parenting

I wonder if people consider the philosophical and moral implications of bringing up a child.

One of the most common arguments I've heard for having children is the continuation of the family line. If a family wants to extend their lineage, why not write a well-researched account of its oral history instead? I would imagine it would problematise and enrich notions of who is a Muslim, etc., who is an Indian, etc. which we need desperately. It would take away academic (and by extension class, caste, geography and gender) monopoly over who writes these histories, and what kind of histories are heard.

But I digress. Not everybody cares about knowledge monopolisation and that's okay.

Another argument is having someone to take care of you when you grow old. This is a justified anxiety since not many of us care to die alone and it's comforting to have someone with whom you have an intimately shared history with. I imagine the economics of raising a child take care, partly, of this requirement. I think we may have enough to provide for ourselves when we grow old, were we to not spend on raising children. Of course, emotionally we may choose the intimacy of having our own children to share our old age with, rather than friends or other relationships. But that is not reason enough to have children, since it doesn't account for the personal liberty of the child.

I also want to protest against the hypocrisy of this justification: a parent-child relationship is considered emotional, and is operationalised emotionally, but the justification (particularly this one) to have a child seems rather transactional. In this sense, rural families who decide to have children so that they can pitch in economically seems to me a more candid approach to having children, although it is equally unjustified for the same reason: children are not a means to an end, just as much as parents aren't.

A third argument is that children are a source of company in an otherwise lonely world, or relationship. Let's not consider the latter situation, since children are not a means to make a parent feel better about themselves or their relationship with their partner. To the justification that children are a source of emotional joy and security, it's harder to apply the utilitarian critique because theoretically, parents also lend emotional support and comfort to their children. But does this always happen?

The question now is: once I decide to become a parent, do I also think about how to become a good parent? (By 'good' I mean, a parent who is emotionally caring and looks at a child not just as a source of emotional solace but also as an individual with rights.)

To understand just how difficult parenting is, let's compare it with teaching. As a teacher it is possible to have access to resources, planned training; to have the luxury of experimentation and personal space while working with children. Teachers get paid, too. As a parent, on the other hand I have almost nothing except anecdotal advice from almost everybody, de-contextualised resources, discontinuous support and a stupendous invasion of my private and/or professional life. What kind of support, really, do parents have on how to raise a child? Why does our society not acknowledge this lack?

There are some people in this world who have really made a muck of being parents. Their children are trying their best to be well-adjusted despite their upbringing. Their parents, in turn are trying to cope with dark moments of feeling defeated and self-betrayed. Both children and their parents have to eventually find support systems elsewhere. This process is immensely difficult because of unnatural and unjustified expectations that society places on parenting and children's relationship with their parents.These expectations also make acknowledging this social failure almost impossible: bad parents are rare and their children have bad luck.

In fact, I think it's really hard to be a parent because although they are encouraged to be one, they are hardly given any pragmatic support once this irreversible deed has been accomplished. Parents are left stranded and unprepared to handle the enormity of laying foundational groundwork in a child's life, entirely on their own. Is it enough that women can fertilise eggs and lactate, that men can generate sperm, that they have a stable socio-economic arrangement, that they get along with each other? Where is the child in all of this biological and economic preparation?

Perhaps people who decide to be single parents have had the opportunity to think a little harder on the philosophical implications of bringing up a child, since it isn't a natural extension of their current state in life. It is not enough to think about the potential changes in one's personal life (given that that is also a crucial component of the decision-making process) simply because being a parent is not entirely about you.

We need to free parenting from its essentialist trappings. Being a parent is not natural, simply because procreation is. We need to think of it as a choice, as a role that people need support and preparation for.

freedom and democracy

Excerpt from The Diary of a School Teacher, by Hemraj Bhatt (trans. Sharada Jain)

While watching T.V., I came across a news item about a Madhya Pradesh teacher who had advertised in the newspapers for a female friend to massage him and fulfil his sexual needs. The police, on reading the advert, conducted a sting operation on the teacher and took him to the police station. Here, they asked him vulgar questions again and again – just to enjoy themselves at the expense of his discomfort. The teacher, on his part, was visibly ashamed and kept apologising, saying that he would never do something like this again.

The TV channels played this clip on loop. Several questions came to my mind. What do these channels want to convey by showing such news? What is worth showing and what is not? What was so great about conducting a sting operation on a poor teacher?

