Teacher, teacher

“Where is K for Kangaroo?”
“Idhar, here!”
“Very good. N for Nest?”
“Pata nahin, I don’t know”
“Next to M for Mango. Show me, where is M for Mango.” “Yes, now show me N for Nest.” “Very good. Aap bahut smartie ho, you are such a smart kid!”
“Now, show me W for Watch?”
“Here.”
“Does that look like a watch to you? Show me W for Watch.”
“Very good. E for Elephant?”

Me teaching the alphabet to my kids? Not at all. That’s my almost five-year old with his younger brother.
How quickly they grow into their new roles!

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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.

The Invisibles

Entering the supermarket today, I heard an authoritative voice boom – “children not allowed here”. I naturally glanced around guiltily – I had brought both the kids to the supermarket before and had never been told of such a rule. Maybe this time I could somehow talk the security guard into allowing me to take the kids in.

But that remark had not been addressed at me at all. It was two kids, clearly of the worker class, who were being denied entry by the security guard. Their old and slightly scruffy clothes did contrast badly with the gleaming interiors the supermarket, but it did seem somewhat mean to deny them entry on those ground alone. After all, I visited the supermarket mainly because fruits and vegetables cost at least 10% less than they did at the nearest market – should people to whom that savings means a lot more than it does to me be denied the right to shop there? True, the management had the right to turn away anyone they did not deem suitable, but it somehow did not seem right either. But again, was there any guarantee that those boys would even buy anything. There must be cases of people who came only to gape and enjoy the air-conditioning, and if the presence of these people offended the sensibility of the target clientele of the supermarket, they management would feel compelled to turn them away.

But these two boys were barely ten – two days after everyone fell over backwards to make token gestures on Children’s Day, it seemed somewhat unfair to deny these boys something that was clearly a big adventure. But I was not in the frame of mind to try arguing with the security guard, so put it out of my mind and walked on.

A minute later, I saw the two boys skipping down the aisle. They knew exactly where to go and went there directly. Picking up a big box of cereals, they made for the checkout counter, paid and departed. Both were quite at home in the place, and must have invisibly visited earlier as a part of their ‘Madam’s’ entourage. It was only when they tried to enter on their own that they became visible and therefore undesirable.

I was glad they had stood up for themselves. But I still wonder how the security guard would have reacted if they had shown them a carefully hoarded ten rupee note with which they intended buying themselves a packet of potato chips. Would they still have been let in?

At the Planetarium

My older one had been wanting to visit the Planetarium for weeks. Knowing how difficult it would be to schedule it into a normal weekend, I’d promised to take him during our week in Delhi. The big day arrived, dozens of things went wrong we reached the ticket window barely 20 minutes before the show was supposed to start. I was sure we would not get tickets, and kept trying to prepare my son for the disappointment of having to wait another day to ‘see the stars’.
The lady at the ticket counter seemed not to understand what I meant when I asked if tickets were still available, but since she produced the tickets without much ado, I did not dwell too much on her apparent confusion. We ran into the Planetarium, and found ourselves surrounded by beautiful photographs of the night sky taken from various historical sites, memorabilia from Rakesh Sharma’s space visit, paintings made by children of the Chandrayan expedition, and nothing else. There was not a single person around – not even one.
Minutes before the show was to begin, people started tricking in – three school kids, a man my age and his mother, a man with two kids of school going age. That’s it! Including my not yet three year old, there were exactly a dozen people in a Planetarium that could easily seat at least two hundred people.
The show was beautifully executed. Complex concepts were explained in very simple language. There were things that even a self-confessed astronomy buff like me learnt for the first time. And going by some of the references, the commentary had been updated in the last month. But, there was practically nobody to see it.
Malls are always crowded with people who are there only to have a good time. Why can some of those people not visit a Planetarium sometimes?

A reason to celebrate

My younger one was in a festive mood yesterday. Wanted a rangoli and many pretty diyas. I gave in to his demands. He told me the colours to use, I followed his instructions faithfully. The diyas were the ones we’d bought at a school fete last year and never used.

