Straight lines & perfect circles

There was a film called Perfect Circle I saw a long time ago. I remember very little of it except for the bit where these two people - one of them I'm fairly sure, a kid - are trying to draw perfect circles and find it a thing not so simple.

I remembered this because my son wants to take Art at school next year and is not great at drawing, though he's amazing at craft and generally a genius with his hands. He used to be a champion artist when he was a kid, but you know how we're all Matisses until we're five.

So he's been trying to work at getting better but given that he started with this new resolution an hour ago, I think he should give himself a little more time before he decides to opt out of Art altogether in favour of Economics.

He began with wanting to draw an SLR; gave it up for a bottle of Parachute coconut oil and gave that up when he couldn't get the indent in the bottle to look like one; chose a lava lamp and baulked at the glass and the odd, frozen shapes inside.

Finally, I told him, 'Forget all these strange materials and stick with 2D for the moment, yes?' So we picked a Madhubani design he could copy. So all those freehand straight lines he has to draw as borders? BIG challenge. 'Economics,' he muttered under his breath.

Someone please tell my son drawing straight lines freehand is not as simple as he wants it to be.

Vampire Loves and other distractions

I got Joann Sfar's Vampire Loves for myself, but the kid has annexed it. In the first few pages, there's an old-fashioned vampire, a girl he's broken up with, a cheese-loving cat, a redhead vampire who's decided to follow him everywhere and a block party at a graveyard. I wonder what he makes of it?

In other sneaky kiddie news, I am sick of him reading Enid Blytons. So recent strategy to get him to read other stuff includes giving him dictation (his handwriting is terrible and he spells as if he's taken dictation from someone who's had their teeth pulled out; so this is necessary) from new! exciting! books!

Of course, it's useless to dictate from Arun Kolatkar's The Policeman because it's only drawings, but they're lovely and we giggled through it, esp. at the beehive that forms under the pleeceman's armpit.

Two Minutes Older: Let Them Roam

'Free-Range Kids'. I don't know about anybody else, but to me the term sounds slightly sinister. I can't help thinking of chickens, piglets and lambs skipping their heedless lives out in sunlit pastures while waiting for their hideous -if humane -end on someone's table. Of course, if you've read Jonathan Safran Foer's book, Eating Animals, you'll take my romantic notion about what `free-range' means with a sack of salt. But this is not about food.


I first heard the term `free-range kids' a month or so ago, when I was resentfully wiping off cycle chain grease from my hands. I had driven my son and his cycle to his friend's place. (I have been resigned for some time now to driving him around if I wanted him to have any friends at all.) Though these friends stay reasonably close by, I didn't consider it safe for him to cycle there by himself. Hence my annoyance at having to chauffeur the kid and his mode of transport around.


I was also being contrary. ``When I was young,'' I began, aware that I was sounding like every detestable adult I knew when I was a kid, ``we didn't have our parents hovering over us all the time and telling us to be careful.'' My friend nodded sympathetically, and handed me a rag on which to wipe my greasy hands. Then he threw out the phrases ``helicopter parent'' and ``free-range kids.'' And he told me about the concept.


It's the title of a book by American writer Lenore Skenazy. The term describes her approach to a specific kind of hands-off parenting. Working on the premise that the world is no more dangerous than it was when we were growing up, Skenazy suggests that what has changed is our perception of it as being less safe for children than it actually is. This is how she let her son be a free-range kid: she left him -then a nine-year-old -at Bloomingdales, gave him money and told him to take the subway back home. Alone. America was horrified. Other parents thought she was being irresponsible.


It is true that we allow our children less space than we ourselves had. In 2008, in an article in the Daily Mail titled `How children lost the right to roam in four generations', David Derbyshire wrote about the members of one family in Sheffield in the UK. He discovered that in 1926, while the oldest member of the family, then age eight, was allowed to walk six miles to go fishing, the youngest member, in 2007, also eight, was only allowed out 300 yards without supervision.


In my time, I would have cycled the distance I had driven my son, but I wouldn't and still won't -let him do the same. He goes for music lessons to a place nearby and I drive him there and back.


Could I bring myself to let my son walk to his music lesson, allowing him to take the time out to explore his surroundings -which, for what it's worth, consists of overflowing drains, potholes, traffic and a few shops along a very busy main road -and become a confident and self-reliant child in the process?


