In the long list of personal moral failures for which I will have to atone, participating in schoolyard and dormitory bullying–even if only briefly, and in attenuated fashion–must rank among the very worst. The only exculpation I can offer in my defense is that I was young, but all bullies in school are; I’m afraidContinue reading “On Being A Bully”
Tag Archives: boarding schools
Gabriel Rockhill On Never Dying
Over at the New York Times’ The Stone, in ‘Why We Never Die‘ Gabriel Rockhill writes: Our existence has numerous dimensions, and they each live according to different times. The biological stratum…is in certain ways a long process of demise — we are all dying all the time, just at different rhythms. Far from being anContinue reading “Gabriel Rockhill On Never Dying”
Prisons And Boarding Schools: The Informer Phenomenon
I’ve made note here, on this blog, on some interesting similarities between prisons and boarding schools: the discipline, the regulation of time, the uniforms, the social dynamics. Yet another similarity may be found in the ubiquity of informers: moles, spies, double-agents, leakers, snitches–call them what you will–conduits for the passage for information to administrative andContinue reading “Prisons And Boarding Schools: The Informer Phenomenon”
‘Orange Is The New Black’ And Boarding Schools
As I make my way through the second season of Orange Is The New Black, Netflix’s original series based on Piper Kerman‘s memoir, Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison about her experiences at FCI Danbury, a minimum-security federal prison, I’m struck again by how much of the prison experience remindsContinue reading “‘Orange Is The New Black’ And Boarding Schools”
On School Libraries – I
The first school library I can remember using was during my sixth grade. I had transferred schools after the fifth grade, and perhaps because of the trauma of losing my favorite school teacher, some memories of those first five school years seem to have been obliterated. Including the ones about libraries. My new school’s libraryContinue reading “On School Libraries – I”
Of Prefects and Punishment Drills
In my ninth and tenth grades, I attended boarding school in India. Like many boarding schools of its type, it incorporated the disciplinary mechanism of the prefect: senior schoolboys placed in charge of those junior to them, armed with the rule book, and cricket bats and hockey sticks with which to hand out six ofContinue reading “Of Prefects and Punishment Drills”
Samir Chopra 