We all have our share of moulting. But schools
are special: every year of schooling is
concomitant with some new stage of body and
mind, some part in a play with a changing script
and a whimsical lightsman. And schools, streets,
parents, people, they work on us day and night,
like tireless potters, deprecating one another,
messing up for us what the caterpillar does so
well. But one of my schools changed me very
much: instead of trying to mould me, it broke
the cast of my upbringing.
Learning by the
Kilo
For much of my schooling, studying was by rote.
Exams and homework were duties I was born into.
One had to stand first in class. And when
standing first was applauded, I began to chase
it; it fed me. Wheeled by an ambitious mother
and backed by an entire pantheon of gods bathed
daily in milk, I was quite the model student.
When I wasn't, there were scenes, and I was left
with all the weight of what I'd done: fine, if I
wanted to go astray and wash vessels, it was up
to me. So I memorized my answers diligently.
I got accustomed to children in white-and-blue
uniforms pouring out, piling up and swarming in
noisy eddies around me. There was an assortment
of punishments for us - ranging from
waist-pinching and good old wooden-scale-whacks
on the palm to a sophisticated crouching
position, the Hen, in which you gripped your
ears from under your knees - all depending on
what we did to get the teacher's goat - and
sometimes just like that, in a meditative way,
when the flies were annoying. The rare teacher
might indeed have been dedicated, but there was
no sense of doubt or discovery in class - there
were just too many of us for that - and in the
heat the fans hardly worked.
Stepping Out
Most people in my family were engineers. And
most people from my kind of family were either
engineers or doctors. An uncle of mine once
suggested to the family - when I was about eight
and bouncing like a rubber ball - that I should
become a doctor, "just to balance it".
My parents began to worry about my schooling.
They wanted a respectable place, a boarding
school that would teach me values as well as
prepare me for entrance exams, that would build
my character and personality and groom me into a
smart achiever, into a smiling chap with good
manners and gold medals and the willingness to
show up in silky red veshtis when there were
pujas at home.
My mother had misgivings about Krishnamurthi
schools because - while they were known to be
good, they were for the affluent, you know, boys
from rich families, who knows what habits they
have. For my father, they were too expensive.
But they looked at each other and decided it was
the right thing to do.
There's so much to learn, in choosing schools.
If my parents had gone around my new school,
wondering why there were no ranks, why there was
a pottery shed, why there was no beating or
disciplining, why children there didn't
necessarily become engineers, it might have
unsettled them wonderfully.
Stepping In
When I arrived at The Valley School, I was out
of place. I was embarrassed about my origins, my
chequered Co-Optex bed sheet, my language and my
bucket and everything else. I was besieged by
American ways. I picked up a patchy accent in an
hour, lied about having gone abroad and learned
to say 'oboy', 'yeah' and 'nope' before the sun
set on the first day. I tucked my striped shirts
out.
I caused a riot of giggle and guffaw when I
stood at the door once with my hand stretched
out and my "May I Come In?" pealed in
the ears of the class. There were no rules, no
uniforms. You didn't have to stand up while
speaking; you didn't have to say 'sir'. Most
teachers were 'uncle' and 'aunty' although a few
had nicknames you could call them by, and you
found yourself dining with them and playing
cricket with them, even giving them the glare
when your delivery missed their bat's edge.
The campus was green, and wild in places. There
was music: sitar from the Art-room, flute from a
window. I found etched terracotta on walls, and
chunks of chiselled stone at my feet. In Art
class, under a thatched roof, I painted two
brown hills with a yellow sun rising between
them, and it grew as I struggled to make it
rounder. A boy beside me was sketching in
quick, firm strokes, and what looked like blades
of grass became three men poised on a floor,
neither human nor of familiar shape, and it made
me uneasy.
My struggle in this new society was to be
something, to have an identity given that my
previous one was shattered. What would people
here approve of? Nobody seemed to care who came
first, indeed there were no ranks - so what now?
A lady teacher pointed out that I was so
comfortable being alone, for a young boy - and I
became devoutly comfortable being alone, I held
it as my flag and my anthem for years.
I now see that first year as being about
stepping over boundaries, clinging to what we
know and yet letting go to project new images.
