In Defence of Rote Learning

For someone who hated it, it comes as a shock to me to defend rote learning today. 

Far be it from me to criticise the collective wisdom that guides the education reforms and processes of a state, but to play Devil’s Advocate, I don’t necessarily think rote learning is bad. Bad is also a loaded term in and of itself anyway. But especially here, with rote learning, “By-Heart System” as we call it, I believe it would be highly erroneous and simplistic to categorise it as “bad”.

I was never very good with memorisation. It always takes me longer than normal to commit things to memory. It is not entirely fair, then, that it is so easy for me to lose these memories too. So the few things I have indeed memorised, I cherish. 

I always think of Ozymandias when I think of rote learning. I memorised the PB Shelley poem because it was part of our syllabus in Primary School. The poems I first encounter in my college years are hazy now and I may recall a vague analysis here and there but that is it. In college, we no longer memorised. When I consider how the analysis of Ozymandias that was suitable for 10 years-old Me seems quite shallow when I revisit it today, I think of that proverbial home you can't return to, or the river that you cannot cross twice. They were right; the poem hits different now. 

This is exactly it – my defence of rote learning. It would never occur to me to revisit the poem if I can’t recite it from sheer memory. It is not analysis I experience with an Ozymandias musing; it is the poet’s words that have survived inside my head. These lines resurface in my memory and find new meaning in my adult life. Mere analysis could never.

I’m not saying the current system we have in Mizoram of rote learning is good. But in itself it is not the death of education. I know a ton of Australia trivia because I learned it via “Answer By-Heart” system in Class 6; I got a lot of detention for it too, @#$%^. I remember Times because of rote learning. True, if the teachers had ever even once explained to me that all numbers are abstract; and that when we say “za” it is in fact English and we are saying, for example, two twos are four and not two two za four, it would have made memorising easier. But be that as it may, even though I didn’t understand it, I memorised Times up to 12. I still retain most of it. It helps.

I mean, how many of us kids truly understood an “I wandered lonely as a cloud...” or a “Miles to go before I sleep...” or a “Do not go gentle into that good night...” but today, on this side of 30, feel it in our very soul? These are lines immortalising their creators. We remember them because we learned them in school. Because we memorised them. Because our teachers made us. Because it was important for year-end exams. Because those grades dictated our next steps. Some things can serve dual purposes, surprise surprise!

Exams and Grade Scores are not for everyone; I will never argue that they were. But a little competition never hurt. In fact, these healthy competitions become the things that toughen us. Competition is not bad. Schools that are good are good for a reason. I believe they will also still be good if the system changes. They are good because they know what the system demands, and they supply it. If the system changes, I am convinced the good schools by way of saying the ones that deliver “Top Students” will still be “good”. 

I attended three schools in Mizoram – Nazareth English School (Aizawl), Sacred Heart School (Lunglei), and Mary Mount School (Aizawl). They all competed competently at the state level. All three taught us things beyond textbooks. They taught us AV Learning, cross-stitching, public speaking, leadership, sports (yeugh!), patriotism, music, arts, etc. And yet, all of them also focused heavily on rote learning. Thanks to which I have a bunch of facts and art forever stored in my memory banks. I do not complain.

Sometimes I think there is something fundamentally off with our society where no matter how much education you can cram inside a child, Society with a capital S will cure them of it sooner or later. Society will always be the best and worst of us. Because our Society does not want individuals. It wants sheeple. And sheeple we all become in the end. We will always blow with the strongest wind. It is good when the winds are good and then we all become this giant good thing. But woe betide us when the ill wind blows. 

This is why we don’t learn. Instead of taking things into context, we reduce all debates to What Aboutisms and Over-corrections. It is always extremes with us; never a sweet mid. We throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak. Our education system needs correction, yes. But it is not Education System alone that requires it. There are so many moving factors at work that it demands a certain level of detached Non-participant Observation to point out the problems inherent and figure out ways to fix the holes. And not throw the baby out when we throw out the bathwater.

All of these to say that I, for one, do not think rote learning is inherently bad. Or even a ranking system. As long as we find a Mid-Point that works, and stop this maniacal fundamentalist mindset, we should be good. That applies elsewhere too, come to think of it.

People Don't Listen

The Beckhams, Victoria in particular, being in the news recently got me thinking of how people don’t listen. Then they misunderstand with the confidence and entitlement of a middle-aged white man in the USA. As vocally too.

Not about her, actually. At all. I do not have such an intense parasocial existence with celebrities that they take up my time. Not even Taylor Swift, or Shania Twain when I was younger. I do enjoy keeping up with their news but it’s with detachment. Perhaps a certain level of joie de vivre, but not this maniacal fanatic engagement with celebrities and their lives like I see on the internet, as though they personally affect my day to day, like they were kin or neighbour. I do enjoy a gossipy girl sesh or a Sociological musing or two but then I just shrug it off and say: hey, celebrities are not real; they only live in my phone screen. 

