Off to a new start, with a prayer on my lips....

The D-day is almost round the corner!

With the arrival of the new uniforms, new books, crispy brown paper rolls, my excitement knows no bounds!!

I can finally take a long breath and state that the raving, ranting and tension of the past few months (here and here) are officially over. There was some confusion, nail biting sessions in between when we had to choose between the two schools into which AD had got admission. The choice was made after much deliberation and head breaking ...as if it was not admission to LKG but deciding and finalising a career choice!! Huh!! (Never imagined I would become a hyper Mom!!)

So my little one is on the threshold of a new world.....a world, which along with our love, support and guidance, will shape her into the person she will grow up to be....

There will be happy moments and sad.

Good times and bad....
Moments of achievements, success and highs.
Some of disappointments, frustrations and anxious sighs.
Bitter fights, scary scoldings, taunting and teasing.
Lunch times bursting with glee....eating, sharing, games and scraped knee!
Homework & tests, exams & marks end either in
Unbridled ecstasy or despair ..oh so stark!
Inspiring teachers who make learning a joy;
And devil's incarnates will be there too...devious tactics who love to employ.
Discipline and moral science,
Bunking classes and acts of defiance.
Favourite subjects and lousy ones.
Lots of Friends and loads of fun....
School life will be all this and more.
A storehouse of knowledge, values and wisdom galore
Hope my princess grows and imbibes
all that it takes to lead a sincere and honest life...

Summer Holidays

"Everybody has a summer holiday
Doing things they always wanted to"..... crooned Cliff Richard half a century ago.

And I couldnt agree more.....Summer Holidays or Goromer Chhuti were indeed the favourite and longest of all vacations during our growing up years. An almost two month long break from school, studies and schedule. Cousins coming over from different parts of the country. Lazy afternoons filled with games and gossip.

-Hide and seeks in the nooks and crannies of the attic and staircases, under the beds and behind the giant almirahs;
-climbing guava trees and scraping knees;
-listening to the radio in warm summer afternoons, all heads jostling for space right in front of the radio;
-recording our voices on the blank cassettes inserted into the coveted tape recorder;
-buying ice cream sticks from the ice-cream vendor who would take a break from his cart pushing right in front of our gate and call out "K..W...O....O...L....I...T...Y" repeatedly till we kids compelled our mothers to let us out and buy the orange or chocolate fudge sticks from him;
-sitting on the terrace oblivious to the blazing hot sun, gorging on the 'stolen' homemade mango/tamarind pickles, which had been put out on the terrace for the sun to give it a finishing touch;
-the Poila Boishaakh (Bengali New Years celebration on 14th/15th of April) celebrations and get-togethers....
Memories of summer holidays are full of fun, frolic and laughter. Days spent at cousins' or 'best' friends' places, family reunions and sometimes a family vacation.
Of course, the fights and squabbles, teasing and taunting, anger and making up were also there in all its glory...but that's what gave summer holidays its multihued tinge!

***

As I see my little AD growing up in a nuclear world so different from the one I grew up in, without her extended family to pamper and indulge her, I feel a trifle sad that she's missing out on the companionship and camaraderie with cousins and siblings that we took for granted. Her Summer Holidays too, are poles apart from our summer holidays.

In her world, routine is not abandoned for a month or two. The scheduled life goes on....The long and relaxed, fun-filled vacations are replaced by choc-a-block activity filled summer camps. Not camps in the true sense of the word, but planned, 'scientifically' chalked out programmes to keep kids busy in a host of creative lessons and activities. A continuation of her playschool sans the academics....I wonder whether they are half as much fun as the impromptu and myriad activities we indulged in during our prolonged vacations, eons ago....I hope so.

Times have changed. We parents are busy. And corporate jobs do not give us the luxury of long vacations. And living in a city with no family and equally busy friends as our social network, with cousins and extended families scattered all over the globe, summer holidays of yore have become an almost extinct phenomenon.

So the much advertised, exhorbitantly priced summer camps are not an option but more a necessity!

