the truth about Ninad

As an eighth grader, it would always thrill me to think about next year, academics aside. This was all because of Ninad, our yearly school magazine. I was scared that I wouldn’t be selected and that I wouldn’t ever get to work on the Ninad and get my picture in it not just once, but twice. But when ninth came, I fell ill and when I returned to Sahyadri, I was a part of the team. There was no real official announcement or a personalized letter, heck, no one even said, “Hey, Prarthana’s part of the Ninad team now!” except once which was why I went to the very first Ninad meeting of my life.

And here’s the thing, when a few students are handpicked by a teacher, two conclusions are made by all the other students who were, for some reason, not selected. First, the teacher is accused to be greatly biased and that, “They would never choose me because I am really bad at their subject” but either way, everyone continues whining with the occasional, “Oh, man, even I wanted to be a part of the Ninad team, this is unfair.” The second assumption made is that the team members are sure to think too greatly of themselves, and recreate the whole Aryan superiority theory.

As a result of these conclusions, students start disliking not only the teacher but also of course, us, the team members. The night when we returned from our first Ninad meeting, our dorm-mates refused to even look at us and being unable to stand this, we spent majority of that evening, standing outside in the little garden outside our dormitory, talking about the injustice.

In the beginning, we were all very enthusiastic and eager to start working. The dining hall became the playground to catch a potential prey who we could threaten into writing an article for the Ninad. Soon, we were desperate enough to eat up an assembly slot to force the whole school to spend their time writing something for the Ninad. This was our main source of material for the magazine.

Time passed by and the enthusiasm dropped. Next thing I knew, I was running around the campus with two (or less) other (partly) dedicated members, looking for a fellow team member to pull them to our weekly Sunday morning meeting where majority of the time was spent enjoying the privilege of e-mailing our parents and the rest, making lists which we never looked at again. It was not fun anymore.  Another term went by and by this time, we had realized we need not nine members but ten. So we added a new team member and it honestly went back to the zero enthusiasm soon.

When we finally “finalized” the Ninad with an aesthetic cover page and eighty pages of humor, poetry and memes, we got told that we need to work on it further. So today, when we were actually supposed to be done with the Ninad, we’re actually screaming at each other through a WhatsApp group that everyone has probably muted.

If I could tell my ninth-grader-self anything about the Ninad it would be something along the lines of how annoying it can get. The Ninad is painful, I would say, it will stretch on forever and other students will start thanking God they weren’t selected. I would tell myself, you will have to wake up early on Sundays and have breakfast so you can get to the meeting on time and you will have to work during the vacations, during tests and during times when you just don’t want to work. No one will listen to you sometimes, I’d say, and sometimes Bhau dada won’t give you the keys to the Computer lab and so you’ll have to hike all the way to Ritesh sir’s dorm to get them. You will finish it someday, but it won’t be enough for some reason and it will seem unnecessary but you will finish it.

The Ninad was not what I thought it would be, not a very awarding experience but a rather long one with a lot of sacrifices (by which I mean that of time and sleep). But I wouldn’t not accept to be on the team if I could turn back time or something because when you work on a project for so long, it becomes a part of you, it becomes your masterpiece. And as much as this hurts me to admit, I actually like working for the Ninad.