Scribbles: Another Brick in the Wall

“Baban, Baban”, shouted Krishti’s Mom aloud as she has a terrible time all through the day when her son is on leave from school. He is always lost somewhere and wastes much of his time in playing and doing things that are not constructive. After another spell of shout and from a remote corner of the ancestral old house a thin voice came “Whaaat?”

In no time Krishti appears in front of his mom and asks, “Maa, are you calling me?”

“Yes”, she replied, as she was cleaning and scrubbing all the brass utensils under the kitchen sink with ripe brown tamarind as the next day was Saraswati Puja. “Tomorrow is Saraswati Puja. So you need to wake up early and take bath. I shall give you some fresh clothes to wear and we all shall be ready for pushpanjali. And please don’t have anything until pushpanjali. We must be fasting before praying to the Goddess. This evening, your father will be bringing all the materials for puja and the saraswati idol on his way back home.”

“No, Maa, I can’t be ready for that.”

“What??”

“Are you not ashamed of worshiping the idols?”

Speechless was his mother and the soonest she recovered herself from the question she had confronted moments back, she muttered “Why should we be ashamed of worshiping the idols?”

“Our class-teacher, Mrs. Christina told us that only the fools worship the idols.”

Breaking the silence of a few more moments, Krishti was awarded a tight slap on his cheek. His silent teardrops kept on wondering what his mistake was this time. He always tries to follow the instructions of his teachers and his parents blindly, communicates them honestly, and still he does not understand every time what goes wrong.

Krishti reads in Class II in an ‘A’-Grade school of repute in the city of Kolkata where his parents, after achieving their own goals, had put their son into with much of ambition. It is almost an everyday affair that due the pressure at school, the kid gets a beating. The incidents are trifling-- sometimes Krishti misses to take the Maths copy and the teacher does not allow him to attend the class because bringing the copy is more important to the teacher than learning arithmetic; sometimes he starts playing with his friends around book-cricket because the literature teacher is too drab and uninteresting. And when asked, he stands up and confesses that it was him who initiated the game, because everywhere, he is asked and taught to tell one the truth. In return, he gets a note in his diary to call up the parents to meet the class-teacher.

This note brings further catastrophe in his life. Mother starts crying, father shouts at his mother that he won’t be able to skip his office just because of this reason, as for meeting the class-teachers there are fixed hours and Mother is not skilled enough to face the class teacher because she is not that smart and chaste in speaking English. Finally if the meeting happens, the whole house would be under the spell of silence for the next indefinite period of time because the literature-teacher would be blaming Krishti that he is the only one in the class who disturbs the whole class and does not do his work. Moreover, he lacks manners and is arrogant because he tells the teacher that she is not as good as his father to tell him the stories from that that book. And the teacher would with a munching relish of sarcasm conclude at his parents, “So why school? If the parents are so learned, keep him at home.” And he would be a silent observer of his parents bowing down their heads in front of that smart lady with manners, on verge of crying. His little mind accepts all the blemishes within himself that he is responsible for all the woes in the life of his parents, though he is not yet clear about the reasons.

It really takes the father to sacrifice a good lunch sometimes at office to pay off the school fees and the car-pool, monthly. The commotion in the evening in the name of studies turns so unbearable to him that he stays back in the local club with his friends on his way back home from the office and switches off the cell phone so that he is not disturbed from the homefront. Occasionally, when he sits with his son, he is loaded with questions from the other end which are quite like a thought-process springing from the context of studies taking a route similar to Ulysses of James Joyce. Suddenly, the beautiful session is struck by the thundering information that Krishti has to take a Maths class test the next day and the whole hours are simply wasted. A fresh process begins past midnight with a guilty father starving.