Last week as I went on a short trip to attend the last rites of my Mamu, AD met some of her cousins for the first time...Dadas (elder brother), didis (elder sister), bon and bhai (sister and brother). They played, they fought, they squabbled over a box of crayons or a teddy or just fought for the sake of fighting. They made up and played again....to fight all over again.....
I was glad ... to give her a slice of life as it was when we were kids. To cherish the companionship, the unadulterated love, the complex rivalry, the bowing down to say sorry, to resume normalcy and let bygones be bygones...

I hope every year, if not a long leisurely one, at least a fun filled brief holiday with cousins is what I can gift my AD...so that she grows up with her own handycam stored memories of summer holidays in contrast to our album filled with sepia tinged snapshots.....

"We're all going on a summer holiday.
No more working for a week or two.
Fun and laughter on a summer holiday...."

Einstein @ 5 or Tagore @ 4? Make a choice and make it FAST!!!

AD’s playschool cum Daycare Centre has been recently acquired by a franchisee run company. In its previous avatar, it was a Mom and Pop establishment ..an informal setup with excellent infrastructure, lot of space, warm and friendly teachers and care givers and a high standard of hygiene. In its present and more glamorous avatar, it has assumed a pseudo corporate getup! Amidst the various improvement schemes, a newsletter- cum- group mail system has been introduced through which we get notices, information about the school & activities and also feedbacks sent by various parents and guardians are circulated to all other parents.

Today I received one such email …a feedback from a parent singing paeans about the school . I was about to click the window shut, when something in the latter part of the mail caught my eye and I couldn’t help but read on….a wish list for his 9 month old baby enrolled in the daycare.
Just reproducing the relevant part of the email :

“Wish list from our side:
1. In addition to the good care that day care kids are getting, we will really appreciate if some brain development programs are conducted for kids of age 6 months and more. We attended a session in our office from K...Gl... school staff (http://k...gl....com/). Please go through the website and see their presentation. We are not suggesting you to copy them, but we feel there is no harm in getting good things from anyone. They have some programs for brain development based on research done by an American scientist Glenn Doman. They claim that babies of 6 months can learn reading. Curious to dig further, we searched internet and found many web sites and research articles that support this fact. For example: see the video (with sound ON) at the home page of this website - http://www.y....c...com/ . Also there are lots of videos available on you tube...."

I was initially amused and then wondered, where are we heading? Is it really needed….a 6 month old baby reading?

What’s next? PhD in Astrophysics at the age of 5yrs?

Why cant we let babies be what they are supposed to be ....just babies! And let them grow at their own pace!!!

The sky high and sometimes impossible dreams parents dream on behalf of their kids put tremendous pressure on the kids to perform. Some kids either baulk under the burden of expectations or just give up on life in general. With students' suicides on the rise, isnt it time, we, as parents introspect....restrain our ambitions from setting unattainable targets for the child and let them 'grow' and 'bloom' first into good human beings and not mere degree spewing/money-churning machines.

Say, I Care - With Books

Reproducing a mail I received from a friend JHUMPA GHOSH mailto:jhumpa.ghoshray@gmail.com), closely associated with NGOs working to promote sustainable livelihoods in communities in and around rural and semi-rural West Bengal and upliftment and improvement of their life in general.

They have taken up a cause to come to the aid of children who due to various circumstances have to put a halt in their education midway.

I request my Blogger friends to please spread the word to help this cause which will help hundreds and thousands of school going children. Some are talented beyond imagination. Most are so keen to study further. A little help, a small encouragement from our ends will go a long way in ensuring that the fate they were born to, doesnt become a permanent curse on their lives.

