Chapter 1

It was Day one in Class twelve. My eighth year in school. We, the lastbenchers were at our usual places. I was in the second last bench, with Narayan Vasu, my friend for more than 5 years, and behind us were Suresh Shastri, and Raghav Krishna. Next to them, in the adjacent final bench, was Karthik Balu, Rajesh Ravindra, Pradeep Seshadri and Rahul Ramesh.
This was more or less our group of backbenchers. Not backbenchers in the true sense of the word's usage, but here backbenchers because our focus was less on school, and more on JEE preparation. We were fun-loving guys, but focussed all the while.
Narayan had come to P.S in class 7. Ever since, we were the best of friends. We had started our JEE preparations together, but due to his inability to cope up, he had shifted JEE preparation base, and started concentrating more on AIEEE preparation.
Suresh was a head-strong guy, with a lot of attitude. A fun loving guy, highly focussed, but at the same time, a big pervert. He complemented me to a 'T'.
Raghav was one heck of a padips. With a baby-like face, he was fondly called 'baby' by the others.
Karthik was this guy who streched beyond even the skies, a guy who had been trying Sandhya Ramakrishnan, the so-called hottie of the school, for more than a year then, but was failing miserably, slowly shifted base towards JEE preparations.
Rajesh Ravindra was a childish character, who turned to tears every ten to twenty minutes for some or the other reason. He was called Right thanks to some ad imitating Rajinikant.
Pradeep Seshadri was what you would call the height of goodness. Fun loving, but had everything within the limits, except his studying. That alone streched beyond boundaries. But was a good quizzer, thus making the third quiz partner to Suresh and me.
Then there was Rahul, a last addition to our group. Known better as a king of chemistry, he could do anything and everything in it. Plus, he watched a lot of movies like me. He got into mainstream JEE preparation a bit late than the others, but had coped up very well. He had placed himself among the main contenders for a great JEE spot.
Morever, our group consisted of Jayakanth, from DAV, another chemistry thala, and Krishna, from PSBB, who were part of the group from our JEE classes.

At this point of time, I was just back from Mumbai after the IMO training camp there, just missing the cut off by around 5 marks. There obviously was some disappointment, but there wasn't any time for me to brood as school began almost immediately. We were waiting to see our new English teacher, as our old one had become principal. Then entered our class teacher, who was to be our English teacher as well, the person all of us knew as 'Peter', and he was R.Subhash. I initially for a few minutes didn't know why he was our class teacher, because he seemed to like the adjacent class better. Only then was I told that he had been their class teacher the previous year and had been promoted to become the class teacher of a section in class 12. He then asked for the names of the ones who wanted to be nominated for Head Boy of the school. I had been nursing ambitions of leading school for over a year, and hence, I got up, and I found another classmate Saurabh Rangarajan. He was probably equally popular, but he worried me about getting my votes split. So, I had to be on my guard. Saurabh's best friend Vishnu Vinayak, was a guy who hated me, and he was actively campaigning, not for people to vote for Saurabh, but for people to not vote for me.
Our names were given to the principal, and the nominations were to be announced the next day in the assembly. There was Priya Raman, a friend of mine, pumping confidence into me that I would be definitely nominated, and that she would vote for me, and would campaign for me as well. That was when I started becoming a good friend of hers.
I went to school with a speech prepared the next day, hoping I would be nominated. We were standing in the assembly, and we were waiting for the nominations to come, and the principal said 'G.Vignesh'. And off I was to the mike to give a short speech. I forgot half the stuff I had written down in the paper, but I didn't want to damage myself by reading out from the paper. So, I spoke my heart out, to realise finally that I had done a good job of it. Then we had to campaign in classes 6 to 8 that day. I did gather some amount of voters that evening and we did have some amount of fun campaigning. But being the smaller classes, it wasn't of much significance to any of us. The next day was to be a very significant day in my school life, and I was awaiting it...