PUC – the lost years

On some mornings, far fewer than I’d like, I jog at the Aiyappa Park in Jalahalli. On most days I find young men kicking a tennis ball around, or playing some form of modified cricket. They’re from a nearby college, bunking class and having fun. They prefer the joys of the park to the enforced boredom of class – but they all know it’s a dead end. Your future is in the class. Playing in the park is just a temporary respite.
I know. I used to be like them.

When I look back, I remember my PUC days as the most wasted of my academic years. I didn’t know what I was doing there, and I didn’t want to be there. Everybody talked of the 2nd PUC exams, and we all sensed it with foreboding. Killing time in the park was a valve from the pressures of solving trigonometric equations, or trying to memorise structures of molecules that one wasn’t ever likely to encounter in real life.

Those boys playing football or cricket during college hours – the college principal must’ve written them off as wastrels, unlikely to ever make good in life. Their parents too must’ve given up on them. In all likelihood, they would’ve given up on themselves; reconciling themselves to being ‘bad’ students for whom the academic and career path would never shine bright.

What a tragedy.

Looking back, it’s the PUC years that kill every aspect of you, the non-academic aspects. From your 10th standard on, you’re expected to ‘grow up’, expected to shock yourself into the real world, the world of excellence in studies that would pave the way to a seat in a good college, following which you could ensure yourself a good job. This path was set in stone; any deviation was disastrous.

So from the tenth standard on you were expected to sacrifice every passion. You were told that playing was inimical to studies; that that time was better spent mugging up abstract formulae and equations. You gave up on the things you enjoyed as a kid – sketching, painting, and especially, playing.

But the tenth standard was nothing compared to the 2nd PUC, which made or broke you. And so it was a relentless programme of tuitions and homework, while the more frolicsome part of us had to be killed. The sportsman in every one of us dies at that age. Nearly every promising sportsman gives up his passion during the PUC years. Those who defy these pressures are few, very few.

Any coach will confirm it’s the teenage years that are most crucial to build a sportsman – it’s when you are blossoming into your peak fitness. Our colleges have succeeded in stunting entire generations of potential sportspeople. Children are enrolled into summer camps, and that’s where most of them are initiated into sport. (In earlier days of course, there were no summer camps, just playing with the kids in the neighbourhood.) Hundreds of kids are enrolled into summer camps. Why then are there so few competitive athletes?
The answer is that the numbers are filtered out by the academic system. Parents are fond of kids who perform at sport – as long as it does not harm their studies. But the 10th standard, and later, 2nd PUC, are considered non-negotiable years.

A child who shows great sporting promise is thus taken off training the higher he progresses in school. Coaches are therefore unsure of how much to invest in any kid – for it all seems a waste of energy if the kid is going to give up the programme anyway.

And so we turn out professionals who are such physical misfits. The fitter specimens are out there, but they have been socially ostracized, for there is no system to take advantage of their fondness for physical activity. A visionary national sports policy will have to take into account the ‘PUC years’ which represent a deathly phase for our sportier side. The question of why a nation of over a billion can produce only one Olympic gold medal is easier to answer when seen from this perspective.