Notre Dame... And Everything It Means to Every One of Us

... The colourful clothes and sand dunes in Montessori... And Mrs Mower's lessons on etiquette.
... The transition to the reds and whites that became eternal to our being for the next 12 years.
... The assemblies... The speeches... The ABBAs we sung at 7 in the morning.
... The colourful rides (?) in the playground.
... The P.T. lessons.
... The basketball court.
... The gossip sessions on the tenis court.
... Taking off shoes outside the Computer labs.
... Mrs Rekha Srivastav, who to this day remains my style icon!
... Mrs Rajni Verma who, my mom told me many years later, took off her shawl in the biting cold, because her class 4 students were performing a skit without their sweaters on on a cold January morning.
... May Day celebrations.
... Discovering rock music with a band whose name I forget, back in class 6!
... The Work Experience classes, and what we really did during those 80 minutes.
... The sports days, the drills, the school band, the music, the colours.
... Walking in impeccable straight lines, irrespective of where we were headed - bus lines, assembly lines, post lunch break lines.
... Sr. Joan's music lessons, and our motley bunch wanting to sing at the start of English classes, just so that we could stall "getting educated" for just 5 more minutes.
... The white sports uniform.
... The one act plays, the tableaus, the elocution contests, the debates, the salad dressing contests, the essay writing contests.
... Echo. Says it all, doesn't it?
... The red and white salwaar kurtas in plus 2 that made us feel like we had conquered the world just by growing up enough to wear what we thought only grown ups did.
... The Children's, Teachers', and even Principal's Day celebrations and all the music and dance that came with it.
... Board exams and how overrated they were!
... The Julie School - our first lesson in compassion.
... The canteen samosas, phuchka waala, and the piping hot dosas on dry leaves.
... The labs and how much we looked forward to them strictly because it meant no lectures.
... The oaths of a lifetime of no alcohol, that I don't think any of us really took :D
... The earnest atteempts of those teachers to turn us wild things into what they called "ladies". But then it only meant "no stamping your feet on the staircase" :)
... The Chapel, the Christmas celebrations, the Santa Claus, and a month of Christmas Carols.
... The socials that didn't happen for our batch.
... The "social standing" we had among "men" in the nearby schools, and all the waiting and pining outside the school campus ;)
... The school trips - to Calcutta and Bombay and Goa and Sikkim and the Sanjay Gandhi Jaivik Udyaan.
... The Mamma's meets and the PTA meets that every one of us abhorred with the same intenity - toppers and back benchers irrespective.
... The dismissals :)
... The bomb blast, the suspension, and the discussions, laughters, kudos it triggered.
... The farewells and the entire year's planning that went into them.
... And the friends, the acquaintances, the batchmates, the teachers, the principals - a bunch of spirited women - the type one doesn't see everyday.

I may never have said this before, but of all the women I have met in life so far, the most spirited are those that belong to Notre Dame. They don't make such women anymore. I owe almost everything I am to my school, my alma mater. And whatever I have missed will come back to me in a few years I am sure. In the small town that I grew up, Notre Dame was a different world altogether! I can only thank my stars that my parents decided to send me there, in spite of the "social standing" and the "pining and craving". LOL! Almost a decade later, I can now appreciate how Notre Dame recognised and appreciated the individual in each one of us.

It's Notre Dame Day today. And I want to celebrate it. But I don't know how! If I start singing my school anthem, my neighbours will think I am crazy and I can't even guarantee that they don't already. But I will sing nevertheless.

Here's to Notre Dame. Here's to Damians. Thank you for making us the women we are!

P.S. - There's a Sisters of Notre Dame institution here in Bangalore. And a few years down the line, I want a daughter only so that I can revisit the best days of my life :)