Are You On Autopilot?

It’s so ironic how, I go to bed so reluctantly at night and then about five hours later I’m so reluctant to get out of it. Once my feet touch the cold tiled floor of my bedroom ‘auto-pilot mode’ is immediately activated. The next forty-five minutes or so go by in a blur and I long for that moment when I can take my seat on the bus beside seven-year old Mohammed and then fall right back to sleep after he’s told me one of his little anecdotes.

Waking up in the morning and taking off in a flurry of activity after a cup of coffee is not equivalent to being completely awake and aware. As creatures of habit, we all tend to move through the day on automatic, sticking to a schedule and a plan. Have you ever arrived at work without quite knowing how you got there? Have you eaten your lunch at your desk and not even tasted it? Have you ever snapped at a colleague because he or she was taking up too much of your time and preventing you from getting on with your planned tasks? I know I have. And as a teacher, pretty much every move I make during the day is dictated by a time-table.

Last Sunday when an email popped up in my inbox with the link to a youtube video telling me to do the exact opposite of what I’ve just described, it made me stop and think for a while. It takes practice to calm down, slow down, and become more socially conscious. It takes an effort to let the world wash over you and not be affected by it. It takes an effort to show people you care and not be quick to judge them for the strangest possible reasons. But that’s something that each of us need to practice in our daily lives. Isn’t it?

Take a few minutes to watch this video, the message is simple but can have a profound effect on you if you really think about it.

 

मा

I remember so vividly the details of a day when my grandpa came to our house on Elliot road. He was sick, angry, worried and to top it all he couldn’t even walk without falling over. That day I saw something amazing. As grandpa struggled to walk up to our first floor apartment, my mother suddenly turned to him and said ‘Daddy, stop!”, she then proceeded to lift him up in her arms as if he were as light as a feather and then carried him up two flights of stairs without batting an eyelid. Every time I think of ma, I’m reminded that my mother is the strongest woman I know.

As I type this, I’m struggling to find the right words. How can I begin to articulate the depth and breadth of my love for my mother? It’s almost impossible to paint a comprehensive picture of who she really is and a simple patchwork of phrases or a walk down memory lane will not suffice. Be that is it may, the following is an attempt in that direction; here’s 3 things about my mother, 3 things that you should know.

My mother has beautiful eyes.

Growing up, I often watched ma get ready for work. My mother loves dressing up (still does) and each morning she applies her make up with the precision and meticulousness of a heart surgeon. Those eyes have a few lines around them today but they still retain their luminosity and their glow. In every line is a story. My ma has not had it easy. She’s never really told me and yet I know. I know the years of struggle she’s had to endure. Life can be so complicated sometimes but ma’s borne it all, her eyes looking heavenward, at the bigger picture. Ma’s eyes are the windows to her soul.

Ma has rough hands.

Yes, I said rough, they’re not the dainty hands that are evidence to hours of pampering and care. Mum’s palms tell of hard work and of much sacrifice. But what I love most about ma’s hands is that I’ve watched them reach out to people over and over again. I watched as she rushed to an old lady’s aid one day. The lady had fallen over in the street, writhing in pain as crowds gathered around her to watch. No one came forward to help. Mum was swift; she called for help, sent me off to get water and then sat by the lady’s side comforting a total stranger like she did when we needed her reassuring hands. My ma is the most generous woman I know. I’ve lost count of how many second chances she’s given people. I’ve lost count of how many people owe my mum money. I’ve lost count….she never counts. Never keeps score. My ma’s hands are rough but they’re beautiful.

Mum can be scary!

I remember back to when I was in the 9^th grade. Dad was working abroad and we were at home having a chat one evening when I casually mentioned that someone I knew was bullying me. Not the kind of bullying you’d expect in a school but the kind that required serious intervention. I watched mum’s face contort and change dramatically as she persuasively pried every detail out of me. That night I went to sleep a little less worried, mum sensed it too. The next evening the doorbell rang and to my shock and horror there stood the family of my tormentor. The next thirty minutes went by in a haze. I’ve never seen my mom so angry, so menacing and so categorical. I don’t know about my visitors, but every cell in my body tingled. Mum won that day. Not because my bully backed off, but because she made his parents realize that he was a child in dire need of attention.

I could go on waxing eloquent about ma, but I won’t. Many of those stories are personal and I want to guard them closely. But you get a sense of who my ma is and what she means to me, right? Ma’s a woman of honour. She’s the perfect friend and though she stands a little over five feet she’s a giant, a dynamo and an example of what a good mother is really like.

