Fight! Fight! Fight!

In primary school I learnt that if it were not for a civil society, I would have been long eliminated. Few people know that Darwin came up with the 'Survival of the fittest' theory after a recess brawl at school. He began by writing a tragic personal memoir on his blog. But furious that nobody, not even close friends ever read his blog, he eventually wrote an entire scientific paper about it, thereby shooting to fame.

He should have known; about the blog I mean. If there is one place where you can keep written documents safe and out of sight, it is your blog. Blog posts are never read, not even by those who visit the blog. Why is Coca Cola guarding it's recipe in a bank safe? Why is Bill Gates struggling to keep the code for Windows under wraps? Upload it on your blogs guys. No one will ever see it again!!

But more about the frustrations of writing a blog that no one ever reads, later. This post is about bigger issues - Primary School. Primary school is a much underestimated environment for study of primitive human culture. At an age when human beings have not yet learnt to respect the law and indulge in social niceties, justice usually boils down to one thing. Who can beat the crap out of who?

At school, the aforementioned crap was usually being beaten out of me. When it comes down to a fight, I am the complete and thorough definition of a loser. On different occasions, in different school yards, with different adversaries, I always found myself at the wrong end of a punch, the receiving end of a kick or the painful end of hair that was being pulled out. Some people would take pride in such consistency but I found this very unbecoming and undignified. The humiliation was rather upsetting. The beating up was just too straightforward and direct. It was a very final, very binding decision of who was right and who was lying half dead on the floor.

Then I came to this fancy all girls school with choirs, pinafores, hymn books, aerobics and - (important plot point here) karate. Karate, as serious as school karate can be, with white belts, yellow belts, brown belts and black belts. Now aerobics was up to my taste because we wore colorful slacks and tees and jumped around like little Jane Fondas trying to lose fat we 11 year-olds had not yet gained and get toned bodies we did not yet aspire for. We could also let loose our pigtails and wear bandannas or pony tails; a remarkable improvement in style. But karate was painful. We had to wear a white lab coat with no buttons, white pajamas and the colored belts to hold the comedy together. The belts were also a watertight agent of segregation where black belts were top dogs and white belts were faceless, nameless numbers. After running barefoot all around the school to warm up, we did a choreographed ballet of punching and kicking the air. I liked to believe that this ballet would one day come hand in self defence or even crime fighting. I was a white belt, need I mention.

I had barely settled into the routine when one day we were asked to pick partners to duel with. Everyone was to pair up with someone their own size and mettle. The winner would get promoted up by one belt. An introduction to the way the world outside worked, it was a wonderfully simple scheme. As the new girl I was surprised when a girl from three rows away offered to pair up with me. She was my size. She seemed to smile a lot. She even went and got our names written in the teacher's register. We taught each other the few basic moves we knew. Her enthusiasm was so charming. I was loving the elegant and polite workings of this all-girls school civil society.

When the duel began, the smiling girl began to kick and punch with the precision of nearly-blue belt and with the mercilessness that only one girl can show another. The beating up was nothing new, a nostalgic reminder of my old school really. But the smiling sickness of the face was making me nauseous. What was this funny feeling in my chest? It wasn't pain. I later learnt to call it by fancy names, like cheating or betrayal. That afternoon, it was just 'the-funny-feeling-in-my-chest-that-was-not-pain-but-hurt-even-worse'. The smiling girl got the blue belt she had been practicing hard to earn for an year now.

As I was sent back to the sea of white belts, I learnt that school had finally grown up around me. It was no longer all right to settle fights with a simple shoving and pulling affair. In the grown up world, fights were civil. Planned, orchestrated, many against one, behind the back and completely fair if the end gain was important enough. Later in high school I learnt that a fights hurt deeper when no physical manhandling is involved. In this ironic lesson about growing up, I learnt to miss the plain dust-biting justice of primary years. At least you knew who you were fighting and what you had done to invite it.