It’s almost 5 year to the day that I was excited to see the Little People go back to school. This time, it will be their first day in Middle School.
Of course, Wow Dinga is already an ‘Old Boy’ at the Middle School, having gone there two years back, but for Ms. Papaya and Little Po, it will be a whole new ball game. Since I am not actively involved in the lives of Little Po and Wow Dinga, I have no idea of how it all was. The fact that Wow Dinga is still happy to go to school means that it couldn’t have been all that hard to navigate.
This last week, Ms. Papaya was busy getting organised for the first day of school. Luckily, the first day, in fact the first week, promises to be fun, an easy transition from the playful Junior school days to the more serious and rigorous academic days in the years ahead. No longer will they be babied and molly-coddled with childish endearments and gentle nudges of encouragement. They will soon see red marks boldy marking out their mistakes and possibly have to face consequences for shabby work.
Middle School will also mean more responsibilities and possibly longer hours with more extracurricular activities thrown in.
SAME BUT DIFFERENT
Even though the school is the same, the campus will be different. The teachers and staff I’ve bumped into the last few years will no longer be there, and it will be a while before I get familiar with them, as there will be fewer occasions to interact with the school, as the children are that much older and more independent. There will be different uniforms on different days. And projects will be more complex. There will be more day trips and the much-anticipated out-station trip!
There will be different problems to navigate and social complexities to deal with, like shifting friendships and imaginary slights as the little ones develop a stronger perception of themselves.
So I don’t know who is more apprehensive about Middle School – the Little People or me?
Frankly most people have replaced writing by hand with typing and arithmetic has been replaced by god only knows what. And of course reading remains reading though the screen has largely replaced the printed word.
Teaching maths these days is no longer what it was when I was in school half a century ago. I don’t think Arithmetic is a separate subject any more. The children learn the basics of adding, subtracting dividing and multiplying with word problems etc without being told they are learning Arithmetic.
Anyways, like the French say, “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”.
So it doesn’t really matter how you learn your numbers, eventually they all add up.
Then, during the dawning of the age of Environmentalism and Sustainability, the Three R’s came to represent.
It has remained the enduring theme for school projects over the past two decades and has become the default meaning of the Three R’s.
my current avatar of the three R’s
But according to me, the Three R’s are
Reality, Reality and Reelty
Yesterday, I was shocked to see how much my REALITY has changed. I was spending an enjoyable time at a high-end craft store when the earnest, young salesman, trying his hardest to sell us an exquisite piece of artwork, described it as a priceless antique at just 60 years old! I looked at him aghast. Heck! Since when did I become old , let alone ancient?
Only in the morning my granddaughter who was indulging me with a facial stroked my skin saying it was as soft and supple as a baby’s . How did it become wrinkled and crinkled by afternoon?
REALTY
A city’s demography changes every now and then largely because of the shift in Realty or property markets. Residential areas change, business districts relocate and the population changes accordingly. Slowly but surely, as residential buildings morph into commercial space, we will no longer bump into ordinary people like watchmakers and dressmakers or even regular folks who live in the nearby regular buildings. Gentrification, or more accurately termed ‘Redevelopment’, has transformed old established residential areas into slick glass-towered communities housing a completely different breed of people.
REELTY
Finally, the last R which is a word coined by me , is the Reelty we all get up to every morning ( yes , the majority at least ) that we all gravitate to when we switch on our mobile phones.
After checking the time, we automatically go to messages and sooner or later come upon a reel that leads from one to the next till we find that we’ve spent more than the second we had wanted to spend on checking the time !
From the 4th of July till the 9th, the rains came pelting down. As if to make up for the deficit, it really began raining buckets. And it went on for 5 days at a stretch as if in a rush to fill up the lakes that held water only for a few more weeks .
Of course we were grateful that all our prayers were answered and that it rained. But at the same time, it rained so much that many trees were uprooted, branches fell, cars were damaged and sadly around 11 people lost their lives. One was an 8 year old boy who was crushed in his school bus when a branch fell on it .
So when the rain stopped last Thursday we all heaved a sigh of relief .
