Recoleta's Atlas

July 14, 2024, Buenos Aires. Photo credit: Swarna Rajagopalan

Outside Buenos Aires' famous Recoleta cemetary is this amazing, old gum tree. Beneath, you are surprised to see someone carrying, dragging it, a little bent under its great weight. 'Recoleta's Atlas' was sculpted by Joaquín Arbiza Brianza from over 3000 car parts, welded together. 

Sometimes, we are each Recoleta's Atlas, carrying the world on our shoulders, trying to drag a much larger tree, deeply rooted to the ground. 

Polyglot Power

I like language. I like words. I like written words better than spoken words. I also love silence but my love for language remains. 

This was not always so. 

Tamil is my native language. Growing up in Bombay, I spoke it in a stilted way and although my mother taught me the alphabet, remain largely illiterate. 

In school, we started Marathi first. I never heard anyone speak Marathi and this was a whole two years before Doordarshan's Bombay station was launched so I had no exposure to Marathi. Suddenly, one day, we were asking Aai to look at the lotus and the next we were reciting Manimau. For the most part, I was swimming blind. That cluelessness remained all the six years I studied Marathi in school, never quite catching up. 

Hindi followed and was somewhat easier thanks to cinema. Still, as a native Tamil speaker, I was self-conscious about aspirated sounds and gendered nouns. I think this remains throughout our lives. With my friends, I did three levels of the Rashtrabhasha exams and I will say that despite my self-consciousness and my deficiencies, the coursework of the third exam gave me an appreciation of Hindi that I had not considered. 

I started learning French before Std VIII. I wanted to be a diplomat and French was a diplomatic language, I had heard. It was also better taught, taking nothing for granted, so finally, I did well. I learned French for many years in school, college and at the Alliance Francaise. I was once decent at it and am now rusty, but I treasure my ability to read in French and occasionally surprise someone with a word or two! 

You notice I have not mentioned English. Even in my Tamil speaking home, everyone read in English. There were English books and magazines everywhere. English was just there, taken for granted. Everyone read in my family so book recommendations (and very rarely books) got handed down. 

The other language in the shadow of my family's history was Burmese. An entire branch had done their schooling in Rangoon before the Japanese invasion. They were fluent and one branch famously could only do multiplication in Burmese. I tried to learn phrases from my uncle and though they were pedestrian, I liked to think it was our secret language. 

I may not have excelled at language learning, nor pursued literature as my field of work. However, what I treasure, even with the little bit of every language I have learned is the way they allow me entry into other cultural universes and the way they enrich each other. 

On short visits, I like to learn how to say 'Thank you' in the local language. Nothing connects you to another human than your brave and sincere if disastrous effort to speak with them in their language. I would say even that our mistakes build bridges. 

When I started working in the social sector in Chennai, I brought with me my imperfect Tamil. What was perfect was my wish to connect and communicate. I spoke as I could, accepting the chuckles as well as the corrections as gifts. I was not reviled for making mistakes but indulged. I speak a little better now but I don't hesitate to speak. 

I want to say here that I wish I had learnt better and retained more of all the languages I learnt. However, even the smattering of this and that has enriched my life immensely. Perhaps in the years I have left, I will find a way to go back, start over and do better. 

Learning languages is very, very important. I am not an educational psychologist or any other kind of expert. But I think that the ability to code switch (that is, to speak a sentence in Tamil and then English and then Tamil again, or any other combination of languages) gives you mental agility. 

Knowing multiple languages opens multiple universes for you. Just think of the joys of listening to multiple genres of music! It's like that! 

In all the language politics in this country, generations are growing up monolingual. This means they cannot learn beyond what is published in their language or from people speaking other languages. 

Learning more than one language allows you to get better at each one. Each one deepens your understanding of the other as you learn a new rule and say, aah, in the other it is... 

And this is why it bothers me that so many colleges and universities do not require language learning. The 3-language formula, which now seems discredited, forced us to have some sense of our own regional language. Young people these days know English, and because they only know English, they do not seem to know it very well. Hindi survives this somehow thanks to popular culture. But the divide between those who only know English and those who only know their mother tongue is going to fracture this country further. By sidelining language learning in colleges, we are raising a generation of rootless people who cannot communicate with each other. 

There is no age for language learning. Online courses and apps make the opportunity accessible to everyone. At the very least, we can return to what we did in the early years of Doordarshan--watch programmes, news and films in every language! Now we can do that on our phones! 

And now I am going to do just that. 😉 I will have fun and I hope you do too! 

PS: Sometimes, you write something and it turns out to be a first draft of many other things that you may never get around to writing. (20/1/24)

Obstacle Course Days

Today was an obstacle race set in a maze. The obstacles and disruptions were minor, when you consider the state of the world, but they felt like a minefield. My stress level kept spiking. My patience was in smithereens. My spirits were weighed down by anxiety. And the frustration of encountering a hundred little irritations that would not let me think or read or write or do anything substantial, decimated the rest of the day. What was the purpose of such a life? 

Outside in the world, which may or may not be the real world, people did earth-shattering things that strangely, still left the world much as it was before my irritating day started. Nevertheless, these brilliant things (for no one is ever less than brilliant any more) made my day seem even worse. 

What is this life, I wanted to scream, if full of domestic disruptions, we cannot find time to blog? (Sorry, WH Davies) Just simple blogging.

