The Killing

My cousin visited us yesterday with her 6 year old daughter. This niece of mine is a hyperactive kid and my mom has named her ‘terrorist’. She is the kind of kid who is constantly devising means of wreaking havoc wherever she is at that moment. She was unnaturally quiet and I thought it was probably because she was sleepy (as it was around 9 pm). We were chatting while my niece was rolling around on our bed. My cousin had mentioned a while ago that the kid’s class teacher had earlier complained that she was not  attentive in class and was not doing very well in studies. She later found out that the kid had a vision problem and got her to wear spectacles but the class teacher had not stopped complaining. So I asked my niece if she was being a good girl in class and if her teacher had stopped complaining. I was not thinking of anything when I asked the question, but the kid seemed a little shifty while responding. I took it simply as a sign of her feeling sleepy.After some time, my niece fell asleep.
Now two seemingly unrelated topics that we spoke about :
My cousin who seemed to be waiting for this told us that she (the kid) was very upset that day because of what happened at school. Apparently that morning after the first period, my niece felt uncomfortable wearing her shoes and removed it. She stuffed it in her bag and was going around in her socks. Her class teacher who taught English, noticed this and asked her where her shoes were and this girl said that she had not worn shoes to school that day. The teacher admonished her for this, wrote a note for the parents in the kid’s diary - things seem normal till this point. What she did next is strange - she complained about this to the principal, who then called my cousin and her husband to complain. Since she (the principal) was able to reach only my cousin’s husband, she started yelling at him for sending the kid to school without her shoes and for being an irresponsible parent. My brother-in-law was annoyed and at first protested saying that he was sure the girl had worn her shoes to school and on learning that it was the school’s principal who was yelling, controlled his temper and promised to be more careful.
As all good fathers do, he later chided my cousin for being careless. My cousin asked my niece why she had hidden her shoes and later lied to the teacher. The girl was in tears. My cousin gently told her that no matter what, lying was a bad thing.
As we were talking about this, she mentioned something else. In the recent exams, my niece had scored over 90 in Maths and Social Sciences and over 60 in other subjects except English where she had scored a paltry 45. This was strange, to say the least. She also recounted her recent experience in the PTA meeting at school, where the same teacher complained to my cousin in front of the other parents that my niece had torn a page off her English textbook and that as punishment her teacher had refused to return the book to her.
This happened in one of the most popular schools in Chennai. Although all of us felt that the teacher and the principal had behaved irrationally, for the sake of the kid, I advised my cousin to have a heart-to-heart chat with the teacher and see if things could be resolved amicably.
While I thought that my niece was wrong in lying to the teacher about her shoes, I also realized that all these problems probably had a common root. My niece seemed to be afraid of this teacher and that probably caused her to lose interest in the subject too.
Does this seem familiar to any of you? Most of us have had experiences with a certain teacher who hated us for no reason. I have seen a few in my school days. They would pick on one particular student and constantly tease him/her, insult the student, even destroy their morale sometimes. More often than not, the student ends up hating the subject in retaliation. In my case, my nemesis in school was a sports teacher. He hated the fact that I existed and tried to hurt me whenever possible. This probably explains my total lack of interest in any kind of sports. My aunt who was a teacher has even told me that one of her colleagues who often used to target a certain student in her class, confessed that she hated the sight of him and had no idea why.
The thought that the unreasonable hatred or dislike of a certain person can turn a 6 year old towards lying, to temporarily escape from the teacher’s wrath (as she probably thought that her teacher would blame the parents instead) and also develop a hatred towards a certain subject, deeply saddened me. My mother still cannot forget the taunts of a certain science teacher in school, due to whom, she lost all interest in the subject that year and consequently scored badly in that subject alone - an event that subsequently changed the course of her life.
Due to some unavoidable circumstances, my niece has to spend an hour or two all by herself at home in the evenings, since both her parents work and my aunt who usually takes care of the kid, is away from Chennai for a short while. I was telling my cousin to ask her to keep the door locked and not open the door for strangers. Although I was afraid to voice my fears, I told my cousin to be very careful with the kid and to warn her about lurking dangers around her. My cousin was telling me later that she was trying to tell the kid about good and bad touches from different people and that she had explicitly instructed her to report any mischief by others immediately. I was reminded of my music teacher in school, who would call the girls in the class to her room and ask us to be careful with the Art teacher. She would ask a few girls if he had touched them. I remember finding it disgusting then thinking that this lady was trying to take away our innocence and was corrupting our minds. Now I think she was only trying to look out for us, probably because she had seen and/or suspected something afoul. It was a government school and the politics played there are worse than the politics we see in our organization. The best she could do was to warn us in vague terms to be ‘careful’.
I was thinking about these things again and again yesterday night and in the morning. What kind of our world are our kids growing up in? I have just returned from a visit to my niece and nephew in Singapore and the thought that these perfect beings will grow progressively less innocent and more imperfect in order to survive in this world sends shivers down my spine. I would not want them to learn what bias means or what hatred means. I would not want them to know that in the real world, there are sheep and there are wolves in sheep’s clothing and externally they appear the same. But then how will they survive in this world? In the first incident, more than the teacher’s behaviour, I was deeply disturbed by the fact that the 6 year old kid could sense the teacher’s dislike and proceeded to lie over a small thing. I can see her gradually moving from the innocence of childhood to the deceits of adulthood. In the latter case, much as I would want her to trust every person she meets, the fact that I am seeing more and more reports on child molestation - with the minimum age limit of the victim going down every day- I am wondering if losing her innocence is the price to pay for her safety.
We lost our innocence too, but the age of losing our innocence seems to be going down of late. Kids are forced out of their innocence and childhood by the deluge of infotainment in the media, an overdose of sex and violence everywhere. Nothing seems to entertain or satisfy and the craving for more of everything seems to be the order of the day. While I look on, the children are oblivious to what they are missing. So is it a trade-off between innocence and survival? There are no easy answers. Meanwhile I feel really old and tired already.