The reason the Beckhams got me thinking about people’s listening skills is because their PR team is on overdrive and pushing a lot of nostalgic 90s Spice Girls and Girl Power era on my FYP and a lot of those reels are set to the song Wannabe. Slightly going off tangent is my specialty.

Now Wannabe is always touted as a nonsensical song. Because why? People. Don’t. Listen. 

Wannabe is actually not a nonsensical song at all. It is very upbeat, no doubt. And an earworm especially with the zig-a-zig-ah, which is also the reason why people think it is nonsensical. Additionally, as about 97% pop songs of that era, Wannabe has a lot of repetition of words. Which is because the tune demanded it. 

The chorus is definitely an earworm. If someone were to straighten out the chorus as a standalone conversation, it would read simply as “I will tell you what I want.” The rest of the song – the verse and the bridge and the rap – is telling you exactly what she wants. It is very clear. If you want to be my lover, this is what you need to do; if you want my future, this is what must happen; if you want to get with me, you must do this.

This is what happens with the Meatloaf number I'd Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do That) as well. Drunk intellectuals love to joke about how he just keeps saying he won’t do “that” but he never tells you what “that” is. But if you listen right, every time he says he won’t do “that”, the preceding line tells you what he will, in fact, do like run to hell and back, that he’ll never forget the way she felt, or take a vow and seal a pact. This is when he says he will do anything for love, but he won’t do those things; that, in other words.

In fact both songs actually randomly go deep. Meatloaf bursts into sheer poetry, in fact.

And some days it don't come easy

And some days it don't come hard

Some days it don't come at all

And these are the days that never end

And some nights you're breathin' fire

And some nights you're carved in ice

Some nights you're like nothin' I've ever

Seen before or will again

And maybe I'm crazy

Oh, it's crazy and it's true

I know you can save me

No one else can save me now but you

As long as the planets are turnin'

As long as the stars are burnin'

As long as your dreams are comin' true

You better believe it

Meanwhile, Wannabe delves into philosophy. A proverbial stance, you could say.

If you wanna be my lover

You gotta get with my friends 

Make it last forever

Friendship never ends

If you wanna be my lover

You have got to give 

Taking is too easy

But that's the way it is

If you take things out of context, things seem off. But listen properly and consider the whole, and you might be surprised that what you’ve never understood suddenly makes sense.

Honestly, you can’t tell someone anything if they’re not willing to listen. 

Little bit like ranting and raving about celebrities and how they live their lives. If you shave off their frills and put them in context like they were your neighbours, a lot of the things they do actually makes sense. It’s just difficult to see this when they’re so much prettier, richer and more famous than you are. 

Besides, recently I’ve started thinking perhaps one of the reasons so many of us are having such godawful days is our Karma for the gleeful way we consume the misery of celebrities. True they are serving out their karma for whatever hustle they pulled to be where they are. But perhaps some of our bad days are us serving Karma for how we treat the stories of the actual human beings behind the people that live in our phone screens.

Anyhoo.

My Best Friend, My Abductor - a short story by Mavena and Esther

We had not always coexisted but the aliens are clever. We did make the best of it, though. We are of earth where evolution is the order of the chaos. We learn to adapt. I have to admit – the takeover was intelligent. We never realized what was happening. First, they took some of us, then they took more of us… When intelligence was the design of the being, it is almost impossible to resist. Nature was always on their side. It was like the earth was waiting for their arrival.

That was a long time ago, something we have pushed to the footnotes of not even history but perhaps anthropology. Cohabitance and Coexistence have become so normalized – the aliens and us, living together. 

My mother often told us about losing her own to them. She said she used to remember them clearly earlier but maybe they do something to us when they take our kind away because she could no longer remember what they even looked like. My father says nothing of the sort ever happened, that it was all an old wives’ tale. He said if abductions were truly a reality, there would be clear signs. Memory wiping was always too clean and neat a solution for him. 

If they could only see me.

It is strange but my mother seems to have been right after all. I wonder if they remember me, because I can’t. If I met them right now, I would not be able to pick them from a row, like in those movies with police and criminals. We watch those movies a lot. My abductor is very fond of them. Then when we see someone that looks like me, she’d pat my head and say some gibberish. I never know what she means. But I like to think she says something like: hey that’s you! I don’t know. It hardly matters.

Everything I used to know is so far away from me now that all I know is her and her world, this strange new universe that I am not sure how to navigate.

