Working with children -1

The different essay contest - 2007

We often hear it said that children have not learnt to think, to apply knowledge, they can only memorize and recall facts, that they are not creative any more, that they do not have the reading habit, that they lack the moral timbre to take positive and sound decisions. And so on and so forth.

I believe however that every child has it in her to do all this and more. We just do not give them the opportunity to explore their world and to discover themselves.

My work has taught me this about children: that they are willing and waiting.

The onus actually is on us.

Three years back I was part of a team that designed an essay-writing contest for children of classes 5 to 12 in a Chennai school. The children were divided into four groups. Each group was given different writing tasks, tasks that were carefully designed to appeal to them.

But everyone knows that most kids don't enjoy essay writing. Few children look forward to it, specially because most times the task requires them to write about a visit to a zoo or a letter to the Municipal Chairman about leaky drain pipes. We decided that we would be different. We would make the task interesting for them. My colleague Rohini and I brainstormed and came up with topics that ranged from the fantastic for the Class 5-6 kids to deeply introspective and reflective topics for the adolescents of Classes 11 and 12.

We topped it by addressing them in the school assembly before the contest. I addressed classes 5-8 and Rohini, the older group. She appealed to their more matured thinking by asking them to learn to plan and organize their thinking and writing. I appealed to the imagination of my younger audience by telling them that there was a Harry Potter ready to burst out of their brains if only they paid attention to him. The children listened intently and nodded.

Then we asked them how their essays should be evaluated - what they think we should look for in an essay. What was a good piece of writing? The children responded by giving us a list of parameters which defined what they thought was a good piece of writing. A fifteen-odd point checklist for evaluating their essays came entirely from them.

When the essays came - and how, there were some 600 essays to evaluate - we were stunned. Stunned because not one essay was a perfunctory or an obligatory bored attempt. Each one - even the worst - was earnest and sincere. We could sense effort in every word. In most of the essays, we could hear a struggling voice trying to catch and express furiously-tumbling thoughts and ideas.

Of course there were poorly written essays. And of course, there were some essays that showed poor thinking or a paucity of ideas. There were some that were politically correct and made all the right noises. But even these were not written grudgingly. Every essay showed that the writer had engaged in the task to her best capacity or as she deemed right. The active engagement showed.

One of our evaluators remarked that it seemed as if the children had been waiting for an opportunity to write. Indeed, that's how it seemed.

Which brings me back to my point. The children are willing and waiting. What are we doing to engage them? And more importantly, are we actively engaging with them at all?

Cognition and language

It's one more of those eternal mysteries: language and thinking. Do we need language to think? Does thinking happen only in a language? After all, we all know language is a medium.

I have always wondered whether we actually needed a language for thinking. But some language teacher-friends of mine have always argued that thinking involves a language. After all, they say, our inner dialogues are always in some recognizable language or the other. True. But the dialogue is still a dialogue - internal or external to us. Is it the same as the process of thinking? A dialogue still expresses an outcome of the process. That's been my contention.

Recently, a colleague talked about a friend's two-year-old child who did not speak but could communicate his needs and desires very well. The child, she said, could also associate articles with their owners, and sort steel dishes from china ones. There it was. Obviously here was evidence of cognitive activity that did not have the scaffold of any language.

After all, how do babies learn to speak. They learn by associating sounds (words) with objects they represent or symbolize. The association, the memory, the recall and retrieval are intuitive cognitive processes stimulated by sensory perceptions. And it is this cognitive activity that generates this beautiful thing called language. [And which baby ever started learning his mother tongue with a,b,c? - but that calls for another post.] The child is not thinking in a language.

So also with the hearing impaired. They cannot hear a language but that is not to say they are not thinking. Obviously their sensory impulses are transcribed into some other internal language that helps to identify perceptions and associate them with others, to interpret an experience and understand a context. Their engagement with the world is through non-linguistic means.

And yet most of us think we cannot make do without a language. The problem is we have become so dependent on language that we have gradually reduced usage of all the other media of communication open to us: music, rhythm, touch, feel, movement, stillness and even silence.

The glow of pride, the glower of irritation, the beam of happiness, the sudden flicker of an eyebrow, the puckering of the lips - even slight motions can convey messages. Body language is a great communicator, indeed a great revealer.

