Nepal, June 28 -- "Did you bring your Taj Mahal Atlas?"

"I forgot, Sir."

"Did you eat your lunch?"

"Yes, Sir."

"How dare you! You don't forget to eat your lunch, but you forget to bring atlas! fataha paji!" roared Amar Babu as his cane instantaneously rose to bear upon the boy.

Decades after leaving school, this is how Yagya Bikram Rana [later Brigadier General of Nepal Army], who attended Durbar High School in the 1930s-1940s, reminisced about his teacher Amar Babu in a memoir article "Durbar Schoolka Ti Dinharu" published in Nepali magazine in 2010.

When Amar Babu, whose real name was Amarendranath Basu and who taught Mathematics and Geography, walked the corridors of Durbar School, the sharp clacks of his hard-soled leather shoes...