It was also, in hindsight, a bend in a long
struggle with sincerity.
Opening Up
I was preoccupied with the differences between
the CBSE syllabus that I'd come from and the
ICSE syllabus here. I'd never heard of Set
Theory, for instance, but could quickly
calculate missing angles and unspool the tables
of savage numbers like 27. I now think this is
an important, archetypal difference: the ability
to connect and relate versus the ability to
calculate and remember.
The school was removed from the noxious fumes of
Bangalore. The air was fresh; the grass was
alive. You could do that wonderful, timeless
thing: sit below a tree with a book. You could
watch the lake's ripples, the ducks taking off
and returning to squabble, and the villagers
wrestling with their sheep at sheep-bath-time.
There were no video-games cramping the mind with
explosions, no TV shows feeding us instant
gratification. You felt the seasons. The monkeys
beat us to the fruit, stunning us with their
leaps.
There were travellers who came and went: an
Israeli architect who was obsessed with domes,
and who held up an eggshell to explain how a
dome can rest on nothing; a reticent French
miniature-artist who travelled the world to
display his work and sing with his guitar
amongst strangers; a Malayali strummer-singer
who sang about bananas, since, and he was
quite convinced of this, everybody likes
bananas, and this might unite the world some
day. I don't know how they managed it! I wanted
to travel too.
Our director sometimes spoke with us about
mindsets, and conflict because of mindsets.
There was a class on the contrived nature of
likes and dislikes, where the teacher compared
them to a game of tennis within the conditioned
mind. We sometimes made fun of it all, and the
teacher was easy to imitate ("Bayker heets
from here to there, Leyndil heets from there to
here" and so on). But some of these
sessions returned to me many years after I left
school; they stayed in the mind, like books in a
musty attic where a man can read with wonder
what he gathered by chance as a boy. In such
classes, little windows opened to questions that
didn't crystallize to an answer: like anger,
death, attachment, right, wrong.
Much of my experience outside class brought my
senses to life. Walking back from dinner to the
boys' hostel meant going through the wet, dense
vegetation at night, the strong perspirations of
the earth, the restlessness of monkeys, with
Physics and Hindi in one hand and a sputtering
torch in the other. Nature comprised not just
the dainty flowers: it was the stubbornness of
hairy moths, the skins of snakes, the ribs of
eaten rodents, the miracles of anthills and
kitten-birth and trees felled by rainstorms, the
sounds of wild boar in the bushes, the mosaic on
the wings of dead butterflies fallen in our
paths, the nervousness with which I kept looking
back when I walked alone past what we called The
Big Banyan Tree.
From the way teachers spoke of the wildlife
around us - so casually, almost as if animals
were neighbours and postmen - I grew into the
assumption that it was all a part of our lives.
I learned to admire the elegance of creatures
and respect them for what they were. I remember
a hot-headed young Indian cobra that, having
occupied the path to the hostel, threatened
everybody and swore in hisses when an audience
gathered; and a senior student, the son of a
German naturalist, coaxed it into looping around
a long stick that he held - changing ends
several times as the cobra drew towards his hand
- and then slowly walked to a bush and released
it. Nobody shrieked or threw stones or brought
forth saucers of milk. And people carried on
rather coolly: it was no great event, maybe
worth a little dinner-talk but not a fright.
Had I studied these years in a concrete building
with thirteen floors in the middle of Bombay,
these things might have meant nothing to me: a
tree might just have been a tree, as a box is
just a box. And I saw that where I came from -
where good boys studied hard and did their
duties and prayed to god and god took care of
the rest- so much was pushed under the carpet
that the carpet was an undulating joke.
When I went home during breaks, I found the old
order trivial and stultifying. There seemed to
be so many assumptions in everything at home
that conversation was difficult. My tendency to
stand quietly on the balcony got everyone
worried. My father, still anxious about the
spending on my education, anxious that something
should come out of it all, watched me closely,
at the dining table, at doors, before guests.
Then, in school, there was all the difficulty of
growing up: the groups of boys that formed, with
all their codes of conduct, their walking styles
and shibboleths, were in some ways a replacement
for the strict, bored, waist-pinching teachers
of earlier years. We were all terribly insecure:
the boys among the boys, the girls among the
girls. We were renegades with rule-books, bound
by our fears.
