How imperfect is the perfect score!

My three colleagues and I were discussing the merits of group activities and power point presentations rather seriously. Suddenly, the aroma of fresh “besan ki laddoo” pervaded my nostrils and my senses rebelled against my effort to drive the brain. We stopped mid- sentence and looked at the radiant faces before us. Their smiles widened as they caught our expressions. One of them said “95.4%” and “96%” said the other with a judicious blend of pride and happiness.

We squealed, hugged, congratulated and dug into the box of sweets all at once! I can hardly recollect what each of us actually said. I just remember that it was a lot of high pitched noise every few minutes because our geniuses (some of whom found it difficult to finish a class test on time) glided in to give us delectable treats for their brilliant results in the class XII CBSE Board examinations.

The Principal was thrilled and she congratulated the brilliant batch over Face Book. The teachers were ecstatic on having added yet another golden feather in their ostentatious caps and declared so on Face Book again. Someone announced, “Three 100s! I am loving it!” Another teacher declared, “First time in the history of the school..100 in music! God bless you child!” A third person announced, “ABC 100, DEF 100, XXX 100, XYZ 100! They all have the perfect score! Life couldn’t be better!”

There was much jubilation among Principals of schools, teachers, students and their parents as is expected. The officials of the CBSE Board probably looked up at Heaven and heaved a sigh of relief. “Thank Almighty! There are no catastrophes and tears. There is only happiness all around. This is the perfect way to conduct a public examination!”

Surely this is the perfect way!

We abhor terrorizing children with public examinations. Their young minds shouldn't be stressed so we remove the secondary school examination. The students of CBSE whisper rather vociferously that the syllabus of an entire academic year is too burdensome. So we insist that the children be tested on what is taught in that particular semester. Too bad if the teacher has taught prepositions in the first semester and adjectives in the other! If she dares to set even a 2 mark question on a preposition, she is taken to task for her lack of sympathy for her little gems.

Yet there are unsatisfied geniuses around. “But that’s not enough!”, they whisper again. The educationists of our mighty nation put their heads together, scratch their grizzly chins, munch away quintals of biscuits, and gulp down litres of tea, as they wonder how to quieten the voices. Voila! The lessons are shortened. Facts and details are taken away, grammar done away with, language simplified…it is all taken care of.

The voices are still not quiet! The numbers of questions in the examination are reduced. The patterns of the papers are changed. Multiple choices are introduced. A special 15 minutes is allotted for “reading” the question paper and 10 marks is allotted for internal assessment. Phew!

Much to our dismay, the class XII, Senior Secondary School examination lives on.

How mundane it is today to score 95% and more. When I went through class XII, we were all happy to get 70%. “First division!”, we would say contently. Just a few years ago, one struggled fairly hard to touch the 80% and eventually, if one did touch the score, the world opened up for him.

The perfect score seems to have lost its seat of perfection and it makes me wonder. If our students score 100 so easily, are they becoming sharper by the year? And if they are, how wonderful it is for our nation!....it’s a nation of geniuses! Yet, most of these bright youngsters fly off to look for greener pastures in the US of A even today. What a pity!!

Or are they really not as bright as the CBSE tells them they are? In that case, does CBSE create a make belief world for them? Would they stumble and fall as they jostle along the path of the big bad world? Would that create mediocrity, stress, cynicism and eventual dejection?

It makes me wonder whether the youngsters are just tidbits to feed the adult ego. Each school needs to elbow out other schools for it must be known as the “best” and so the race goes on…!  While it is the responsibility of every right thinking adult to motivate the youngsters to recognize and reach their potentials and to inculcate the habit to strive, the excessive hype and the deafening din is quite exhausting. Certainly the hard working students have earned all the accolades and the adulation, but just in case there is any unlucky soul who hasn’t written an examination well (for whatever reason), does it necessarily mean that he is less intelligent? May be not!

I have a young boy in my class who dislikes learning French. He would much rather work at the computer. He hails from a business family and he knows that his future lies there. The young lad confided that he has to study French since his parents cajole him to dream of living in Canada. It troubles me. I make him infinitely miserable as I burden him with extra work in the subject that he hates, only because the Principal insists that the school must have a brilliant result.  I am so untrue to my heart.

The perfect score thrusts up the magic bar for entrance into colleges for general studies, thus making admission difficult. It does not even help our students to get admission into engineering, medicine, architecture, legal studies, hospitality etc. Then what do we kill them for? It would be a lot more meaningful if the CBSE syllabus, at least, prepared our children to pass the entrance exams for the various fields! Instead, the harassed youngsters are cruelly shooed off by their equally harassed parents from one tutorial class to another the moment they are back from school. It is “STUDY..PERFORM..SCORE!! “ and it goes on incessantly.

