Silly, sillier, silliest

Rare is the Children’s book that has not made me want to re-write. Rarer by far is the Children’s book that treats children like the intelligent people that they are, without making itself far too complicated for the child to get anything out of it.
For some years, I tried working around the books that were available, but now I have stopped altogether. Stories, I have stopped reading out – I merely hold the books up and help the children make up their own stories. And reference books, I just use the pictures of.
But sometimes, you find a book so terribly terrible, it makes you stop on your tracks and wonder if capital punishment should not meted out to people who take such liberties.

My younger son is all of thirty months old. He’s in the process of articulating the concepts of big-small, tall-short, thick-thin, and the book he got home from the Class Library was to help him do just that.
The book opened nicely with a friendly introduction for the parents, and three yellow duckies called Dib, Dab and Dob asking you to point out the big dog and the small dog. ‘Hey, this is a pretty decent book’, you thought to yourself, ‘even kids who have no idea of sizes can understand the concept.’
You praised the book too soon.
On turning the page, you were confronted with a picture of three giraffes striding along a savannah grassland. Big, bigger, biggest is what Dib (or maybe it was Dab) wanted you to get the kid to point out. It was not even, as my mother pointed out, the technical mistake of calling giraffes ‘big’ rather than ‘tall’. It was something much more fundamental – when the kid is just about learning to tell ‘big’ from ‘small’, why then should you have to complicate things further by telling him that ‘small’ is actually ‘big’ and ‘big’ is in fact ‘biggest’. My five year old can perhaps understand that, not so the child who the book is meant for.
It only got worse –

Can you point to the tallest flowers?
Can you point to the shortest flowers?

Forget either of my kids, can you?
The flower of the sunflower plant is the biggest, and the plant is also the tallest, so you could safely point to that and say, ‘this is the tallest’.
But the smallest flower is that of the fox glove, while the tulip plant is the shortest. Which of them is meant to be the shortest flower? Don’t ask me for answers, I did not write the book. And neither did the author think to provide answers at the end of the book.

I did the most sensible thing I could think of – I used the book to teach the son colours – violet, ochre, peach, olive – the book was just brimming with the colours that both the kids are now obsessed with.

But, I wonder if it is too much to ask of the author of a Children’s book to test it on a single intelligent child before offering it for publication.

Schrödinger's Cat

Am I alive or dead? I do not know.
They tell me that till they verify if I am alive or dead, I am simultaneously alive and dead.
How could that be?
I can either be alive, or dead. I cannot be both!
Or can I?
I am alive now! I may soon be dead, but right now I am alive, even if nobody knows it but me.
What matters more – my being something, or their knowing it?
I am confused?
Why did it have to be me? Why could Uncle Erwin not have picked Rover for his thought experiment?




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Drabble (n) - an extremely short work exactly one hundred words in length. The purpose of the drabble is brevity and to test the author's ability to express interesting and meaningful ideas in an extremely confined space.


Painting by Russel Baker - take from his site

Remembering Leaders who deserve to be remembered

“Don’t the kids have school today?”
“No. Holiday. Teachers’ Day.”
“Wonder why the celebrate Teachers’ Day today?”
“Birthday of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. You know who he was, don’t you? Eminent Philosopher and India’s second President.”
“Oh really? Wonder why they celebrate his birthday as Teachers’ Day – maybe he taught at a high school or something. Would be interesting to find out.”
“Actually, he was a Professor at Oxford. Maybe you can try googling his name?”

I wasn’t to know it then, but that early morning conversation with the husband was going to me my most intelligent Teachers’ Day related conversation of the day.