I have made myself at home here in her world. I never knew such places existed. Every time it changes. Every few moon cycles, we change locations. The first time she put me in her Transport Pod, I nearly puked, I was so disoriented. But it has gotten easier with constant repetition. I also think perhaps that first time has to do with me not knowing what to expect. I was just chilling with my mother and my elder brother and younger sister when she randomly appeared, picked me up and away we went in the Transport Pod. 

These days, I actually like the experience, although any movement that’s prolonged for too long becomes taxing on a body. That should be understandable. I get very fussy. And she makes soft apologetic noises so I try to be understanding but honestly, transport should be easier with their high-tech environment.

Besides, she often travels through portals. She has a lot of them. I never know which ones are the travel ones, though. Movies like to portray portals as circular or oval but her portals are always rectangular. Sometimes she does take me through them and we explore her world. I seem to thrive better in her natural habitat than she does, something that always seems to amuse her. I run faster than her, I hear better than her, I interact with her world with more enthusiasm than her, I even make friends with her kind easier than she does.

She does not engage with her outside environment very much except to large bodies of liquids. Different colours – blue, brown, one time even green. Maybe her job has something to do with liquids. We’d take the Transport Pod and go to these places. I like the places but they are not very friendly back. 

We visit the hills sometimes as well; that is always a friendlier trip. She’s not very adaptable to the outside environment at all. She gets out of breath very quickly; I think her kind was meant to stay indoors. Maybe they colonized a wrong planet that does not support them as optimally as they require. Maybe one of the reasons they abduct so much of us is also because it reminds them that once upon a time, they were good with their environment as well.

She also has a few portals that she does not allow me to cross. I can’t ever tell which one is which. And the house is big and scary without her in it because she is all I really know. Stockholm Syndrome, perhaps. I sometimes cry for what seems like hours and days and then she calmly just reappears at the other end of the portal, sometimes with no visible change, sometimes smelling different, sometimes in entirely different outfits. It is very disorienting.

You have to understand why I do this. She is my best friend and over time, my whole world. We may not understand each other’s language. But she did pick me among many others. She feeds me, she exercises with me and she takes care of me when I am sick. This is my life now. Maybe my life might have been better left to me and my own kind, but how would I know? You cannot live two lives in one.

She does a lot of experiments with me, her and this one man who always wears a white coat. Sometimes they give me injections. Sometimes they put me in strange metal platforms. Sometimes they push at my bottom. It is never pleasant. But I take it as perhaps my labour to her – maybe I am performing some sort of medical tasks for her studies. So I bear it, even though I don’t enjoy it. I don’t think she likes these visits either because she always makes gentle shushing noises to me when the experiments begin until they end. 

One of the strangest parts of living with your strange alien abductor is that we sometimes randomly meet people like me! My mother was right, after all. These creatures do abduct a lot of us. I’ve never seen my exact kind, though. We maybe a dying race. Or the creatures never came abducting in our part of the world. I meet people larger than I am, smaller than I am, never my exact kind. I even made a friend although we don’t speak the same language and he’s a bit dumb. He tries to escape constantly and I try to tell him to just remain where he is because this world is not kind to our kind. I don’t think he understands me.

My other friend is an old man who I think gets lost sometimes. My best friend talks to him and he just smiles at her. I don't think he understands her either. And then there are these three siblings who always aggressively shout hello to us, then run away if we approach them; weirdos. Most other friends of my kind are transient. They come and go, each with their own aliens.

Sometimes when we are outside, her vivid purple sky calls to me. I remember things I should not. But more like dreams in the morning than actual memories. I am in a world I probably should not be. And my best friend is an alien who came to my world one day and just straight up abducted me.

And then I wake up from my reverie and return to this world. She pats my head and murmurs in her language to me things I don’t really understand but it clearly soothes her to talk to me, so I just listen. She protects me from others of my kind who are hostile to me and waits for me when we meet friendly ones and I interact with them. In return, I choose her above all the other aliens, even the ones who treat me as warmly as she does.

We play games together. She tries to teach me things that are silly to me but I comply because they seem important to her. I try to teach her survival methods but that is all lost on her. She is afraid even of the rain! I can’t even teach her that during sunshine is the best time to run around outside for exercise. I fear she will never learn how to survive in the wilds without me.

The stars have changed positions since she first brought me to our home. She does not seem to have aged a day. Meanwhile, I have grown from a fat little toddler to a fluffy but otherwise well-adjusted teenager. I am close to my prime, and can protect her when she needs it. I worry about her when she goes off to the world outside alone because she barely knows how to navigate it. However she often insists on it. I argue my case but alas, she does not understand me.

I am her family, and she is mine. It is her and me against the world, my best friend my abductor.

