Noulakaz

The blog of Avinash, Christina, Anya and Kyan Meetoo.

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Teachers of RCC around 1989-1990

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I have just stumbled upon that photo in the Royal College Curepipe Friends group on Facebook.

What can I say? The photo brings back a lot of fond memories. Having spent eight years in the college, I had the pleasure to have a lot of them as teachers. Let me try to remember their names:

  • Miss Dupont (who really understood immature boys),
  • Miss Gopaul (Ruby or Castafiore pour les intimes),
  • Mrs Runghen (one day I will remit to her the tens of French essays due…),
  • Mrs Nabheebuccus (who I didn’t have as teacher but who, as you can easily imagine, we were all appreciative of…),
  • Mrs Jeewoolall (who did Social Studies with us),
  • Mrs Chunnoo (who was the mum of one of my classmates),
  • Mrs Girdhari/Fulena (who we all revered when we were Form I kids),
  • Mr Mungur (a very nice Economics teacher who I still meet from time to time),
  • Mr Subadhu (an excellent Chemistry teacher who knew how to deal with rebels),
  • Mr Boolaky (whom I liked a lot even though I don’t remember what subject he taught),
  • Mr Ng Wong Hing (an excellent Physics teacher who now is at the Ministry of Education),
  • Mr Law Pak Chung (who was my Biology teacher in Form V),
  • Mr Beeharry (Carlos pour les intimes who I am ’cause we are related),
  • Mr Ramsurrun (the very well known Hindi teacher — he saw very very little of me…),
  • Mr Harmon (the hood aka wood teacher),
  • Mr Amandine (the desperate music teacher who played guitar really well),
  • Mr Saverethiar (a very severe Maths teacher),
  • Mr Mawjee (an English teacher if my memory is right)
  • +
  • Mr Wan Hok Chee (a formidable Maths teacher who does not seem to appear in the photo)

And, of course, the rector and his deputy:

  • Mr Gopaul (who was instrumental into making us Royalistes. I distinctly remember him coming to our Form I class on admission day and telling us: “You are the future of the country”. From very early, we were groomed to (depending on the point of view) become spoiled brats or people with the capacity to contribute a lot for the development of Mauritius.)
  • Mr Rampadaruth (the enforcer of discipline except that, if I remember correctly, we all knew how to disappear when he got near. But I have to confess that he managed to get me twice: (1) when I was in Form II, I left school on the sports day to go and play Pac Man. A friend, Henri, told him and he came to fetch me. I got a Saturday arrest. (2) In Form IV, I showed Hansley how to break the legs of a table to fabricate a drum kit. For some reason, he gave both of us an arrest for “damaging school property”.)

I wonder whether it would be possible to organise something where we could all meet again. Maybe for the next Old Royals meeting?

Merry Christmas to all of you

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Today is the 25th of December 2017 and Christina, Anya, Kyan and myself wish you all a Merry Christmas.

Interestingly, do you know that Father Christmas originally wore green and, in fact, appeared to announce the coming of spring? This would imply that he came around March every year. But he became red when Coca-Cola decided that it would be good to have Father Christmas on an advert for them and that he should wear red instead of green. That’s a pity because well, I believe, green looks much better than the overwhelming red… As you can see below, Google agrees:

A second thing I would like to mention is that I hope you all got the gifts you asked for but only if you asked reasonably. According to statistics, most Mauritian households have massive debts and it would be a pity if, for the sake of having the flashiest phone or the flashiest car, people keep on taking more and more debts. I wonder what percentage of the population has a positive net worth in Mauritius? That’s a study which needs to be made because I was reading an article the other day about the fact that, the less net worth you have, the more stressed you are.

A lot of studies show that, generally, those who have positive net worths, i.e. the millionaires, are not flashy at all. They don’t drive the latest BMW or have the latest iPhone. Real millionaires are frugal. Heck, that’s why they are millionaires. This would imply that those around us who like to show off are, as a matter of fact, poor.

Merry Christmas!

Classifying the most valuable football clubs in the world and what this means for Liverpool

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Today, while surfing on the Transfermarkt website, I stumbled upon their list of the most valuable football clubs in the world. What I did was simply to separate the clubs into different tiers where two clubs appear in the same tier if their values are close to one another (I used 5% as a threshold).

Interestingly, we notice the following:

  • Real Madrid is in a class of its own.
  • Then follows Barcelona but still alone in its tier.
  • The 3rd tier is interesting as it includes four clubs: Chelsea, Manchester City, Bayern and Manchester United.
  • The 4th tier consists of Juventus, Paris Saint-Germain, Arsenal, Athletico Madrid and Tottenham.
  • In the 5th tier, we find Liverpool only.

Most of these football teams apart from Chelsea, Manchester City and Paris Saint-Germain are historic clubs.

This ranking also puts in perspective the difficulty for teams other than Real Madrid or Barcelona to win the Champions League. And it also explains, of course, why Liverpool still has to invest in a few world class (expensive) players in order to consistently compete against Chelsea, the two Manchester clubs, Arsenal and Tottenham. Jurgen Klopp is right: the time is for Liverpool to buy expensive and established players who can immediately slot in and improve the team. Liverpool should not buy second rate players anymore. Of course, Klopp is also keen to integrate young players from the academy into the first team.

Interesting times ahead for Liverpool. But also, tough ones.