It is Kola Perumal !

Time: Feb'96

Venue: T Nagar, Chennai, Shri Shankarlal Jain School

Event: RSP weekend camp

 A bunch i.e. around 12 of us had enrolled for a 2 day weekend RSP (Road Safety Patrol) camp organized by the Chennai city traffic police at Shri Shankarlal Jain School, T Nagar Chennai, in the pleasant month of Feb 1996. This camp was mainly held to promote road safety awareness among school kids which I personally felt was extremely necessary in the chaotic Indian City traffic. Our school had done reasonably well in the recent Republic Day parade held last month and we were all on an emotional high. Most of us faced the grim reality of our last few months of fun before we stepped into the rigor of 12th std routine, supposedly, the most important year of our lives. So we rather live it up now.

This camp was a mix of fun, social and awareness sessions and was planned well throughout the day. There were competitions ranging from painting, quiz, dance, music, talent shows and the occasional knowledge sessions on traffic and road safety awareness by the top officials of the city. Over 500 boys and girls from over 50 schools all over the city had culminated for this event. Although it was a casual weekend camp, the nature of the competition was extremely fierce with each school vying for the top spot in each of them.

I wanted to try my hands on the quiz competition. Our team M.Senthil, D.Jagdish and I participated in the quiz competition. The first round was a written competition with about 50 general knowledge questions and we thought we had done quite well, infact we felt the questions were too simple for us. After this round, we moved on to the other events as cheering squad for our school mates. I remember our boys also did an ad-zap show which was quite hilarious and the crowd loved it.

Later around 4pm was the announcement that quiz finalists were going to be announced and asked the finalists join the stage for the finale. This is how the announcement went on as the officer M.T.Varghese (some names stick in our mind all through our lives just like this one) on the mic announced loudly:

"The First Finalist is DAV school".. this didn't bother us and we were still confident we would crack it and that it would be us next.

"The Second Finalist is SBOA school".. damn, a hint of disappointment and confidence draining away and questioning ourselves if our overconfidence led to our underperformance.

"The Third Finalist of the evening is….".. after a short pause "Sacred Hearts School" and a bunch of girls celebrated frantically.

All our school mates were dejected and we turned out backs and started moving out. There was no way now, we could be the last team to be selected from the 50 odd schools eagerly waiting to be called out.

The officer now started out loud again "And the Fourth finalist of the evening is…………….." and there was an unexpected eerie silence among the 100s of students seated there, and Pramod from our school who diligently stayed back shouted "Kola Perumal" Everyone turned to him……….. Officer:  "YES IT IS KOLA PERUMAL !!!"

We 3 were ecstatic and ran up to the stage on hearing our school name and our school mates cheered us as loud as they could as if we had won the competition itself. We made it through..!

 P.S. - The finals itself was a bit somber and all questions were around traffic rules and regulations and definitely not our forte. We ended the competition at a joint 3rd but more than the final onstage participation, the selection process is what we all enjoyed more and recollected often in our get-togethers.