Dear Akka (on a bad day)

Once again, inspired by the specifics of today (more of which should find mention on my work blog here soon), but this is note-to-self-and-other for whenever we need it. Every last one of these kids and these stories come from my classroom, the good, the not-so-good, and the downright ugly. Everyone needs something to spice up their day, right?

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Dear Akka (on a bad day),

Remember.

Remember the child who walked up to you in the middle of an intense class on homophones to say she had something to give you. What, you asked, in part disgruntled by the interruption but also for most part curious about what could have brought it about. Here, she smiles, pulling out a slightly squished rose. It looks like it travelled in an almost-safe place this morning, a plastic bag next to a water bottle perhaps, or atop a stack of books, surviving just enough pressure to come out with only a few petals ruffled and squashed. You smile. Thank you, you manage, as you try and compose yourself and the class to come back to homophones. Now, what is the difference between ‘bare’ and ‘bear,’ you ask.

Remember the child who you were afraid of, the one who was sent back from the remedial classes to “reintegrate” so to speak. How will I manage, you wondered, sometimes aloud but much more to yourself. Can I handle the twenty others in the class as I give him the attention he needs? And what if I can’t? Am I giving him what he is due? Splashed across a page of a notebook buried inside a bag, there is a question that will haunt you. Have YOU given them wholesome education today? Have you?

But also remember the same child, two months into the classroom, bending over a worksheet judiciously trying to keep pace with the class. You walk up to him and ask if everything is alright. He asks you for permission to speak in his mother tongue, casting away the alienness of what you are trying to impose in favour of the known, the familiar, the safe. Sure, you allow. Is this what I ought to do, he clarifies, and you nod in reassurance, patting him on the back as you walk by, hoping that half the encouragement you intend finds its way to him. The next day, he comes up to you and tells you he has finished the first worksheet and could you help him through the second in class? You rejoice. You hadn’t expected to even see the end of the first, forget hand over the second. Of course, you nod, meet me tomorrow and we will get it done.

Remember the girl who called you her guru, her role model. You felt your heart flutter in that minute, and you still don’t know if it is because of fear or gratitude. Could you live up to the job? What had you done to receive such high praise? What could you say to the sudden glow in her face as she talks to you about feeling inspired, motivated, driven to do better, do more? You tell her about your own story. You tell her you see that she can do it too. You tell her that you will be right there, one step behind her, as she feels her way around the world, gripping at the crevices that stop her from slipping. You race through the compartments in your mind, wondering who to talk to and where to look to give her that one more opportunity. Who knows what could tip the scale?

But also.

Remember the child who, early on a Wednesday morning, told you you were wasting his time. Why do we bother with this, Akka, he groaned almost to the tune your bruised ego was singing just then. Tell me more, you ask, unsure of whether you want to know the answer or you are just trying to do the adult thing of keeping a cool head. What is the point, he wants to know. And you set off into a spiel on stepping into another’s shoes, hurrying on before he cracks a bad joke and demands the shoe size. You tell them how a time-tested way to learn is to teach, and how by that logic, to answer questions you must make them. He seems only half mollified. You lean back into the wall, trying to blend into the background.

Remember the child who rebuked you for not doing enough. We have only done two stories in English, Akka, he complained, inadvertently pitting you against the colleagues who you laughed with at lunch. What did he know that one of those two was Marquez, something that all and sundry gaped at when you said you were reaching high? It didn’t matter that he had done four different worksheets, each reinforcing a different skill with the second, a story from the very-foreign Ghana, as he understood the difference between folktales and fact. To him, it was two sheets of paper versus many more, and in that moment, two just didn’t seem good enough. And he told you. And it stung.

Remember the one who just does not seem to care, and no amount of cajoling and begging and enticing would change that. The birds outside the window, the dogs at the door, the dust at the corner of the bench; it was all always more interesting than…well, you. You bring music and dance into the classroom, and whip out that magic weapon of a sponge ball. You animate your stories and coerce your voice into performing a roller coaster. All of it to no avail. You are still not interesting enough. So you pull through the class and breathe a sigh of relief at the end of it, only to have the memory wash over you the next time you tentatively set foot into a classroom and spy the one disinterested face amongst the bright sea of ‘good morning Akka!’s.

The next time you sit to plan a lesson, the next time you get handed a flower in class, the next time a student doesn’t seem to care for a word that you say, remember. Remember the Flower Girl, the Hardworker, the Starry-eyed One. But also, or more so, remember the Disgruntled One, the Disappointed One, the Bored Out of His Mind One. Remember what each brings to the table, to the classroom, to the discussion, even if you cannot hear the words out loud. Remember how each of them made you feel, what each of them made you think, why each of them matter. Remember what you owe each of them, a chance to find themselves in your classroom, whether aloud or not, on the page or not. Remember that your job is not to smile through flowers or cry through critique, but to level the playing field the best you can and watch from the sidelines. Remember.

