TEEN-da-PUNCH

Well, I have already written about one of my inventions - my daughter Ananya... but so far, I have mentioned my other invention, my teenaged son Amartya, only in passing. The time has now come to let my friends and enemies know a bit more about this invention too...

You may say, 'Friends, sure, we understand - but why tell your enemies?" Let's say, it's that time of the year where you are supposed to be kind to your enemies... and in a bid to bring some cheer into the lives of those who have long suppressed their wish to boil me in oil and other such stuff, I bring this unique Christmas gift... exposing the terrific torment I undergo at the hands of my teen.

(I notice the dictionary gives four quite different meanings of 'terrific' - astounding, terrifying, frightful and splendid - here, you can choose whichever meaning you prefer, or a combo of all four....)

I will write no more... but the 6000 words below should say it all...
(using the equation: 1 picture = 1000 words)

Bhatiwara (concluding part)

Of ‘Happy’ness... and ‘Human’ness

And now, before I carry on with my ‘education’ story, I just have to talk about the people of Bhatiwara. Some of the most deprived people of our country ... and at the same time, some of the most generous and warm-hearted people I have ever met, worldwide.

In Bhatiwara, around 70 out of the total 75 families are aboriginal people - adivasis, many with an annual family income of Rs. 25000 or less. Some families have no belongings except the clothes on their back and a few utensils. There are no indigenous crafts or skills, and the adivasi people here have toiled on rich peoples’ land for meagre wages for years and years. Even those who have their own land leave that and go to work on others’ land – because they can’t ‘afford’ to spend the kind of money the land demands to yield good produce.

Shailu's house

Shailu...extreme right

When I see the extent of deprivation here, I start feeling guilty about everything – from my salary to the amount we spend on a Domino’s pizza. But what amazes me is how happy these people really are, contentment writ large on the faces of even the poorest. Take a look at Shailu, who sat around a bonfire with 5 other adivasi people and me on my first night up at the farm - and sang philosophical songs, to the accompaniment of the beats of a plastic container he had converted into a makeshift ‘drum’. And, now, just take a look at the house they live in – all six members of their family...

Nights at the farm are quite extraordinary, actually. The silence around is so palpable you feel you can reach out and touch it...and darkness for miles and miles around – except for the small bonfire burning in the courtyard, and the 2 solar lamps in the house.. in these near surreal surroundings, the words of their songs rang  out loud and clear...

“Do dinaan ki hai zindagi, tu matt kar maan ghumaan...... yeh zindagaani kaanch ka putla - kankariyon maare phoot jaye, tu matt kar maan ghumaan...”

Songs extolling simple living, and living without too much ego and selfishness... and looking at them it appears as if they do abide by these guiding philosophies...

They go so much out of the way for you, you start feeling guilty.... they use up their entire week’s quota of oil and masala to try and make the meal they serve you meet your standards. I am supposed to be off masala, but I just don’t have the heart to refuse... and I think because the meal comes so much from their heart, I miraculously escape suffering any consequences...

At the school, one of the grade 4 girls, after just one hour of interaction makes me an impromptu ‘dil se’ offer – an invitation to come and stay over 1 day each at the house of her friends and herself... she seems totally serious, and I find myself actually considering the idea for a few seconds, before giving her reasons for not being able to do it.

Contrast all this with the kind of life most of us city people are familiar with – where everything revolves around conveniences and the ‘self’... even our philanthropy is a form of satisfying the self..

You might say ‘have less, give more’ is nothing new. Research clearly indicates that poorer people tend to be more generous, give a higher percentage of their incomes to charity etc. But still, nothing prepared me for the kind of warmth these people exude.... you just have to experience it... all I can say is, I am still overwhelmed.

No wonder I and other city folk who visit experience such total sense of peace up here...