I suspect not. I certainly want him to become a self-reliant young person, but sending him out alone to walk or cycle on Hyderabad roads is more likely to turn him into a gibbering wreck of a human being.


I could be wrong. I suspect I am. What if I taught him to take buses, to ask for and remember directions, to use a public phone? What better way to teach him to live in a city than to allow him to navigate it on his own instead of protecting him from it as if it were a temporary residence we'd leave behind us some day?


Suspicion and fear take root easily enough. The ways in which cities have changed are evidence of it -gated communities, extra security and the ghettoisation of once-mixed localities. Anyone who makes a case for resisting this tendency to fear everything in order to be safe is worth listening to. Besides, I don't want to be a helicopter parent.


(An edited version of this in Zeitgeist, the Saturday edition of The New Indian Express.)

turning word into artefact

At first, we thought of a pottery workshop. Then a friend, who's been working with papier mache, suggested we make masks and get the kids to paint them. I wanted them to also mess around with the mache.

So that's what we did. One week before, we tore and soaked lots of newspaper. Every other day we tipped out the iron-coloured water. Ground, sieved, mixed with fevicol, and made masks. We decided on a couple of coats of primer, to give the kids a good canvas on which to work.

Here is both process and product:

Ten (It's not about you, it's about me)

Yes, flood of posts, apologies. 

The kid turned ten yesterday*. 

Ten years since the last ultrasound, where - though no one was allowed to say a word - an unpractised tech and sharp eyes told me it was going to be a boy. Ten years since the most major surgery I've ever had. Ten years since I was scared out of my wits holding a tiny bawling, jaundiced creature with an unsteady head.

And all the events in between. I feel most feline.

__

*No birthday party. That will happen later, once school begins. It's going to be a papier mache party - the kids will mess around with pulped paper, making masks and things and painting them.

Two Minutes Older: Being Watched

“We develop in the child a desire for truth, decorum, courtesy and high-achievement,” the flyer for yet another international school says. Further down the same page, in bold red, is what the school is advertising as a Unique Feature. I am sceptical, because under Sport, they have claimed to offer carom facilities to the students. And chess. (Why did they leave out book cricket, I wonder?) Maybe this unique feature really means the children will have a bedside lamp so they don’t have to spend a fortune on batteries for their torch?

I find I'm wrong.

Unique Feature: We intend to set up CCTVs and web cams so that parents can see their children online from offices or houses, during day care hours. The intention is that the parent may be reassured of the child’s well being and also provide a platform for the parents to actually view their child learn and socialise.

This is so many kinds of wrong that I am thankful to see this is, so far, only an intention. Maybe prospective parents will be as outraged as I am and this surveillance of under-18s will come to nothing?

On the other hand, who knows about parents these days? Though Facebook’s terms of service say only those who are 18 years and over can use the social networking site, I find many children as young as nine on it. They get around this by providing a false date of birth.

Parents go through some traumas about whether to allow their children access to or forbid them from entering the virtual world. But once they’ve caved and allowed their minor children into social networking or other forms of interaction online, I don’t think any parent is going to jump through too many ethical hoops before s/he decides to ‘supervise’.

It’s a flexible word: it could mean anything from adding your child as a friend on Facebook to checking their email, to following their every move online because you’re really worried about stalkers and other online predators. It appears that even with children, privacy must be sacrificed to safety.

Once the necessity of something is acknowledged, it becomes easier to be persuaded about the means. Terror threats? Of course our malls and stores and airports need to be watched. Naturally, streets and stations, ATMs and hotels should have CCTVs. Of course we need to be x-rayed. You think it’ll help if every single thing about me – including my biometrics, where I’ve travelled and how many bank accounts I have – is accessible with one identification (such as the UID)? Sure! If you assure me it’s for my own good.

As adults living in a fearful world that looks increasingly like something Philip K. Dick might have dreamt up, I can’t help wondering if there isn’t some kind of perverse vengefulness at work here: we’re watched all the time. Why not our children? It is for their own safety. For their own good.