But you could take a walk with a girl; no ayahs
came looking for you with canes. And
occasionally, in those conversations, one ceased
to feel tested for virility, and one leaned back
on rocks, biting blades of grass, watching the
sky and speaking in low tones; one became,
occasionally, comfortable with the silence
between people, with being free of all that
insecurity.
Learning wasn't linked to rewards and
punishment. We ran the races on Sports Day with
no prizes - we just ran; at least, it was
intended that way by the school. Now there were
indeed rivalries, and to the two fastest runners
in my class - who couldn't stand each other -
this race was about proving a point. But for
others, it was fun to see how the body
responded; it wasn't so bad not to win, not to
pump your fist when someone else fell; there was
a thrill in just being, in jumping through tyres
and returning all muddy.
Many stayed away from the space the school was
trying to create; I'm confused about why. It
seemed to depend on the parents. If the parents
themselves sought such spaces, children broke
through the peer norms and found ways of
expressing themselves with a freedom they
wouldn't have found in a conventional school.
But if parents, having paid the fees and signed
the forms, left everything else to the school,
with fixed ideas of what they expected, their
children just shuffled around, chewing gum and
looking bored, like toads in the sun,
disgruntled prodigies whose place and time were
anywhere but here and now. There were other
parents who clearly said, pottery and holistic
development were all very nice, but what about
formulae and shortcuts? A question for a school
to ask might be, 'What are the parents learning
from their children's education?' If children
are stifled at home and then sent for an
alternative education, they grow - but like
potted plants, like bushes clipped with heavy
garden shears.
In Retrospect
Surely alternative education isn't separate from
alternative living. I assume that parents who
truly want a meaningful education for their
children are aware of the vulgarity of life in a
world driven by greed and envy, full of machines
and gadgetry, with the cities hostile and
congested, the air polluted, the water not fit
to drink and the people lost without their chips
and entertainment.
It's a long shot - a bit of an armchair dream -
but if schools could teach you not just how to
explore the world, but also how to live, and how
to make a living, it might change our lives and
make them richer. Now making a living is not the
same as maximizing wealth - for the latter, a
sequence of coaching classes, an IIT, an IIM and
futures-trading on Wall Street will do - it is
about that ingenuity which is in abundance in
nature, to engage, adapt, improvise and survive.
A friend of mine, a former chartered accountant,
was walking in the street one day and suddenly
realized he was meant to be a baby-photographer,
not an auditor. He huffed and puffed - but
managed to get going. It's a small-scale,
personal job, with neither Sunday nor Monday,
not a job in a large firm driven by metrics, but
he's doing wonderfully. It would blend well with
a lecture on ecological diversity, as an
instance of local adaptation, as an argument
against disruptive, large-scale projects. And
perhaps a school could nurture such living.
In India, it might be easier than in the
developed West to teach a way of life that is
part of all the cycles of nature, in which you
know what ginger and turmeric can do, how
technology can work with natural cycles and not
against them, why the topsoil and mangroves are
precious to you, how to grow and build things,
why a bottle of cola costs you much, much more
than ten rupees.
There's the wonder of living, greater than all
the percentiles on printed cards. Mathematics
and physics are not just in dreary pages, but in
the swinging of a cricket ball, in the steady
logarithmic growth of a common snail's shell, in
the design of the winged seeds of tropical
lianas, that glide in windless air. There's
history and Shakespeare in the epic struggles of
plants- their greed, stratagems, agreements and
treachery in trying to grow in cities, fields
and crowded rainforests. There's percussion in
poetry, music in whale songs, madness within the
atom. There are profoundly troubling questions
in physics, in my moving unchanged and forever
if someone pushed me in space, in the idea of
the Milky Way having an edge… My school was a
good setting for making such connections, but I
didn't look at what we studied deeply enough -
maybe at thirteen, I moved away from
conventional education too late. I am astonished
whenever I discover an extraordinary experience
now that I just moped past back then; things
forced apart in textbooks are now lying spilled
in my mind like paints on a floor, seeping into
one another. |
