Day 24 - How to interrogate a lying child

Kids lie. Period. Any parent who tells you that their angel never did is a bigger liar.

I don't have any homework. I've finished all my homework! He started it first. I never said that! I didn't eat the last cookie! These are some of the most common lies that kids tell.

There are some tried and tested ways to get the truth out of your kids especially when they're little.
So, if you've run out of veritaserum (trust me, you can never have enough) and if you don't want to resort to torture (though you may be sorely tempted to), there is one surefire technique you can use, the art of deflection. Asking Junior with a stern face, "Did you hit your sister?" is going to elicit only a stubborn No. No matter how many times you ask it. Try this instead, "Honey, did you hit your sister with your right hand or your left? This (Demonstration) is your right hand and this is your left. Now tell Mommy which hand you used to hit your sister." Chances are the response will be the right or the left. See, Artful deflection.

My mother was an expert at this. There is an old story that is now the stuff of family folklore about a cousin of mine when she was about 3. Now, when we were young we were forbidden to eat in anyone's houses without explicit permission because a lot of our neighbours ate a lot of stuff that we didn't. And besides, someone had to control what we ate, else we would eat till we got a bellyache. 

Now, there came a day when this 3-year-old cousin was very hungry and from the neighbour's house drfited aromas strange and delicious. Well, the kid succumbed. But she couldn't tell the adults. So she lied. That she hadn't eaten anything. No, she didn't want a snack or a glass of milk. No, she was absolutely sure she hadn't eaten anything.

That's when my mother stepped in with the subtle art of deflection. "So did you eat idli or dosa at Sabina's house darling? That's all they make, isn't it?" She asked the stubborn little child with the suspiciously round tummy.

"I didn't eat either!" She should have stopped right there. "I ate Puttu. They don't make only idlis and dosas!" she said defending their culinary honour. Then, realizing that she had just incriminated herself, she tried denying everything, "I didn't eat anything."

The story should have ended there, but it was so much fun that a little later, my mother let it slip quite casually, "So, did Sabina's grandma serve you or was it her mother?" Pat came the response, "Her grandma of course, her mother is at office!" And a little later, the realization and then again the denial. 

"So did you eat the Puttu with bananas or gravy?" "Gravy, of course. They always make gravy with Puttu!"

Needless to say, the rule banning outside food was soon relaxed in our house. People were getting a bellyache anyway. From laughing.

Now, there's an old saying that the hardest kids to wake up are those that are pretending to sleep. There's a tried and tested technique for that too. Just look down at the supposedly sleeping tot and say, "You know, I think he really is sleeping. I know he's sleeping, because kids who are really truly deeply sleeping will raise their legs way up high and then put it down again." Now watch the leg rise and catch them out.

Of course, kids are smart and if you try the same tactic one too many times, they will start to faintly smell a large furry rodent, but you can come up with any number of these tactics. Because as devious as kids are, their parents have twice as much deviousness naturally built in. Comes with the package. So go ahead and trick those shysters. They deserve it!

Day 23 - Postcards of Varanasi

Varanasi or Benares,

The city of contrasts,

The paradise of paradoxes,

Where life

Slowdances with death,

Grab a bite

Or burn a body

You can do either

Or both.

Crassly commercial,

yet profoundly mystical,

The city through which

Flows the mighty Ganges,

Polluted and putrid,

Yet powerful and pure,

Where you can cleanse your soul

Amidst the all-abounding filth,

And take the direct route to heaven,

Provided you pay your way.

The city that no one can know

In its entirety,

But only in bits and pieces.

Presenting a brief cameo of that city of contradictions - Varanasi - with haikus based on some fabulous pics clicked by my friend and colleague, P. Vijay Kumar, with his kind permission.



Sadhus in saffron

Launder their muddy souls and

Hang them out to dry.

Meandering through the

Pious river, a boat that’s

Made in India*!

* Phrase courtesy Sid Chatterjee

Death waits its turn to

Climb Manikarnika Ghat’s

Stairway to heaven.

Bridal wear or shroud,

Benares silk is the key

To eternal bliss.

The power of prayer,

Races through high voltage wires

In God’s waiting ears!

Day 22 - Communication in the twenty first century

They say that communication is the key to the success of a family. Keep the doors and channels of communication open at all times, say experts who have studied this subject for many years. At least that's what it said on the forward I got recently from an acquaintance.

Now, we are all at different points on the communication app scale - for me the dial veers between "I like the potential" and "Gosh, I am getting too old to keep up!", my husband is at "Don't really care as long as I can call and send messages...and play online bridge". My almost 13-year-old is at "Yup mastered that too, bring the next one on!"