And, now, a bit about animal behaviour at the farm – since the cattle and the two dogs and two kittens are a part of the extended household there. Julus, our young farm manager had recently got a pup from the village, a look-alike of a pup that had died earlier (and one which Ananya had simply adored). The pup’s mother followed the pup to the farm, and initially tried to lure it away with the promise of milk. When she did not succeed, she started walking up all the way to the farm (2.5 kilometres of a rough, rocky uphill path) to feed the pup – daily! She seemed to ‘realize’ the pup had a better future up at the farm.. and willingly gave it up, while still continuing to take care of it the best she could - without giving up the family or the village that had nurtured her... 

It’s strange, while humans seem to become less and less caring and more self-centred, animals continue to display such ‘human’ behaviour... :)

So, where do we go from here?

Well, this brings me back to where I started off – those difficult questions. There is no doubt that these are people ‘marginalised’ by the mainstream. The lives of their children are cheap, the infant mortality I have personally seen even in these few visits is alarming. The education system is currently just giving the children some proverbial ‘fish’ daily – till they are 14 or so. After that, there are no free meals, and they are left to fend for themselves – with no idea how to fish and spending the rest of the lives struggling to find fish from here and there. Simply put, the situation is bad.

No doubt, something needs to change. But the question is – what do you do for the people who are the most deprived... especially if they are so happy the way they are..

This part is going to come out very confused because that is how I feel. On one hand, I really want to see the children of Bhatiwara learn something useful – learn to fish. But is it possible to do it without affecting the basic fabric of that society? Let me try and explain myself. Right now, the people of Bhatiwara are marginalised, but content. The children play in the open air and shout and jump. They live in picturesque huts and are one with nature and animals. They worship women.

The ideal case scenario is if all this could be preserved, while giving the people a much better life, with healthcare and education of a reasonably good quality. What we DON”T need is the kind of ‘development’ where you come back 5 years later and find the men lolling about drunk while the women toil, the pretty white-and-blue huts replaced with unsightly cement structures, and families watching ‘Big BOSS’ on TV at night....

Even apart from these slightly hi-fi philosophical questions, there are concrete issues. Can any real change be brought about in the existing education system, or does a parallel system need to be set up? What kind of parallel system is feasible in these conditions? The village dynamics will be a force of its own to reckon with – I experienced a glimpse of this when I saw a few higher caste students waiting in the classroom till the adivasi students arrived and then asking them to sweep the room.

For any outsider to make any real change here is going to be tough, and to do it with all these conditions imposed, even tougher. But it will be difficult to live with oneself if we don’t try.

While speaking to the primary school kids, I tried asking them on several occasions what they enjoyed most in school. Something they remembered – some special memory. No response. Finally, one of the kids piped up, “26^th January ke din mazaa aata hai... uss din humein kheer milta hai!” This induced animated responses from a few others too, and one said “Haan, aur pooriyaan bhi!”. A pause, and then, “Do do pooriyan!!” ... with a stress on the ‘2’ pooris part, as if that was such an unbelievably generous treat..

So obvious – what else could hungry children possibly look forward to? I felt humbled and stupid...

I left Bhatiwara knowing this is just the beginning of my journey. Though I plan to travel to many places over the next few months, this will be the focal point for me. I don’t know to what extent I will be able to get involved or do something for the people here – but to start with, I am setting myself a small goal – in a year’s time, these children will have something more than the memory of a good meal to talk about...

Stop #1: Bhatiwara (continued)

"The should we hope for our future"


(continuing the Bhatiwara school story...)

The secondary school was next. There, the teachers sat in the ‘staff room’ correcting papers of the recently held monthly tests. Meanwhile, most of the students just sat listlessly in their classrooms, doing nothing. It is funny, how without learning anything they go on having tests.

The teachers were correcting the papers with such a grave air that I did not even dare to ask them to take a class. Instead I sat around, and started looking through the corrected papers.

They were Class 8 English papers, with the usual stuff – grammar, paragraph, textual based questions.

Question #3 caught my imagination – it asked, “What should we hope for our future?”. A textual question – but an intriguing one.

Most of the papers had questions copied from the board, but not much else. The students’  favourite mode of ‘answering’ seemed to be to pick some random word (or group words) from that or some other question and rewrite those as the ‘answer’. Like:

Q: “Who were trapped in the well?”
A: “Should we hope trapped in the well”

As I looked through more papers, those of the higher scoring students, my consternation grew. In one question, the students were asked to write a paragraph on ‘My family’.