Krishti loves to draw, to write things of his own, play cricket all day long and going for movies and eating out in the air-conditioned multiplexes. The last one is tantalizing. He knows well, despite all his faults, his parents would hardly refuse to give him anything he wanted in those special days. He feels like a ‘King’ that day because somehow with a spell of magic all his faults are forgotten and his parents make him realize that he is the cherry-eyed son of them. He is so very exceptional and outstanding. So many praises suddenly raises the question in his mind, “have they gone nuts?” Even if his father runs short of money somehow that day, he would take out that strange card out of his purse that his parents call ‘the credit card’ and nothing would be unattended or unattained at his and his mother’s ends. He loves to watch the television too, mostly the cartoons. But to enhance the GK, mother always insists on the National Geographic Channel sort of stations. Post dinner, if there is no class-test next day, he is allowed to read story-books. And it would be his mother only, who would be choosing the story books. When stuck up at words and asked about the meanings of them, father would be suggesting him to underline the unknown words, consult the dictionary later and try to make sentences with those new words. The fact hardly strikes the mind of the father that it is his 8-year old son he is talking to, not to his office colleague. Anyways, He likes to read the Tintin-books the most. At least he can comprehend the meanings of the unknown words from the picture and the known words around.

Last day he saw his father reading a story of Issac Asimov where the line was written that ‘Margie hated school’. He asked his father later, that why did Margie hate school? Father explained to him that the science fiction tells about the future school where there would be no institution but only work-stations at homes, one for each single student, set and tuned according to the standards they are reading and there would be no teachers and no classmates, too. She hated that and liked to go to the institutional schools like the present time. She misses that.

Krishti, after hearing that started thinking, what is so good about the school (the institutional schools now) that Margie would be missing it? One of his seniors at school forgot to tell his mom to wash his keds. In the Assembly the games teacher pushed him falling to the ground and kicked thrice on his stomach, and said, “Now your shirt also matches your keds.” In a free period, a teacher came to their class, and asked all the students to do what they liked. Krishti started reading a story-book as he always carried one in his bag. The teacher identified him and told him not to read it because he had to take part in what the other boys were doing. Another teacher came to the class last day and asked all the boys in the class to write what their hobbies are on a cheat and collected them. After a few hours he came back with a letter to the parents of the students for compulsory subscription against the hobby classes after the school-hours. That evening there was fight between the parents, how would he come back home as the car-pool would not bring him back at such odd hour.Krishti does not know now when this Berlin Wall will come down. Somehow he had the feeling within himself, perhaps it would have been better if he did not have a hobby. Whats the use in inculcating it when becomes a compulsion at school and parents fighting over the issue!!!!

Everyday he comes home from the school with something new to traumatize his parents. How he has started getting scared of himself.

What is there ‘good’ in schools? He kept on wondering and satisfied himself with the answer within himself, ‘to know that, I have to grow up.’ But who would help him growing up? He sees no one, neither his mother, nor his father and never, his teachers. Those handful teachers who are nice and good are too good to resist the bad ones. He is wondering in whirlwind of darkness, “Why, on earth, was I born?”

Facts:

a) Mothers of students go under psychological counselling in many schools.

b) Many children in the primary/junior sections do not want to go back home after class-test scripts come out with the fear psychosis that they would be beaten up by the moms.

c) Many students have stopped talking because they are scared of talking as they fear that whatever they speak would bring them some punishment either at school or at home.

d) Teachers cannot teach in the classes because traumatized kids, after having their low-score answer-scripts start crying aloud. Others join them without knowing the reason.

e) Teachers of reputed schools have started treating the parents of their students as their students too in the name of discipline.

f) School children are found with strange diseases unlikely to happen to them because of carrying too much of weight and psychological stress they face due to school.

g) Meeting the Head-of-the-Institutions or the class teachers is a task like seeing the PM or a Cabinet Minister.

h) The parents are undergoing traumas and the smooth life is disturbed with the stress from the schools of their children.

i) Internationally marking with the red ink, writing negative/detrimental comments, punishments—all are banned and regarded as offenses. However, parents take it as a norm or show of discipline and indulge it. More these rules are flouted in an organized way, better is the school, is a common belief.