In the evening, the Mothers were talking about how it would have been better if a "real holiday", and not Teachers' Day, had fallen on a Friday.
“At least it is good that Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan had the consideration not to be born on a Saturday”, I suggested mischievously. “It would have been such a waste to have to go to school to wish the teachers during the weekend.”
The blank looks I got proved that nobody had any idea what I was talking about. “You know, S. Radhakrishnan, the person who’s birthday we celebrate as Teachers’ Day.”
“Oh, so that who it was, was it?”, said someone when the silence started getting a bit uncomfortable. “I knew it was someone’s birthday. But I didn’t know his name.”
“Didn’t know, or don’t care?”, I wanted to ask, instead contented myself with saying. “S. Radhakrishnan. The second President of India, you know.”

By then, people had turned away. Nobody cared two hoots about the second President of India. Not that I blamed them. If the current incumbent was anything to go by, the office of the President of the Republic of India deserved no more respect than the lowest of a municipality officer. But that was not the point. The point was that nobody seemed to care about the degradation of the office either, or about anything else that they should be caring about.
“Forget S. Radhakrishnan, one of the most distinguished scholars India has produced”, I wanted to shout.  “Do you even know who the first President of the country was? Or who wrote the Indian Constitution? Or anything at all about the history that your grandparents lived through?”
Apathy may be very fashionable at the moment, but how could anyone flaunt ignorance?
My parents’ generation may well be the last one that remembers the stalwarts who gave voice to the newly independent India and made her the power she became in the Non-aligned Movement. My generation just does not care.

I went to bed a disgruntled person.

Two years back, I had mentioned Teachers’ Day to a Polish friend of mine, and when she asked why we celebrated it when we did, I’d said – “Birthday of S. Radhakrishnan. Eminent philosopher and our second President.”
She’d immediately shot back – “I know that guy. He’s the one who wrote The Indian Philosophy, the book I consulted when I wanted to understand why you and E had such differing views on karma.”
We should be ashamed that a 25-year old student of International Relations in Warsaw knows more about one of our great leaders than we do. Or maybe we should just be happy that someone remembers him after all.

Would Practically Perfect Do?

On Teachers' Day, for the best teacher I had, and I had several really good ones....


Would Practically Perfect Do?

I was seven. I had missed six weeks of the previous term because of measles followed by jaundice. I had still topped in class. I was excited.

“Amma, I got my report card today. I stood first.”, I shouted, as I jumped off the school bus and ran up the drive.

My mother took the blue booklet I thrust into her hands. I looked at her with anticipation as she scanned the report card, waiting for the hug I knew would follow.
Instead she looked up and asked – “Where did those five marks go in arithmetic?”

I hardly knew what to say. “Amma, I topped in class,” I told her. “And I got the highest marks in arithmetic”, I added, thinking she hadn’t noticed that.

“I don’t care how the others did”, she clarified. “I want to know why you lost five marks. Why can’t you be more careful and not make so many careless mistakes?”

~

Growing up with a teacher for a mother was not easy. She always strove for perfection. And I? I was just a kid, and a distractable one at that. I could never concentrate the way my mother would have wanted me to, and I rarely did as well as I should have been able to do.

By the time I reached my teens, I stopped trying. Topping the class was no longer something I aspired towards, and if I got full marks in any subject, it was more an accident than anything else.

It was not that I did not care about learning – I was passionate about that – it was just that I grew indifferent towards the formal system of evaluation. As I reasoned it out to myself, as long as I knew what I was learning, and understood it well, it did not matter how I performed in the examinations. While my classmates were cramming guidebooks that taught them how to write “perfect” answers, I was busy solving esoteric mathematical problems which anyone could tell you would never be asked in examinations.

If my mother was upset by my sliding grades, she did not express it openly. Perhaps she put it down to rebellion, and thought that if she ignored it, it would go away and I would once again become the topper she knew I could be if I tried. Or perhaps she had resigned herself to the fact while her organized mind craved perfection in her only child, the fact that her daughter still voraciously sought knowledge was good enough.

Years passed. I was never academically brilliant, but was reasonably satisfied with my performance. My mother never, in my hearing, mentioned my studies or grades.

~

A week back, I came across a bumper sticker.

“I may not be better than you, but I am better than I was last week.”