I picked the paper of the student who had scored ‘well’ on this question. This is how his answer script looked:

My family

“I have a pet dog.
His name is Moti.
He is black in colour.” 

And so on...

Sanjay, their teacher, saw me staring at this answer and explained. Apparently, the only paragraph ‘taught’/dictated in class was ‘My Pet Animal’. So the few students who had the ability to memorize, had done so and tried to reproduce it verbatim... oblivious to the fact that the topic given in the exam was quite different.

Sanjay defended it saying that he had to give marks to whoever had written anything, since the standard was so abysmal and 70% students could not write, and hence not even attempt the question.

There was more. There was an essay to be written on ‘My school’. I am replicating here part of the essay written by one of the best students in the class – interspersed with my own comments in italics. 

My School

The actual answer script

I read in Senior Middle School Bhatiwara.
(Ok. The start seems encouraging!)

It has a red building with 15 rooms.
(Well, it is actually a blue building with 3 rooms.)

There are 35 teachers in my school.
(The school has 3 teachers, counting the para teacher. Well, it is understandable that to a child 1 teacher might seem like a whole army.. but still – from 3 to 35...?)

The 'red' school building with all '35' teachers standing in front of it 

The name of my principal is Mr. S D Sharma.
(The principal of the school is Mohanji)

He is a learned prison.
(Hmm... we can debate whether this one is a ‘careless slip’ on the child’s part, or a deep philosophical comment on the education system...)

(Don't misunderstand the intention here, the humour is directed only at our toothless sytem...)


The student had just mugged up the essay from a guide book and reproduced it. In this case I was not that uncomfortable about the student scoring well, because an essay does not necessarily have to be factually correct. The fact that the student had interpreted the question correctly and written these few lines almost flawlessly was an achievement in itself!

The sad thing is - that students who have the ability to mug up and write so much, have actually not been taught anything ‘real’ – not even to substitute ‘red’ with ‘blue’ where needed!

Well, I also started to understand what these tests are about. I realized every English test here is basically a test of pattern recognition for them - irrespective of class, topic etc. The children recognise that whenever the paper contains one particular series of ‘symbols’, they need to put down another fixed set of symbols as the correct response. For example, I might go and tell the kids that they would see this sequence in the exams:

“Quadrile Gryphon advise Jabberwocky?”

They should recognise this sequence, and put down the sequence “Gryphon gobbledegook advised Jabberwocky” in response. And that is what the brighter ones will do. Reproduce it unquestioningly, without deciphering anything at all in the jumble of symbols, let alone comprehending the ‘meaning’ of a particular group of symbols... 

So much for language teaching...

But despite everything, the situation is not hopeless. Sanjay, who has started teaching just a few weeks ago and is yet to settle down into the indifferent and apathetic attitude that prevails, declares his intent of at least seeing to it that by the end of the term all the kids know their alphabet. A noble thought, and I hope he is able to do some good to some batches of students before the systemic apathy catches up.

Incidentally, one of the best answers that I saw to the “What should we hope for the future?” question was: “The should we hope for our future.” MS Word might look down on this sentence and mark it with a green squiggly line... But think of this - this kid had actually figured out some rules for himself – he had some idea of the general ‘form’ the answer to this question should take! 

Definitely, that infused me with a bit of hope...


I originally ended Part 2 of my Bhatiwara chronicles here, but a friend who read it criticised me for sounding too much like the media - sensationalising without taking responsibility. Well, while this may be somewhat true, I can't do anything much at this point - except declare that my intent is to try and bring in change - and invite ideas and discussions for the same.


I am not sure what could be done - need specific ideas. I dn't know how much longer the present class 8 batch will be there. But for the next batch of class 7 and 8 students (present 6 and 7), is there any way we can help ensure that at least 80% of students do not leave the school without learning to read at least one language with comprehension? 


I am going to try very hard to do that...