Remember to ask yourself. Have you given them a wholesome education today?

Love,

Akka (on a good day)

Reflections in the receding water

This is a bit of writing in the wake of the Chennai floods, a string of thoughts as and when they came to my head. The piece is written in two parts, the first after a day out in the city helping with distribution efforts and the second written today after we wrapped up relief operations.

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My Chennai flood experience started a little different. It was one of luxury, of prosperity, of excess. Two hours after young boys battled each other to grab a packet of biscuits from my hands, I ate hot food and drank hot chocolate milk at my college mess. Why me? Because I'm lucky to have access to a campus that's in the spotlight, a campus that convinced all the vendors to operate on credit, a campus where the mess workers waded through waist deep water surrounding their own homes to cook for us because, in their words, "naange illena ungalukku pasikkum." (If we don’t come, you will all be hungry.)

But my Chennai flood experience is also one of need, of desperation, of want. It's one of women as old as my grandmother begging for food from my fast depleting bag, of young boys discussing how many mouths a Rs 5 biscuit packet can feed, of the scores of eyes laying sight on food for the first time in days. It's the experience of giving and getting instructions to barricade our buses and close the windows to stop people from climbing onto the bus as they try to grab food, of people flocking the minute they see what looks like relief supplies.

My Chennai flood experience was one of gratitude and oneness. Of volunteers coming together and spending hours collecting, sorting, loading and distributing without stopping to ask for names. Of the IITM team realising we don't have a master list of everyone who worked to thank later on because no one waited to take pictures or fill a roll call. Of locals who tell us "Inge oru vellai saapadu irukku-nge, neenge aduthe edathukku ponge." (We have our next meal here, do go on to the next place.) Of citizens sharing contact details on public forums if that means access to more bread loaves or medicines. Of us thanking the stranded for magically procuring coffee while they thank us for turning up. Of running out of paracetamol in the middle of a medical camp only to have a stranger offer to go shopping and return with a box full.

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I’ve seen Bhanu Akka every day for the last five years, as she sits patiently in the lobby of our hostel, in charge of our security. Every day for the last week, she has told us stories of her house and her neighbours, as they struggle to put their lives back together after floods ravaged the city. She told us stories of another Akka whose house was washed away but who was ”lucky” enough to save her ration card, which she proceeded to dry on a dosai kallu. She told us of people whose utensils were blackened by sludge, whose choice lay between washing them thin or the unaffordable solution of replacing them all. There were stories of snakes in the stagnant water of bedrooms, people lying on the bed anyway for want of somewhere else to go. There were tales of traffic jams caused on the only half of the road that was usable because people began spilling onto the streets to escape from the cramped, unhygienic environments of shelter halls. The auto driver who dropped me home late last night thanked God for his first floor house, telling me how the people on the ground floor were flooded and those on the second were dealing with leaking roofs and walls. The beginning of every conversation in Chennai today has become ‘how is your home?’

Behind every aching muscle in my body today, there is a story. The stories from Anankaputhur and Vyasarpadi, Moggapair and Iyyapanthangal, Velachery and Taramani. The stories of people in neighbourhoods I barely knew existed till recently. The stories of the woman as old as my Paati who begged me to give her a sari she could use. Or the Anna who ran behind our bus as we pulled away after distribution. Or the Akka who bent down close to thank me for distributing sanitary pads, saying only we understood her struggles. Or even the woman who stood by me as I assisted in a medical camp, warning me when the time came to stop. “People are coming back for seconds, ma,” she told me. “Go give this to people who need it more.”

Never before have I seen this kind of longing. More often than once, I have been shaken by men and women much older than me thanking us for our work, their eyes glowing at the sight of food and medicines. Even in the ruckus of our “control room”/collection centre, as we joked of having stocks to last for years, there was a tinge of unease in our voices, speaking volumes of the roads just outside our gates. No matter how much we joked and collected and segregated, all this would disappear in minutes outside, we knew.

This last week and all the hours in it have taught all of us many things. It taught us the value of bread and water, of dry roads and cloudless skies. It taught us to save every drop, switch off every extra light, huddle in one room to optimize candle light. It taught us that good faith and trust can still drive mass movements, a lesson reinforced every time supplies traded hands with no questions asked. It taught us that our city, known for orthodoxy and conservatism often spoken of in the same breath as boredom, can rally together when the going gets tough and not give up. It taught us that in times of need, hierarchies are forgotten memories as professors checked with student coordinators to volunteer in the efforts and children lugged many kilograms of rice to unload/reload. It taught us to share information, resources and encouragement. It taught us to stick together and come out stronger.

