The Hindu Business Line : The grind begins… yet again

Today’s edition of the Times of India carries a Laxman cartoon where a puzzled Common Man stares at a middle-aged parent pushing a pram piled with books with his school-going son walking behind. The caption runs: “I used to take him round in this before he was admitted to the school. Now I use it to carry his books to the school.” One guffawed.

Yet another morning of mine had taken off on an auspicious note, thanks to Laxman. This day many Mumbaikars, like the Common Man, would have felt grateful to Laxman. The Common Man starts your day brightly, a happening denied by pompous teachers and government officials.

Above the cartoon, is the news of SSC results being declared on Tuesday and one could see young boys and girls crowding cyber cafes to get the results on the Internet. Seemingly, the small group near the Yogi Nagar bus stand in Borivili had scored good marks for they were joyously munching vada pav with coke. One over-heard a girl telling her boy friend, “Hey, we will go to the late night show of Sivaji: the Boss (Bachelor of Social Service) at Kandivili.&# 8221; Surely they will make merry to forget a miserable one year eating up books and notes at school and special classes.

Sheryl, the daughter of my good Goan friend Paul is in Class X and will be sitting for her exams in March 2008. Paul is a worried man — a state of existence he is not used to. “Sheryl goes to school at 6.30 a.m. in the morning and comes home at 1.30 in the afternoon. Then, for three hours she attends special classes in Marathi, Hindi and mathematics. By seven in the evening she goes to another special class to finish the homework and study science.

“To help her, I have shut down my TV set. In my times, I never studied. And now for one year I cannot go to my favourite Goa as Sheryl has told me to be at home. Worse my wife has banned my having a quiet Sunday drink as it will distract Sheryl. This way I may as well sit for the Class X exams,” a distressed Paul told me in the office over a cup of coffee.

Till the 1990s, SSC results used to come to the office early morning with a queue waiting outside with numbers. Shankar and Ravi kept the queue in a reasonable state of excitement, while Usha quietly referred to the SSC book and read out the results. That day, the office did not do anything other than handing out passes and fails. A second set of results would land in the house of my dear friend Vasu at Girgaum and we would phone up friends and contacts giving them the good news; the homes of the failed were never called. But the best part of the deal was the hot, kanta (onion)-pohe topped with coconut shreddings from Vasu’s kitchen. One has not eaten better quality kanta-pohe. The all-wood home of Vasu is spacious and one c ould relax over the food. This writer has been trying to cadge an invitation from Vasu for a good round of the healthy stuff but he has not fallen for it. “Aa jau, aa jau (come over),” he says before walking away to catch a BEST bus to Girgaum.

For newspapers, the gold medallists make front-page news and at least those based in Mumbai will carry interviews with parents and children while the local TV channels will beat them by 24 hours. Till date, one has never met a gold medallist at the work place; most newspaper offices have graduates (at best) though after 2000 A.D. a new generation of chartered accountants and MBAs fill the pages. They are skilled though one suspects a section of this crowd is a reject of the Indian corporate or public sector world and has taken to journalism as the profession is the least demanding.

With Internet and e-mail, most do not bother to step out of the office to see human faces for building contacts in government and industry. It may be an interesting idea to search out past gold medallists in SSC to get to know their lives; perhaps, some enterprising journalist could do an exclusive. Most corporates this writer has come across did not care for schooling while bankers, as a rule, wore thick glasses suggesting some hard reading in the night; that again is just a guess. It may be interesting to take the example of Laxman, who walked imperiously the corridors of the editorial offices of the Times of India in Mumbai. In his book, The Tunnel of Time – An Autobiography, R.K. Laxman writes: “ My parents somehow did not realise that it was time I should be sent to school! Left to myself all day, I played around the house merrily. My brothers having gone to college or school, Father taking a walk or visiting bookshops, and Mother busy in the kitchen or in the pooja room, I enjoyed roaming in the large empty hall and rooms all by myself without elders’ interference. Anything that caught my fancy I used to draw on the floor with a piece of chalk.”

That helped Laxman become Laxman and gift the Common Man to the Indian public. Beginning this week, my two-year-old grand-daughter Shreya has started going to a play school for 30 minutes. Her mother (my daughter Dakhi) took a week’s leave to get Shreya used to the punishment.

On the first day mother and daughter cried; from the second day, Shreya has turned comfortable and has been snatching the food of her friends.

My grand-daughter prefers the rowdier side of life and one is sure her mother will get many complaints. When Shreya goes to SSC, there may be no schools and special classes. Schools will be a waste.

P. Devarajan

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The grind begins… yet again