I recently took stock of my finances and decided that I didn't need to live like a Buddhist monk anymore. Consequently, I bought subscriptions on both Funimation and Crunchyroll, thus emancipating myself from the illusion that I'm not a weeb. To be fair to myself, the word "weeb" or "weaboo" carries with it connotations far exceeding anything I can reasonably be accused of, but it's nevertheless the closest word in the lexicon for someone who has given himself over as wholly to anime and manga as I have. I used to be less licentious with my anime and manga back in the good old days: I'd pick something I liked, like Slam Dunk or Bleach, and devote my attention fully to it. But having a paid subscription on an online streaming service exacts from one an obligation to make the fullest use of it, so I've been merrily watching all the anime I can get my hands on. I've discovered some pretty good ones, too, like Hyouka and Chihayafuru. The latter is a shoujo manga pretending to be a sports manga (or a sports manga pretending to be a shoujo manga), with strong Slam Dunk vibes that were very effective at getting me hooked. The former is a slice-of-life series about a high school student with prodigious deductive abilities and a philosophy of not doing anything that requires expending unnecessary energy who deploys his gifts to solve everyday mysteries that beset him and his friends in the classic lit club.
I picked up the light novel series on which Hyouka is based once I finished the anime, so now people have one less reason to accuse me being a weeb. (It's technically a book.) Hyouka made me nostalgic about high school, as I was telling ivy recently. Seeing everyone engaged in club activities, having fun and broadening their horizons made me wish we had things like that at my school. School in India - at least back in my day - meant one thing only: studying. That was literally a student's only purpose in life. Extracurricular activities were a farce at Kalpa, and at FIITJEE students were made to feel that any time spent not studying was time we were robbing from our futures. I don't know how accurate a depiction of Japanese high school life Hyouka presents. I took a course in sociology in college where we had a unit on Japan's high schools. Too bad I don't remember jack. Regardless, schools in India do a really bad job of helping students develop any life skill other than studying: Any you manage to acquire are acquired in spite of and not because of the education system. SUPW doesn't count. I remember a comical episode in the seventh grade where Mrs. Lakshmi, the head of middle school and a woman given to sententious soliloquies, reproved students who were not paying attention in SUPW by saying, "When you're the director of a big company and you're unable to sew a button onto your shirt, people are going to laugh at you." We laughed at Lakshmi behind her back. Now, with hindsight on our side, we continue to laugh at Lakshmi.
As evidence of how misguided the education system is, I found recently after a cursory examination of my classmates ten years after we left Kalpa that many of those who were at the bottom of the class, constantly on the receiving end of some teacher or other's objurgation, are now doing pretty well for themselves. They received little support from the education system to whose care they had been entrusted for the entirety of their childhoods, and they managed to rise above it. That's commendable. But there must be others who succumbed to the systematic demotivation and failed to realize their potential. This is a travesty.
Nanochip and I rebelled in our own small ways at Kalpa. On the last day of classes we recorded a gleeful video in which we confessed to numerous petty crimes, which for the most part took the form of defenestrating personal belongings and school property of meager value. You can watch it here. We regret it not at all. The closest we came to being part of a school club akin to the ones in Hyouka was when we started a book club that lasted all of one day. We embarked on the project with the blessing of the principal, who, Nanochip tells me, for some reason or other was reluctant to give it to us. I have no memory of it. Our failure lay in trying to turn the club into a kind of cult-like organization. I'm sure the principal was none too thrilled when we drew up a charter and decided on the name Knights Templar. A general lack of interest, combined with our elitist drive to make the club as exclusive as possible, meant that the project was dead on arrival, and we deprived ourselves of an opportunity to look back on our time at school as jaded adults and feel that we had left some kind of mark.
School was fun, to be sure, but I can't help feeling that it wasn't meant to be fun. Maybe that's what made it so fun.
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