Boarding School Food: Down Memory Lane

It may have been bland and boring but school food still has the power to evoke strong emotions.

- Shobha Tsering Bhalla

A lot has changed in India’s old English-style boarding schools over the decades. While it would be a stretch to describe our schools as Dickensenian (we had hot water tub baths twice a week and movies in our hall every Sunday), life was quite spartan. In contrast, today's boarders are no longer forced to sleep in cold dormitories without a shred of privacy, to attend chapel every excrutiating morning, to do without television and computers, to have all their mail censored and to eat bland English nursery food every day.

By the standards of my boarding school and those of my husband’s – both old establishments in the hills built, initially, for the children of British colonials serving in the hot plains – today’s boarders live a life of luxury. The only thing that doesn’t seem to have changed is the aura of “prestige” that still clings to a boarding school education.

Then as now, the term boarding school was dripping with snob value but I am aware that, after scrimping and saving, my parents had sent my sister and me there in the belief that they were giving us the best education possible, which, in a sense, they were. My father, whose job as a government administrator kept him in the wildest frontier areas of North-east India, had no other option but to send us away to a beautiful pine and mist-clad town called Shillong, known as the Scotland of the East, as it was the closest hill station with several excellent schools. One of them, our brother school St Edmund’s, had the reputation of constantly producing the highest scores in the “A” Levels (known as Senior Cambridge exams) in the Commonwealth.