In a country and in a society where nothing is immoral if done on the sly, who gave the police and the TV channels the right to define morality?

This teacher could have fulfilled his desires without the advertisement. Then the police and journalists would not have known about him. But he expressed his feelings. What does freedom mean in a democracy?

Hemraj Bhatt (1968-2008) was a assistant primary schoolteacher in a government primary school in Uttarkashi. He was the only official teacher in a school for 51 children, ranging from classes 1 to 5. He began keeping a diary which was translated and published after his death. His reflections provide insight not just on his daily struggles to provide meaningful education to his children but also on the entire education system itself. Read the full diary here.

a friend and a therapist

Friends you can count on are rare. Friends who help you through depression are an even rarer subset. But should your friend also be your therapist?

I speak for myself when I say no, she should not. In the throes of depression I cannot see things which are fairly obvious. She makes the decision to be the calmer of the two and attempts to show these things to me. But this decision comes at a cost--she has to overcome her own fear and shock and try, at all costs, not to display it to me. She has to discard everything she's doing and concentrate entirely on me. No matter how she's been feeling, she must rally enormous emotional forces from within herself and use them to systematically counter every argument my corrupted mind throws at myself, at her.

But every time this happens, she is put in a terrible position of grappling between love and helplessness. Unlike my therapist, she has had no training in clinical psychology; any strategies she comes up with are ones she creates on her own, based on her intimate knowledge of me, the connections she makes from the history we share and her learnings from previous conversations. She never stops learning, she never stops trying for me.

But she's my friend. She's not a therapist. She comes from a position of love, and it is this same position which overwhelms her each time these conversations happen, because it is beyond the scope of our love to provide me with ways to cope with depression. Her love convinces me that I need these strategies, but it cannot always provide them to me. There is nothing right or wrong about this, and neither is this a limitation: this is a fact.

If you have someone like this on your life, don't take them for granted. Talk to them whenever you need to, but if you want help, go to a therapist or a doctor. Just like self-medication, forcing them to be your therapist is harmful and unfair on both of you. Remember that every breakdown you suffer from, they suffer with you, and somewhere it is worse for them, since they do not have medication or therapy to fall back on. You should.

'Zindagi Gulzar Hai'

There comes a time when you realize that you have surrendered a part of your heart to a book, film, television series or a professor because they leave you moved. The writer, the artist becomes a presence in your mind separate from your experience of their work.

With each redefining moment of watching Kashav's story I feel a complicated mixture of love and alarm at its intensity. I sometimes cannot believe this story has actually been written.

Sultana apa, you have my heart. Don't let me down; I won't be able to bear it.

[No spoilers, please.]

Ab ki baar...

And a close favourite:

Seeing there is no place left for reason or humanity.

Source

old dreams

I recently read a letter which had a vision of my future. The writer imagined that four years later, in 2013, I'd be teaching a group of 18 year olds about languages across the world. I'd also be alone in a different city somewhere, spending my free time walking around, soaking my senses in myriad sights, sounds, smells.

When I read that letter, it struck me how old some of my closest dreams are. It doesn't make my desire to become a teacher more valid than someone who has decided to teach today. It doesn't rule out new dreams, younger dreams. I'm simply humbled by their power. Things change every day; there are no footprints in a desert. Once in a while, a wind blows again and again, steady among the shifting sand dunes.

This wind is now making me change my direction once again. If you know anyone who has done or is doing a B. Ed in India, do let me know. I want to become a teacher.

screaming

A precious advantage to having your own place is the freedom to scream. One afternoon when the lights were burning the back of my eyes once again, I went to office, stood under the shower and screamed. I screamed with my mouth wide open, then shutting again, in fear. After all, the windows of the bathroom were made of glass with wide mouths of their own. I pressed my spongey lips on the bathroom wall and screamed into it. I beat my forehead and crushed my heart inside my throat. I wanted to reach inside myself and grasp that; heavily webbed sticky dense untouchable yet so heavy, so heavy. Had I no friends in this city I would have screamed freely in my own house and cleaned up later quietly.

Susan Gowling, Those Precious Hours

"To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;" *

It could happen with anything you're studying, anything you're doing, even if it is out of a conscious choice based on what can bring you the most happiness, the highest fulfillment. You could have that one black smudge, the one subject, area, task, you just hate thinking of, and cannot ever compel yourself to enjoy doing. When I think of my decision to do a BA, to do it in English Literature, then my black smudge would be tomorrow's exam.