I nodded my head when I saw it. That was exactly what I believed in – to know a little more, to be a little better, to have grown a little at the end of the week than I had at the beginning.

Unwittingly, my thoughts turned to my mother, and her obsession with my grades. In her quest for perfection, would she ever understand my desire to just strive to be a little better than I was the previous week?

Then Epiphany!

After all these years, I finally realised that what my mother sought was no different from what I did myself. She was never happy with anything short of perfection, because she knew I was capable of something close to it. All those years of what I thought were disgruntled silence were perhaps years when she was not unhappy with the fact that I sought knowledge for its own sake.

I wanted to rush to my mother and thank her for teaching me to constantly strive to be better then I was. Instead, I wrote this. For her.

Friendship and betrayal – my son’s “Coming of Age” story

On Sunday, my son had a ‘Coming of Age’ experience.
He saw his ‘best friend’ from the Daycare playing downstairs, and wanted to join her right away. Even though I told him I would take a couple of minutes, he put on his shoes, ran outside, and stood patiently at the landing with an expectant look on his face. He was not trying to pressurize me to hurry up – he just wanted to make sure he was ready to leave the moment I was.
I melted at the sight of his eager face, and told him he could go down on his own – he was a big boy, and did not have to wait for me to take him down. He looked at me once to make sure I was not being sarcastic, then called the lift and scampered away.
Three months short of his fifth birthday, my little baby was learning to be independent.

Half an hour later, he had another ‘Coming of Age’ experience. A more meaningful one, even if a lot less pleasant.
Four of them were in the playground. One plonked himself on the see-saw, my son and another scrambled to get on the other side. They fought, each pushed the other, called the each other names. My son did not ask me to intervene, but the other boy did. I stayed neutral – let them sort out their own disputes.
When it seemed as though my son would win, the other boy abruptly changed gears. He stuck his little finger out at my son and said, “katti”. “Katti”, responded my son – they were now officially sworn enemies till each forgot the incident – but it did not stop there. The other kid dragged the first one off the see-saw, made him “katti” my son, then the three of them linked hands and ran off.

I could not bear to look at my son’s face. He didn’t cry in anger, sorrow or frustration, as I would have thought he would – he was beyond tears. He just stared at the retreating backs of his erstwhile friends, with a half wistful, half-uncomprehending look on his face. Had all emotion been drained out of his face, he could not have looked worse.
“Why did my ‘best friend’ go with them?”, he kept repeating. That he had an argument with one kid, he knew. That the kid would take away another one, he was willing to accept. What he just couldn’t understand was how his ‘best friend’ could get swayed by the other two and just walk off leaving him behind.
His heart was no longer in the game. We came back home. Watched some Spiderman. Ate some popcorn. He cheered up. But he did not forget. “Dirty ‘best friend’”, he would mutter periodically. “I will never play with her again.”

I wished there was something I could do to ease his pain. Some lie I could employ to convince him that his ‘best friend’ did not betray him as he thought she had done.
But there was no escaping reality. The reality was that his ‘best friend’ had just let herself be led by the mob. The reality was that his ‘best friend’ had deserted him without even being aware of the facts of the case. The reality was that this was neither fair nor just, but that life was not either fair or just. The reality was that this had happened to him once, and it would keep happening to him again and again. No, there was no escaping reality.
All I could do was to arm him, so it would hurt less the next time it happened. I gathered him in my arms. “Darling, just remember there are five people in the world who will always love you – Papa, Mamma, Dada, Patti and your little brother. Your friends may come and go. They may hurt you, say bad things about you. But as long as the five people who are most dear to you love you, nothing else matters. Okay?”
He nodded. “But I will never play with my ‘best friend’ again”, he announced emphatically.
“She made a mistake, darling. She did not mean to hurt you. Tomorrow, you will forgive her and start playing with her again. Okay?”
It took some doing, but he finally agreed however reluctantly. I know he did not understand most of it. And neither did I expect him to – five is too young an age to confront treachery and betrayal.
There is a lot he has to learn – that friends will hurt you without realizing it, that friends will make other friends and deliberately shun you, that friends will sell you out for personal gain, that you should never call someone your friend till they have proved themselves worthy of it, and even after that, not to have too many expectations of them.
We all experienced this, we all learnt this the hard way, some of us are still in the process of learning it. I do not wish to shield my son from any of this – just wish the first lessons hadn’t happened quite so soon.
That night, my son showed me he is not as fragile as I through he was. He will learn these lessons. He will survive. And he knows that come what may, his Family will always love him.

