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Corporal Punishment Can Go Too Far By- Melvin Durai Melvin Durai is an Indiana-based writer and humorist. Born in Tamil Nadu, India, he grew up in Zambia and moved to the U.S. in the early 1980s. In 1995, while working as a reporter for a daily newspaper in Chambersburg, Pa., he began writing a regular humor column. His weekly column now appears in several newspapers and on a number of Web sites. He also writes a twice-monthly column on Indian and Indian-American issues. He is a diehard fan of the National Football League and also likes to run, lift weights and play soccer, tennis and pool. An award-winning feature writer and aspiring novelist, he plans to publish a collection of his best columns. You can write to him at comments@melvindurai.com To read his older columns, go to http://www.melvindurai.com

A recent editorial on The Japan Times Online caught my eye and triggered a flood of memories about my short-lived schooldays in India. The headline read, "India's barbaric idea of school discipline." The editorial criticized a recent High Court judgment in Kerala that supported limited forms of corporal punishment. "Corporal punishment," stated the editorial, "has no place in a civilized society."

I could picture millions of Indian boys and girls agreeing wholeheartedly. "Yes," they would say, "our teachers are definitely barbarians. Evolution must have skipped them by. They're so primitive, they think that 'desktop publishing' is carving your initials into a desk."

It's easy for adults to condone corporal punishment. But when you're a child, it can seem like the worst form of torture, so terrible that you stay up at night plotting your revenge. You wish you could turn into an adult overnight -- someone as imposing as Mike Tyson -- and pay a visit to your teacher, preferably in the middle of a school assembly. "Remember that lesson you taught me yesterday? Well, here's a lesson for you." As philosophers always tell us, it's better to give than to receive.

Though I completed most of my lower-level education in Zambia, I did try to attend school in India, spending short periods in several schools before quitting. Perhaps "quitting" is not the right word. It felt a lot more like "escaping."

It was tough to adjust to the rigorous academic system and I went from being a top student in Zambia to being a top idiot in India. Needless to say, I was a top candidate for corporal punishment, particularly during my stint at a Seventh Day Adventist school in Madurai. One male teacher grew especially fond of pinching my right arm. He always picked the same spot, as though other parts of my body weren't involved in whatever crime I had committed. It was the only time in my life that I've seen my skin turn green.

The teacher seemed to take great pleasure out of pinching me. He would mutter something like "you must always, always do your homework," his face looking as gleeful as that of a dog at feeding time. The only thing he didn't do was drool.

If I had any special dream in those days, it was to pinch that teacher until his whole body turned green. That way, he could become an actor instead, starring in a Japanese movie called "The Green Monster."

Unfortunately, he wasn't the only teacher who seemed like a sadist. A woman at the same school would hit my fingertips repeatedly with a ruler until they turned red. It hurt so much, I felt like screaming for my mother. "Mommy! She's killing me! Call the police!" Before I met this teacher, I never realized that human beings could be so merciless.

Whenever I was being punished, the other students would just sit still and watch, probably thinking, "Our parents would be really upset if they knew we were getting so much free entertainment. This is better than going to the movies. Thank goodness Melvin is in our class."

Some of my teachers spanked me worse than my parents ever had. Perhaps it's not too late to give them a dose of their own medicine. A private investigator could easily find their names and addresses. And for the right amount of money, Mike Tyson may be willing to travel to India. I'd have to give the boxer some specific instructions: "OK, Mike, this particular male teacher pinched my arm. You can punch him in the arm. And this female teacher hit my fingertips. You can bite her fingers."

I hold no ill feelings toward my parents for spanking me. But those teachers, they had better go into hiding.

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