What could surveillance possibly add to the school experience? What are they going to do – haul up the chalk-thrower? suspend the one who passes notes? send emails home complaining that so-and-so was caught sneaking coffee into her milk during breakfast and they have the footage to prove it? Can it be that parents and teachers think this is a good way to prevent child abuse, assault and so on? (Have they watched Dibakar Banerjee’s Love, Sex Aur Dhokha?)

Any ‘truth, decorum, courtesy and high-achievement’ the students of this school might attain is likely to be false because they’re too busy trying to be someone else for the camera. Isn’t adolescent self-consciousness bad enough without this?

I might be overreacting. But it’s been thought of and that is sufficient for the idea to gain traction some day. It won’t take much to convince us that our trust in our children must be backed by evidence. Or to believe that the world is a complicated and dangerous place, and schools no less so, and that such measures are necessary.

The power that adults wield over children is vast enough. The least we can give them is some privacy in which to come into their own selves in their own time.


(An edited version of this in Zeitgeist, the Saturday edition of The New Indian Express.)

**
Won't be accessing mail for a few days now. Will respond to comments when I return.

Two Minutes Older: Vegetable Love

One weekend afternoon as I was cooking, the oil ran out. I upturned the whole tin and waited for it to give up what oil it had left, drop by slow drop. As each drop gathered at the rim, backlit by the window in front of me, I started having semi-apocalyptic visions.

I thought of what it took to make even this much oil. It occurred to me that I, who laughed at those old jokes about where milk comes from (answer, according to the spoilt brat in the joke: the supermarket), did not know what it took to make the couple of litres of oil that we used every month. Whatever the process, I knew it used a lot of energy.

As I stood with upended tin of oil, the electricity went off and my visions scaled themselves up from semi- to full-blown apocalyptic ones. What if the world had no more electricity? What would we do for cooking oil? What would it take for us to produce a spoonful of oil for one meal’s tadka?

Field, oil seeds, planting, watering (without the benefit of pumps), harvesting, pressing – I felt exhausted just thinking about it and I wasn’t even taking into account the months of waiting we would have to endure in between all the hectic activity described above.

The waiting seemed to me the most exciting and frustrating part. A few months earlier, my son had planted the eye of a potato in our garden and every day he would drag my mother and me out to monitor its progress. As long as it was sprouting and growing visibly, it was clear that much was happening out of sight and below the ground. Once the leaves achieved a uniform greenness and height, however, he no longer knew how to tell if the potatoes were ready to harvest or not.

“Shall we pull it up to see how big it is?” I asked.

Naturally, I did not expect to be taken seriously. But I didn’t think my son would curl his lip at me either. This was the same boy, who, just a few months before, had thought that burying a body was a good way of preserving it so that we could take it out from time to time to remind ourselves about how it used to look when alive.

 Children grow up so fast, I thought to myself and we sighed at how long it was taking for the potatoes to grow. Three weeks later, unable to bear the suspense any longer, we harvested the potatoes.

This is what we got: five teeny, miniscule white and skinless potatoes. We fried them (while giving thanks that we could just go and buy oil instead of making it) and thought philosophical thoughts in the few seconds it took us to consume the result.

Since that time, I have been paying more attention to process in the natural world. I’d like to be able to say I sleep better because of this new-found enthusiasm for all things cyclical, but that would be going too far.

Let’s just say, it’s soothing to see the seasons change – to enjoy the rain of leaves in spring before the flowers come, to collect the flowers when they fall, to dry and powder them so that there’s natural colour for next year’s Holi, like a memory preserved and then relived*. It is even possible to welcome the thought of summer just because it brings with the heat the promise of watermelons, aam panna and khus sherbet.

There’s also a sense of anticipation and contentment that owes everything to the time it takes for things to happen. This is what Andrew Marvell must have meant by ‘vegetable love’ in his poem, ‘To His Coy Mistress.’ He, of course, was urgently wooing his beloved so for him time was a wingèd chariot hurrying near. We’re in no rush here, even though we may sometimes be impatient.

Every time we eat a papaya from our garden or spend an afternoon shaking down gooseberries from the tree and argue about whether to eat them up or pickle them, I consider not just the day but the whole year seized.

(An edited version of this in Zeitgeist, the Saturday edition of The New Indian Express.)

