Back To School

“What is the capital of Slovakia?” intoned my younger brother working on his assignment. To me, this was too much stress and embarrassment to suffer in one sitting. During the last couple of hours, I had already feigned a couple of restroom trips to sneak a peek at internet’s take on Genghis Khan’s lineage. Did one really care about whether the Mongolian marauder lived in a ‘ger’ or drank fermented mare’s milk called ‘airag’? Life seems rather unfair that one is now required to help out with one’s sibling’s homework. I am forced to revisit my school days that had happily ended over 3 years ago. Memories of what one learned then escape me. But honestly, hasn’t the world kept on changing ever since? Whoever had heard of an Arctic hamlet called Resolute or an Eskimo tribe called the Inuit before all that talk of global warming? When was anyone interested in the geography of Uzbekistan or the people of Tajikistan before the mighty USSR crumbled into fragments of free thought?

At times I stop to question- where has all the creative thought gone? Is it left behind in those day-dreams we used to spin on the last bench in the classroom? Is it lost in the endless brooding on “Why did the chicken cross the road?” or “What came first, the chicken or the egg?” I long for the times, when one simply used to sit n’ try to pry open the nearest bit of machinery one could lay hands on (considering it as a hyper-beam laser to blow up planets!), the ultimate childhood engineering fantasy. Kiddos today prefer to stick to internal combustion engines being published in those Autocar journals (Boy, they do understand those!).

Likewise I eschew my brother’s science homework. The subject, Introduction to IT - one declares loudly for the entire family to hear-was included only a year back! I wasn’t taught that in school. Or, take for that matter the entire world of New Vedic Math that was just digging the roots of the Indian education system even as one was slipping away from the grip of my final school years. Disjoint sets or unions were not in the same league as age-old equations to calculate the height of a tree using the length of its shadow as a parameter. Having reassured myself that one could not possibly know everything that young children expect us to know today, one tackles them with stern confidence. “Check it up on the Internet.” The other day my brother whooped in joy. He had picked up a social studies project needing to describe the development of the Indian classical music. The music buff I am, this must surely be a period he expected me to be intimately familiar with. Save the rock cult one gets to read about in the Rock Street Journal, my memory of the topic in our social studies books is only a blur. “What is the basic difference between the Hindustani and Carnatic gharanas of music?” he commenced his barrage of questions. “I am busy” one replied, pretending to reach out for the phone. “Go, ask mom”.