The Doon School

"The self-confidence Doon instils is the courage to walk your own road, if necessary, alone..."

"If I had anything to do with this place, I'd close it down."

"The boys should leave Doon as members of an aristocracy, but it must be an aristocracy of service inspired by ideas of unselfishness, not one of privilege, wealth or position."

"By 14 he should have learnt all the ordinary principles of social behavior. He should know how to stand up and speak to a variety of different types of people -- to his own mother, to someone else's mother, to his father, to his schoolmasters, to servants, to Mahatma Gandhi or to the Viceroy, and to do this without any self-consciousness... At fourteen a boy should have constructed a framework of competence in language, in mathematical ability, and in social behavior. After that age he is, as it were, filling in a design to the framework. In short he learning to exercise taste... At 16, he acquired taste, a sense of the beautiful and the ugly, of the strong and the weak, of good and evil... At 17 must come another quality, less instinctive and requiring a maturer mind: he must acquire a capacity for judgement."

"For years after I left, I thought of Doon as a kind of jungle, and looked back on it with a shudder. I was teased and bullied by my classmates and my seniors because of my interest in studies and reading, because of my lack of interest in games, because of my unwillingness to join gangs and groups, because of my height -- and, most importantly of all -- because I would get so furious when I was bullied. No doubt, if in my teens I had been more relaxed about things, or if I had had more of a sense of humor, things wouldn't have been so bad. But I wasn't, and I didn't, and they were. My parents made enormous sacrifices to send me here. They never had a lot of money. Sending me to Doon was perhaps the best investment they ever made."

"Doon is a unisexual Victorian relic. Make it co-educational!"

"Girls should not be deprived of studying at Doon"

"It would not be untrue to say that the foundations of Indian Mountaineering were laid by masters and boys of The Doon School."