*Just so you know: epic fail. We forgot we left the flowers out to dry and when we returned from a week-long trip, they were burnt brown. 

__

Bonus photo, found on Jenny Davidson's blog and saved in that choking feedreader I've talked about for nearly a year for just such a contingency.

Toshi leaves her fortress

After all the fuss and tantrums, Toshi has left the fortress and decided to see for herself what it's like out here.

Welcome, kiddo.

the curse of annual day functions

Never again.

You hear me? Never again.

It wasn't even as if it was my own kid's Annual Day*. The kid's closest friends invited him to theirs and we said ok. After a mad scramble to get there on time, we found - what's new - that the event wouldn't begin until an hour later (we were waiting upon the Chief Guest, Saroj Khan**).

It was pure torture: kids reciting their rehearsed speeches in a way that doesn't seem to have changed in 30 years (I half expected the girl to spread out her skirt in a half-curtsy like those St. Ann's kids of my youth were taught to do...oh god! that's the cue for my migraine to return. Make note of all triggers, Space Bar); tinsely props, Bollywood, Bollywood, Bollywood.

I can't even go on - I'm so depressed. But the Principal or Director or whoever, feeling she needed to justify all the classes reassigned for rehearsals, the days spent at the venue, and the holiday they would have the following day, reeled off dubious statistics to prove that involvement with 'art' increased a child's 'performance' in school four-fold.

After an hour of this, and after one of the kid's friends had done with her performance, I said we were going to leave.

In the parking lot, we found ourselves locked in by other cars that were not even left in neutral. We sat in the car for an hour listening to the radio and watching the moon. Then, as some cars started going over the verge and out, and the space around us cleared somewhat, I did the same thing. Never done it before, mind you and never want to again. I worried about the axle, the wheel, all kinds of things, but really didn't want to hang around until 10pm for the owners of the cars around me to return.

Like the raven said, "Nevermore!"

__

* At the kid's school, Annual Day = each class doing their act under the big tamarind tree at the back. Only the parents of that particular year are invited, and it's all painless and over in an hour. This is what I call civilised. Plus, there's no moralising about Life and Courage and Country and all that.

** Yes, the choreographer. What can I say?

From there to here, from here to there

1. You know what freaks me out? To log into my mail and find an old friend who is no longer alive, listed as available to chat on my sidebar. I'm guessing it's family using that old and supposedly defunct id, but WTF?! What could there be to check in that mailbox?

Something similar happened after a Facebook friend passed away recently. For the first few days there were quotes from poems, a lot of 'missing you' and 'thinking of you' notes which, though futile, were at least understandable. Less comprehensible were the flowers gifted and sheep thrown at and Farmville products peddled on his page. WTF?

We're entering a new age of joblessness.

2. Sustainable Aircraft must be read. Read everything, but especially read Michael Scharf and go through all of Linh Dinh's piece Street Reading.

3. Are you a poor Indian writer? Kuzhali Manickavel has some advice for you. If you leave praise you might get elected to be a unicornperson. (Alternatively, you could just leave her all your money.)

4. from the Archives of Things I Have Seen First-Hand: the ability some people have to extrapolate one or two casual, incomplete conversations into coherent world-views in their retelling of it. This is the way one random student collared on his way out somewhere becomes a Student, and his ill-considered remarks become representative of something else altogether. This, dear readers, is how opinion is formed. (This is also how we went through journalism class and something-something research while studying mass comm. Only, you don't expect grown-up professional folks to follow the same methodology).

5. About the storytelling session last night: the place was done up beautifully. More people came than we expected, what with the 'Seige' - as all the papers are calling it - still taking place elsewhere in the city and all.

Learnings include:

Never read first if you can read last. People are always coming in late and will either entirely miss your reading or you will be distracted with shifting seating arrangements, people waving to each other to indicate saved places, or the sound test will take place only during your reading.

Never assume that storytelling means story reading. Know your own story well enough to be able to tell it without the help of the book. If your story depends too much on how you've written it and the precise order of words or even the specific use of those exact words, it is a bad story to tell children who are easily distracted with the balloon-lamps and the candles and the bean bags lying around.

Don't use your own child as a benchmark. Everyone's vocabulary is unique and variable, as is their lived experience, and what works for one child or a group of at most three children will not necessarily work for a larger group.