Silence is a very powerful tool. In this instant response world, silence can be a great tormentor. Even an innocuous, unintended silence can be interpreted in a hundred obnoxious ways to drive away one's peace of mind. Lack of communication is itself a message, a communication.

Neither thinking nor communication actually need a language.

Raavanan's perspective?? Huh?

In his old age Mani Ratnam decides to have a go at ole’ Valmiki’s tale, finds Anil Ambani to sink some loose change into its production and ropes in big names to act. Vikram plays his favourite role – perhaps the only role that he knows – that of a demented masculine brute leftover from prehistoric times, and Aishwarya, plays the role of the beautiful damsel in distress and establishes convincingly that incredibly beautiful damsels can be incredibly dumb too. And lo, Raavanan is born.

But before the movie is deservedly consigned to wilderness, a couple of million suckers in India will readily have shelled out a couple of hundred rupees each to watch it in elite movie halls, (not to mention ruin their health with tubs of buttery popcorn and all that) and swell Anil Ambani’s bank balance.

While most of Ramayan’s main characters are recognizable in Raavanan, not one has been convincingly etched or completely developed. The story could have been better exploited to study how characters are shaped by circumstances and experiences. But neither are the characters drawn out nor is the plot clearly worked out.

Till the intermission nobody knows why the things that are happening are happening and after intermission, one begins to wish they just would cease happening. Lots of loose ends are never tied up and at the end of the show, one is left wondering what the team was trying to say or show.


Till the end we are never told why Veera, the demented brute with the golden heart (the heart is more a surmise, even that isn’t clearly established) is in the bad books of the police, and what made him the bad guy that he is said to be. Veera’s act of kidnapping the DSP (protagonist)’s wife seems to be mere personal vendetta – taking revenge for the rape and death of his sister in the hands of the police who gatecrash into and make a mess of her wedding though only goodness and Maniratnam know why. The DSP in chasing Veera and using state machinery to recover his wife also seems to have acted more out of selfish interest than general interest.

And though the final twist in the end is good, we never really know how to respond to it, because nowhere in the movie have the characters been established convincingly. And through it all, poor Aishwarya tries to look brave and smart and good and virtuous and sympathetic and helpless and a lot of other things besides but the last scene clearly establishes her as the stereotypical dumb damsel. The policemen, convoy, sniffer dogs and all – as always – come across as being slow, stupid and senseless.

I am tempted to borrow Veera's eloquent vocabulary to describe the movie: much buk-buk about nothing.

Denial and Self denial

I am not a masochist. Nor a renunciate. But looking back at the last decade and half of my life, I can't help asking myself whether we have forgotten the virtue of denial and self-denial. The newspaper recently carried a report on children who insisted on admission to elite colleges whose fees were beyond their parents' means only because their friends had gone there. This, although they had already obtained admission in good colleges with subsidized fees. Callous insensitivity, I thought.

I often - too often - hear of children who refuse to visit relatives whose houses are not air-conditioned.

We see young school girls precociously splashing money in beauty parlours and shopping malls. In supermarkets and shopping malls, children heaping carts with junk food and other 'goodies' is a common sight.

How many of our middle class children have used public transport like buses or travelled sleeper class in our trains? How many of our young upper middle class children get fresh air or play outdoor games regularly? [Playing games the way we did when we were young is of course different from cricket coaching or tennis coaching - which of course is a very fashionable and desirable activity today.]

The clothes that our school and college girls and young office goers are wearing are unrecognizable.
Their hair styles would have been unthought-of just a decade ago.
Young children of upper middle class families have grown podgy and fleshy. Their very body structures have changed.


And here are two critical differences:
We were taught to help others, to oblige when some one made a request. Our children do not hesitate to say, 'Sorry but no," when asked for help.
This is the change I find completely unacceptable.

Brought up in a culture where one is trained not to wait to be asked but try to anticipate a need, I find it shocking that children can say, "So boring. I don't want to do this."

Equally shocking is seeing children doing things just for themselves when they could well have done the same things for others. Small things such as serving/passing food at the dinner table, setting plates and fetching water. "I have helped myself. Why should I do it for you?" is often implicit and sometimes explicit. I never fail to ask a child that does this, "Do your parents earn only for themselves? Do your parents cook only for themselves?"

Eating out was a rare treat when we were young. It was a family outing to mark an occasion or celebrate an event. Today when we are not eating out, we are ordering home delivery. We eat out when we are bored, tired of home food, just too tired to cook, or just plain lazy - which means every week almost.