While we goad our students to attain that perfect score, would we be honest enough to tell them that in most times it does not matter? We do not look back or even remember what exactly we scored in a certain examination in class XII. In fact, most often, it does not even come in the way of what we eventually do in life.

Sadly, on the one hand, we ensure that CBSE mollycoddles our students and on the other, we bruise them sorely by tugging them mercilessly to attain whatever we believe should be attained. It’s high time we admit that the perfect score is not quite so perfect. Our children need not hang themselves for marks, instead let them thirst for knowledge and thus reach their dream. We would probably have a much happier future generation! 

A fever? Why not?

I was waiting for my usual sticks of gladiola and carnations and feeling rather amused at the humdrum around. The local flower shop is small and that Friday evening it seemed filled with rushed customers eager to carry away a pretty bouquet.

The couple at the counter insisted that their bouquet be wrapped with orange paper instead of the rather common place red. “Bring the papers down, silly boy! Don’t be slow!” Eager to please his customers, as he should be, the shop owner, Chander ji, commanded the young worker, Bishu, to pull the bundle down from the shelf above. He snatched the bundle from the boy and began flipping through the sheaf in great speed to find the desired colour.

Alas! What catastrophe! There was no orange! There were all possible colours but there was no orange! The lady let out a heart-broken moan, her husband frowned for want of better expression of his irritation, young Bishu stood expressionlessly and Chander ji, a good and honest man, growled menacingly at the young worker. “All day sitting with your phone, you useless boy! All day playing games or at Facebook! As if you are very educated! You ignorant fellow, Facebook doesn’t help you keep your job! Get your mind together and pay attention over here!”

My ears cocked up like my little Simba’s ears. What did I hear? Young Bishu? Facebook? Is that what Chander ji said?

The boy busied himself with the red paper without a flicker in his eyes. The owner addressed me, his regular customer. “You see madam, what the young generation is up to? A young boy of 17/18 years whiling away his time with Facebook, pretending to be very educated…He!” I nodded as glumly as I could, though I didn’t see at all. “When we were of his age, we worked hard to make money. Look at him, look at all the boys. They study till class 5 or 6, come to work but no honest effort at all….” I expressed my solidarity with Chander ji by pulling a grim face and shook my head in great defeat.

I haven’t stopped thinking about it. The young helpers of a local florist are victims of the Facebook fever! Is that the extent of the spread of the epidemic of a social net-work site? I know the boys read and write enough to earn a living…but they are on FB! They buy a good smart phone with their monthly saving and the world opens up for them. Lo and behold! They are sucked into the FB fever!

Personally, I am not a social net-work fan and I only use FB to delve into other people’s private lives rather vociferously as they would like me to. I never forget to click on the “like” button when middle-aged couples serenade one another on the site. I am equally prompt in writing an eloquent comment about the beautiful friends who change their profile pictures every alternate day. I can hear them screaming out for attention…so there I go…

But let’s get back to today’s Bishus. If these young boys can drown themselves in FB, what is the harm? It keeps them away from causing trouble, from loitering around and from a host of other undesirable activities. Firstly, the youngsters save money to buy the smart phone instead of smoking it away. Secondly, though they do forget to buy the perfect coloured paper, much to the wrath of their employers, they keep themselves engrossed in a fever that is not quite so bad. The more I think of it, the more I feel a surge of happiness bubbling in me. May the FB fever engulf the young boys and open a new world for them! Amen!

Fingers Crossed!

I have done it again! I have dunked all my knotty fingers in all the scrumptious pies around me! I am nose deep in work and adore every moment!

I love to teach, I love the language an\d I love the students whom I teach. They fascinate me. I enjoy talking to them, listening to them and understanding them as enthusiastic members of the human race.

For 3 months every year, I teach administrative officers at the HIPA (Haryana Institute of Public Administration). They are mainly police officers and each batch of officers is sharper, better read and more versatile than the other. I am amazed at their keen sense of humour, their humility and forthrightness.

“More classes of French? Surely not!”, I exclaimed in my last class. “You are essentially police officers, not students of French!”

“Even police officers have high sensibilities, ma’am!” retorted my student, IPS officer Imran, rather dryly.

I couldn’t hide my smile which was lurking naughtily at the corner of my mouth. I am overjoyed as any other teacher would be. The students are thirsty! How good is that!