She can hold her own in an electronics store about cookies and cakes and gingerbread and other things that ought to be on a bakery menu, not in a store that sells high-end gadgets, half of which, I am not sure which end of the anatomy to connect to. They all sound as if they would add several pounds of cellulose, and I should have banned them from the house. Instead, turns out they are the brains and muscles of our cell phones. I should have banned them anyway. The only person who knows how to use them all is my daughter. When any of us needs to install, troubleshoot, or learn how to use something on our cell phones or laptops, we call her.

My 4-year-old, thankfully, is still happy merely listening to songs on the phone and hasn't yet discovered any apps that would help him to colur within the lines and write cursive small letters within the boxes.

As you can imagine, there is no dearth of gadgets in our house that enable effective communication. Everyone except the 4-year-old has a laptop each on which we keep in touch with our colleagues and classmates whom we just saw a few hours ago, our next door neighbours whom we hardly ever see, our friends from many years ago, and a few people we don't really know but could - maybe.

Our birthday gifts over the last few years - especially for the kid - has inclined to move from roller skates and bicycles to articles more electronic. We got her an iPod a couple of years ago to encourage her appreciation for music. She has since been using it to belt out the latest and greatest hits from pimply boys and girls who still wear braces and probably need to be driven by their parents to recordings. Fortunately, however, the iPod has no other hidden talents - it plays music and that's all. The Kindle, on the other hand, which we naively got her so that we did not have to stockpile books that seemed to be reproducing at an alarming rate, we discovered to our horror can be used to access Facebook, chat with various friends on Google Plus, all in the middle of the night. This, we realized a little belatedly, is the twenty first century version of the old reading-in-bed-with-a-torchlight thing. I now do an electronics raid in her room at bedtime to make sure she actually sleeps. But for all I know, she's probably rigged the light switch to beam some bits of incoherent teenspeak to the ceiling of her best friend a few miles away.

I can't wait for her to turn thirteen. She would finally be old enough to use Facebook legally and I don't have to feel guilty about it any more. She would be, at least in the world of the Net, a mature and responsible adult! Hah!

So yes, as far as communication goes, I guess our family is doing quite well. Oh wait, you meant communication with each other? Now why didn't you say so before? Well, we do on occasion, chat with each other on Facebook and gmail across the dining table, and we're all each other's friends on Facebook. At least until we're unfriended. Does that count?

　

Day 21 - The school that launched a thousand books

I always thought my old convent school was a sadistic institution devoted to the art of killing all possible fun for people under 15. But now that I have had a couple of decades to think about it, it was probably the inspiration for some of the greatest books ever written, the muse for generations of authors.

The school, which has been standing for what seems like centuries, is a forbidding Dickensioan place with dark niches and gloomy passages. The walls were a dull whitish grey and your footsteps echoed mysteriously when you walked through the corridor. On the walls were mournful paintings of miserable and waif-like children, a few of them with tears rolling down their cheeks. Maybe because they couldn't stand the sight of our drab and ugly blue uniforms with our oiled and tightly braided hair topped off with blue ribbons. Every once in a while we would see a ragtag group of children march through the grounds, with dreadful haircuts, skinny frames and huge hungry eyes and too-long patched  hand-me-down uniforms, orphans whom the convent 'sponsored' in their infinite magnanimity.

The Dickensian ambience of the school was further enhanced by the Fagin-like characters that populated it. Once a fellow student had a fainting fit after she was made to stand out in the heat due to heaven recalls what minor transgression. The teachers splattered a few measured drops of water on her face and watched her until her eyelids finally fluttered open. She was just blinking as various wimples and canes and rulers swam blurrily into focus when the principal admonished her severely, "We spent 10 paise on a call to your parents to come and get you. Please ask your parents to refund that money tomorrow." The poor sick child sank bank onto the cold floor in a coma.

There was also something distinctly Hogwartsish about the school. Nuns in white habits floated by and legends abounded about the wiccan activities that took place in the convent in the dead of night. Stories were told of potions being brewed and cackles heard long after lights out by the resident boarders, those doomed souls left by their parents to survive in the dubious environs of the convent. The sisters held rulers aloft like wands that cracked down on unfortunate palms at regular intervals. They also apparated at the most inopportune moments, especially when school fees were due and disapparated the moment you needed a little extra help.

The bathroom was a separate building altogether, to get to which you had to cross compounds and climb down long flights of stairs. It was a veritable Chamber of Secrets in which all manner of creatures were reported to have been seen, from snakes to rats to a ghost that was believed to float around and moan when too many people visited. We had our own resident basilisks and Moaning Myrtles and never knew it!

