Woodstock School Alumni Magazine Vol CIV, 2011
Woodstock School Alumni Magazine Vol CIV, 2011
Woodstock School Alumni Magazine Vol CIV, 2011
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Following Sports Day was the interschool<br />
meet, magnificently called the Olympics.<br />
Before Sports Day and Olympics, I never<br />
could sleep much, a fact which did nothing<br />
to help my performance. Olympics was always<br />
an awesome affair; we’d walk several<br />
miles over the hills to St. George’s or Oak<br />
Grove. The great climax to my sports thrill<br />
was the day Alec and I took every first<br />
place but one event in the under-14 division.<br />
We both got big brown chenille Ws<br />
for our achievement, and the opportunity<br />
to attend the sportsman’s banquet to which<br />
we were expected to ask a girl - an ominous<br />
prospect for one totally inexperienced in<br />
that field. I asked Jeananne Constance to<br />
be my date. It was a terrifying evening.<br />
Sixth standard was the last standard we<br />
stayed at Ridgewood. From now on we<br />
would be recognized as “hefts,” no longer<br />
chuts. Still, as long as Bob was in school,<br />
I was known as “Chutty Erny.” We had a<br />
set of slang expressions quite peculiar to<br />
<strong>Woodstock</strong>, most of which have doubtless<br />
passed out of usage. “Buck off” meant<br />
show off; “squinch,” cheat; “chut,” small;<br />
“heft,” large; “packa ding chaunce,” terribly<br />
good; “bra,” brother; “sas,” sister;<br />
“taws,” marbles; “airzes,” airplanes;<br />
“gaff,” fun; and “homey,” homework. Most<br />
of this quaint vocabulary has slipped my<br />
mind but there were enough of these words<br />
to fill a small dictionary.<br />
The dames lived in what was called the<br />
College and at our age only sissies paid<br />
any attention to them. During the noon<br />
hour, we often bought treats from the<br />
ubiquitous cake wallas. Usually there<br />
were landslides after each heavy rain.<br />
I remember the Tehri Hills, Dhanaulti,<br />
Magru, Bear Mountain and Bears Cave,<br />
Pepper Pot, Bundar Poonch, Kellogg, the<br />
chakars, Mullingar, and skating parties.<br />
We sang “Shadows,” the <strong>Woodstock</strong> hiking<br />
song, and “Cheers for the brown and<br />
the gold.” I also remember “Charley’s<br />
Aunt,” “You can’t take it with You,” and<br />
“Tobias and the Angel,” and also prizegiving<br />
day, going-down-dinner, capture<br />
the flag down at the gravey (graveyard),<br />
the Hostie, Kincraig and Dehra, the buz<br />
(bazaar), Sobha’s (Sobha Ram’s), and a<br />
thousand other words, the mere mention<br />
of which brings back the indescribable<br />
flavor of all that was <strong>Woodstock</strong> to me.<br />
My great sorrow was that Dad was elected<br />
OMS president in 1950, forcing us to leave<br />
India and <strong>Woodstock</strong> after my freshman<br />
year.<br />
Class Jottings That Sing<br />
Abhra Bhattacharjee, ’92, Director of Development, <strong>Woodstock</strong> <strong>School</strong><br />
When I first joined the Development<br />
Office at <strong>Woodstock</strong> 18 months<br />
ago, I came from a communications<br />
background and I was very excited about<br />
the idea of redesigning some of our publications.<br />
When it came to our Quadrangle, Pete<br />
Wildman, our Head of Communications and<br />
Marketing, and quite the designer himself,<br />
warned me that I could mess with the cover, the<br />
editorial, the glossy paper stock and perhaps<br />
even switch from black and white to fourcolor,<br />
but I shouldn’t tamper with the Jottings.<br />
And so, although we innovated last year with<br />
on the Quad cover for the first time, we still<br />
had incredible contributions from more than<br />
70 classes of <strong>Woodstock</strong> alumni.<br />
“Jottings are what everyone wants to read,”<br />
says Li Chu ’59, our full time voluntary database<br />
administrator, and someone who has<br />
done more than her fair share of collecting<br />
and collating the Jottings over the last nine<br />
years. “They keep us connected. Everything<br />
else is just extra.”<br />
She is right.<br />
Jottings are the lifeblood of the Quadrangle.<br />
No matter how hard we work to create feature<br />
stories that are timely, provocative and<br />
just plain interesting, class notes will always<br />
overshadow them. They’re the first thing<br />
readers turn to when they get the magazine<br />
and the last thing they put down before they<br />
turn out the light.<br />
In one respect, we’re lucky. With Jottings, we<br />
know there’s something in every Quadrangle<br />
that people will read, regardless of its content<br />
or presentation. But let’s face it—to an editor,<br />
that endless name, rank, and serial number list<br />
of new jobs, marriages, children and deaths<br />
can seem very uniform, and I know that for<br />
many class secretaries, the thought of preparing<br />
the annual Jottings ranks somewhere be-<br />
Quadrangle - 9<br />
tween root canal surgery and telemarketing.<br />
Fortunately not everyone feels that way. As<br />
I prepared this article, I reached out to a few<br />
advancement colleagues to ask what they had<br />
learned in their experience of creating alumni<br />
publications. I also enquired of a handful of<br />
class secretaries that clearly enjoy what they<br />
do, and had a lot of great advice to share. They<br />
also asked if I could share some of their pet<br />
peeves with their classmates, to help make<br />
their annual exercise a lot easier. Here is what<br />
many of them said.<br />
Get Real<br />
My advancement peers at other schools<br />
and colleges tell me that their class notes<br />
section has become a lot hipper and more<br />
confessional through the years. <strong>Alumni</strong> at<br />
other institutions share life-affirming stories<br />
about their triumphs over disease, job loss or<br />
family tragedy with classmates they haven’t<br />
seen or spoken with in decades. For those of<br />
us that attended <strong>Woodstock</strong>, this should not<br />
be too difficult; after all we all survived the<br />
food, the hills, the leeches and the langurs<br />
together. It is remarkable to me how we are<br />
able to pick up our relationships with classmates<br />
or other alumni no matter how long<br />
it has been since we connected. Try and be<br />
real and honest when you send in your news<br />
to your class secretary – after all that is what<br />
a classmate and friend really wants to know.<br />
Many <strong>Woodstock</strong> alumni say they feel that<br />
if they haven’t achieved certain goals—<br />
a beautiful family, a stellar job, a Nobel<br />
Prize—then they aren’t worthy to<br />
write in. But you and your class secretaries<br />
can work to dispel that myth.<br />
One class secretary wrote, “Let’s not just<br />
talk about facts, let’s talk about feelings,<br />
and now I see my classmates being honest<br />
about the curveballs life has thrown them.”