is the sentence I hear most often these days. I know of many people who have a preconceived notion that the senior most class in school should ideally be a troupe of serious, responsible young men and women parading down the corridors with gloomy, despondent faces. However, I don't think they can get farther away from the truth because my batchmates are the craziest, most dynamic and easy going people I know! And no, we don't shy away from responsibility and aren't careless or callous. But to expect us to sport a gloomy, serious look at all times, is asking too much! The truth about how thick we all are, and how we’re able to rise to the occasion began to dawn upon me only when we were split into different ‘houses’ in class eleven, and, for the first time in our lives, began taking the annual ‘interhouse championship’ seriously. 

A long standing tradition has been to conduct an ‘Interhouse dramatics competition’ every year. The four houses put up a play and the winning team walks away with the prestigious chance to perform during the Annual Day.

This being our last year in school, two of my friends and I decided to organise the play for our house- from deciding on a play, to writing the script, casting actors and organising practice sessions. And this, truly has been THE EXPERIENCE OF MY LIFETIME. 

Since the three of us admire and delight in the humour of Sir P.G.Wodehouse , setting a Wodehousian tone to our play seemed an obvious choice- until we discovered he hasn't authored any plays. Understandably, we were initially sceptical about going ahead with the Wodehouse theme because the bitter truth is that none of us were sterling playwrights. Besides, the others houses were adapting and editing existing plays, so a script authored entirely by three sixteen year-olds would be rather raw and amateur in comparison. Given these difficulties, we were motivated to begin preparation well ahead of time and that, dear readers, is the story of how we invaded and inhabited  a restaurant for three hours one April afternoon. 

The obvious question staring us right in the face was ‘How are we going to take characters like Jeeves and Wooster and make them appeal to an audience that has probably never heard of them before? And more challenging, how are we going to retain the undercurrent of British humour from the book while converting it into a play that OUR audience will relate to?’ Fortunately, there seemed to be a mutual understanding between the three of us and two sandwiches into the brainstorm, we had a broad outline of the story.

In the subsequent weeks, we haunted a Starbucks outlet down the road for an hour or two each time. Working on a script together was more entertaining than I had imagined, since every person, incident and object around us became the butt of our jokes. And usually, we ended up working these jokes into our script. Four visits to Starbucks later, the entire script was born, along with ‘Creative Dissonance’ (a highly esteemed and intellectual group on WhatsApp named after a repetitive of the discussion that a ridiculously loud group of middle-aged men and women seated a table away from us had  engaged in). It was the first draft and subsequently revised fifteen times in pursuit of perfection. In this regard, out senior and my good friend has devoted many many minutes of her existence (strangely enough, it was this very existence that I was blissfully unaware of till a year ago! ) 

However, more than anything else, I think I have become better friends with these people as a result of this play. Ten years down the line, regardless of anything else I remember about my school life, I am sure that this is an experience I will never forget. It is something I will cherish and treasure forever. The friendships we cultivate during our childhood are, after all, in all our naiveté and innocence. These are the friendships that we make without any ulterior motive, without any context. These are the friendships that we might have least expected to make Yet, they are probably the only friends who, even after an eternity has elapsed, will make you feel that things are exactly how they used to be.