Small villages, Kantabelia and Madandanga in the Nadia district, have been facing a nagging problem of continuing education after the fifthstandard. The village school is till Class IV, and after completing that, if students wish to continue with their studies, they have totravel 5 to 10 kms. That is where the problem lies. Each year, a major percentage of students drop out due to this reason. For they say,that, the added travel expense would be a burden on the family income, not to forget the cost of books. In an ethnographic research in a collaboration with KIIT School of Rural Management, Bhubaneswar it has come out that a large number of students drop out every year after primary education because of the inability of their parents to buy books. In an educational awareness programme, a proposal for a mobile textbook library for class V to class X has been offered from Change Initiatives. Change Initiatives is already running a project - Telecenter on Wheel (ToW) - over there (Some details on ToW are available here, here and here). A manually run tricycle van has been equipped with ICT tools forinformation dissemination in rural communities. The library would bean added feature of the same. A set of textbooks for class V to class X and a few children story books kept in ToW have been displayed as amodel library. The library will start functioning from May 2009 alongwith the academic session. The members of the library will be allowedto read the books only. The van will be taken to the nearby villagesby rotation. The van has a portable three set tube light so thatstudents can read at morning as well as evening hours with adequate illumination. Change Initiatives has requested the local schoolteachers to involve the guardians and villagers as volunteers for the library. ChangeInitiative also proposed the local teachers to organize a meeting withpresent and retired teachers for making this initiative a success. Andwe are also planning to give books to needy students of Kantabelia andMadandanga for the session of 2009-10. Change Initiatives is seeking support from people like you for thesuccess of this mobile textbook library. You can contribute by donating the new textbooks and/or old used textbooks according to thenew Madhyamik and HS (Madhyamik - Class X boards & HS-Class XII Boards of WB Boards)syllabus, from Class V-XII. If you wish to support us but don’t have the books, we could send you the booklist and then you could buy them for us. We also need to encourage the reading habit of the students, so if you have fiction or non-fiction books that you wish to donate, please letus know.

The address where you need to send these is:

Change Initiatives

GC-79, Salt Lake City,

Sector –III,

Kolkata-700106

You could also contact Arundhoti Dutta (9831898803) for any further details Or mail at changeinitiatives@gmail.com.

All donors would be acknowledged, through the books they donate.

Your help can bring hope to many students finishing school, who are presently forced to leave study, start earning, stay home and lookafter their younger siblings or migrate for a better living.

____________________________________________________

Donations to CHANGE INITIATIVES exempt from income tax under Section80G of the IT Act, 1961.

_______________________________________________

CHANGE INITIATIVES, an NGO based in West Bengal, India, does development research and works for sustainable development with communication tools such as ICTs, videos and print.
The aim is to promote sustainable livelihoods by facilitating communication, raising awareness, promoting knowledge and enhancing access to information in communities

Mothering HANUMAN

Remember my blog entry on School Admissions?
Well…the tension has now reached a peak.
The actual interviews / interaction sessions have begun. And my worst fears are all coming true.
* For 30-40 seats, there are about 1500 applicants, if not more.
* My daughter’s unpredictability is on the rise.
School No.1: She refused to say hello. And that’s not all, upon being offered candies, not only did she grab a handful, she wouldn’t say THANK YOU! We were red-faced with embarrassment.
We didn’t want to create a scene and left it at that. On our way back, when I asked her why she was so unresponsive, her casual “I wasn’t in the mood for conversation” (Kotha bolar mood chhilo na) left me dumbstruck.
School No.2 : While going to the school, I was having my usual chat with my little girl. The normal stuff we talk about everyday on our way to and from her playschool but in a slightly more structured manner....like her name and colours and other stuff she may be asked in the interview. She was particpating in her normal enthusiastic manner. I was relieved but the butterflies kept fluttering in my tummy...

When in the room, the friendly teacher, after the initial greetings, asked my daughter her name. After the initial silence, she looked up with an impish grin, her eyes gleaming with mischief and proclaimed “I’m Hanu!!!!!” I CRINGED and nudged her. She clarified in a louder voice..”I’m Hanuman, this is Sita-Ma(pointing towards me) and that’s Ravan (pointing towards my husband)”
The teacher, after a momentary pause, burst out laughing and commented “very imaginative..she's very fond of Ramayana, is she?”

Interviews for School No.3 and 4 are scheduled for next week.

Would you still say that my hypertension is unfounded???

Bibliography

Hanuman : The Monkey God. An important personality in the Indian epic Ramayana.

Ravan : The villain in the Indian epic Ramayana. His ten-headed persona fascinates my little girl

Sita-Ma : The wife of Sri Rama in the Indian epic Ramanayana.

