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Thoughts around the education system that taught me the words filling this essay
Mumbai suburbs provide an interesting contrast.
This cosmopolitan city is home to people from all walks of economic standing and cultural backgrounds cramping their muscles to make it in life.
India is diverse beyond imagination with its menagerie of languages, religions, and festivities. Within a single block, you could find people below the poverty line, and affluent ministers with their crores stashed in bribe currency.
To survive Mumbai’s heavy competition requires every middle-class family to speak English with working proficiency.
Those who immigrated from another state can speak at least three languages. For example — I can speak English (first language), Hindi (pseudo-national), Tamil (mother-tongue), and Marathi (regional.)
This significant adaptation aids in mastering new languages quickly, even as an adult.
But there is a downside to trying to fit too many cooks in the kitchen. Vocabulary suffers for at least one of them, especially when most never cross state boundaries.
This heavily burdens the education infrastructure to equip the new generation and keep them from lining railway stations begging for alms.
I studied at a quasi-public school. It had its own school board and charged operational fees, which were minimal due to the government’s financial support.
Each class had around 65–80 students.
Surely you’re joking, Mr. Subramanian.
No, I am not. We’re talking about an affordable school in Mumbai, after all.
Here we could witness kids coming to class slightly after daybreak, and returning to their realities at home, which were as varied as the seasons.
Here are a couple of extremes that come to mind on this quiet, sunny morning.
Kid 1:Me
I remember the butt-whupping I got from dad when I messed up my 2nd-grade English exam.
This was one paper where scoring a silver medal was worse than illiteracy, since my mom was quite the author and teacher.
This question of despair asked me to list three rhyming words for —
- cat
- sun
- bat
Easy, right? I had faced more formidable opponents and emerged victorious. These were my answers —
- cat — rat
- sun — fun
- bat — ball
It wasn’t two out of three that messed up my dad on a hot and sweaty night without electricity at the dispensary.
It was the sheer stupidity of making a mistake on an abnormally similar question within the same field of vision.
I wrote bat-ball because my grandpa would invite me to play “bat-ball” since I couldn’t yet say “cricket.” In another functional family of this age, such naiveties would be considered cute and posted on Facebook for a million claps and “Aww”s.
Meanwhile, I was ironically fielding paperweights and belt buckles. Maybe all that strenuous workout made me the successful person I am today. Did it?
It got me temporary results but left me traumatized at the mere thought of exams.
Though, I should admit — it was way better than when my brother frolicked back home only to realize he forgot to flip the question paper. What a dumbass!
My school had a treasure trove of English teachers while math teachers balanced the scale by being equally pathetic (It got a lot better as I started my final school year. Lucky me.)
It didn’t help that my mom was barely making progress with her table of 12.
And my dad’s professorial skills speak for themselves. He would have disemboweled me had I failed to become a 4-year-old Plato and not given the correct answer to “2*0” on my first try.
My fifth-grade teacher was in dire need of therapy. She displayed extreme coldness at the sight of kids, especially those who were terrible at math.
Obviously, I stood out.
I got perfect grades in every exam except math, Marathi, and drawing. And she was always yearning to embarrass me in front of the class.
She asked us to define “percent of x” on the first day of opening that chapter. Her idea of teaching was for 7-year-olds to study independently, and hers to test our IQ.
Her stern tone attacked the first kid in the left-most column —
“Stand up. Define %age of something.”
“purr…what?”
“Okay, next. Stand up! I won’t repeat my question. Also, you…first kid — kneel on the floor.”
And thus, every kid in the class yielded by kneeling. This charade didn’t take long to reach me.
Some smartass had replied that percentage was “anything divided by 100,” but he ended up with a similar fate as the others. The harder you try and dress to impress, the more sadistic bitches intend to tear away your britches.
I echoed the same answer. If you are going to be executed, better be one among hundreds rather than hanging lonely in the public square.
“My Divide by 100” reply received a deadly stare. After what seemed like an eternity, she replied —
“Everyone in the staff room said you were smart. Seems they were mistaken. Next!”
She would have been an excellent swimmer with her heart of ice.
Kids 2 and 3: S1 and S2
Let’s create a one-letter pseudonym for this one.
I assigned the same letter since both were sisters separated by a few months. They were also held back by a couple of years and hence, landed in our class.
This meant they were two years older than all of us — which was akin to 20 for 9-year old’s. Those sisters belonged in our siblings’ classrooms.
They bore a unique trait that set them apart from the other 60-plus students in the class.
Both of them were disheveled, smelly, and uncouth. They wore the same faded uniform every day for a week in the unforgivingly humid tropical climate.
They shared textbooks, and when one was absent from class, the other often followed suit.
They also had a knack for borrowing stationary. And both had a distinctive rebellious streak of not completing their homework.
Most of us detested them. Even teachers were fed up with their lack of respect for instruction. The naughtiest kids in the class still made progress, but these girls were utterly hopeless.
Mrs. A was our class teacher who also taught us English.
