[ Jayanta Deka ]

The abolition of the 80:20 arrangement in government recruitment in Arunachal Pradesh has understandably brought back discussions around government jobs, eligibility and opportunities for the people of the state.

For me, it brought back memories.

No, I am not seeking a government job in Arunachal. I left the state long ago for higher studies and then work. My father, a teacher, retired in 2019. But I belong to perhaps one of the last generations of children whose non-tribal parents spent most of their working lives in government service in Arunachal.

Our parents came to Arunachal for work. We didn't.

Some of us were born in Arunachal, while others were born in Assam, Bihar, Kerala, or the states our parents came from. But we grew up in Arunachal, went to school there and, in many cases, studied there right up to Class 12 before leaving for higher studies and eventually work.

For our parents, Arunachal may initially have been a place of posting. For us, it was simply where childhood happened.

In the 1980s and 1990s, there were many non-tribal government employees serving in Arunachal, a large number of them from states such as Assam, Bihar and Kerala. Government employees served across the state, including in its remote interiors, and their families mostly lived in government quarters wherever they were posted. Many spent years, sometimes decades, in these places, building lives and raising their children far from the states they had originally come from.

That was the Arunachal in which we grew up.

Looking back, life in the 1990s might appear difficult. There were no telephones. Television was a luxury and television, for the most part, meant DD-1. Our connection with the world outside could sometimes be the state transport (APSTS) bus that left for Assam at around six in the morning. Miss it, and the outside world could wait another day.

But I don't remember thinking life was difficult. It was fun.

We found our own ways of filling the days. Cricket bats could be homemade, and sometimes the balls were too. We collected raw rubber and wrapped it around a bamboo root until we had something round and hard enough for a game. Later came audio cassettes, with songs travelling from one house to another. Slam books entered school and suddenly favourite actors, songs, best friends and ambitions became matters requiring serious thought.

We loved to dream. Winning the class quiz or the class antakshari competition could make our day. More importantly, we talked. We could sit together for hours and talk about everything and nothing, because there was nowhere else we particularly needed to be.

Government quarters had their own culture too, created by families who had arrived from different parts of the country. We celebrated Bihu, Holi, Diwali and Onam together. Nobody needed an invitation to participate because a festival in one household or one part of the colony invariably became an occasion for others as well.

But our lives were never confined to the government quarters. Our friends and classmates were from the communities around us, and many of us picked up local languages simply by growing up among them. Sangken, Mopin, Solung, Christmas and Buddha Purnima became part of our calendar too.

We didn't have a term for this mixed culture. We were children. We simply enjoyed it.

Independence Day and Republic Day were particularly special. The level of community participation was something difficult to miss, and Independence Day in many places was incomplete without the community feast. The celebrations belonged not just to the school or the government establishment but to everyone.

There was another excitement that many who grew up in the interiors will probably remember. Cinema sometimes came to us.

The travelling units of the Directorate of Information and Public Relations would arrive with films and a screen, and an open space would turn into a cinema for the evening. People gathered, children waited for the screening to begin, and the whole thing became a community event. Long before films became available on a phone whenever we wanted them, watching one could mean sitting together under the open sky with half the place around you.

Meanwhile, our parents were working, saving and thinking about our futures.

Education mattered a lot to them. They wanted us to study well, and perhaps that was the bargain they had quietly made with themselves when they accepted postings far from the places where they had grown up: work hard, save what they could, and give their children the opportunity to build a better future.

Many of us did well in school. There were quite a few class toppers among the children of government employees, perhaps partly because we knew how much importance our parents attached to our education.

But what strikes me more today is that their hopes were never limited to us.

Our parents were equally delighted when their local students did well. In fact, those students were frequently held up as examples before us. We would be told to look at how well someone was doing despite having to work harder and shoulder responsibilities that many of us did not have.

When a student excelled, our parents celebrated the achievement. When one of our seniors went on to study medicine, for instance, there was genuine pride among the teachers. These were not merely students whose names had once appeared in their attendance registers. Even years later, many teachers continued to speak of them as their own children.

Time did something wonderful to some of those relationships.

We grew up and many of us left Arunachal after school for higher studies and work. Our classmates and seniors followed their own paths. Some stayed, some went away and returned, and some eventually became teachers themselves.

Then, one day, the former student was sitting in the staff room alongside the teachers.

By the time many of our parents were approaching retirement, some of their younger colleagues were people they had once taught. The relationship had changed naturally over the years. The pupil became a colleague, and the colleague often became a friend.

There is a funny side to this as well. Some of our parents are probably better friends today with some of our old schoolmates than we are. While we were away building our lives elsewhere, they spent years working together.

Now, as our parents' generation retires one after another, they leave behind their pupils as colleagues.

Perhaps that is one of the finest things a teacher can carry into retirement.

It also makes the changing face of government service in Arunachal feel deeply personal to those of us who grew up there. We see younger Arunachalis joining the professions in which our parents once worked, and among them are people whose stories our parents know from the beginning - children they taught, encouraged, sometimes scolded, watched succeed and later welcomed into the same staff room.

For the teachers who came to Arunachal decades ago, that must carry a particular satisfaction.

Their own children have mostly moved away. We left for college, found jobs, raised families and built lives elsewhere. Yet many of the students they taught remained part of their lives. Some became colleagues and some became close friends. Even after retirement, those relationships endure.

The old government-quarters world is changing too. One by one, the people who populated it are retiring. The generation of non-tribal teachers who spent decades serving in Arunachal's schools, including in the interiors, is gradually reaching the end of its working life. There are fewer of them now, and in another decade, there will be fewer still.

Perhaps that is why the 80:20 decision took me somewhere quite different from the immediate debate around recruitment.

It made me think of the teachers who arrived in Arunachal when they were young, sometimes with young families and sometimes before they had families at all. They taught generation after generation, watched their own children grow up alongside their students, and slowly became part of the places where they had originally arrived merely on posting.

It made me think of government quarters where Bihu, Onam, Holi and Diwali were everyone's festivals, and of Sangken, Mopin, Solung, Christmas and Buddha Purnima were celebrated with friends outside them. Of Independence Day community feasts, open-air cinema, DD-1, audio cassettes, birthday treats, homemade cricket balls, class quizzes and antakshari.

Most of all, it made me think about our parents and their students.

Those students grew up.

Some became doctors, officers and professionals. Some became teachers themselves. Some became our parents' colleagues and friends.

And now, as the teachers of our parents' generation prepare to leave the staff rooms for the last time, many can look around and see their former pupils carrying on.

We didn't know, while living through it, that any of this would one day become something to remember. There was no reason to. Our parents were doing their jobs, their students were going to school, and we were busy growing up together.

For our parents, Arunachal may have begun as a posting.

For many of us, it never was.

It was simply home. (This article was first published in thenewsmill.com. The writer is founder-editor of the Guwahati-based digital publication. He can be reached through deka.jayanta@gmail.com)