Delayed anniversary post

I can’t believe it’s been 8 years. 8 years of living together, fighting, laughing…well, to be honest the fighting and laughing has been going on much longer than that. It’s been an eventful year – Bojji was conceived and born, A decided to turn entrepreneur, we finally moved into the house of our dreams though unfortunately we don’t own it yet…

A, you’ve been my rock and more than that, especially this year with everything that’s been going on in our lives. I on the other hand have totally taken advantage of you, from leaving you in charge of the kids while I was traveling on work to having you do the bulk of the packing and unpacking of the house during renovation, dealing not only with the 3 kids’ tantrums but also mine. I even forgot your birthday this year. I promise I’ll try to do better next year.

At times I can’t believe we’ve been married eight whole years – our marriage seems much younger. At times it feels like maybe we were married at birth. It’s an incredible feeling to have one person who always understands you, even better than you do. Who always believes in you more than you do. Who’s always on your side and doesn’t even let you abuse you.

In my wildest dreams I couldn’t have imagined a more perfect partner for me than you. I always wanted to want someone but not need them. But you ruined it for me – now I not only want you but need you to be by my side every moment of my life. So, as the poet said, “Grow old with me, the best is yet to be”.

PS: Had to report this conversation.
A ( to Chubbocks): Tomorrow is mama’s and my anniversary – we got married on this date.
Chubbocks: You got married on Wednesday?

The Learning Instinct

Okay, had planned a mushy post on A for our anniversary today but am now not feeling the mush because of various reasons so here’s another post that I have wanting to put up for the longest time.

Puddi had been wanting to go to school for quite a while. Every morning, when all of us sailed off to school or work, she’d peer disconsolately down at us from the verandah, and plaintively demand to go to school. I wanted to enroll her in a parent-child program but knew I couldn’t go with her at such a heavily pregnant stage. So finally we enrolled her in playschool in November, after Bojjandi was born. It’s a new playschool but run by the same teachers who taught Chubbocks at playschool and we knew she’d really benefit from them.

She’s been going twice a week since November now, so it’s just about 14 classes or so – about 28 hours of school. She started out as this clingy little child who never got off A’s lap during class and didn’t open her mouth. But now she’s participating with gusto, requesting her favourite song during music time, speaking up to name the colour, shape or alphabet of the day. On the days she has school, she starts clamouring to go right from early morning. She replicates all the activities they perform in school throughout the day, be it singing the songs, the learning games or the ‘clean-up time’ song. What’s amazing is that we’ve never bothered speaking English to her – I speak to her in Kannada and A in Hindi – but just because the playschool is conducted in English, she’s been picking up so much of the language.

From a child who usually spoke in Hindi or Kannada, she’s begun composing long sentences in English. One can almost see the wheels in her mind turning as she gropes for the right word to express whatever she wants to say. It’s a joy to watch her blossoming and to experience how her mind is expanding. The more she learns – be it at playschool or from my mom who seems to have an inborn instinct for teaching little kids – the more she enjoys it and the more she wants to learn.

Chubbocks is similar – if there’s anything he gets interested in, he just goes after the subject, wanting to absorb information like a little sponge. He has a passion for dinosaurs, which started with A bringing him a movie called Dinosaur, and now he’s made us buy him several books on Dinos. He spends all his free time drawing different types of dinosaurs, reads up on them, knows the names of several different varieties and his latest ambition is to become a paleontologist. Earlier his passion was for tornadoes and again he loved going through a book which explained the phenomenon, asking us questions and discussing them until he understood the concept. Of course, if he’s asked to do any of this as a task assigned by us, he just doesn’t get up the enthusiasm – every time I’ve asked him to read in the afternoon, he’s either turned around and fallen asleep or chosen to spend his time drawing!

Watching these two and several of Chubbocks friends, whom I’ve known since they were all in playschool together, I come back to the conclusion that the learning instinct is inborn in human beings. Animals operate on pure instinct and nearly all their knowledge is inherited, but human beings are remarkable in that we come equipped only with the learning instinct. After that, it’s left to circumstance and later on one’s own inclinations, as to what and how much each one of us learns.

Unfortunately, that means that for those of us not fortunate enough to be born in the middle class at least, even this basic right is denied. The schools run by the government are so pitiful, the teaching level so pathetic even in the private schools, there is a complete lack of infrastructure by way of libraries or learning centers where thirsty little minds can drink in knowledge. And by and large the teaching methodology preferred is that of driving in what the teacher thinks it important for the child to know rather than stimulate the child’s curiosity and let it learn from a more wide-eyed and self-motivated perspective.

My friend’s daughter recently chose to take up IB, International Baccalaureate, at high school level because she was so bored of the commerce stream she had chosen. Ever since this girl started in the program, she has been so self-motivated even her own mother is surprised. She has to do several different projects for each course, they have interesting extracurriculars like drama workshops and model United Nations conferences, they have to prepare an independent paper, like a mini-thesis, for the course…it really equips children for a lifetime of learning. The traditional way Indian schools teach is intended to be useful only from the exam point of view – regurgitate and forget. And it invokes little desire in most people to continue a love-affair with learning. As for the children of the poor who really get the most unmotivated bunch of people teaching them for the most part, no wonder so many of them get bored and drop out of the system even when not forced to by the sheer need to earn a living.