Why these changes?
Perhaps we have indulged our children a lot more than we were ever indulged.

Consider these.
We used to share crayons with our siblings as children. But now we buy each of our children a box.
Our toys, books and clothes were often hand me downs from older siblings and cousins. Our kids have never seen hand me downs.
We swept and cleaned, ran errands, fetched and carried, and had regular chores to do. Very few children today do any of these.
We went to school by walk, bike or public bus. Our children mostly cycle or go by car.

Our lifestyles have changed beyond recognition. But who is to blame? We have allowed a slew of products and brands to dazzle us, suspend our sense of discrimination, and change our spending habits and consumption patterns to the point of loosening the grip that foundational values had on us. We have slowly but surely gravitated towards a lifestyle that is not only un-Indian but also unhealthy and unsustainable.

What then can we expect of our children? With us as role models, can they be any different?

Suddenly after indulging their every whim, and often even before it was even expressed,we expect them as they grow into adolescence to become serious students, hard working, disciplined and diligent. None of which we tried to cultivate when they were younger. We cannot deny them cable tv, mobile phones and pc games after having given them these ourselves.

What we could have done but did not do was to spell out ground rules and strictly adhered to them. We could have denied our children a few of the luxuries we pampered them with. We should have used that magical word 'no' a bit more often than we did. We could have denied them a few of those expensive cravings, or made them work really hard for them.

But to be able to practice denial one needs guts. If you do not want your child to unblinkingly ask you why you denied her things while you indulged your every whim, you have to practise what you advocate. And you have to be seen to practise it. You have to deny yourself stuff you badly want, you have to sacrifice your comfort before those of others, and you have to put others before you. Before denial must come self-denial. At least to the point of getting back on the track of disciplined living. Because you know in your heart of hearts, notwithstanding the shopping sprees, the festive bashes, and the parties, that it was self denial, strict parenting and disciplining that got you where you are. And if you want your children to get there too, the formula cannot be much different.

What good food means to me

After a long layoff, I re-entered the kitchen recently and picked up the ladle and pan. Shamelessly speaking, I was truly delighted to find that I had not lost the touch. The golden touch for which I shall be ever grateful to my mother and grandmother. I had not forgotten those old lessons in cooking that my grandmother and mother had given me. But I will come back to those later. First, I must acknowledge and appreciate the women in my life who taught me the value of food. And at the same time, satisfy my urge to salivate at the thought of all the yummy food that I had grown up on.

Food for nostalgia
My grandmother was a fantastic cook. Even today, many years after her death, people talk of her cooking. I still remember some of those mouth-watering dishes I grew up on: the paruppu urundai rasam, vazhaipoo paruppu usli, vendha paruppu thuvail, the mysore rasam, the koottu, not to mention the melting mysore pak, buttery murukkus and cheedais. Oh, and I must not forget the red roast potato curry my grandmother used to make. I have never had anything the like of it, before or after her.

Let me not omit some of those fantabulous ‘tiffin’ items that I have not had elsewhere – that were so typically my family specialities – thavala vadai, thavala adai, thavala dosai, Kanchipuram idli, rava pongal…

Mother was - and is – a great experimenter. She served up slurpy kurmas and chole and spongy puddings, feathery cakes and whatnot. We grew up on delicious fare, my brother and I. Syrups and squashes, jams and pies and cookies – nothing daunted or flummoxed her.

Even father cooked – he would add a dash of jaggery to his rasam and sambhar that would give an indescribable zing to the dishes.

Fattened to be slaughtered at the altar of life – that was what we were - no, just joking. (Actually, we weren't fat. Both of us were fairly thin.)

And I haven’t yet paid homage to the payasams, the halwas, the burfis and the podis and pickles, the bajjis and bondas, the kozhukottais and polis.

And of course, the most amazing decoction coffee ever.

But I guess the drift is clear. We were a ‘food’ family, I mean a FOOD family.

My first lessons
So how could I go wrong? When I was in Class 8 or 9 – I can’t remember rightly – my mother took it upon her to teach me to cook. It started with making tea. And I still remember the unfortunate afternoon when I first lit the gas stove. I used about eight matchsticks to get that right. Mother was gnashing her teeth at me by the time the gas was lit. (In spite of all the gnashing she did when my brother and I were growing up, I must say her teeth have kept well: at 67, she has not lost a single one, nor seems likely to for the next two decades. Needless to say, she is still gnashing them.)