Each time that I walk into the immensely imposing auditorium, I find my group of young officers patiently seated, waiting for their short, flat-heeled, sari-clad, silver-haired French teacher. The sight fills me with warmth and I am ready to do better than my best.

As I brandish out my pen drive and try to retrieve the ppt presentations, I have eager students and technicians at my elbow, all ready to help. I give up with a sense of relief. My pen drive connected, I begin my lesson. In a few moments I notice that, along with my students, I have the technicians seated at the back of the class, intently listening to what I say!

These intelligent officers enjoy discussing books, films, music and a host of other things. They strive to read and speak French as smoothly as a native. I am humbled at their desire, their effort and their gracious behaviour.

While I am ecstatic every moment of the sixty minutes that I teach, as I pack up my computer at the end of each class, I am left with a sense of utter confusion. Would these sharp, witty yet polite officers who impress me each day, transform themselves into lethargic, pot-bellied officers, slumped at their desks, all gruff and grumpy in the years to come? I cannot visualize it, though I know of it.

In the thorny path of life, would these starry-eyed young officers stumble and fall? How many of them would rise from their fall? How many of them would lose themselves on the way?

My students are fine officers and gentlemen. If they can hold their heads high what a fear-free nation we would live in!

I can do little else than keep my fingers crossed.

THE MORNING RAGA

As the yoga teachers take the day off on the 25th of November, I complete 9 months of yoga at the Sivananda Centre.

It has been a challenging journey for me. I was fighting cancer. Last February, I had just completed the basic treatment, had blotchy skin and had an inch length of grey hair sprouting out….I looked awful and felt awful and was afraid to face the world again. That was when I had walked into F 42 South City I, not knowing what to expect, and full of apprehensions. My first meeting with Arun Sir, was reassuring, but not promising, as I did not believe in promises any longer.

I had disastrously low immunity, no stamina what- so- ever and an excruciatingly painful back. Hobbling out of bed with a bent back, gradually giving myself time to even stand up straight was the most usual morning routine for me. I had wiped out the memory of the childhood spring out of bed, to embrace the hobble with grace. I had decided that physical pain was a part of my life and I needed to carry on with it. Along with an abundance of pain and exhaustion, I had an abundance of courage and hope.

It was a rather slow start. The Beginners’ Course by Vinod Sir gave an encouraging glimpse into what I could achieve. Thus my journey began. Six rounds of Surya Namaskar was as big a challenge as conquering the Everest!!! I could not even do the dumbest thing like stretching myself in to the “child’s pose”. My back killed me!!! I religiously attended the yoga classes three to four times a week, even though I went in for an extended chemo therapy every three weeks all the while!!

I could not lift up both my legs. I used to be in agonizing pain. It was around the third month that one morning Arun Sir helped me raise my legs and hold on to my thighs while everybody else practiced the “shoulder stand”!! I was shamefully proud of myself!!!

In the last six months, six rounds of Surya Namaskar, stretching back into the child’s pose, getting into the shoulder stand with the help of the teacher became an easy task for me. It has been only a week now that I do not need help to get into the shoulder stand any longer…..I can do it on my own!!!

I go for a brisk walk thrice a week and I still attend yoga classes four times a week. Naveen Sir’s gentle smile greets me each morning as I embrace the day with yoga. The gorgeous dawn beckons me as I spring out of bed. My hobble is a thing of the past. In fact it is a brand new morning raga for me now!!!

Every single teacher of the Sivananda Yoga Centre is Patience personified and has helped to create a different world for a person like me. I sent my best wishes, my warm regards to every teacher and I say the two little words: Thank You!!

TRYING TO BOUNCE BACK!