A Short Sociology on Postal Addresses

When I studied in Mary Mount School, our teachers exposed us to certain extra-curricular activities like subscription to magazines which catered to North-east teenagers/youth, Christian youth, Indian youth etc. Aside from their own material and content, these magazines and comics taught us colloquial English that textbooks do not offer. The teachers even provided us the opportunity to make foreign friends via International Youth Service, what we called Pen Pals those days. These days, all of us are Screen-Mates, it seems like. Facebook Friends and IG Followers, all of us.

In the 00s, Snail Mail was still popular. We knew our addresses because we kept writing them on envelopes. We bought stamps in bulk. We bought paper and other stationeries scented by potpourri. We received them constantly too. These days, all the stamp buying I do is for office dak.

How things change!

We lived in Armed Veng in the days of IYS Pen Pals. Esther Leihang, M40 Armed Veng, Aizawl 796001 was the address I scribbled at the “If Undelivered, please return to” space at the flipside of the envelopes I’d mail to Europe and America. I don’t know if all the letters were delivered; if they were undelivered, none of them ever returned to me. However, mails addressed to that address did find their ways to me. 

We talked about veng/locality names quite often in my friend circle. Sometimes I still think about them, especially when I move to a new town/village.

Take Electric Veng, for example. It is where I stay in Hnahthial. There is seemingly an Electric Veng in every slightly bigger town in Mizoram. Apt too because that would usually be the localities where the Power & Electric Dept. run their sub-offices.

Or Chanmari in almost every big town. That I figure would have been named for where people used to, you know, mar the chand. Hit the bullseye. Target practice places evolving to proper localities. 

Or an ITI Veng which would develop quite naturally around any place that has an ITI institution. Like a College Veng in many places as well. Or even a Sikul Veng (for older schools, perhaps?). 

My old locality as well. There are not that many Armed Vengs in Mizoram. I know of no other than the one in Aizawl. Armed Veng was named for the establishment of the 1st Batallion Mizoram Armed Police in the area. The Veng developed around it. Leitan, by contrast, appears to exist in other places as well, not just in Durtlang. Rock-cut areas for roads, you understand, literally lei tan.

This is the way many areas have developed – around an institution. Not just in Mizoram but even back in Delhi. INA Colony and Defence Colony come to mind.

It happens. 

Hermon, is another common name. It is also the Lane where we currently live in, within Leitan Veng. In many places it is the name of the Veng itself. As in Hermon Veng. A bit more Biblical. There are few Vengs like that. Bethlehem Veng, for instance. Or Peniel Veng.

There are a few Republic Vengs here and there. I wonder where that is from. Also the few scattered Nursery Vengs. Is Nursery here for kids’ education or plants? I don’t really know.

In Mizoram, other less creative but natural occurring common place names for localities would be your Vengsang, Venglai, Vengthlang areas. That would be Upper Area, Middle Area and Lower Area – where the town expanded. Very natural. Very easy to understand. In this way, you’d also have your Ramthar and Ramhlun, Vengthar and Venghlun – new areas and old areas. 

There are the Adjective variety as well. For instance, your many -kawn(s); you know, junctions. You’d have your Sikulpuikawn, Bungkawn, Bawngkawn, Serkawn, Ramrikawn – junctions named for identifying markers: Main School, Banyan (?), Cattle, Fruits, Border, what have you. There is a Kikawn in Lunglei; I have no idea what a Ki is.

For that matter, quite a few villages are named this way. After a brook, for example. Selesih and Kelsih come to mind. Brooks where mithuns and goats, respectively, drank? Maybe there are more -sih(s) I can’t remember presently.

There are also quite a few Zotlangs and Zonuams here and there. Go figure.

Addresses are quite interesting. It would be nice for a little Graduation thesis in Sociology. Maybe someone from MZU or College Level Sociology can pursue it for term paper and make a little Sociology of it. It should be interesting. Research on names of places. I’d read that.

Speaking of education again, schools have changed so much. I don’t even know the academic year anymore, leave alone syllabus. In all honesty, it has become harder for me to relate to teenagers today, my age finally catching up, as it must, as it happens to every well-adjusted human to their appropriate ages. I don’t know what ECA schools lay out for their kids. In the days of Facebook and Instagram, IYS Pen Pals are probably a thing of long ago. Snail Mail, as we called it. I had a few friends in Italy, USA and France. We’d send each other stickers, collected the stamps, exchanged pleasantries. At one point in college, I even reconnected to an old Italian friend in Orkut, though it did not last. We had become different people by then. 

I appreciate what the school did for me and all I learned from the ECAs of the more literary bent, for introvert kids like me. I wonder if they still do it, one way or the other.