One of my friends from college, Ravi, started up an NGO several years ago. He graduated from IIM A but his heart was never in the corporate sector and luckily, he realized where his vocation lay pretty early. So he set up in his own home, and started running tuition classes for the poor children who lived around – maths and English. As he went on, he realized that spoken English was a key requirement for them as even the brightest of them wouldn’t get a good job if he or she was unable to converse in English – sad but true. So he expanded to cover spoken English and later on, computers. Not programming but the use of basic Windows programs – Word, PowerPoint and Excel. Over time, he built up a base of more teachers – I helped him out for a couple of years when I lived closer to him – and had regular classes in batches. The biggest issue we struggled with was how to keep them interested and to help them built further on what they knew rather than starting each day as a blank slate. Ravi at least has managed to light the fire in many of the kids he helped, and now they want to study further and to run similar helping centers for other kids like them. But who helps out the rest of India?

Piecing it together

Helpful tip: Never have your third baby and renovate your home in the same year. It's incredibly stressful!

So...this was the year the Bojjandi chose to make his appearance, as a happy surprise for us. And, as it turned out, the tenants from the ground floor finally packed up and left and we decided to rent their place also, since we had outgrown the space we had rented 6 years ago, when there were just the two of us and no Chubbocks or Puddi in our lives, with their 3 tons of toys and other gear. Dad manages the house for the owner, who lives overseas, so he did a full evaluation of the ground floor and discovered that the previous tenants had done little or no maintenance for the past 7 years - from things as small as leaking faucets in the kitchen to a bathroom which was neither used nor ever cleaned in the entire duration!

So the contractor and his men moved in mid-July, claiming that it would just take them a month to complete all the work - from repair work to correcting water seepage to waterproofing the outside of the house to repainting all 3 floors. They started with the ground floor and managed to complete it by around mid-September. From telling us that they would let us know a week in advance of when they wanted us to move out of the first and second floors, suddenly one day they landed up brandishing their tools and asking us to vacate immediately. The move was chaotic, not least because I was working insane hours at work and heavily pregnant. poor A ended up taking the brunt of it, and our stuff got hastily moved out of their way- clothes were bundled up in old bedsheets or into the cardboard carton the new fridge came in, the kitchen stuff was spread across three rooms by our helpful household staff, all sorts of things were crammed into two rooms + the kitchen on the ground floor.

The contractor and crew didn't finish their work until way after Bojjandi was born - in fact, they just finished middle of last month, and have left delightful little surprises for us. Shower and other curtain rods are missing, doors which used to lock earlier are now unlock-able and so on. There were some things that they just couldn't do, for instance cleaning up the weird stains on the mosaic floor...Meanwhile we had our hands full dealing with three kids and were at my mom's place for the last two and a half months post Bojji. A did some of the unpacking and setting up whenever he could, including organising our massive library, and I helped at odd intervals, when I could spare the time between Bojjandi's two and a half hourly feeds.

We finally moved back Sunday and I've already been back at work half days from the 1st of Dec. So we're back to hunting out spare moments when none of the three kids want attention and we're not wiped out and needing rest ourselves to piece the rest of the house back together. It's beginning to come together room by room and it's also amazing us how many things we (especially the children) have, because we sure didn't pay for most of their stuff...On the plus side, our efficient old live-in maid who'd gone away to her village for many months, is now back with us. I'm looking forward to the day when we've finally put away every piece of the puzzle in its rightful place and can heave a sigh of relief and joy. But the thing is, in Delhi, that's never a day of final reckoning, given the constant change of seasons...

Mumbai Aftermath

It's already more than a week after the terrible events of Bombay. And I'm still trembling inside. The day after the Bombay attack started, I kept Chubbocks home from school, unable to let him out of my sight ( Of course, by afternoon, dealing with all his pent-up energy, I was wishing I had sent him after all!). But how long do we keep ourselves safe by cocooning ourselves at home? Can I afford never to send my kids anywhere - school, playground or birthday party? I wonder if Chubbocks' school, a prominent one, has any safety measures in place and whether they plan to conduct drills in what everyone should do in the event of an attack. I can't help but remember the Chechnyan attack in Russia, where they held a school hostage and killed so many children. It felt bad enough then, but now that I'm a mom, I feel a visceral grief even imagining the possibility.

I work in a large office complex, with hundreds of people and several large offices around. We have some form of security check going on, but I wonder how well-trained these people are to actually be able to recognise if someone is carrying something dangerous. They check our identity cards in the morning and let us in, not checking our bags. But the terrorists in Bombay did have some form of identification, as did those who carried out 9/11. Each time I come into office, I say a prayer that I'll be able to get out safely and go home to my family.

It's not as if terrorism on Indian soil is something new. Way back in the 80s and 90s, Delhi was one of the first victims. All DTC buses used to have a sign behind the seats asking people to keep their eyes peeled for suspicious unidentified objects which could be bombs. My friend was visiting from Chennai and his hair stood on end when he read that the first time, and he spent the rest of the journney with his face below the seat, looking around for suspicious packages. Over the years, we've even developed a thick carapace and carry on...

But no longer. 26/11 has exposed the total lack of intelligence, security, coordination and concern on the parts of the administration and the government and left all of us feeling exposed to danger in a worse way than ever before. On 26th Nov, it was Bombay, today or tomorrow could be any other city in India, any other venue, and we all have no way of knowing or keeping ourselves safe except to cower within our homes forever.

I've never been the kind of person who worries, mostly I am happy and optimistic. But in the last week, I've grown a new nerve or something which just constantly worries for the safety of family and friends. I know it's not going to help and that it's not in my hands to prevent such a thing from happening, but I am worried each and every day until we're all safely back at home. And bizarrely, as someone who always eschewed fatalism as the philosophy of the indolent, suddenly that seems to be the only attitude which can help us lead life as normal. Que sera, sera, Insh'allah, who can prevent destiny...