Today, three separate people asked me which festival I celebrated yesterday. They thought I was hideing something when I said I made the decoration because I felt like it.
Do we really need a reason to celebrate? Is not the fact that we are able to celebrate, reason enough to?



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.

Recrimination

“Mamma, I want to go swimming. Please!”

“No, Mamma, you have to come in with me. What if I drown?”

Had my son not been so excited about going swimming, I would not have taken him at all. Had he not insisted, I would have been outside, fully clothed.

Would I have seen on time that his head was under the water and that he was drifting? Would I have been able to reach him on time, and get the water out?

Should I blame myself for letting him bully me? Or thank his intuition for his still being alive?

Chasing Butterflies

Chasing butterflies. Small ones and large. Butterflies with bright yellow wings, and butterflies with dull brown ones. Butterflies stocking up on nectar, and butterflies fluttering about playing ‘catch me if you can’. Butterflies that allow themselves to be caught, and butterflies that are too canny for you.
Chasing butterflies. Both literally and metaphorically. Thoughts that descend on the brain and flit out of sight the moment to try to articulate them. Ideas that keep you engrossed for hours, but nobody else seems to care a damn about.
Chasing butterflies. Can anything be more fun whether you are five or seventy-fifty?


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.

Do I expect too much?

The Standard Chartered Mumbai marathon has spoilt me. It is so incredibly well organised that I have come to expect something close to perfection, and mismanagement like at the Airtel Delhi half-marathon leaves me feeling very very cheated. Sure the run had its highs, and in time, that is all that I will remember, but right now, the slight bitter feeling of being let down is what predominates.
Small things - each very small things on their own, but things that matter a lot in the larger scheme of things.
Like the plastic Airtel flags that were thrust into our hands as we entered the holding area. Did anybody seriously think that a runner would carry them for 21.097 kilometers and display them for the cameras? Some, like me, threw them into the nearest garbage bin, but many held onto them, and only discarded them en route. So 5 kilometers into the race, there was every chance that an unsuspecting runner would step on one of the plastic flags, skid, and end the race with a sprained ankle. Would it be too much to ask the event sponsors to not give out things that could be potentially dangerous to the participants of the longer race.
Water stations - there was one at the 1 kilometer mark, another at the 2 kilometer mark, and a third at the 3 kilometer mark. By the time you reached the 6 kilometer mark, you were lulled into a false sense of complacency - there would be water stations at every kilometer - and you threw aside the half finished water bottle you just grabbed. But guess what? Once you hit Rajpath, there were no water stations till the 10 kilometer mark. Mercifully the sun gods were kind, but if the sun had been as bright as it should have been, I shudder to think of running down that unshaded stretch without any water. Can the participants not be told of the location of the waterstation before or during the race?
The day before the race, I was talking about how the unsung heros of the Mumbai marathon were the BMC workers who ensured you never saw more than half a dozen discarded water bottles in one place. The same cannot be said for the helpers in Delhi - there were discarded water bottles all over the track, and I must have personally kicked over a hundred of them to the side so they would not hamper the participants coming after me. Perhaps that has something to do with the etiquette or lack of it in Delhi, but one could try to tell people to be a little more considerate, can't one?
But the worst was reserved for the end. Soon after reaching the 17 kilometer mark, we could hear peppy music blaring out on the public address system. It rejuvenated us at a time when we needed a shot in the arm, but only till we realised that the music heralded the participants of the Great Delhi Run. To call them a mob would be an understatement - they were an inconsiderate bunch, full of their own self-importance and thought nothing of stepping on your shoes from behind and pulling them off. People tired out from the longer run just did not have the energy to jostle with the participants of the shorter run, and most just stopped running, and started walking. How difficult can it be in a city like Delhi to have separate finish lines for the two runs? The half-marathoner seeks a special kind of thrill in finishing the race - do they not deserve a place to exult?
I do wish the organisers of the Delhi half-marathon learn from this experience, because the Delhi half is definitely a race I would love to run again and again.

And as I leave, here is a picture I took of the lead half-marathoners 39 minutes into the race - I was somewhere between the 5 and 6 kilometer marks at that point of time.