Trivia or Truth? A peek into our 'Education Industry'

In India there is a myth….which may also be interpreted as a joke. That when you conceive your baby, you register her/his name in the school or playschool of your choice to ensure admission a couple of years thereafter.

That it is a myth or a joke, was a misinformation.
It is neither... Well, at the most it is an exaggeration...but definitely not a myth neither a joke!

I realized this recently when my daughter completed three years and we started enquiring about schools. Browsing through the websites of various reputed school, another fact which hit me was that in some cities of our country (in my hometown of Kolkata, for example), she would have lost an academic year because she falls short of the ‘CUT OFF’ date for admission by 4 days!!!

Yes! Had she been born 4 days earlier she would have gained a year, at least academically!!

If only I knew, I would have asked the doctor to advance the Caesarian operation by four days ! Huh!!!! What a joke!

Yes, in our country that is what school admission procedure is all about.
Well to make matters worse, in some (read ALL METROS) cities, money is the solution to all hurdles of education. The more you ‘donate’ the better the school your child gets admission in. A Lakh or so for your three year old!!! Too expensive? Who cares.....

And of course I forgot the recommendation part….an MP, MLA, or for that matter any ‘angootha-chhap’ politician or someone with some clout in the society or government will make the admission process a cake walk.

The admission process begins in another day or two…commencing with the form distribution, followed by interview (of the parents and their two and a half to three year old unpredictable, temperamental kids!).

I am tensed and anxious! My husband is cool and unperturbed! And the person (albeit a miniature one but a person she sure is!) in question, whose academic future or non-future is to be determined in a month or so, is NOT EVEN AWARE that the first judgemental event of her life is about to happen.
I guess, amongst the three, the onus of worrying and anxiety falls on me…!!!!

Bibliography:

Angootha chhap-A Hindi terminology used colloquially to imply illiterate individuals who place thumb impressions on written documents in lieu of signatures

Hyderabadi Hiccups

The City of Pearls and Nizams, forts and monuments, dotted with lakes and rocky hills... Steeped in history and culture, here the confluence of multitude of religions rendered it a novel charm of harmonious co-existence. Life was graceful and slow-paced. ‘Tehzeeb’ and nawabi etiquette were true to form in all strata of society…be it the lowest rungs or the upper echelons of the social hierarchy.

Hyderabad was all of the above and more…Hyderabadi way of life was unique because of its multifaceted hues.

Then came the windfall. A whirlwind of growth frenzy and development brought about a metamorphosis… And Hyderabad, in a span of few years transformed itself to Hi—tech city aka Cyberabad.

The city changed … and how!
The indulgent way of life had to give way to breakneck speed.
Hyderabad became a ‘happening’ place to be in - with almost every IT giant one can think of, making Hyderabad its major hub; with a booming real estate with massive projects coming up; with SEZs mushrooming in surrounding districts; with a swanky airport of international standards to boast of; with bright, young professionals flocking to the city from all over the country and different parts of the world.

What more could Hyderabad ask for? Unfortunately, MORE..MUCH MORE - better service, better work culture, sense of punctuality, a positive and proactive attitude, to say the least!

The new makeover was too sudden and at too alarming a speed. The common man, used to the nawabi culture and an inherent attitude of indolence and procrastination, COULD NOT and DID NOT keep pace with the speed of transformation.


My husband and I are part of the burgeoning professionals who have made Hyderabad their home in the recent past.

Moving to any new place is a mammoth and tiresome task, settling down to new environs is not easy.
But in Hyderabad, the difficulties are several times more, thanks to a pathetic, uninformed and lackadaisical local service sector…
- be it a driver who oversleeps and forgets to report to work; or
- a car mechanic who responds to a complaint of a broken silencer two months later, expecting that the repair job would be waiting for him ; or
- uninformed / untrained sales personnel at departmental stores who respond to a request of the modest eau de cologne with a blank stare followed by directions to a shelf stacked with Colins cleaner.

I can cite a zillion such instances which I have been experiencing in the past twenty months that I have been in the city. Some, on hindsight, are so comical that one forgets how exasperating and irritating they were when they had actually happened!!