I hated my blotchy skin, my grey stubby hair, my teeny eye lashes….I hated the way I looked. I was depressed because I did not know how to get back to LIFE. And all of this low state cobwebbed in me after I began feeling better!!! It took me a while to accept myself, my changed looks and move on. I first joined a Book Club. It took an immense amount of courage to step out of the comfort zone and meet people who did not know me. We met at a lovely lady, Tara’s place. Even with Pradipta by my side, I was so self conscious that I could not speak. When I finally tried to introduce myself, my voice was hoarse and I croaked!!! Fortunately there were some wonderful people and by the time the evening was out, I felt a lot better. I do look forward to the Book Club meetings now. My next mammoth effort was to be involved in a “play reading”. Since my grey hair is a wee bit more presentable and my skin, a little less blotchy, I wasn’t so nervous. I thoroughly enjoyed reading my role. The experience took me back to school and college!! Thanks to some great people, Pradipta and I had a terrific evening again. We are so looking forward to the next evening of “play reading”. I was consciously goading my self confidence to climb up another notch, but it received a severe blow! It slumped down when my dear friend Sumita could not recognize me at her son’s wedding!! I realized how much I had changed!!! I was distraught, but then I reasoned with myself. I was a changed person after all….so naturally my looks were also different! I joined Sivananda Yoga classes. That was my next step forward. It takes an effort to tell people about my medical condition, but once done, it is easy. The instructors are wonderful and every day is a novel experience. Last week I received a phone call from DPS Sushant Lok requesting me to teach there! The school is 5 minutes away from home and I hopped across to it. Teach French to school children? I could do that even in deep sleep!!! I promised them that I would go across twice a week and teach the little ones from the new academic session. I have just completed one year of struggle and I am trying to catapult back to life!!! I look bad but I feel good. The Merciful God has placed tiny opportunities before me and terrific people around me. I embrace both with a lot of gratitude.

DOWN IN THE DUMPS!!!

I am grateful to be alive, to see the sun rise each morning. I feel blessed.

A month back I was going through a “down in the dumps” phase. I stopped writing the blog. I just wanted to withdraw and drown in myself. I wanted to have nothing to do with the world around me. “Why am I fighting?”, “Am I really going to be free of cancer?”, “What am I going to do when I get better?”, “How will I fit myself into the world around me again?” Ever since I had shed my armor, my bandana, I felt vulnerable and a myriad of questions badgered my mind. I broke down. I confided in my best friend, my husband. We discussed it at length and he concluded that I probably needed professional help.

After having voiced my turbulent thoughts once, I mustered the courage to confide in my dear friend, Madhu, over coffee at CCD. She had goaded me to get out of home and meet her. In the sweetest sort of way she told me to pull myself up and not bask in self sympathy...she said, that was not “me”. I was not elated, but I felt a lot better.

Then it was my friend, Ritu who snapped me out of my weepy, whiny state. “You don’t always have to be chirpy! It’s fine to be grouchy, or weepy…you have a right to be so! In fact you can even be nasty if you want!!!” she counseled me. That did it!! It worked wonders to know that I do have the blessed right to drown myself in self sympathy and even sulk.

Of course, it was providential that soon after; I was suddenly involved in a host of activities that left me no time to brood. I resumed teaching my neighbor’s child, editing my last book, reading and baking cakes.

I am acutely aware of the finality of everything, yet this awareness makes me LIVE each moment with immense joy. I am all set to embrace the world around me once again.

RIP VAN WINKLE!! :-))

As a child I was greatly disturbed by the story of Rip Van Winkle that I read in the Radiant Reader Book II. The idea that one can fall asleep for a hundred years and wake up to find that every thing around him has changed did not appeal to me at all and made me most uncomfortable. Yet today I am humored to realize that I have under gone a Rip Van Winkle –like experience of sorts!

Just a week back, Jai, my gardener, told me with a lot of pride that he had planted some marigolds in the pots. I stared at him for two seconds and asked him, “Marigolds? Why now? They are going to wither!” He almost asked me if I was out my mind and insisted that they would bloom very soon. I kept quiet.

I was intently buying vegetables for the home one morning and silently marveled at the fresh green enticing vegetables, wondering how they were available at this time of the year…I was rather pleased. Little did I realize that they were of course winter veggies!

The other day I attended a ladies soirée after a gap of six months. I was naturally happy to be there and would like to believe that every body was glad to see me. But as I walked in, I noticed that almost everybody was wearing silks. I wondered why everybody was in winter wear!! So was I, mind you, and I even carried a shawl…but I was all confused!

I kept wondering why I was all confused about the season. Of course I knew that the deadly Delhi winter was settling in, but it all seemed to be a mumbo-jumbo in my mind. I was rather disturbed and the confused worm wriggled incessantly in my brain. Then, finally I figured it out. It was during the waning winter that I had been detected with cancer. I had fought it all through summer when I was so completely knocked out. The season had just not registered in my mind. I had only been struggling to live through every isolated day.

I now realize that I have a lost a season! It has just evaporated! From last winter, I sub consciously move to summer, though my conscious mind knows that the cold winter is galloping in. Each morning when I shiver as I remove my blanket, I need to remind myself that summer is over. Today it is a cold winter morning, and every thing is as it should be.

Of course I am not Rip Van Winkle, but it is amazing how the mind can make you one! :-))