The there was a select group of children who went for the same competitive exams, performed the same dances in the same contests and won the same prizes year after year. Any newcomer, however talented, was looked upon in a distinctively Matilda-like fashion. The principal, the one who asked for the ten paise back -come to think of it - bore a striking resemblance to Miss Trunchbull.

My all-abounding nostalgia for the school has never taken me back even once since I left it more than twenty years ago, but I have heard that it is still an institution which one presumes will continue to inspire children's authors to write more grim tales of school for years and years to come.

Day 20 - The Man With The Golden Heart - A Tribute To My Thatha

I shudder to think how close I came to never knowing my grandfather.

The first time I remember seeing him he was flat on his back - I was five years old and had rushed back with my family from the UK where we were living because he had just had a massive heart attack and for a while hadn't been expected to survive. I thank my stars everyday that he did - for twenty five years.

Thatha was a sweet soft-spoken man, whose actions spoke much louder than his words. The kind of man who told you stories and took you along on walks and let you comb and tie up his smartly cowlicked hair (when you were five!). The kind of man who you just knew would quietly but relentlessly move heaven and earth for you.

He was a careful prudent man, having struggled hard his entire life to make a good living for his family. The first windfall he ever saw was his superannuation. It turned out that he was a financial wizard, he just never had the money before to know it. But a lifetime of frugality cannot be undone by a few years of relative prosperity. He still wouldn't dream of taking an auto when he could take a bus and wouldn't take a bus if he could walk. And yet, on his way back from wherever he went, he would buy his granddaughters 'goodies' from the neighbourhood bakery, samosas or puffs in brown paper bags, the sinful goodness leaking out in delightful moist patches, the sight of which still makes us nostalgic.

He repaired everything till there wasn't any more room on it to patch or darn or glue. Nothing could be thrown away, an old envelope became practice sheets to work out sums on and old calendars became book covers. Tiny old pencils would have pen caps stuck on them to make them easier to hold. Pieces of cardboard, the brush from an old pot of glue, bits of brightly coloured rope, everything had the potential to be turned into Something Useful.

He once created a weighing balance with a long pencil for the stick, light plastic plates for the scales and tiny ten paise coins, which according to his research weighed exactly a gram each, for the weights. With this contraption he weighed newly bought gold jewellery, so he could be sure the jeweller hadn't cheated us, and mail to be posted so that he did not have to stick on a single extra stamp.

If you had a refill pen whose spring was broken, Thatha could be counted on to have a tiny spring handy in his trusty box. Was your text book coming apart at the seams? Out came the large needle and the thick twine and Thatha got to work. School bags, shoes, umbrellas, dreams, hopes, there was nothing that Thatha couldn't put right.

Thatha once fixed me up with an ugly old umbrella  (after I had lost many beautiful new ones) that had lines of white stitches crissing and crossing its decrepit grey expanse, keeping it from disintegrating. My initials were darned into it indelibly in bold orange thread. This umbrella quickly became excruciatingly loss- and theft-proof. No matter where I left it or what I did with it, it always found its way back like an ugly puppy. I left it behind on the bus, at school, in people's houses. Not deliberately, at least not consciously so. But the next morning, on the bus or at school, there it would be. It lasted me all the way through school, through thunderstorms and scorching noon walks. How I wish I had that ugly old umbrella now with the lovingly embroidered veins of stitches running through it and the big bold initials!

My grandfather didn't believe in band-aids or band-aid solutions. When we needed some quick help in solving a Math problem that just wouldn't get solved (with the school bus due in half an hour), he insisted on starting from the beginning, from grilling us on our tables, to making us hold our pencils straight, to lecturing us on our handwriting. (His own handwriting was tiny and print-perfect.) We shuffled our feet impatiently, we whined and we protested. Buses have come and gone a thousand times since then, but every once in a while, when we pencil something on a piece a paper, it could be a list to the kirana store, or an address on a card, but inevitably an old memory kicks in and we feel an invisible hand holding our hand reminding us of the importance of holding our pencils upright.

This month Thatha would have entered his ninetieth year. He died eight years ago - his good old heart just literally gave out. This is a poem i had penned for Thatha on behalf of all four of his granddaughters for his 80th birthday a couple of years before he died.

To Our Dear Thatha

THATHA
You didn’t just tell us bedtime         
Stories, true and imagined,
You opened up discussions about      
Life and living.  

You didn’t just take us along
On your long daily walks,
You showed us the world
Beyond our front door.

You didn’t just teach us to
Hold our pencils upright,
You taught us to live
Our lives that way.

You didn’t just fix our broken
Umbrellas and shoes,
You taught us never to give up
On anything—or anyone.