The Festivals I celebrate and why I do

Any one who knows me would know that I am not a “God- person” in the conventional sense of the word. The last time I voluntarily stepped into a temple to pray was before my teens, and I think that asking God to bless you is a little demeaning – surely God is not going to do something merely to get one pathetic individual to chant his name in a particular way. To me, God is something that exists, something that you know will look after you, and something that doesn’t want or need any of offerings people thrust on it.

Yet, for the past five years, come rain, shine, illness or injury, I have celebrated Gokulashtami by drawing Baby Krishna’s feet exactly the same way as my mother does, and her mother used to before her. I do use white paint and a brush, instead of the traditional rice paste, but the kolam pattern is exactly the same one that has been handed down in my family for generations.
Diwali is a twin celebration for us – we bathe, put on new clothes and eat sweets in the morning (no pre-dawn Ganga snanam for the kids – I have yet to completely forgive my parents for making me go through that ordeal year after year), and perform a Lakshmi-Ganesh Puja in the North Indian tradition in the evening.
Last year was the first year we were in Mumbai after the birth of my kids, and we got a Ganapathi idol home (we celebrated Ganesh Chaturti when we were in Delhi too, but without the idol). And we are doing the same this year too.
During Durga Puja, I make it a point to take the kids to a Puja Pandal whenever I can – a tribute to my pseudo-Bong heritage acquired during all those years in Calcutta.
On Tamil (and Punjabi) New Year’s Day, we make it a point to go to a temple, and have the kids do the pradakshinai.

Have I suddenly got religious? Is the fact that I have two little ones making me superstitious about not turning my back on organized religion?
Not at all – my Belief remains as strong as ever. My God doesn’t need to be appeased with rituals. My God is good to me, because he wants to, not because I remember him a couple of times a year. But my kids are not old enough to know that.
I celebrate festivals at home, because I want my kids to grow up with a conventional God, till they are able to establish a relationship with a God of their choosing and definition.
I also celebrate festivals at home, because I want my children to grow up with strong traditions. In a cross-cultural marriage like ours, it is very easy for the kids to grow up knowing neither culture. I want them to be aware of both – hence the Tamilian rituals on Gokulashtami and the Punjabi ones during Lakshmi Puja.
The choices my children make are their own – I cannot and do not want to interfere with them. But what I do want to do, and what I am trying to do is to make sure the foundation they build those choices on are as solid as I can possibly make them.

I had a maid

I had a maid.
Tall dark and ugly. She could have carved a niche for herself on TV enacting Surpanaka, Hidimbi and Putana. Instead she chose to come to work for me. She looked so menacing, I cringed, but I convinced myself that appearances could be deceptive and let her into my house and my life.

She was not just efficient. She was super efficient. Whether she did the things I told her to or not, she definitely did things I did not ask her to.
She watered my plants every day, even the ones that did not need watering daily. When I told her not to do so, she took to watering them before I woke up. She stopped only when I laid a trap for her, caught her in the act, and all but told her that I would dock her pay if any of my plants died.
She claimed to be an excellent cook, but the food was always cooked to her taste. She never seemed to remember to put fewer chilies, and happily polished off all the food that we left because it was too hot for our taste.
She would stuff my children with junk food when they were not hungry, and use that as an excuse if they did not eat at mealtimes. When I told her to stop letting them snack, she was still not able to feed them their meals and I often found half eaten rotis and dal-sabji mix in the garbage bin.
When I sent her shopping for vegetables, she always claimed there was only one bunch of methi leaves left at the stall. It took me three weeks to figure out that she did not get two bunches as I asked her to because she did not want to clean all those leaves.

