IIT and other, undecimal stories.

This book is a compilation of stories roughly in chronological order, which chronicles the life of a school, and subsequently college going student, in Calcutta in the ‘60s.  It is the polar opposite of Malgudi Days in that all characters are real and the situations, factual.  However, the recollection of childhood days through the prism of nearly half-a-century of subsequent existence must necessarily be somewhat refracted.  The mind, according to Tagore, is a painter not a camera.  It records facts idiosyncratically adding colour according to its own whim and fancy, when and where it pleases.  Akira Kurosawa endorses the viewpoint by exploiting this facet of the human mind brilliantly in his film Rashomon.  These stories are therefore ahistoric, purely personal memoirs.