Summer Camp

The schools are closed for the summer vacation. This year the Karnataka government has decided that they would provide the noon-meals even during the vacation time! So the teachers are expected to come during the summer vacation and keep the schools open. I have taken this opportunity to have a kind of summer camp for the children with more informal sessions. The government’s plan is, as usual, not very well thought. There are around 25 students (out of almost 300) who turn up. The meal provider has so far (it has been one week) not provided the noon meals.

I now handle 10 children and it is lot more enjoyable. There is direct interaction with each and every child and I am not playing any policing role at all. We still do English and Math. I bought these bi-lingual picture books from Tulika, which has both English and Kannada on the same page. The idea is that the children would read the Kannada and know the story and I would help them read the English bits and slowly they would be more comfortable reading and speaking English. I also work on Math using the decimal blocks and Cuisenaire rods.

Since the class strength is reasonable, we have lot of conversations outside and along with the teaching/learning. Here are some snippets:

Dogs

Out of the 10 students almost all of them have been chased or attacked by stray dogs. 3 of them have actually been bitten and had to get those horrible injections for rabies. Anyone in Bangalore or even outside of it would have heard of the recent happenings in this context. The dogs are a serious health problem and I really don’t understand these “animal lovers”. Do they let cockroaches roam in their houses and not kill them? Are dogs endangered? Would they upset the ecological balance? Just cull them. It is nice to sit in houses with security gates and travel in cars and wax eloquent about their concern for dogs. Let their children be chased every day by dogs and be bitten by them and then I would like to hear from them.

Mobile Phones

All their families have mobile phones. Some families have more than one. Most of the children remember the 10-digit number of the phones in their families.

Private Schools

There are 3 children who come to my summer class from private schools in that area. They belong to the same socio-economic background as the other children. Two go to “Blossom” school. They have better capability than the government school children but only marginally. A class 6 student, Annapurna, who has supposedly learnt English from class 1 can just about read a simple English book. But her attitude was amazing. She took the book back home, worked on it hard and the next day could fluently read it. This is very different from the government school kids. Though I have given them the books for a week, I doubt any of them even open the books at home. This drive to perform could definitely be seen in the private school children. Another kid, Hemanth, goes to “Orchid” private school. He is in the 1^st class and he is very good! He can already read simple English books. His brother Manjunath, who just finished 4^th class in the government school, can barely read English. Seeing the difference in performance from the same family but in different systems makes me wonder if I should re-calibrate my opinion on private schools, at least in the urban slum context. For "Blossom" the kids pay Rs.85 per month and a Rs.750 donation. I was not able to find out how much is the fees in "Orchid".

Lords

“Rent seeking generally implies the extraction of uncompensated value from others without making any contribution to productivity .....”

I guess Indian cricket gives a new connotation to Lords. The so-called senior players are more like rent seeking feudal lords than professional cricketers. I am amazed at several comments about how Tendulkar should decide when he should quit, till then he should be kept in the team! If this is not feudal, hierarchical mind-set what else do you call it? I guess in a country where hierarchy has religio-social sanction through its caste system and enforced by the system of marriage, you can’t expect anything better. Under the guise of ‘respect’ for seniors we are just continuing to sing paeans to hierarchy. Current performance does not count. The results are obvious. The Australian team has shown what professionalism and performance is all about. For all our flirtations with modernity we remain fundamentally a feudal nation.

It was most satisfying to see India kicked out of the tournament in the first stage. With 16 teams playing we could not figure in the top 8. It is not cricket anymore; it is a huge joint venture between BCCI-Product Advertisers-Players. The game is secondary. Otherwise how can we justify the ‘blue billion’ hype of winning world cup for a team which was ranked 6^th! The posters and banners popping in Bangalore wishing the team good luck along with the photo of the local politician (goonda) were intolerable. The same organizations, which have spent money on this, would balk if they had to do some awareness campaigns on issues that really matter like sanitation and health (polio campaigns or bird-flu). Hype took precedence to actual performance.

With the trash out we can now watch some real cricket and we got it in that beautiful innings of Jayasurya against West Indies. He started watchfully after two quick wickets. Got a good look at the pitch and bowlers and then in his inimitable style just took the bowlers to the cleaners. Now, this is performance.

Well, there is another hype that will bust soon. A year or two back I was in IIT-Powai interviewing computer science students. One said his favorite subject was Algorithms, I asked what work he has done on that and he answered that he wrote a library information system. Get it?