She spoke about the kids she had taken care of in her previous jobs so often, I was sure I would burst if I heard another word about either of them. I often wondered why, when she seemed to care for them so much, she did not show any sign of affection towards my kids? I continued to hope – maybe she would grow to love them with time.
She would often be brewing her third tumbler of tea while the husband was heating his only cup in the microwave. The poor man never complained – he knew how dependent I was on her.
Sometimes I just wanted to press the mute button- get her to stop up, tell her I was not interested in her mundane thoughts and commonplace experiences. But I pretended to be interested – far from perfect though she was, I did not want her to leave.

Then my older son had to be hospitalized the day before she was to take her monthly break if two days. I asked her to postpone it, even offered to give her an extra day off if she did, but she would not budge. She had planned to leave in the evening, and in the evening she would leave – she was not even willing to see the night through and leave in the morning. The only concession she made was to agree to stay home with the younger one till the husband reached home – so grudging was she in agreeing to that, I wondered if she had been planning to just abandon him at home so she could leave when planned.
We survived the crisis, as we always do. She had a whole bunch of stories to explain why she had to leave when she did, and I pretended to believe them only to avoid a conflict. A week later, she informed me that her mother was ill and that she would take a four to five days off the following month after her payday. More than two days off in a month was not a part of the deal, and if she hadn’t been willing to compromise on her leave, neither would I.
I asked her to leave.
~
The next one was as different from the first as could be.
Thirty-five years old, either widowed or abandoned – I never found out which – she seemed to be fond of the kids. She established herself as an important member of the family from the day she arrived. I was told exactly which vegetables she liked and disliked and was encouraged to buy the ones she liked even if none of us would be caught dead eating those. When she fell ill, which was pretty often, I had to rush out whatever the time of the day to get her the particular brand of medicine that she said would make her well again.
My blood would boil when I saw her lounging on the sofa in her sleeveless nighties, but I never said anything because she would have the kids on her lap. She claimed never to sleep in the afternoons – she spent them on the sofa, with her feet up, the radio on her mobile turned so loud she never heard the children if they cried out in their sleep.
She ironed precisely when it told her not to, took decisions on whether we should have roti or rice for dinner depending on what was in the fridge (I never have rice, the husband never has rotis), and insisted that aloo paranthas should only be made her way (by mashing the potatos into the flour before making the dough).
She as plain lazy, and desperate though I was, I knew she could not last. When I called up the agency to demand a replacement, I was told that she would work better if I fed her more than just two rotis a meal. I felt like telling the agency about how I was fool enough to buy karelas solely for her consumption, but contented myself with informing them about how in the last several generations nobody in either my family or my husband’s had been stingy about food for the domestic help.
Two days after that, she left my younger kid alone at home when she went down to pick up the older one. Rudeness I was willing to put up with, lies I could pretend to ignore, but I would not someone negligent looking after my kids. An hour later, she was out of the house.
~
I now manage without full-time help. It is not easy. Sometimes I do not dust for days. Often, the bed gets made only at noon. I seem to be either hanging out clothes, or folding them, or ironing them, or putting them away all day long. But I do not mind – my home is my own, I can do anything I want to.
It is only when I am ill that I miss not having someone take care of me. Someone who can make me a cup of warm soup, when I can barely drag myself out of bed. Someone who can keep the kids entertained when I sleep it off. Then I remind myself of how my maid took off when my son was in hospital, and I tell myself I am much better off without a maid.

But when they invent a robo-maid that does what you tell it to, and shuts itself off when not needed, you can bet I would be queuing up to acquire one.