This insane, disappointing day is done. The truth is that in the cracks and gaps between its annoying disruptions and despite my dramatic feelings about them, I did a great deal of work today. I got many things done that were important and essential. 

In women's lives, the clear work-day does not exist whether you go somewhere to work or you work from home. Responsibility stalks you, and trips you up, and lurches into your path from the shadows, and just when you think you've figured things out, the earth shifts. Most of us have learnt to persist and to work like thieves, stealing the time and bandwidth we can from here and there. 

It is truly a miracle that most of us manage to do what we do. When I was very young, a working woman said to me that she needed a wife who would make chapatis for her when she came home. I mocked her later. She was so right! Every working woman needs the kind of support that wives have provided in patriarchal societies. It's not just chapatis, which we can now order, but the entire gamut of backend logistical management and emotional labour that has freed men up to think deep thoughts without a care. 

When women aspire to do other things, it becomes a zero sum game but the inevitability of care responsibility removes the element of choice. They want to and should have it all but the cost is very high and often paid as poor mental and/or physical health. 

As for me, today, I will have to console myself on the tasks I completed and take some comfort in having survived the domestic obstacle course still calm enough to write this post. 

A labour of love

I have had the best teachers. This is one of the huge blessings of my life, along with an incredible (far from perfect but incredible) family. 

I have not always learnt perfectly from my teachers. Sometimes, I have been less prepared coming into that year's curriculum and sometimes, less prepared for class. Sometimes, I have been distracted by the drama of life. Sometimes, I have just found the subject tedious (sorry, Econ, I really tried!). Sometimes, I have been slow to grasp. Sometimes, their pedagogy left something to be desired.

But when I say I have had the best teachers, I mean that I have learnt from some wonderful humans all my life. They came in to teach me a particular topic, in the formal classroom or as supervisors. But from each of them, I learnt how to be. Each one showed me a dimension of how to live. 

Sometimes these were concrete tips that I still use. How to construct evaluation in a course so you create a learning path. How to continue to work (especially on a paper) even when you are blocked. The importance of legible fonts in a submission (sorry, sorry, sorry!). How to hem so neatly you can barely see. Really, the sum total of whatever I know, I know because of my teachers. 

I treasure too the example of the professor would quote Moliere's Sganarelle in the middle of a discussion on realism in international relations. I treasure the professor whose week included a jazz gig. I treasure the school teacher who turned every poem into a song and the one who had an anthem for her maths class--which made us smile but also ready to learn. I treasure the brilliant mind of my dissertation advisor that would find PhD topics in the strangest places--the limitless imagination and the creative play. (We read a book on play in our epistemology class but sadly, we did not play at all.) I treasure the years in a teaching-first college that freed me of the need to control my class (age and experience also help).

Most of my teachers have had this in common--they have been good, caring people. They have not needed to control their students' choices. They have been content to free us to grow while being present during our journeys. They have been secure humans--this is so rare, so rare, in education! 

I have noticed that my favourite conversations now are about teaching. 

This is because I treasure the gift of being in a classroom more than I can express. 

I played 'school-school' all through childhood. In fact, you might say, I am notorious for having schooled many generations of visitors to our home. Greatgrandparents, great-aunts, great-uncles, uncles, aunts, cousins--many, many are graduates of my school. My family will tell you that as my great-grandfather lay dying, I taught my great-uncle (his son) arithmetic on the lawns. I was four, he was a senior civil engineer. He was also my most difficult student. He got all his sums wrong (deliberately, indulgently). I was so concerned about his education that for months I sent him postcards with homework that he returned with mistakes! He may have been the student I have loved most in my life. 

As a teenager, I wrote the prospectus of a school I was going to start with all the elements I loved from schools in story-books (about schools). I made sure to bring in my other blessing--my cousins--by giving them all jobs and building rooms for them in campus plans I would love to draw up (in my next life, I will be an architect and in this, I enjoy admiring my architect friend's projects). 

I have tutored (badly) and I have run peace education projects on my own before I really knew the term. 

The linear path out of a PhD was to a teaching job. I taught through graduate school and four years after that but then for more than a decade, the teaching I got to do was repetitive training workshops and some mentoring of interns. 

The peace education programme at the NGO is for me the heart of my NGO--my heart too. We do other things and we are known for other things but this is the centre-point in my vision. In the years in which we imagined it as a classroom and school-centred programme, I got to talk teaching with my Montessori teacher cousin who is a classroom rockstar--sure-footed in what she wants to teach and secure enough to also become a student. I loved this. I still love talking teaching with her though she has moved on from our project (she is still a teacher).

The gift of being in a classroom has returned to my life in bits and pieces. I have come back to regular teaching, enriched by every life experience. I channel every good teacher I ever had into my work and hope to be somewhat as effective. 

Again and again, when I am preparing or when I am in the classroom, I think: This is what they mean by "labour of love." To do something you love. To do something you can do with love. To do something that fills your space with warmth and affection. That is something I have learned from my students who ultimately are the best teachers you will ever have. 

I started writing this post thinking that I love teaching and talking about teaching but I never blog about it. Then I thought of my wonderful teachers and this is where the post has meandered. It is guru dakshina and it is also gratitude that I get to be a lifelong learner in the satsang of my students. It is a prayer that the gift that has taken its time to reach me, stays with me for a while.