My Two Cents: Exam Results

In days long past, where poplar trees lined the backyard and bread was baked in the campus itself, with home-grown peanut butter served with it within the walls of a brick-layered dining hall… I once watched a lot of Hindi movies. 

I haven’t watched many more since. I watched those movies also because on Saturday nights, the school would show it to us on open air theaters. I didn’t have a choice. Very uncomfortable seats because the seats were basically rock cubes and cement in a mini-arena. But spending summer nights outside was nice, save for mosquitoes but we had Odomos for that. And anything on the big screen was – still is – doubly nice, even when you didn’t understand a majority of the movie. Language problems.

Anyhoo. I only remembered Roorkee movie nights because one child actor Harshaali from a movie called Bajrangi Bhaijaan apparently scored 83% in her CBSE Xth Standard Boards. I saw it on IG on the TOI page. She made a little video thanking her haters on this occasion. The comment section was brutal. It was all basic information every Indian kid knows by heart, that 83% is below average, that people score 100% routinely, that you should stop dancing and study harder, and that unless you get 90% and above, you have nothing to say.

It is a rather dull comfort to know nothing really ever changes. Comfort in the sense of knowing what’s coming, even if you can’t change it. Of course, things do get worse, but you get the idea. I don’t know how many lives will be ruined in an endless cycle of chasing the 100% score dream. In Mizoram context, we don’t push for 100% but dear lord, Letter marks! Top Ten! Topper! Good kid, bravo, now pick up more books and become an IAS or a doctor. Endless cycle.

I hope the new generation of parents would do better than the last in this regard. Common courtesy, basic etiquette, common sense, logical reasoning and empathy can take people far in life in terms of success and/or happiness and you don’t always achieve it with high scores in tests. I wouldn’t advocate dropping studies because I’ve been deeply conditioned to believe in education but I’ve started to re-think even this. My new stand, albeit still shaky, is that vocational skills coupled with basic education, especially financial literacy, is what is important and possibly more productive and attainable for the majority of people. You don’t need to be a Topper for that. You certainly don’t need a cent per cent score.

I really have no clue about the peanut butter though, and you can’t quote me on the bread either, possibly should not take my word as gospel truth about my new stand in education thirdly, but the poplar trees had really been there, in nice straight lines. Very pretty. Roorkee could be incredibly gorgeous in the right light. Unless I imagined the whole thing.

French and AV

Mlle. Sasha Rose, my French teacher, one time begged our Principal and Headmaster to screen a movie in French for us so as to improve our listening skills. They allowed it, for some reason. And so we sat and watched Breakfast at Tiffany’s. In French but with English subtitles and we were supposed to remember at least 10 dialogues from it. Remember and note down, I think.

Which is how Audrey Hepburn’s face/voice saying, “Quelle nuit!” is burned in my memory. It means “What a night!” and this is nice because I don’t remember any other French at all from my one year haphazard French lessons with Miss Sasha. I lie. I remember like three (ish) other phrases: Je m’appelle Esther, Comment ça va? (Ça va bien!), and C’est la vie. Maybe we can add Tres bien! to the list. Ooh. Also that it is spelled Lion but pronounced Leo. Like the zodiac sign.

Miss Rose’s idea was something practiced where she was from. I never bothered to ask. She was white and she was American is all I ever knew. She’d tell us how she once spent a year in France where everyone told her how atrocious her French accent was. She said: they’re not very forgiving if you mispronounce French and act like you know French. I find that interesting. 

I think Indians in general are much more accepting if you butcher their language as long as you can communicate, however broken. Very appreciative, too, which is nice. Atithi Devo Bhava and all that, maybe. Mizo again, however, are not accepting. But we don’t get mad. We just laugh mercilessly at people who butcher the language. And then mockingly mimic them. Not very nice but it is what it is.

In my old school Sacred Heart School in Lunglei, we had these classes too. AV Class, it was called. For Audio-Visual. This was how I watched The Lion King, Dunstone Checks In, Home Alone and some other kid friendly movies. The teachers would give us few questions. Easy ones. Maybe something like: what is the name of the monkey? Or the lion? Or what is the name of the director? Something easy. Something a kid could get. We watched the movie and kept an ear out for these details. 

It is a very effective teaching method, especially in the listening part because English is not our first language and they were teaching us in English, however different the accents were. Also this listening of dialogues teach kids colloquial usage which, I find, is never redundant. It trained me to listen and pay attention to details. I don’t know if other schools currently are doing this but they should. It is entertaining and useful, both.

AV Classes are over now, my French lesson way more over. Any French these days is much less AV than it is somatic, to be sure. C’est la vie, indeed.