An illustration :
Last year, just after shifting, I called a carpenter to fix a shelf. After at least a dozen phone calls and half a dozen visits to his workshop, he finally took pity on my desperation, and obliged me by coming over to ‘have a look’ at the dimensions and estimate the raw materials needed. It was the humblest of shelves, with no ornamentation, just utilitarian to keep my printer. A job of not more than half a day. Well, after his first ‘visit’, he decided to disappear once again. Again I resumed the phone calls and trips to his workshop. Finally he relented. He came with the materials, started the job, made the two supports to which the plank of wood was supposed to be fixed, cut the plank of wood as per the required dimensions. And before he could proceed, he received an ‘emergency’ phone call and with the ongoing job and materials scattered all over the floor, he again did the disappearing act…NEVER TO RETURN, despite several dozen attempts at contacting him..
A fortnight or so later he called me, demanding payment for the material and work (he seemed to have been afflicted by selective amnesia, choosing to conveniently forget, that the work, for which he was demanding payment, remained unfinished). I burst out in anger, ranted and raved. But to no avail. That was the last I heard of him or from him and I was just too tired and disgusted to care.
The plank of plywood was later utilized as a makeshift shelf where I dare not keep the printer!!
Please note that the carpenter did not even bother to collect money for the raw materials he bought!!!

Some not so comical ones…
For the past one and a half month my microwave is out of order.
Initially, the oven door had come off. The response to the complaint lodged with the call centre was snail paced. The technician decided to turn up a good ten days later. He reported that the door needed to be replaced which would be done within two days. I was surprised, as the door, to me, looked in fine shape except for the joints. But the technician would know better…or so I thought!
Another week or so passed by and when I again called up the fellow (I had been wise enough to have stored his mobile no.) he informed me that new doors of that model were out of stock and he would come and repair the existing door! Well, if the existing one was repairable why bother to prescribe replacement in the first place, I asked, but to myself. I was too happy that the microwave would be operational the next day. So I did not dare ask too many questions. The technician turned up two days later, repaired the door, collected Rs.400/- and left. My maid informed me (over phone as I was at work) with great pleasure that the ‘mesheeen’ was working.
She was the happiest as the chore of heating food is so much more simplified with the ‘mesheen’ in action!
But our happiness was short-lived.
The door was fine, but now, due to his inefficiency or lack of skill, the technician had dismantled and reassembled the machine in such a manner that it was not working at all. Another technician came after a week of phone calls and we were finally asked to send it to their workshop where it is still being ‘repaired’ (or further destroyed!!). Our wait is on…

My three year old goes to one of the better playschool cum day-care centres in an upmarket locality of the city. The school has great infrastructure, pleasant teachers, adequate outdoor play areas which satisfied my husband and me enough to entrust them with the responsibility of our baby for almost ten hours a day. Last week while I was discussing the activities of the kids with one of the teachers, I casually mentioned Montessori method assuming it to be common knowledge. I was shocked and amazed that the terminology was as alien to her as Greek is to me.

These instances, you would say, can happen in any Indian city. Maybe….though I’m sceptical that the levels of service in any of our other BIG cities can be this poor. What makes the lack of professionalism and efficiency all the more glaring is the cost factor - The charges for the substandard services doled out are exorbitant and could be amongst the highest in the country. The price charged for the sheer indifference, complacency, lack of interest and absence of adequate skills, is mind boggling..

Well, from all of the above, you would conclude that I hate the city. Strangely enough, I don’t. Though neither am I magnanimous enough to love it.

A city like Hyderabad, with its peculiarities and nuances, grows on you. Its myriad contrasts are almost a microcosm of the India of today-where development and backwardness co-exist with glaring obviousness.
But to rise above the average, retain its growth spurt and make it a city of high standards, a remedy for the HICCUPS IN THE LIFE OF A COMMON MAN IN HYDERABAD, has to be developed.
Because hiccups may be just a mild discomfort, but if they persist, life becomes sheer HELL and are indications of bigger problems to come!!!!

Bibliography : Tehzeeb - An Urdu word which means manners / etiquette