Just Relax..

It had been more than a year since I last visited my sister in Singapore. In between, there was another cute addition to the family. So in addition to my dear little niece, I also had my tiny nephew to look forward to in this trip. Things were changing at work too and the likelihood of getting into a shepherding role was looming large and I thought it was the right time to take a break, forget all about work and office and get away from the madding crowd.

So we made plans - my parents and I, booked the ticket on Tiger Airways - the TNSTC (Tamilnadu State Transport Corporation) bus that flies. The cheap guys actually charge you for every checked in baggage and also for seat selection or even reserving overhead compartment space for cabin baggage. However, they had no idea of the genius of Indian brains when they formulated their rules. As a result, we paid for a single check-in baggage and smartly utilized all our cabin baggages and the usually-not-weighed handbag allowances to carry a mini-grocery-store to my sister. My darling niece had already requested (actually, ordered) us to get her a ‘Barbie’ or ‘Hello Kitty’ mobile phone and after hunting around in multiple stores, my dad had success in finding it in one of the platform shops in Mylapore.

Tiger Airways is called a budget airline and we were never allowed to forget that fact. In the Chennai airport, our check-in baggage was not even scanned. And actually it is an insult to TNSTC buses to compare them with the Tiger Airways flight, however my conscience was also telling me that you usually get what you pay for and so we settled uncomfortably in our seats. Once the plane took off, I saw a strange guy trying to put his head on my lap. I was shocked, but only for a minute, for I realized that the guy in the front seat had merely pushed his seat back and thanks to the spacious seats, he was almost on my lap. So I decided to do what any other sane person would do - I pushed my seat back to scare the guy sitting behind me!

I frequently criticize or make fun of people on their English but I didn’t try any of that on the flight. The flight attendants spoke in a language that sounded vaguely like English. The Singaporean accent is kind of strange to untrained ears. It is nothing like the American, British, Australian or French accents. To get some idea of how this language sounds, imagine trying to speak with your mouth full of marbles - much like Eliza Doolittle is made to do in the film version of ‘My Fair Lady’. Consonants seem to be hurrying on their way out tumbling over the previous guys and causing general mayhem!! After a while I gave up trying to understand the announcements and instead concentrated on my ‘Thuppariyum Sambu’ novel by Devan.

