It was 1971. I had just written my SSLC Exam. As usual my performance was average. My efforts to enter a college of repute were unsuccessful. Then a newly opened college came to my rescue. It was none other than Guru Nanak College in Chennai that is going to observe its golden jubilee soon. Deep inside me I was not happy about having ended up in a new college. But on the very first day all my misgivings left me. The fledgling institution won my heart completely.
I simply loved its location inside Guindy Raj Bhavan’s forest. It was like a big forest lodge. I never before knew that a virgin jungle existed within the city. The trees, bushes of flower plants, lonely paths, game trails, ponds under the clear blue sky, spotted deer, monkeys and butterflies did something to my heart. At lunch time, my classmate Sridhar and I used to walk into the forest with our lunch boxes to eat under a jumlum tree that stood shedding fat pinkish fruits, watching a herd of spotted deer in the distance.
Often, we stumbled upon movie shootings inside the forest. Once actor Jaishankar, during the shooting for his film Ganga, exchanged his exquisite lunch for our curd rice and mango pickle. During the filming of a Telugu movie, a tiger brought in a leash made a dash for the nearby bush dragging its trainer behind. We ran helter-skelter for our dear lives. One day, a cobra entered our classroom. All of us at once scrambled onto our benches. The serpent king appraised the class with its button eyes for a minute before slithering back to the jungle.
Those days students mostly covered the 4 km distance from the college in Velachery to either Guindy or Saidapet on foot. One afternoon Sridhar and I were walking down the road when a sudden thunderstorm started to rage. We took refuge under a roadside tree.
Then came slowly an Ambassador car and it stopped in front of us. A bespectacled middle-aged man from the driver seat gestured to us to get in. He explained to us the risks in taking shelter under a tree during thunderstorms. He dropped us at the Saidapet railway station. After that incident, this gentleman started to stop in front of the college gate to pick up and drop at Saidapet as many of us as his car could hold. This person was none other than Gopalakrishnan, former chairman of Indian Bank. He was the manager of its bank’s Velachery branch then.