When colleagues bore brunt of lampooning

MY journalistic career began accidentally in the mid-1970s at Mayo College, Ajmer, where, as a callow assistant master, I authored and covertly circulated subversive pamphlets satirising my colleagues.

Titillatingly dubbed The Lampoon, these single-spaced A4 cyclostyled leaflets parodying fellow masters (including the principal) elicited the desired reaction: peeving my colleagues but electrifying students. Anonymity was obviously observed, with no master being named but referred to by assorted appellations like Kaddu, Jinx, Rampu, Sampu and Piaro, given to them by students, but leaving little or no doubt as to their identities.

And as insurance against being identified as The Lampoon’s progenitor, I mocked myself mercilessly in the guise of ‘Thud’, the moniker bestowed on me by students due to my ferocious exertions on the squash court. Of course, I was under suspicion as The Lampoon’s architect, but Thud’s inclusion in it somewhat allayed doubts. However, the unexpected j’accuse eventually outing me was delivered by the sporting principal himself during the morning assembly session at the end of term several months later, in which he announced my (voluntary) departure from Mayo.

Op Lampoon was diabolically complex in its execution. Its impudent contents were laboriously hammered out on a portable Remington typewriter, allocated to me in my role as staff adviser to Mayoor, the monthly school journal. Thereafter, a stencil was prepared, equally arduously, and limited copies run off on the school’s sole inky copying machine in a secluded alcove by the magnificently turbaned peon manning it. He innocently believed the incendiary stencils to be only sets of student test papers.

The Lampoon’s distribution came next, demanding crafty and surreptitious handling. Some pamphlets were casually secreted by me into random masters’ pigeonholes at the enchanting 19th-century Stowe staff club, to which all teachers repaired daily for their elevenses. But the bulk of the inflammatory handbills were scattered across plates in the senior dining hall, laid out for lunch. Now, I can safely reveal the connivance of Sham Singh, the towering and affable Rajput supremo of the dining hall, in this chicanery and his stoic silence subsequently over l’affaire Lampoon.

All hell broke loose once lunch began with The Lampoon as the only course. Whoops of delight rent the air as students feasted hungrily on the droll ridiculing in them of their teachers. Fellow masters were infuriated, barring a handful, who grudgingly tolerated the parody. But the air of high intrigue continued to imbue The Lampoon’s four-odd editions, particularly since its contents appeared suddenly and seemingly from nowhere.