Since this was not the first time we were travelling to Singapore, all of us had become a little careless. As a result, we had forgotten to note down my sister’s address and happily put down the name of the town where she stayed in the ‘Address’ box in the immigration form. True to my unerring instinct to pick the slowest moving queue, we ended up in one all the while hearing passports being stamped in rapid succession in the nearby lines, while the ‘uncle’ in-charge of our queue seemed to be taking some sort of sadistic pleasure in reading the details in every passport and immigration form one tiny alphabet at a time and relishing each second of our agony. He took a full 2 minutes to read through my immigration form and then looked up slowly to tell me that what I had written on it was the name of a town and not the address. I gave him what I thought was the smartest possible answer - that I did not know the address, and added helpfully that my sister would know it, since she lived there!! Uncle thought for a while (seriously, I wished I had a fast-forward button for this man to make him move at my speed) and said that I had to at least write down the phone number of my sister, which I did on my form and then on my parents’ forms too.

We had already decided that we would not go sight-seeing on this trip and that our main source of entertainment would be the kids. So we kept our promise, the first half of it at least. However, we did go out often and each such outing caused a larger hole in our pockets (figuratively of course, since we were carrying the demon called Credit Card with us). I realized in the end that what used to be only luxuries once have sort of become habits - like perfumes, watches, clothes etc. and where once we shopped to meet our daily needs, we now shop for the pleasure of shopping - to quench an insatiable thirst, which only increases with every dose of shopping therapy. Needless to say, I safely had these philosophical thoughts almost always after returning from the store. But still, better late than never, right?

I have said it before and I will say it again - the public transport system was amazing. All places in the country are well connected by buses and trains and a single pass worked in all of them. People walked quite a lot. I spent more hours walking in these 10 days than I would have done in 3 months in Chennai. In spite of the high number of apartment buildings, cars, people etc., Singapore seemed to be wonderfully green - there are trees everywhere and it was quite a pleasant sight. The apartment complex that my sister lives in is what are called housing board apartments. These are supposedly highly in demand in the country. The apartment community is a sprawling area with open gyms, play areas, tracks for running, walking etc and a lot of well maintained lawns and plants.

People are health freaks and irrespective of the time of the day, there are people running around in shorts or shorter shorts. I was feeling good about myself till I went there and starting thinking that I was abnormally obese. Interestingly, there were restaurants all over the place and people seemed to be eating at all times of the day. And yet, they remain super slim and that remains a mystery!!

Another remarkable thing was how little eye contact people made there. 9 out 10 people had mobile phones/PDAs or iPhones in their hands and earplugs in their ears. In fact in one station, I was looking through the door as the train was halting and I thought that people looked like zombies or automatons with their lost-in-thought expressions and lips that never smiled. Singapore Indians (mostly Tamils) were easily identifiable with their gaudy clothes, jewellery and heavily made up face.

My 3.5 year old niece kept us constantly entertained by pretending to be our teacher and insisting on teaching my mom and me Chinese (although I strongly suspect that Chinese has more words than just ‘tse’ or something sounding like that!!). She would sing entire songs in familiar tunes using this single alphabet and insist that it was Chinese. Rebels were not entertained and I was constantly told by my teacher that I would get a smiley on my palm if I behaved well and a star otherwise. But as she did not know how to draw a star I always received only smileys . She learnt to sing ‘O Susanna’ and part of ‘I am a barbie girl’ and would insist on singing it 10-15 times in a row without getting bored!! My 8 month old nephew would hold long conversations using the ‘aa’ syllable alone for hours together as long as his nanny or mother was holding him.

All good things must come to an end and the same happened with our trip. I wonder about this concept of time. When I come to work on Monday, Friday evening seems light years away (and now don’t ask me how time can be compared with distance. I am emotional, try to understand!) and yet when I was with my dear niece and nephew, Friday seemed to come a millisecond after Monday morning . Anyway, the honeymoon is over. I will be meeting with my flock soon and my new role as a shepherd will start immediately after.