And then slowly we proceeded. Tea, then rice, then vegetables and other everyday dishes - and varieties in each.

What cooking meant to grandmother
I don't recall lessons from my grandmother - but she had set the bars - and pretty high at that. In fact, years later, I recall mother telling me that grandmother had never overtly taught her her secret recipes. That indeed she would shoo every one off before she settled in front of the stove to prepare the hot favourites like polis, kozhukottai, or the bakshanam because she felt that the magic would not work when many prying eyes were on her.

Perhaps it was just that old evil eye superstition. Perhaps there was an unwillingness to share a precious skill - one of the few things she could call her own, one of the few things that established her identity in her society, and gave her a sense of self-pride and self-esteem.Perhaps she had not wanted her daughter-in-law to learn and do better and eclipse her. We shall never know. Mother learnt her secrets by observing grandmother discreetly and from the background, whenever she was called to help with the preparations or the packing and clearing up.

Cooking is not just about cooking
To come back to my cooking lessons. They went way beyond learning to identify ingredients, following the cooking process, getting the proportion and mix of ingredients right, or recognising when a dish was done.

I learnt to tell just by looking whether the boiling rasam lacked salt. I learnt to tell just by the aroma filling the kitchen while cooking whether the proportion of spices blended into a dish was correct. I learnt to estimate just by looking whether the quantity of salt that I held in my hand was right for the dish that was waiting for it.

Looking at and smelling food while it cooked played a more important role than tasting because traditionally food had to be offered to the family deities before it touched our lips. This meant that while cooking I was using every one of my senses keenly and also that I had to be on red alert all the time to find the false note before others sat to eat.

But by far the most important lesson I learnt in the kitchen was that to be acknowledged a good cook one had to do more than just cook well. To be called a good cook by the seasoned ladies, one needed to be efficient and not only effective.

In my early days of cooking, while I was still in school and college, we did not use gas lighters. The good old match stick ruled the kitchen. My sage mentors taught me that real cooking was all about efficient fuel consumption. Could I complete the entire cooking session by striking just one match stick? That meant a minimum of four dishes and a maximum of god knows how many (during festivals and feasts).

According to the women in my life, the number of match sticks I used was a sure fire indicator of my kitchen skills.It was not just about spending match sticks, it was also about how well one planned and prepared for the cooking session. It was about paying attention to details and to the actual process.

The number of vessels used in cooking was also an indicator of kitchen skills. Using fewer vessels on the stove meant effective planning, and less time and energy spent on post-cooking clean up. Spillage,wastage, energy consumption, cutting down the steps in cooking - were all considered very important for the good cook. So also the introduction of ingredients in just the right stages in the process: the garnish on the rasam was done differently and at a different stage in the cooking than the garnish on the sambhar - though the ingredients of both were the same. And if you got it wrong, your error would be sniffed out by disdainful mentors.

Decades after those first lessons in kitchen skills were creased into my brain, today when I look at them in the light of global concerns of sustainable lifestyles and consumption patterns, I am tempted to ask myself: were those ladies in my life fiendishly rigid and conservative old fuddy-duddies or wise and visionary management gurus?

Eco-friendly Indians?

So the world thinks Indians are the most eco-friendly nation in the world. [See http://www.siliconindia.com/shownews/Indians_most_ecofriendly_consumers_Survey-nid-68569-cid-3.html] It better think again. Because if Indians are eco-friendly, it is not because they have made wise, conscious, conscientious ethical choices to adopt eco-friendly ways. Because their eco-friendly behaviour is not an index of their environment awareness.

It is rather an index of their lack of means. If Indians are the most eco-friendly nation of people in the world, then it is because their consumption patterns and habits are dictated more by the size of their wallets than by their environment consciousness.

Whether in the matter of energy use, transportation choices, food sources, use of green products or any other critical environment issues, most Indians still make choices based on their economic or financial conditions, and not based on their attitude towards the environment and understanding of notions of sustainability.

And because the number of Indians making such choices is so huge, it has managed to swing Indian consumers into the No. 1 position in the Consumer Greendex compiled by National Geographic recently. More than anything else, this ranking is more a reflection of the actual state of economic conditions in small town and rural India, which is the biggest part of the country, than it is of our habits and attitudes towards the environment. Let’s face it.