Till a few minutes ago it was paper IV - an unhealthy, vague, presumptuous pool of literatures not meant for the cauldron they've been wearily stirred into. I do not like most of it, and I certainly have had an eyebrow raised this whole year on the why, how and what of its structure. More on this later.**

But tomorrow's paper is worse. It is a wild frenzy of areas that has captured my heart and left it pitilessly gasping for more. Tomorrow's exam is a sin, because of the way all that sheer magic and restless wonder will be mutilated to serve a purpose I refuse to recognise has anything to do with my education.

What does it mean to write an answer to a question you feel you may never be able to answer fully? It's not simply about the fact that I feel I haven't read or experienced enough. It's more to do with the withering inadequacy of words. "Without contrariness is no progression", could you apply this idea to Yeats' The Second Coming and Sailing to Byzantium*? I keep madly dithering between the nervous intensity these words make me feel, and the shove to write a genuine answer that won't haunt me later as written "in partial fulfillment of her Bachelor's degree in English Literature."

My best 'answers' have been written during the mayhem called Prelims. I had no fear of being judged by our professors, I wrote what I truly believed in and got away with arguments I tonight surrender to cynicism. What if I get a uni-dimensional, tea-deprived, answer-key automaton for a checker - this previously lighthearted rant is what now has the power to stop me from being honest, from being ready to take a chance on my beliefs, from being open to perceptions and different angles of looking at things, from being creative, a little cheeky and insatiably in love with fresh ideas. What on earth am I doing then?

Answer: There seems to be no end to the hypocrisy we face in our education, and what it means to be educated.

"Them Academic Suckers"

Them Academic Suckers. I never really liked them in the first place. For me, school was a place I ran away to from home everyday for a blissful six hours of pure fun and expression. Not that that was the original purpose of school. Duh, yeah.

And then those ASs. They'd always be wanting to get the highest marks in all the exams, assignments, even those goddamned class-tests... everything requiring pedagogic evaluation. At least two months before these exams were to take place, they'd be all over the place, creeping up to the teachers with their innocuous little doubts . It was all BS anyway, the rest of us knew perfectly well they knew everything and would go around asking only to impress the teachers. Teachers do get impressed if you ask them specific doubts. It means that you've read through the text thoroughly. Sheesh, I have to admit, they were smart on this one.

They would look down on the rest of us from the rims of their glasses, as if we were lesser mortals, born to shrivel up like plastic wrappers when near fire. Just before the exams, when the rest of us would be busy cramming and splitting our hair on those complicated diagrams, which used to look like the London Underground map and reassuring ourselves and others that it's just another test, we'll do it like we've done all the others, I used to see them flitting from one AS to the other, asking each other in hushed whispers. Once I actually eavesdropped on them, and I regretted doing it sorely. They were discussing something which was 178 pages after the last chapter specified. I was sorely tempted to scream, "Okay!! So you're smart. Can't you talk like normal human beings for sometime? Have the Martians got to us already??"

Once I was graciously invited to these post-examination discussions by a friend who was an AS himself, but not so severely so. I went along for the experience. Usually I would be found in the school-grounds experimenting with methods to dispose off chewed gum, or singing at the top of my voice "Born freeee...as freee as the wind blows...as freeee as the grass grows..." but that day I thought hell, let's see what exactly it is that goes on here. I was in for the most nerve-bending boring times I have ever been subjected to. The ASs had occupied a deserted classroom (and here I was thinking that deserted classrooms were meant for first kisses) and were sitting with the question papers sprawled out in front of their benches. They were all locked in a battle of who could shriek the loudest, and who could bonk the other with those irritating test-questions I had already blissfully forgotten, the hardest. There were some superior ASs who answered the last, and their answers would be the most complicated and long, and would invariably include everything the other ASs had written, and more.

A typical discussion went like this.

AS 1: "So what did you write for the sixth part of the twenty-second question?"

AS 2: "Well, I'm not sure I exactly remember.."

AS 1: "No no, come on, I too am not sure....I just want to confirm..."

AS 2: "Oh well, I wrote that a particle moving along one dimension, like the particle between two walls, is described by a wave function that depends on one spatial coordinate. A particle moving in three dimensions, like a single electron moving around a nucleus, is described by a wave function that depends on three spatial coordinates, x, y and z. It's for three marks, and I think she'll cut one mark because I didn't mention that the wave function gives the probability amplitude for finding the electron at the coordinates (x,y,z), and the square of the wave function gives the probability. What did you write?"