1 week. A dozen core members. Around 25 neighbourhoods. Hundreds of volunteers. Many thousands of kilograms of supplies.

Doing our bit to reclaim home.

What Math taught me

It wasn’t too long ago (or so I’d like to think) that I remember studying for my Grade 10 Math board exams thinking I’d never have to get my hands dirty again. The horrors of trig, algebra, matrices, vectors and linear programming (nope, no calculus) would be left behind as I started Grade 12 prep in subjects I thought were my cups of tea – Psych, Socio, English Literature. For the next two years, the only Math I did was a tad bit of Business Accounts and even then, my calculator did most of the work. I mean for someone who wanted to study Sociology, why bother with Math, right? Right? (Please say yes...)

Fast forward four years and the college student in me realized just how disillusioned I was. For reasons I still cannot fully empathize with, a degree in Development Studies meant I needed to equip myself with an armory of quantitative skills, all based on a fundamental understanding of Calculus. For an entire semester, I sat through a Bridge Course to learn the basics before seeking refuge in my hostel room and crying the Math out every week. Not that that helped anything, actually.

A year and a half ago, I began my tryst with Statistics. For four months, I copied from the board symbols that I could swear were abstract art but seemed to make sense to all around me. If the Prof asked me where I had a doubt, I couldn't say because I couldn't read the Greek out loud. I didn't know the symbols. I will never know whether it was the countless pens used copying out the undecipherable symbols, many prayers and tears or merely a professor’s kind heart that got me through that course but it happened. A year and a few other challenges later, I found myself on the verge of Econometrics.

I got myself a copy of the textbook, assuming the real deal may motivate me a tad more than a black-and-white photocopy (Note to Self: It makes no difference. At all.) and tried to block out memories of super-smart seniors groaning about this particular course in the past. Four more months, I told myself. Then I would really be done. As I wrote ‘Q9’ on my answer paper this Friday marking the beginning of my last answer, I felt a rush I remember from finishing boards. One more answer, 15 more marks, and then this will be over. You will be done.

These last two days have been spent on a euphoric wave of getting through it and as the inexplicable sense of happiness started to wear off, just a tiny bit, I thought back at just how much these courses have done for me this past year and a half. Here are my top five Math lessons:

• It’s like medicine: It tastes like crap, most of the time, but it will do you good. Much of my education for the last six years has been stuff I absolutely adore. And then Calculus reared its nasty head and I have spent hours and hours doing stuff I neither understand, nor enjoy. But what has to be done, has to be done. Many years later, you may be the healthier for it.

• Variables vary: There is no point is asking why this alpha is different from that one. And thus, there is almost no point trying to keep track of these things. Embrace the fluidity and join the cacophony, defining your own alpha. Add a hat for good measure.

• Support systems are precious: These last few years have been a team effort and I kid you not. While I was probably the one writing the exams, the job of making sure I don’t throw myself/my notes out a window was in the hands of those around me. It seemed only right to call them after the last exam and thank them. You know who you are. I honestly couldn't have done it without you.

• Intelligence isn’t absolute: Single digit scores don’t bode too well on the intelligence/self-confidence scale or so I thought. I told myself it was because I hadn't done Math, I was right-brain driven, all these things. But the miracle of passing these last few courses and even coming to enjoy parts of it (only parts though) taught me something I’m unlikely to forget. Intelligence is as subjective as everything else. Man makes the hierarchy. I will forever be worse at Math than Sociology. So?

• Hats and stars could make all the difference: The night before the exam, as I closed my eyes to get an hour of precious sleep, all I could see swimming before me was ‘hat’, ‘star’, and ‘tilda’. The last six hours had taught me they were different, something about bias and estimation. Years of ‘silly mistakes’ and nightmares of words I didn't know existed drilled into me a lesson I couldn’t have learnt more effectively otherwise – attention to detail. That one apostrophe (‘dash’, is it called?) could make a world of a difference.

I still dream of not having to deal with any of this in the future and who knows? Maybe two years from today, I’ll be dealing with STATA and regressions all over again. But till then, I’m done.

Uncharacteristic of my blogs so far, I’m going ahead and naming two individuals who made all the difference to my Math education, in completely different ways. Umar Sir from Grade 10 - for sitting with me for hours on end making sure that holy 90% mark was hit and calling me years later as I struggled in college to threaten me with dire consequences if I didn't pull my socks up and Prof Anup Bhandari – for never judging the inadequacy of my questions, the absence of any foundation and the fear that was writ large on my face. The number of times I have gone in and requested him to repeat weeks of portions is countless and never once have I felt judged. Thank you.