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I had just finished my Class VIII examinations and was enjoying a break - not entirely well deserved as it turned out later when the results were declared. While I was revelling in, what I would later look back to and refer to as, my salad days (as Shakespeare almost stole my lines and wrote “when I was green in judgment, cold in blood”), the nation was going through, what an average writer would call, tumultuous times.

Mandal, till then the surname of that girl living next block with allegedly malleable morals, suddenly came to mean more to us. That a lot of young men fought over Mandal remained common between the girl and the Report. Mandir was no longer where Amitabh went to vent his spleen at the end of the movie. It now had terms like shilanyas and kar seva tagged with it. All in all, the kind …