The Workshop Series That was Different

The Pact

January to March 2012 were very special months for me. My friend Rohini Jakati and I did a series of Communication skills workshops for a group of teachers of Chennai Corporation's schools. These were teachers who were handling English language for classes 6 to 8. And I really mean a series - 12 half a day workshops, all in a row, one every week, for the same group.

I've always enjoyed doing workshops, but what really made these workshops special was the challenge they posed and the way the teachers responded. Rohini and I prepared a broad framework for our workshop series but kept it flexible enough to be dismantled and re-assembled according to the needs of the participants.

Which really turned out to be a wise decision on our part because, looking back, I can see that by the end of the series our framework had really come a long way from where we had first pitched it.

We had decided to keep it open because this was our first experience with teachers from schools for the economically weaker sections. We knew some of their problems - their students were first generation learners and did not have support from home, many of them came from emotionally disturbed backgrounds, and a lot of 'learning' that took place was mechanical and rote. Above everything else, was the teachers' own diffidence - they all came from a Tamil medium background and were just not confident about their own English, though all of them were English teachers.

We knew some of the handicaps these teachers worked with - we had been briefed by the Joint Commissioner Mr. Venkatesh, whose initiative had taken us to the Corporation School, Alwarpet for the workshop series.

But the real picture bloomed out that first day when we stepped into the audio visual lab of the Alwarpet school to find 30 half-anxious faces looking hesitantly at us. I could almost read their minds - who were these two women? Will they treat us with contempt?  what sophisticated theories and impossible ideas will they thrust down our gullets? What would they expect us to do? How can we stick through 12 sessions?

What we carried with us was just our deep desire to connect to them and express solidarity. Our earnest desire to give them what they needed, rather than what we thought they needed.

The key we held was our openness and flexibility and I strongly believe that these made a lot of difference.
We started the series by asking the teachers to tell us their expectations from the series. What would you like to take away from here, we asked. It threw our bunch of 30 into something of a tizzy; some were cynical, but they all got into the spirit of it and finally drew up a laundry list. Now the list which ran into some ten points got us in a bit of a tizzy because we hadn't expected a list as long as this! We realized that we had quite a challenge ahead of us!

We then asked them to define what they would bring to the table if we undertook to try and meet their expectations. That took them aback but with a little prompting, they came up with a list of resolutions which more than matched our expectations!! Their list included points like 'we will cooperate/we will speak in English and not be hurt if we are publicly corrected etc.

And to their credit, most of them adhered to their own rules for most of the 12 days of the workshop. If they had not kept the pact, we really could not have done much.

That first workshop did much more than just tell us what they needed - it was the best ice breaker we could have imagined and it set the tone for the series.

The teachers warmed up pretty fast and learnt the hard way that in order to learn to speak English they would have to speak English.

Unfinished battle waiting at the wings

We are going through depressing times. The newspapers have been full of bad news for ever and aye and there has been no let up. But this one that came in just now threw me into depression like never before:
http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/tamil-nadu/dalit-boy-ilavarasan-found-dead-on-railway-tracks/article4881007.ece?homepage=true

A vanniyar girl marries a dalit boy in a Tamil Nadu town, amidst threats and violence. Her father unable to bear the shame commits suicide. The mother and the community prey on her feelings of guilt as the cause of father's death, succeed in drawing her back to her maternal home. Girl tearfully returns, says she has nothing against her husband or his family and then says she will never go back as her mother is of paramount importance to her. And then the next thing we hear her young husband, in his early twenties, on the threshold of life, is found dead on a train track. Suicide? Murder? No one knows yet. But a wasted life? Yes, most certainly.

What kind of civilisational values do we uphold if a girl amongst us still dare not chart out her own independent course? What kind of parents are these who put their own selfish narrow interests over their daughter's? What kind of society is this that cannot tolerate dissent from any member but must punish them and theirs irrevocably and with a damning finality?

Wasn't there a legal system or a police system that could insist that the young couple could not be pressured by society? After all, they were consenting adults. Could no one offer counselling or even protection to Dhivya against the machinations and manipulations of her mother and family?

Why hasn't any political leader put out a strong anti-caste statement till date? What happened to all those leaders who stood up for Tamils in far away Sri Lanka just two months back? What happened to those others who hop into helicopters, visit flood hit zones to personally assess extent of damage and make the right faces and noises for television cameras?

The Dhivya-Ilavarasan case is an uncomfortable reminder that India shining is actually an ancient civilisation with rundown values teetering on the brink of collapse while trying to keep up the pretense of 'alll eeeeeez well.'

And I still have myself heard and read people saying so often, 'Caste injustice? Now? That was in the past.'
Past? Excuse me. Don't you read the papers? Decades after casteism was abolished by law, we still traumatise couples who choose to marry outside their castes and communities, we make children of discriminated communities sweep their school buildings, clean latrines and carry excrement on their heads. We do not allow other castes enter temples or even walk down public thoroughfares. We do not allow our children to eat noon meals cooked by women from other castes.

In our comfortable middle class homes, we do not share the dinner table with members of 'lower' castes, if we can help it. We do not eat food cooked by other caste people. We do not hire cooks from other castes. When we meet someone new, our first thought inevitably is 'Is he one of 'us?'

Agreed, a few decades cannot entirely wipe out what's a deep-seated, deep-rooted race meme. But surely it is enough time to acknowledge that casteism is not a thing of the past, as we would all like to believe. It exists today, now. It exists all around us, and it also lives inside each one of us, firmly embedded in our hearts and minds. In fact its existence around us has been possible only because we have still given it room within us. The first step would be to shake off the state of denial.