Get a copy of Mooshak e Kaghazi and watch before future storytelling sessions for children.

Loud is not necessarily more communicative. Kids get subtlety - really, they do.

On the other hand, as a storyteller, you're competing with TV serials and video games, and whatever strategy you're using to replace volume, it'd better be a good one.

That's all, folks.

The Scholastic Aviva Storytelling Night, Hyderabad

I'm taking two stories along: one for the younger kids and one for the older, and will decide which to read depending on what kind of kids turn up.

I wrote 'The Do-nut-nut-nut Oven' for my son's 6th birthday, but I mostly figure it'll be okay for eight-year-olds. I've never read 'Hide and Seek' out, so I'm hoping there'll be plenty older ones!

Let's see how it goes.

Spaniard is a Glutton for Punishment

Not really. Spaniard merely didn't know that the birthday party she dropped her son off at wouldn't get over when they said it would. Spaniard is trusting and naive like that and never learns.

This party was at a gaming mall. That sounds like a den of iniquity, but it isn't, really. There's a food court as you enter and up a couple of floors are a bunch of noisy video games that I didn't stay to listen to.

So when I came to pick the kid up,Ii expected the cake to have been cut and only the matter of a return gift pending.

What I found was a game in progress - did I mention the place was done up in blue and while balloons? And you could hear the music two traffic lights away? - two kids were surrounded by a gang of children (of their own respective genders), who were attempting to smother them in toilet paper. Apparently this is how mummies are made. The event organiser was shrieking encouragement into the mike, the music was...let's just say, when I drank the thimbleful of coke I was offered, my ears popped. The girls won. The event organiser managed to sound both hurt and surprised.

Next up was dancing. With the EO acting as choreographer, chief mime, lip synch artist and lead dancer. The kids hopped around and yelled like a bunch of bloodthirsty extras from The Lord of the Flies.

After dinner and the most nauseating cake in the history of birthday parties, the return gifts made me feel even more ill: a huge bag, with three wrapped gifts and a bunch of assorted candy. At least one gift broke before bedtime; another was a vehicle for more candy; the last had a sticker on it to remind you that this was so-and-so's birthday. Last year these folks took the kids to a bookstore and told them they could spend 300 bucks on their own return gifts. I was appalled but I can't decide which is worse.

I think this party was much more fun.

Two Minutes Older: Bread upon the Waters

As the last year drew to an end, I was taught a lesson by my son and his friends. I am, in general, averse to being edified in this manner and was more astonished than pleased. But I have now decided that this is the proper way to begin the new year: with a shiny new can-do spirit back-lit with a halo of faith in human kindness.

This is how it happened: I had taken my son to visit his friends, two girls whom he has known almost from the hour of their – and his – birth. It hardly needs to be said that they spend a lot of time together. Usually their mother or I visit each other and chat, while the children go off somewhere to play by themselves. On this occasion, about two weeks ago, they decided to give us front row seats to a game of Hide and Seek.

It’s a game I hate, especially in its local variation called ‘Dhappa’, where the ‘den’ can practically pass on the title to her next of kin, with the way the rules are arranged. I loathe the game because I spent my childhood being the den. Under the circumstances, I was disposed to sympathise with my son, who drew the short straw.

He counted to fifty then started to hunt. Soon, he found the other two and I felt a glow of pride. Then they started to quarrel gently: it was the turn of the older of the two girls to be the den. She groaned (as who wouldn’t) and said she hated being ‘It’. The youngest quickly said that she would be the den instead, since she was the youngest. My son claimed the youngest had actually reached the wall before he did and so he should once again be the den.

I don’t know where they got this selfless gene from. Not from me, I can assure you. (Also, I was slightly shocked at all this lying for a good cause.)

While the children spent the rest of the afternoon inventing new ways in which to lose in order to benefit their friends, I chewed my nails down to the quick trying to figure this one out. The moral of the story – if you could call it either a moral or a story – seemed to be that people surrounding you should be made happy no matter what and that your happiness was closely tied to theirs.

With this very provisional conclusion in hand, I further realised that, applied to my life, this amounts to casting my bread upon the waters in the most profligate way, in the hope that it what I send out will be returned to me tenfold.

