Menagerie Minds

It was the most gentle of nudges that one can experience. At the turn of the day, there was this little boy, 2-3 years old, who in the most ingenious of ways presented me with an entire menagerie. He took my palm, and with a pen in his hand drew out different shapes and sizes on it and then christened them with the name of a bird or an animal. The glee in his eyes, the tender forte of his hands and the firm belief of what he was bestowing me was indeed a very rewarding moment. There I was, witnessing the brilliance of a child who displayed the ability to think, create and talk about what he felt, experienced and wanted the world to know – without as much as the bat of an eyelid, without questioning himself of what he was presenting and with an attitude deprived of any qualm. And that is a dignity that one wants to so experience throughout. The ability to live out what you think, feel and experience devoid of any constraints.  And it was in that one moment that this adorable 3yr old taught me the most sacred of all theories that I had so forgotten – “Man is made by his belief.  As he believes, so he is”.  This little boy, my source of inspiration, saw the lion, cheetah and all those various birds in his imagination and he lived it in my palm. Since then, I have held on to the images for some time and am convinced that it won’t go away for a long time.

The sequel to this experience (like most sequels) is not as strong… but very relevant and related though. There has been so much talked about the need for revamping the education system in the country. A sizable amount of time, money and space spent by the 3^rd estate gathering what is going wrong in our schools and colleges. Notwithstanding, the government crying out the obvious that we need to invest more in education. 

The question that has not been asked, or dare I say, has been skirted for long. “What is it that we need to change?” OR “What is the vision that we have for education in this country?”  The areas being singled out tend to point towards what is currently wrong with it!

For a country that takes pride in holding perhaps the world’s oldest universities - Nalanda – is it so tough for us to figure out what to focus on? Can we go beyond concentrating on report cards, percentage of absenteeism in schools and colleges, the challenges and travails of learning by rote, teacher qualifications …etc and with single minded effort look at what constitutes the nucleus of our society?  In a world that is shrinking fast due to technology, and is experiencing spotlight conversations of a ‘global culture’, there is this need to expand the territory of individualistic knowledge in the classroom.

We have for long been guided by Macaulay’s Minute on Indian Education. “We have to educate a people who cannot at present be educated by means of their mother tongue. We must teach them some foreign language. The claims of our own language are hardly necessary to recapitulate.” Macaulay’s reference was to that of the English language in that day and age. WE need to meander out of this interpretation, and encourage a framework that guides the child in a classroom – in any classroom to speak in a language  and follow a thought process the he/ she identifies with. The claim of individuality and the belief that overrides it is hardly necessary to recapitulate.

I have been through school, college and university surviving tests, exams and assessments and many a times not! A lack of understanding of why 2 trains travelling from 2 different stations at an x speed would meet at some point… was perhaps responsible for my forbearing absence in the IITs and the IIMs of the world. I believed that all trains got me home and I was content with that… just as the 3yr old boy believed that the little circle he carved out on my palm was a cheetah. And any education system that will help keep that belief alive is the answer to getting it right.  

Acalculia Anonymous

I had to get my multiplication tables right. Mom in the kitchen busy making dinner. Dad expected anytime. The doorbell would ring and that would signal the beginning of the evening chores – laying out the plates, having dinner, cleaning up the table and then crash for the day! However it’s the all-inclusive timetable prior to the ringing of the doorbell that has stayed with me.  Sitting cross legged on the kitchen floor, with a math book in my hand and dampened senses (at least I made it seem so), I was crying out loud the multiplication tables, striving to memorize it.  A dip in the inflection, tone, or for that matter anything that could even distinctly allude to a lack of conviction that 5 x 5 is 25 would mean a repeat recitation!!!  

The entire event of trying to memorize the scores was turbulent. The pain was not so much in going through the process as much as watching your sibling, the young master at work... someone, who had gotten the entire thing (dare I say phenomenon) right. If I had got one set right, I would have felt like Buz Aldrin. My brother was the person who could unravel the mystery of these tangled numbers using a magic wand of some sort. He had cracked the code and I hadn’t!!  And guess all of sibling rivalry started right there… on the kitchen floor!