For non-native speakers, English is hard to master unless it is spoken at home. Strong accents get incorporated, which becomes incomprehensible to the rest of the world.
Mrs. A wanted to nip this problem in the bud.
I remember a reading session when one of us pronounced film as “Filam.” She made us repeat “Fillllm” a hundred times. Quite literally.
Owing to this effort, I can never mispronounce “films,” “restaurant,” and “pronunciation” again.
I can also never forget how these made me an attractive person years later. My fluency made people trust me more and overestimate my intelligence.
Mrs. A was assertive but also kind-hearted. And she was the first to glimpse into the souls of these sisters.
She noticed they didn’t do their homework because their dirt poverty made notebooks unaffordable.
These girls had self-taught to write in short-hand to save space. Because in their world, every line was expensive, and every few pages were worth a day’s meal.
Their mother was a maid, and their father, a raging alcoholic.
She would spend the day mopping floors and cleaning toilets, only to come back to the horrors dispatched by the abusive husband.
Their bread money was cut short to sharing morsels to accommodate the drinking problem of the bully. They lived in a highly violent environment where the mother spent most nights trying to protect her daughters from getting whaled upon.
In India, if you come from a lower-income household, there is a high chance of excessive patriarchy.
Families had to provide unofficial dowry money to get their daughters married (as dowry was made illegal. However, the law isn’t enough to destroy a cultural practice.)
This family was barely making ends meet. And to top it off, the mother gave birth to two daughters. Indoctrinated by this visibly broken system, I cannot fathom how much she would be blaming herself for her failure.
It only gets more hopeless because the mother cannot earn more because of her gender and illiteracy. Their meager household income was capped, but inflation of whiskey wasn’t.
These girls used to bunk classes to share some of their mother’s workload. They also covered when their mother fell ill as their family couldn’t afford sick days.
Allow me to free my thoughts around this —
I argued with mom a while back about divorces. She claimed it is never the solution under any circumstance as it is defeatist.
I could hear the strain in her voice, trying to battle culture with logic. If these sisters were in the US, their mother could have kicked out their deadbeat Daddy’s inebriated arse.
These girls were potentially scarred for life because they were unlucky to be born in a society that considered men to be divine, attending meetings in God’s durbar.
One day, both these girls were absent again. This was more than happenstance since they had barely attended 40% of the classes in the last four weeks.
Mrs. A had enough. She provided us with this teachable moment —
“You kids need to know something — These two girls are struggling to make ends meet. So, I want each of you to help them. You may not like them, but it is all the more vital for you to get to know them.
Happiness is not about having something. It is about having something to give away.
I want each of you to contribute two blank notebooks. Tell your parents that Mrs. A asked you to contribute Rs.20 for this effort.
And those who cannot afford this, meet me after class whenever you want. Here is also my phone number if you want to talk privately. I hope most of you donate.”
And we all did.
Together we contributed 142 notebooks to last the rest of the girls’ school life. Mrs. A demonstrated the power of cumulative addition in charity.
Here is where reality also sets in and what made Mrs. A such a fabulous person and mentor.
The S sisters didn’t automatically finish their homework. Their grades didn’t immediately skyrocket with our philanthropy.
Also, we didn’t end up accepting them just because we knew their state of existence. In fact, some of us disliked them even more because they didn’t even bother to thank us.
But Mrs. A knew something we didn’t.
Manners, ambition, and pride are values that need to be inculcated. They need to be carefully nurtured. Our donation was only one small step to changing these two lives.
She doubled down on her efforts by taking extra classes only for the two of them, scolding them if they missed any of their homework, and recommending other teachers to assist them more.
She did something for them that no one else in the world bothered to —
She cared.
It wasn’t long before she became their proxy parent holding the torch of hope to illuminate their dark future.
Their mid-term grades were shoddy, but they showed promise. After eight months of intense effort, it was time to test their performance in the finals.
When grades rolled out, one of the sisters scored the third-highest marks on one of the exams. The other was far behind, but she didn’t fail like in prior years.
We could witness quiet competition developing between them, one that would propel their rate of progress throughout the next decade.
Mrs. A was one of a kind. She could transform kids’ lives on both ends of the Gaussian curve.
And I’d like to dedicate this essay to that wonderful lady who is now both old and retired.
When I go out for coffee meetups to exchange ideas while keeping up with other Americans, I look back and quietly deliver my gratitude to this unsung heroine.
She saw problems and strived to solve them without quick fixes and patchwork. She transformed lives without asking for anything in return.
This is such a contrast for me, who is willingly participating in Silicon Valley’s capitalistic rat race.
I wish to grow up as a mentor who could motivate people (and myself) to help the downtrodden, even if they disliked them.
I want to imbue myself with hope and patience and not let feelings of unworthiness consume me at the lack of immediate results.
I will begin this journey by aligning my first step with Mrs. A’s footprint—
And request each person donate two metaphorical books — potent enough to change a life.
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