In school, I hated Hindi and maths; history, civics, and religion were boring; English, insipid—because I’d already read all the stories in the text book before school reopened; English Grammar, even worse—guess it’s the blue-eyed cousin of maths; PT, disgusting; craft, a waste of time—I envied the girls, doing needle-work; ditto for drawing.
Draw your breath—singing (yes it was a subject 'taught' in the ruins of the Old Church) was a lip-sync exercise for me—like a fish 🐟 out of water —because my vocal range was somewhere between those of the boys and the girls in my class, leaving me with nothing to do but pretend to be singing.
But I did like two subjects:
🧪 Science—I always topped, right up to the SSC;
🌍 Geography—I loved Physical Geography, perhaps because it's scientific, and was at peace with Political Geography because I liked studying peoples and their cultures.
Who'd ever have guessed that I'd go on to win the Writers Bureau 🇬🇧 Writer of the Year award and worse still, the UKSC 🇬🇧 as a singer/songwriter?! 😱
I was in such disbelief when I saw the announcements on my computer screen 🖥 that I refreshed it a couple of times—like when our German Shepherd saw his image in the mirror 🪞 for the first time and thought it was another dog—before calling my entire HR team into my cabin to verify it was true. 😂
But one person wasn't surprised. While I didn’t believe in myself, that person always believed in me: my mum. ❤️ 🙏