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Any one who has studied for even a year at Loyola School Tvm, will always sing its praise at any venue anywhere around the world just because of the fond memories of those remarkable days spent there that he holds on to. Having studied at Loyola for 12 years I am well known to many students from other schools as having done just that many a number of times….at many an occassion.

At all these places people have asked me to describe Loyola in one word…and for me that word is – PARADISE!… A home away from home? no…a real home…

But its sad to say that like many batches of senior loyolites before us…it is finally time for us…the BOTS(Batch Of Two thousand Seven) to bid farewell to this glorious Jesuit instituition.

BOTS!
But what is even sadder is the hard cold realisation that the next time we return to Loyola…only the signs saying ‘Loyola School Trivandrum’ will serve as a reminder of the fact that this was once our school…more correctly…our home for thirteen years…

Development is good…but it should not be at the cost of heritage and tradition…

A fellow BOT – Syam Nath and I once made a speech at our school assembly about what has changed over the last 13 years at Loyola and what has not… We were very sad to find that there was a catalogue of things that have changed but very few that has not…In fact in the end we had to resort to naming our uncles and a handful of teachers to stress the fact that this is the same Loyola school that we joined back in ‘94.

Gone is the old Baker made Junior school building…
Gone soon will be the Baker made chapel-auditorium complex…or atleast its use…
Gone is the once dense, thick ’forest’ to the side of the old junior school park…and gone also is the football ground that repaced it…
Gone is that very same junior school park with its swings…slides and what not…
Gone also are the trees that used to provide shade to all those young – ‘to be the generation of tomorrow’- kids who used to play in that park…Their new use…to provide wood for the new state of the art auditorium cum indoor stadium that has replaced that old forest…
Gone is the Baker style of the old canteen…now replaced by a far more ‘modern’ look…
Gone also is the old 5 metre jumping pit that has produced many a Carl Lewis!…no wonder Indians never jum 8m…the pit is only 5m long!!!
Gone is the small sand pit beside the canteen… replaced by a hard tarred road…try long jumping there!!!
And gone I am sure are many other things that my seniors will remember but I don’t because I am just too young…
But most dearly missed of all i believe…the most grievous loss…and yet inevitable… is the age forced retirement of all those great teachers over the years and also of the members of the non teaching staff who quite easily are the heart and soul of Loyola…
From when I and my classmates joined Loyola in ‘94…just 4 high school teachers remain- Anne madam, D.P, Joy sir and Thomaskutty Sir…but thankfully a major share of those brilliant junior school teachers remain. Bhanumathi madam, Grace madam, Elizabeth madam, Murray madam, Maithri madam, Renjini madam and Elain madam are still at the school… and so are Joseph uncle, Athul uncle(both retired and yet continuing), Madhu uncle(who retires early this year), Jose uncle, Laser uncle…all still remain…but gone are Rajappan uncle and Varghese uncle…

I read in Ashok Chandran’s blog that till date the construction of the indoor stadium cum auditorium has taken up 40 million rupees…and thats not the worst news… there is still an estimated 6 months of construction left. Our youth festival crowds are at best empty currently…move that to this new 3000-5000 capacity indoor stadium and it will appear emptier than the crowds that come in to see Priyadarshan’s malayalam to hindi converted movies!!!..

Moving on…Loyolites used to make a habit of winning any and all cultural programmes that they attended…thankfully that still remains the same…Chris Gala 2006(hosted by Christ Nagar H.S.C), Nymphs Fiesta 2006(hosted by Nirmala Bhavan) and Resonance 2007 (hosted by STRS) serve as testimonies to this fact. Loyola’s dominance inthe quizzing field is still existent…maybe not quite at the peaks it once achieved but still…close enough…Our new found source of inspiration in sports comes from the football field… Winning the tournaments held at K.V.Pattom in 2006…Strs in 2004-05 and becoming finalists at the Christ Nagar tournament in the same year all point toward this fact.

But the emergence of football and also cricket through the well built up Loyola Cricket Academy have come at a very heavy price…the 1929esque depression in the skill, fate and form of the once legendary Loyola basketball team… We still have the same court..the same level of crowd support…but just no results to show for it… I guess it would be fair to say that Loyola has not seen a basketball team of any worthwhile mention after the passing out of Vishnu.V, Shankar.R.A and their batch…

Its been eight years since the Loyola Junior Basketball Trophy has remained in Loyola…lets just hope for a miracle this upcoming year…because that is what is needed…a miracle!…

Senior loyolites reading this might think…hey thats not too bad…if basketball is the only thing that has deteriorated in loyola over the years and that too due to the emergence of 2 other sports then…that’s not bad at all…. But the problem lies in the fact that basketball is not all that has deteriorated… Punctuality…that great trademark of a Loyolite is almost non-existent…The author himself is living proof of this… Even our school days that used to run like clockwork now finish 2 or 3 hours late!…

Speaking in English….speaking in what???….ENGLISH???… why???…thats the attitude of the current loyolites…and i’m including my batch and a few batches before us in this category as well… The result…real bad standards in English… any ex-Loyolite visiting the school will notice this.

Even small morals like showing respect to an elder…seems to have waltzed out the front door… I feel the students aren’t the only ones to blame for this though.

No one likes to be a foreteller of doom but without drastic changes – in the standard of education and not in the appearance of the campus – doom is what is likely to befall this school….the doom of disrespect from others…

Recently a few students from 10th std went to some government office to get some paperwork through for their fellow mates… they were made to wait for close to an hour by which time our ‘heroes’ grew extremely fidgety. When they told the clerk that they were from Loyola school and asked the reason for the delay they got the reply that the officials thought that they were from Model school or St.Joseph’s school….Now no disrespect to those two schools…but this is what happened… Our ‘heroes’ come back to school and make a big scene rubbishing the uniform and the non-existent dress codes among other things… But truthfully there should have been no disbelief in the fact that the govt. officials took them for coming from some other school…the way our boys dressed ensured that…shirt carefully tucked in so that half was in and half out…long coloured hair falling away in packets…unmatted and untented for what looks like ages…bathroom slippers and cheap sandals to match and unironed clothes….they looked every inch the part of a street walker…let alone a student of any school!!!…

If this is what Loyola is becoming then maybe it is time to disband the O.B.A….I’m only joking….I still want membership…ok!!!… But seriously its not just the basketball team that is on a slump….the whole school is….and thats a cruel yet true fact…

But having studied in Loyola for 12 years has taught me one thing…never discount the Jesuits…they surely will pull something out of the bag…I only hope its not 2 late when they do…

But its always nice to remember Fr. Joseph Edassery’s words: “Loyola’s advertisement is the students and thankfully the students always mature enough to sent out the right sort of advertisement to the world”…. Lets just hope that Fr. is right and that there will be many a great batch to come after the BOTS…

To end quoting the Jesuit motto:

Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam…

“For The Greater Glory of God.”