AS 1: "Something similar, only I also included an example that Helium has two electrons, so the stationary states of the electrons...."

For obvious reasons, I cannot for the life of me continue to enlighten you about this extremely engaging discussion on the answer to the sixth part of the twenty-second question.

When a week or two would pass by since the exams had finished, the rest of us would be evidently uneasy. This week would be the week when our papers would come after correction. Which meant either toppling off the cliff, or just hanging by the thread. The rest of us would be happy just to scramble over the cliff and be off. Our ASs, however, would be satisfied with nothing else less than scaling the cliff, standing tall and proud, and gleefully watching others scream and submit to painful gravity. Ouch. I know.

My friend and I would be standing near the classroom door, watching out with hawk-eyed precision for any suspicious-looking packages or papers our teachers would be carrying in their arms. As soon as we'd spot something dreadfully familiar, we'd announce it to our class. This announcement would evoke three kinds of responses. One kind would be a collective sigh. This would be from the people who were expecting to just make it. The other would be a deep-throated groan, accompanied with loud forehead slaps from those who knew they were not going to make it. And then, there would be wide "Look at my pearlies, will ya!" grins and ecstatic rubbing of hands from our ASs.

Finally the teacher would enter the class. The tension inside the four walls would be enough to crack open anyone's skull. Paper-distribution would be done according to roll-call. The teacher would call out the roll numbers, and the respective students would go up and take the answer-papers. The walk from the bench to that table would be the longest for us, and the shortest for them. It's another thing that we would always be sitting on the last benches, but it was still one hell of a walk anyway. The teacher would either give a smart nod, if it were an AS, or a drooling, evil smile were it one of us. And then, horror of horrors, the teacher would ANNOUNCE the marks. In. Front. Of. The. Entire. Class. I still don't understand what kind of twisted sadistic pleasure they would get out of this whole calling-out-the-marks ritual. There would be whimpers of protests, cruelly pillowed by the teacher's ominous voice.

After this, we would open our fates and read the red-inked reckoning, still glistening on our papers. But usually this would not last too long. At least it was behind us. Now the ASs would be in their form. There would be some sitting in a corner, with a oh-what-a-good-boy-am-I kind of grins, and we would immediately realize these were the ASs who'd got full marks. The ASs who didn't, however, would be in a frenzy indescribable. They'd crowd up in the space available between the teacher's desk and the first bench, their arms flailing around with their papers, fighting for....oh no, not their torn or lost map-sheet, but half a mark. Or even more catastrophic, one mark. "If she got it on that question, how come I didn't get it too?". I would almost shout, "coz they did it by the inky-pinky-ponky, and you got left out, dunkhead!!" I mean, honestly. They'd fight like the way kindergarten kids fight over whose glass is filled with more orange juice.

I used to look at these people, eyeing them from a mental distance, thinking, damn, why? Why the whole charade? It was bigtime basic knowledge that they were cosmically shining bright material. Then why the fretting over who wrote what, who wrote more, who drew more, who made what?

Another thing I couldn't digest about ASs was the whole thing about not showing off. If I'd ask them something as simple as, "So how many lessons are coming this time?" they'd never have a clear answer. And if I'd ask them something simpler like, "So have you done this chapter?" the answer would be "Oh no..I've not even reached there!". Yeah, I'm going to believe that. The OTT modesty show was something that really put me off.

AS 1: "You're MUCH better than me, look at how much you got on that one."

AS 2: "Oh no, just a fluke answer, man."

Cut the ribbon, and get done with it.

I think I'm done talking about them now. It's time for the others. It's time for the rest of us to come out from our closets. So maybe we won't make it to the top Universities or Colleges. So maybe we won't get the pat-on-my-head and goofy smiles from the teachers. So maybe we won't have normal parent-teacher "interactions". We have fun. In fact, that's an understatement. We have the time of our lives. We have a life, inside AND outside the school. We probably know the school better than the janitors. We will be remembered by the teachers as students who gave them a laugh, once in a while. And...we have (and are making) some of the craziest, zaniest and most beautiful memories ever worth telling our grandchildren. So there.

(This was a piece I came across in one of my drafts. I'd written this in a fit of righteous indignation while in class 9. The ferocity of the descriptions draws a temperate smile across my face now, but I love the spunk in this girl.)