We took advantage of this by placing the clothes rack back in the verandah. And thank God for that . It does get quite depressing having clothes drying in the living room !
Belly of the Beast
I’m not one of the theatre going types and unless a play comes highly recommended, I’d rather give it a miss. But I also suffer majorly from FOMO ( an affliction known as. FearOf Missing Out), so I HAD to accompany my friends to this show, which was luckily at the NCPA.
But this new-age play was just NOT my scene. The theme itself, in my opinion, is the typical reaction of a new mum who suddenly discovers that motherhood is not all that it was meant to be. Naturally, she wants the whole world to know what it’s like, hence the stage adaptation of Kalki Koechlin’s oeuvre ‘Elephant in the Womb’ as ‘Belly of the Beast’. Otherwise, the script, which at times I found offensive, was hardly ‘original’. The sound and light effects made no sense to me, and the overall flow was confusing and, all in all, a play completely worth missing despite the sincere performance of the actors.
Book Reviews
Looking for a book to read?
Look no further.
It’s been a long while since I’ve written about books that I’ve read so I thought I’d catch up with the reviews.
Read during the Lull
As always, I’ve diligently borrowed books but not always read them.
Ever since I read Freida McFadden’s ‘The Teacher’ , I’ve developed a strange fascination for her psychological thrillers . So in June I read ‘One By One ‘ and ‘The Tenant’ .
I always wonder why murder mysteries are so popular. With complex characters and unexpected twists, these books are truly absorbing. Unlike the simple mysteries of yore, these books have characters that are riddled with childhood trauma that have given them a dark side to their personalities. But the stories are crsiply told and the reader is kept guessing till the last page.
During the lull I managed to read Kiran Desai’s humongous novel ‘ The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny ’. I borrowed it from the library largely on the recommendation of Anna Shetty, who reads everything on her Kindle. So it didn’t really matter to her how heavy the book was, but I actually had to keep the book on the dining table and read it. It was absorbing because it weaves together many stories related to Sonia and Sunny. but could actually have stood on their own. This complicated novel flits between several time zones, timelines, locales and cultures and requires serious concentration to distinguish reality from fact. This ‘magic realism’ is enchanting and the delightful lapsing into Hinglish, and local languages truly captures the different cultures that Sonia and Sunny inhabit. Definitely worth reading.
Alice Feeny’s latest book ‘My Husband’s Wife’ is another book that I couldn’t put down. Set in a remote Cornish village, the tightly woven plot with its unexpected twists will keep you rooted to the book. Definitely worth reading if you like psychological murder mysteries . But do not read alone in the night or if you’ve had a fight with your spouse .
Currently I’ve begun ‘ This Book Made Me Think of You , Libby Page’s bland, predictable romance. Perhpas Mr. Kinney recommended this book as a relief from the dark mysteries.
Not Read in the lull but read nonetheless
Since I haven’t mentioned the other books I’ve read last month ( June ) I think I’ll take this opportunity to mention them.
Is it coincidence that I read two memoirs written by two authors from Kerala in quick succession?
‘Mother Mary Comes to Me’ by Arundhati Roy is a memoir I found fascinating. Of course, not many people enjoyed the book, which is not very surprising since Arundhati’s books make you think. I did wonder how much of her book was fact and how much was exaggeration. Another ‘autobiographical’ book that caught my eye was ‘The Elsewhereans’ by Jeet Thayil. Thayil describes his book as a document
I read this book largely because Anna Shetty and her family were travelling to Vietnam. And I thought it would be a natural read after Nguyen’s earlier book. Dealing with the problems of Amerasians and the Vietnamese who are willy-nilly drawn into situations for sheer survival, once again this book is worth a read.
Finally, this book by Julian Barnes is quite unlike any book I’ve ever read. I’m a bit ambivalent about it. Did I like it or did I not?
Why were most of the books I’ve read ‘biographical’? And why were most of them dark and morbid?
Now that it’s been dry for a week, we’ve begun getting antsy again. We still have three more months of the monsoon to go and the lakes and reservoirs that supply water to our city are not yet full .
Twenty- five Seven 