It seemed like a good resolution to make for the new year and one, moreover, that I could, with a little effort, actually keep. Of course, it depends on what I send out into the world: even the mildest and most well-meaning bread could return toxic and slightly soggy, given the quality of the water these days. This means that I will have to be full of whimsy or good humour or some other quality I will find very difficult to sustain, just so these things can be multiplied. I will do it because I don’t know how to do it and that always works best for me.

What this means for you is, in exchange for two minutes of your life every fortnight, you get a little bit of unpredictability which, as everyone knows, is Fun. And as that learned sage, Dr. Seuss, said long ago, ‘it’s fun to have fun but you have to know how’.

This column might talk about poetry or films; it might rant or talk about education. There might be trees in it or reptiles. Right now, it is hard to say. As I have said elsewhere in introduction, I am deeply committed to doing nothing and hope to persuade you to join me in my commitment (after all, when world leaders at Copenhagen can do it, why can’t I?)

So here’s the first consignment of bread. I shall wait for the cake. And you should know that I like chocolate best.

(An edited version of this in Zeitgeist, the Saturday edition of The New Indian Express.)

A Facebook style update on my life

Just watched Quantum of Solace. This means that I will have to do that Bond-Smiley post after all, no? (Or maybe I need to read more Ian Fleming first.)

But Daniel Craig is so hot! I mean, I didn't see Casino Royale on the large screen (DVD); before that I saw him in Enduring Love (don't bother); today I saw him on a soul-satisfying Imax screen. And when I think it almost didn't happen it makes me shudder.

Oh, and the kid saw his first Bond film. I thought I'd bring him up to speed with the franchise and whispered rather hurriedly to him that the car in the tunnel (the one I happened to be pointing to at the time I started to speak) was an Aston Martin and Bond always drove one. 'It's an Alfa Romeo,' he said and I thought to myself, ha! At last the kid's got a car wrong.

Turned out he was right: the next second the Italian cops barked car identifications into their phones or whatever, and I distinctly heard them say Alfa Romeo.

Huh.

A little bit of this and a little bit of that

There have been an astonishing number of people landing up here on google searches for Eunoia. I'm wondering why. Apparently the BBC have suddenly decided to review it (or something. Please read comments however). But why, having read samples from there, must people have to search for it and land up here? I'm mystified.

**

This is a strange week in my life. Nearly two years ago, I was in Delhi visiting a friend. I used to go to college with the wife and edit things for the husband (in later years. I wasn't born knowing how to edit). Back then, friend said he was making a film on such-and-such subject and would I mind being in the film. I said, sure!

Now those chickens are coming home to roost.

So this friend is going to be here for the rest of the week filming me (my life as a film, Falsie) and it's an interesting experience. I'll tell you why.

For one thing, when you're behind the camera or viewing someone's life as just one portion of the film, you treat them as (however hard you try not to) a commodity or an experience that you mediate as soon as it happens. For a change, since I am the subject, I get to see things from the other side. I feel the pressure.

For another thing, my daily life's pretty boring and I find myself trying to think up things that might be interesting for my friend to shoot that will look good visually on his film. In effect, I am trying to reshape my life temporarily so that it looks acceptable on screen. This is not to say that it's not true to my life; it's just that I'm considering scrunching up a lot of excitement into my day for a purpose. I'm editing my life in camera, as it were.

What books can I leave lying around? Ought I to finally start on that photography project I've been meaning to do but been to damn bone lazy to begin? Where can I go where the camera will be allowed? How many people's consent can I take for granted just because I casually gave mine two years ago on a terrace in Delhi on a winter morning when there were oranges and coffee to seduce me?

And finally, what should I wear?

**

Since I'm scraping the barrel I may as well do it in style.

My son says the other day, "Amma, what do you call it when you say 'write' but when it happened before you call it 'wrote'?"

"It's called past tense."

"Oh, ya. Past tense.

"Amma, you know what the past tense of self-confidence is? Self-confidental."

Since that day, I've been looking for my grandfather's copy of Wren and Martin. I mean, my grammar's pretty shaky - I can't tell a preposition for a gerund - but I know how it works if I don't have to explain. Now it appears I will have to learn how to.