Sunday Muse: Worship

Amy Farrah Fowler of The Big Bang Theory had this line that I found hilarious: I don't object to the concept of a deity, but I'm baffled by the notion of one that takes attendance.

It often reminds me of a woman I met a long time ago who gave me a conundrum to chew on. She didn’t think of it as such though. For her, it was quite straight forward.

Let’s try to set the scene: Church has decided to embark on Christian Family mission and wants to ensure that all families should try to promote Christian family values. And one of those values is daily Family Worship. In fact, church would go around and ask all families if they have family worship. I think there might even have been a separate register for this. If your family said no, you didn’t have family worship, you guys would be considered weird and outliers.

This woman I met was a church women leader. Following such, she was gung-ho about family worship. To paraphrase her, though: My family is very invested in the importance of daily family worship. But all of us have different engagements all the time and we can’t even eat meals together, leave alone set aside time to sit and pray together, neither in the morning nor at night. But this has not deterred me. Sometimes I’m the only one at Family Worship but it happens every night.

My conundrum therefore is this: Is worship about the attendance?

Now with attendance, I attend church once a week. Anybody else in any novel I ever read would think this was a character that was very church oriented. Not in Mizoram. Not by a long shot. In Mizoram, you're not considered a regular church-goer unless you attend at least 4 times a week. I'm not even kidding. There are 3 services on Sunday. Let's say you attend 2 of those. There’s Wednesday night service and Saturday night service. So that’s 4 (of 5) already. But those are only the services for EVERYONE. It doesn’t make you special. You have to attend one more in a week depending on your station in life, youth on Monday, women on Tuesday, middle-aged men on Thursday. I almost forgot – in between Sunday School and Sunday Afternoon service there’s an additional fellowship service, again depending on your station. Maybe Friday night is the only true Night Off. Friyay indeed.

When I was in SDA Inter-College Roorkee, we attended a lot of church services. Every morning and every evening, we had Hostel Prayers. Quite beyond this, Friday night was Vespers, Saturday morning was Sabbath School, Saturday afternoon was main service, all of them non-optional.

Then in Mount Carmel, Anand Niketan, I again attended hostel prayers every night; in my second year, I was even Chapel-in-Charge! I actually learned to play guitar because of this; I learned a lot of choruses! Sundays we attended church with our hostel warden’s family; our warden’s husband was pastor. I think that was CNI.

Since college, I really haven’t attended a lot of church anymore. It’s not that I have lost faith or anything. It’s just something that has happened. It is what it is.

Add to this my cynical and outspoken nature and a lot of people have asked me point-blank if I was atheist. I really am not. I like the idea of not knowing for absolute certain. It is all in the word: belief. You take something at faith value, pardon the pun. I like for my faith to not be blind and fundamentalist but I take my comfort in short burst of prayers and meditation on Bible verses; Ecclesiastes and the Gospels, usually.

On Bible reading, I don’t know about others but I’ve often heard people say: simply reading the Bible isn’t enough, you have to meditate on them. I respectfully disagree. I have read my favourite books time and again until I can quote them. The Bible is one of those books. When I am sad or lonely or angry, it is passages from these books I’ve familiarized myself with, that comes to the rescue and comfort me. I don’t know the difference between reading and meditating, maybe.

I have wondered, when I was younger, if faith was compatible with science. I no longer do. Where they are compatible, it is wonderful. Where they aren’t, I compartmentalize anyway. It’s alright. It is what it is.

Just to be controversial, and because we’ve talked about Religion and Science in Sunday School for two Sundays now: my take on Evolution v. Creation. I take a lot of the Bible as metaphor; even Jesus always taught in parables, after all. Genesis talked about Creation in seven days. I don’t believe in seven twenty-four hours days creation. But evolution would concur with the general loose theme of how things came into existence in Genesis – the Big Bang of light and everything, everything settling down, life beginning with the plant world, then in the water, then on land, finally culminating in Homo Sapiens, your basic Adam and Eve.

Or the Tower of Babel. Technology and science rise so high that God struck the people and cursed them with a change of language so they can’t communicate. Throughout history, language has changed courses of development dramatically. I believe even now, people are encouraged to learn Chinese? Because while us old British colonial nations still consider English as the language of development, this has not been necessitated by other nations. Interesting. Maybe Babel is about to strike again.

Or Karma. I believe in Karma. Or more biblically, ‘as you sow, so shall you reap’. And that the LORD says ‘Vengeance is mine’. I rest my mind now. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but sometimes we know what some people are truly about, how inherently corrupt they are – either materially or morally or both – but they seem to thrive in the world and people dejectedly think: this world is profitable for sinners. Either that, or sycophantically to their face: God is favouring you so much, look at all your blessings as Signs of Favour. But no, we know so little of people. Karma knows. And Karma doesn’t strike how we wish it would (Job comes to mind) but rather where it hurts people. I’ve had my fair share of bad Karma bitch-slapping me; believe me, I know.