Every child goes through the process and over time learns to deal with the rivalry and of course in my case of not being able to spin the numbers right through school and what more even through college. For many years, I wasn’t sure of how to deal with the fact that I wasn’t good at something  (THAT something being numbers!!!) which my brother was so good at. He just seemed to know it all and here I was, older than him struggling and ALL that mom did was to get us together to memorize them … the operative word being “together”. Guess, she was the only one who knew what was happening there and the WHY behind it all. The principle for bro was simple – get it right the first time and scoot off with friends. I didn’t realize for long that therein lay the blueprint.

Years pass,… and there are still times when I live through the image- and this time with a smile. I continue to struggle on what 5 x 5 is! Bro helps me out when I go shopping. All’s well that end’s well.

It was only till a few days back that the image came back – and this time like the brush strokes of a water color painting – emerging out of the shadows of some secret fissure.  The process that for so long I had struggled with explaining to my colleagues, co-workers and to so many who have sought an answer to the ‘concept of differentiation’! I was struggling through a position paper on Performance Management, the famous (or should I say infamous Bell Curve) when the image of me sitting on the kitchen floor, next to my brother rang out aloud. And with that, the years that followed of me struggling through the maze of numbers.  

And as if like an impulse, my experience of that many years back seemed to be the most logical of moments that I have had. I had been struggling for the last so many years explaining to so many people the need for differentiation through the bell curve. In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rival because they succeed in adapting themselves  best to the environment. Darwin had come to my rescue to explain the so called rational basis of why my brother could do... what I couldn’t.  He had figured it all out… and I hadn’t – and this difference was the only thing that mattered to me THEN.  A figment of an idea that was the basis of an explanation for all the anger and (I must confess) perhaps jealousy too. My mother, on the other hand, ignored Darwin and had played the calculus card. 

Differentiation (the mathematical term) is a method by which one can find the derivative for a ‘function’ at any point. Mathematically speaking, one could look at a derivative geometrically  (as the slope of a curve) or the physical way (as a rate of change). The slope of a curve translates to the rate of change and the way one could find both is the derivative.  She had banked on everything possible that could influence the slope of my learning curve and thereby bring in that change in me.

The math / derivative had played itself out in its entirety.  Everything required by the definition was true. And considering that everything was true, therein was an example of the concept – of a positive differentiation.  Not once had she tried to push, cajole or pressurize the learning process. I had gathered over a period of time, the motivational factors that governed my brothers learning, learned that it was not just a brush of luck that he had gotten the process right. It was a well thought through function /  a derivative that got him out of the kitchen ASAP. He was in the moment playing out in his head what he needs to do ‘now’, the speed with which it needs to be done to ensure he is elsewhere the next moment. The faster you change, the easier it is to manage the slope and therein lies the difference. 

I had unconsciously perhaps embedded that process in many other facets of my academia.  His ability to be ‘in the moment’ irrespective of what he did – memorized the multiplication tables or the famous speech of Mark Antony, actively skimmed through the voluminous books of Irving Wallace or narrated the humor of Jeeves is something that has stayed with me. I see him today with his daughter in his arms – so totally in the moment....!!

The feeling of dislike towards math which got directed towards a sibling, had translated itself over a period of time to a change in me – the beginning of a slope that branched off on its own. There is no need to work twice as hard to be as successful. There is no glass ceiling. Guess, I have learned to live in the moment too since then. I have realized it just now.  There is the new fangled approach now to the bell curve which I could perhaps propagate – all born on that kitchen floor at some point of time in the past. I need to flesh the ingredients out well.  

The War of the Worlds could well be someone’s Ugly Duckling!

… And I thought I had read it all. Science Fiction has caught my imagination for a long time now. Guess the craze started with Children’s literature and then moved on to the world of Huxley and Wells and Philip Dick! Having lived it for so long a time, it gets difficult to see the world around in any different light. It’s been one those days at work – not so tense, not so stressful – a day when I could afford to look around and observe what is happening around me.  I like these days.  It is a moment when you could figuratively ‘binge and purge’ your imagination – drink in all that is truly happening.  I sure wish I could have a lot more of these. And I recall that it was one such day during college that I picked up Wells …

Have you read HG Wells ‘The War of the Worlds’? Written in 1895, it depicts the conflict between mankind and the aliens. The narrative is in 1^st person, an unnamed protagonist who lives in London as he relates the moments when Earth is invaded by martians. The novel stands out as one of the pioneers  in the field of Science Fiction, and by many, has been interpreted as a piece of literature that offers commentary on evolutionary theory, British Imperialism and even Victorian fears and prejudices. The historical nature of the novel, to me though, has been of little significance. I must confess, that it has been the case with most of what I have read. It is the adaptations of the narrative that has enticed me so often (at least thus far). And, one such,  is its adaptation into a radio drama during the 2^nd world war.