You didn't just teach us algebra
And physics and geography,
You taught us to count
Our every blessing.

If we haven’t told you recently, thatha,
How very much you mean to us,
And thanked you for all you’ve done,
We’d like to tell you now, that we
Count you among our greatest blessings,
And thank God you’re in our lives.
And if you don’t remember so well
Any more, each little instance
Where you made a world of difference,
It’s all right…

Because we do!
Happy 80th Birthday Thatha!


 

Day 19 - Learning WithOUT Stories

Using stories is the most effective form to teach, we've all heard that. A million times. I agree.
But, but, but...

My 12-year-old daughter was studying Civics not too long ago and was grumbling indistinctly under her breath. Now that is not an entirely uncommon occurrence, so I ignored it until the grumbling got quite loud and quite coherent - "Why must they invent these stupid know-it-all characters?" was part of the grumble. I peeked into her textbook and she was perfectly right. The chapter starts with a girl asking her grandfather the question that all children wonder and worry their little hearts out about- "Oh, how, but how, are rural townships and villages governed, Grandpa?" Grandpa dips into his agonizingly boring brain and digs out the facts and figures in the chapter entitled (surprise! surprise!) Government in Rural Townships and Villages.

The chapter contains complex organizational hierarchies to be memorized and remembered. It doesn't really matter if the information is imparted by a supposedly wise grandfather to his cocky and precocious grandchild. What my daughter actually used to learn the tiresome information were mindmaps and charts. The story approach was not just redundant, but actually irritating.

The other day, a few colleagues and I attended a mandatory 'training', yes, you know the kind that need the quotes to qualify them. The trainer peppered the session liberally with a pungent overdose of personal memoirs concerning herself, her husband, her sisters and a fractious but oh-so-good-hearted-when-you-get-to-know-her ex-boss. While I recall with vivid clarity that this trainer almost got divorced, that she hated Bangalore at first but then grew to love it, that she loved to good-naturedly play pranks on her team (hopefully not in her 'worstest' English), I can't for the life of me recall what points those stories were used to make.

What I'm trying to say is, if you have a great story that illustrates the point intelligently and coherently, then by all means bring it on. But if you don't, if your content does not warrant it or you just can't think of one, that's okay, we can take it. We're all big boys and girls and so are our learners. Why, even my 12-year-old daughter would have preferred it that way.

Bottomline, if you don't have a good story to underscore your point, for heaven's sake, please spare us the bad ones.

Day 18 - Of fairy tales and horror stories

If her target audience had been anything like me when I was a child, J.K. Rowling would still be waiting tables.

I still don't know how too many children's stories end, I never could quite get that far. The moment the conflict in the story began, something happened to me - my brain went all foggy, my cheeks got all soggy, my eyes misted over with vicarious tears, and my heart filled with someone else's fears. In short, I crumpled and collapsed in a useless and emotional lump.

When my grandpa regaled us with the story of the Ramayana, I refused to let him continue past Sita's abduction. In my version, Rama and Sita lived happily ever after frolicking with non-marichaesque deer and of course with no troubling feminist issues to contend with. I recall an evening when my grandmother came hurrying into the bedroom hearing heart-wrenching and blood-curdling cries of distress to find a distraught granddaughter and a sheepish grandpa who had picked the supremely violent tale of Kovalan and Kannaki as a bedtime story. Needless to say, he got more than an earful for the thoughtless choice.

My sister recounts a day when she came to my second-grade classroom to pick me up and drag me to the school bus. She found me a blubbering mess.I was gulping and sobbing so hard I couldn't even explain the source of my grief. Panic-stricken and fearing the worst, she interrogated my little classmates. "Chechi, Anandam is crying because Pavizham got hurt," was the matter-of-fact and cryptic response she got. Over a cup of milk and much pampering at home, it transpired that the fresh tears were for the hero of a story in my Malayalam reader, a parrot called Pavizham that ended up with a broken wing and unhealed scars because of the ill-treatment meted out to it by the neighbourhood children. I don't quite know how that story ended and I somehow got through the second grade despite such traumatic setbacks.

So many of these stories were probably written to teach young children some valuable life lessons - for kids that got that far. My motto was, just skip the whole sordid tale and tell me what it is I'm supposed to know. I'm not supposed to throw stones at hapless birds, fine. My family learnt one lesson though - to make sure that my bedtime stories were laundered of all violence and sadness. Oh well, as long as someone learnt something...

Fortunately for Ms Rowling, her audience is much more sophisticated and take injury and death with consummate ease - as long at's happening to someone else of course. Dark wizards, hippogriffs, dementors - bring them on, and the more pieces their souls are in the better. Me, I would never have made it past that cupboard under the stairs.