Anyhoo. I digress.

Church Attendance. It is definitely necessary to form your societies, your prayer circles, your pillars of support, your chance to give back to society, your chance to be part of a greater community… Very true. I wholeheartedly agree. But is it the same as worship?

Not As Much As Lord Voldemort

I made my dad stand in line for the sixth Harry Potter book. It was from a bookstore in Sarojini Nagar market in Delhi, before it was all swanky and shit. It was my first completely new Harry Potter book; all my first five copies had been bought second-hand. I don’t remember but I wouldn’t be surprised if dad had bought me the book as a reward for having gotten good grades; that had always been our way.

My parents have never understood my fascination for fiction. My dad lives in a world of responsibility, always taking it just a little bit too seriously. My mum has not a superstitious bone in her body, despite being deeply spiritual, which is a paradox (which she doesn’t find to be so). Neither of them takes time out of their hands to indulge in fiction and imagination and the fanciful world of paranormal fiction. Except for a couple of ghost stories, of course – my dad with his ‘I once gave a ride to an Old Lady Ghost’ and my mum’s ‘I once saw a chhawihfa when I was working in Durtlang hospital but it was probably methane’ stories.

Be that as it may, they’ve always said: If she is reading, it is better than not reading. There has never been a ban on any material. My mum did show signs of concern back when people said Harry Potter promoted witchcraft or some such bull. But even then, she never banned it. I read whatever fiction I could find. My first full-blown novel was The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas which might explain my fascination for gruff men who are far too brilliant for their own good. I might have been ten; I’d say that was a bit young for The Count but like I said, there were no rules. As long as I was reading, it was A-OK.

I read Enid Blyton after Sidney Sheldon, Doctor Faustus and Mills & Boon novels! That was not right. But it still worked. I liked the stories. Whatever I didn’t understand, I simply glossed over.

I never thought I’d be done with comics because I devoured any I could lay my hands on: Archies, Asterix, Biker Mice From Mars, Cartoon Network comics, Chacha Chaodhury, DC, Marvel, Phantom, Photoromances, Richie Rich, Tinkle, Tintin... any and everything. But lately, I can’t seem to bring myself to be engaged in them. Maybe I am getting old. This is new.

In 2011, my mum mused aloud that I read so many books yet never seemed to finish reading the Bible. That got me thinking. I said I’d give it a go. She bought me a small, pocket-friendly, leather-bound NIV Bible and I read it everywhere. It starts out nice with magical stories, gets a bit slow going after a point, but then with the songs and poems in the middle, it finds its ground again, ending with a bang. I’ve been re-reading it annually ever since. I am partial to some parts; not a big fan of some parts.

There are a few other books I continually re-read; January is for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. I have re-read a lot of my old books; I consider it catching up with old, dear friends.

And every September, without fail, I return to Hogwarts, as we Potterheads say; via re-reading the books, basically. I remember my first time reading Philosopher’s Stone. It was in the girls’ hostel of SDA Inter-College Roorkee. My friend Meenu got sent the first two books by her grandfather (I think?) and she lent them to me. I was hooked from the line, “Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.” Yes, thank you very much.

I snuck out of the Lady Shri Ram Residence Hall for the seventh book with a few friends from college who I remain friends with to this day. There was that whole Midnight Release which because it was simultaneous across the globe, meant about 6:30AM for us in India. Actually, Harry Potter helped me make my first friends in college. We were a group of Freshers standing outside the LSR Auditorium and someone mentioned Harry Potter and a bunch of us just gravitated toward each other. These were the peeps I broke hostel rules with and standing in line with at that bookshop in GK-II that morning. Thanks, Potter.

Addiction is not always a good thing. But as Daniel Radcliffe said, it could be drugs. So I’m still doing OK, I guess. There’s just something so comforting about books, especially fiction.

I’m not the biggest fan of non-fiction but I’m trying out memoirs, biographies, travel and science books. They can be fun. I’d like to one day brag about some heavy literature I can quote offhand as a party trick. For now, I don’t really gravitate to literature that teaches you things. I’ve always preferred something ‘to enjoy’ rather than ‘to accumulate’, as in knowledge. Any wisdom I gain from my reading is ever only incidental.

Fiction works for me because in fiction, things make sense. Which is not always the case in real life. It is an escape, yes. But it can also be a way to learn many of life’s lessons without having to personally make many mistakes. Of course, some mistakes in life you make on your own because they are delicious. Wink wink.

I’ve always been interested in fiction. Some might even call it an obsession. I do not deny it. I’ve made my peace with it and I think it is okay. It is not as much as Lord Voldemort with Harry Potter anyway.