The story was presented as a 60minute narrative, as a series of ‘news bulletins’ which seemed to advocate to an audience, at the brink of a world war, that an alien invasion was in progress. What more, the drama was presented with no commercial breaks; which compounded the impact. Am quite convinced, that it is the radio drama that assured Well’s fame. ! The radio broadcast of this narrative led to a nationwide riot, with people fleeing their houses – most of them not knowing where to head. "Was it fact or truly fiction?" .. was the question that many asked even after being told that it was the latter! The ability of the script writer to wrap the novel into a 1hr commentary, create the immediacy of the invasion, and ensure a script that sliced out the impact is phenomenal. The waves were felt across the continent. It was a day of high adrenaline, of exceeding expectations in more ways than one (for better or worse…)

This allusion to the difference between reality (the original) and the adaptation (radio drama) is particularly so relevant.  The wide spread panic was largely because of the absence of the context. In the throes of fear (a war in this case), one tends to forget what the real world looks like. Did Wells really write a book called ‘The War of the Worlds’? Is it relevant at all? How many of the listeners knew about it. And if they did, how many could recollect.  The reality was the ALLIES and the AXIS and both words so much in beat with ALIENS! There were no sources for differentiation and the boundaries had blurred.

The pulse is the same as of today. The requisite to make the whole shebang ‘relevant’, the demand to ‘leverage’ of what is already available, the pressure to not ‘reinvent the wheel’ and the incessant need of ‘less is more’ tends to mask the reality – a reality where an individual yearns to be original, thirsts for innovation, even disruptive ones perhaps and seeks to be relevant from his / her frame of reference.  The adaptation enticing thus far has become a negotiable moment.  Any narrative lends itself to the moment and a silent panic ensues.  

There is this War of the Worlds struggling in many of us- an unrest caused by the combat between voices (heard, not seen) in a context that could well be the figment of our imagination.  The poise for ingenuity and adaptation and the involvement of both is the need for the hour.  The ugly duckling is lost in a world that is unknown to him …. Yet unaware that round the corner the swans exist! 

The Cold Cloud

Guess there are some revelations that hit you at the dead of the night.  It was around, I guess midnight, while watching TV, and amidst all the sniffing that one experiences with the onslaught of a cold, the constant use of a vaporub and the incessant sipping of rum and hot water; hoping that it will make you feel better – that I heard a shrink (ahem, on the other side of the screen) not so subtly assert “if you want to feel better, take a pill. If you want to get it right, face the truth”

The TV screen for the last few days has been a source of providing the ‘distraction’ that one so needs in the throes of a cold and sore throat. And suddenly, it was more than a distraction for me  ...just then!  Guess, I do want to feel better and the irony of it all…there is no real medicine for the common cold. I just have to wait for it to just ‘go away’ and then there hit me the familiar parenting words ‘why are you suffering so often … why don’t you try and understand the reason… etc etc…??” Guess it was like a jigsaw puzzle that falls into place, all of a sudden. 

It was like becoming aware of a feeling that for long existed – with the knowledge of its existence. Not knowing why it was there, how to deal with it and convinced with the consoling words that one often listens to ‘time will tell! It’s all a matter of time’. Guess, one is made to believe that life’s conundrums are like the common cold demanding the patience of time to heal through.  The anxiety of dealing with a decision taken, the nervousness that follows through, the fear of failure, and perhaps the lure of the pragmatic to stay on with status quo.  The heart and the head are never ever aligned. The head says, take the pill… the heart says, face the truth.  

The expression of my face and the language of my body – inert with the suffering of the most common of ailments and I need to get out of it. The truth is not so much the anxiety of dealing with the decision taken – as much as that of the need to prove the rationale of it. The fact  is not so much in the nervousness of the follow through as much as the need to find some inspiration ..someone who has taken the same road. The veracity is not in accepting the fear of failure but in working through the phase before one meets with success.

This heavy breathing just requires that strength of character and a very obtuse sense of bearing to address the anxiety – to set oneself at an angle and listen to your breath resonate.  It IS quite something…. Listening to yourself breathe.  Guess, I don’t need the pill after all… (not that there is one) for this so common an (h)ailment….