Gurukul and T-shirts

Shekhawat and Arora corner Ram Shankar Shukla

Shekhawat was majorly chaffed on finding his old buddy, ‘Gurukul’ Shukla this morning. Not that the latter had gone missing. Rather, Shekhawat had done the disappearing act earlier in the week as he was “only 50 per cent well”. He needed rest. Now that he has regained the other 50 per cent of wellness, he came fortified with scandals of self-styled godmen, the latest being Baba Rampal of Hissar.
He gave Shukla a lowdown on the outrageous lifestyle led by the arrested Baba (as reported in the press) and compared him to other disgraced godmen like Baba Ramdev and Asaram Bapu. In Shekhawat’s opinion, all Babas who have ashrams and gurukuls to their name are comrades-in-arms and Shukla can be no different – all because he runs a chain of English-speaking tutorials across Mumbai. Rather than commend him for his efforts at empowering the under-privileged, Shekhawat maintained that the teaching establishments are nothing but gurukuls.

The monkey atop the high cricket fence

Hence the epithet, 'Gurukul' Shukla.
“When are you taking me to your gurukul?” Shekhawat revived his request today. “At least give me the keys to one of them if you can’t go. I also want to see what goes on inside.”
Amid this light-hearted banter, Srichand Arora walked in and picked on Shukla for wearing a black T-shirt today. “On Saturdays we are to wear white,” he said.
“But I will wear black on Saturday,” Shukla was adamant. “Black is the color of Shani Dev, Lord Saturn.”
The subject conveniently changed, Arora rued over how irregular we had become – Jagmohan Papneja being in Delhi, Nahid Khan still in Lucknow, Monthi Serrao camping in Mangalore, Harbans Kaur away in Ludhiana… apart from Santosh Tyagi taking ill, Khatoon Baig away in Dadar and Arun Patil shooting for a film at Sewri.
Suddenly a long-tailed monkey appeared out of nowhere, making up for all the absentees. It had just killed a crow for breakfast and invited a noisy squadron of its relatives to hover about. It walked around the Garden majestically, stopping momentarily to give Arora a sidelong glance. Arora winked back. Had the monkey taken it as an invitation and charged towards us, our goose would have been cooked – gurukul and white T-shirts be damned!
Jagmohan Papneja:
Shekhawat-ji, there is a lot of difference between a gurukul run by our Shukla-ji and the ashram run by Baba Rampal. A gurukul is more than just a school. It is where students come to learn and be part of the guru's family. An ashram is usually a secluded residence for a religious community -- in other words, a religious retreat. Shukla-ji's category is different.