Centennial Recollection
Rochelle Almeida
On January 21, 2012, my alma mater, the Grand Old Lady of Clare Road, Byculla—St Agnes High School—completes a hundred years. For all of us who graduated from its portals, it is a time to reminisce fondly and to marvel at the divergent paths through which life took us, equipped only, as we were, with the skills we cultivated under its protective umbrella. Newspaper articles will, no doubt, recall its humble beginnings in the second decade of the 20th century, in cow sheds. Afflicted as we are today by ‘Celebrititus’, a roll call of ‘girls’ who’ve caught the public eye, will be bandied about, and for a while, we will applaud the efforts of cohorts of forbidding principals and austere teachers who made them who they are today.
This essay hopes to break away from the conventional by shirking the traditions of celebrity name-dropping and looking back instead on a few Agnesian individuals who, in the tiniest of ways, made me the person I am today—contemplative, reflective and appreciative.