If I were to list words to describe my mum, they’d all end with ‘ing’. The reason behind that is because she is always doing, acting and living a life that does not sit down and expect things to happen but makes them happen, ‘one day at a time’.

Happy Mother’s Day, Ma. You mean the world to me. I love you *heartfull* and I can’t wait to see you!

 

Just in case you ever foolishly forget; I’m never not thinking of you.

 — Virginia Woolf, Selected Letters

Things Change

This morning I woke up and my mind went back to when I was a teenager and would dream of being 30, with all of its grown up responsibility and freedom. I remember spending my weekend mornings helping mum with her household chores. I remember helping her sort the groceries, making tea for my dad as he got ready for work, singing along to Anne Murray or Tom Jones songs as the weekend morning kicked-off in the bliss of domesticity .What followed was some homework, leisurely afternoon chats, mom’s cooking and a jaunt to New Market for some customary window shopping.

Now that I’m not too far from 30, I find myself wishing I could be a teenager again.

Very occasionally, on days like this, I lie in bed, close my eyes tight and wish that things would be slightly different. But instead of opening my eyes and having my wish come true I open them to long to-do lists staring at me in the face and a plethora of other things screaming out for my attention. Nothing is significant enough on its own to cause me distress but all together sometimes they bring my spirits down. So I take a few deep breaths.  Get out of bed, make myself a mug of coffee and take on the world, one person or problem at a time. I try to prioritize, get little or no exercise and the cycle continues.

The world looks a lot different today. I return to an empty home, and though call rates are cheap, there are hardly any stories worth narrating to mum and dad. The casual banter with my neighbors is missing – replaced by the impersonal hi! on Facebook. I don’t even know when seasons change; of course they do, but only outside the glass windows of my workplace.

Today is one of those days. You know, the kind of day when you’re reminded that being an adult is difficult and very overrated?

Don’t get me wrong. I love how my life is right now. Of course there are things that I wish could be different. I wish I could spend more time with my family, I wish I had more chances to goof around with my dog, I wish I could travel more, I wish more of my friendships would endure the tests of time and distance, but that being said, I am grateful for the way my life is. I know I’m blessed.

It’s just that there are days when I wake up and think of people from my past. People I’ve not thought about in a while, people who’ve probably forgotten me. They were important to me at different points in time, that’s changed. I relive childhood memories, I become nostalgic about times spent watching my mum and dad slow dance on a Saturday evening, or singing along with my brother as he strummed his guitar. I miss sharing my dreams with my college friends. You see what I mean? So many things change as we get older. It’s inevitable and that’s what I hate most!

Life was so much easier back then when scrapes from my bicycle ride were the worst pain I could think of, or the worst fight I had was about who should have the remote control. Life was so much easier when goodbyes meant “I’ll see you tomorrow.” But, as we grow up things change. Or maybe we do. Gradually fading away, drifting with the flow, losing ourselves, forgetting childhood dreams and old promises. We get lost in the whirlpool of professional priorities and synthetic emotions.

As we grow up things change. It is so much tougher to be happy. We want more from life, we expect more from people. People disappoint us. We lose more. We trust less. Dream less. Sleep less. Anyways, I could ramble on and on about childhood memories and adult realizations but all im really saying is this: As we grow up things change drastically and I wish they didn’t have to.

2 Minute Reading: Have We Lost Our Compassion?

This afternoon the kids in my debating group had a heated discussion on whether juvenile delinquents deserved to be shown compassion and to my surprise, only a handful of them agreed that children deserve our empathy and understanding. Their *radical* view was met with a resounding ‘no way!’ by the rest of the group. I can only imagine how they feel about adult criminals. They failed to see that empathy too has a role to play in crime and punishment.

I’m not going to get into the details of whether or not criminals deserve compassion, that’s an entirely different discussion but when I came home this evening and as I was going through Barkha Dutt’s twitter feed I read that Sarabjit Singh is lying in Pakistan, probably breathing his last while the our governments debate on whether or not he deserves sympathy so that he can be sent home to die in India.

The entire situation makes me uneasy.

I felt a similar unease back when, Osama Bin Laden was killed. My initial and internal reaction to the news both then and now was a quiet sense of relief. Call me naïve if you will, but the celebrations that followed made me extremely uneasy. The frenzied merriment seemed too crass, too vulgar and extremely inhumane. Dancing on the grave of a dead man no matter how evil he was seems so gross, so debauched and so callous.

The responses to Barkha’s tweets this evening are quite unforgiving. They made me cringe. They made me uneasy. I cannot explain why.  It feels like we’ve lost touch with our spiritual selves. We lost our sense of compassion. We’ve lost our way.

Whether Sarabjit Singh is actually guilty or not or whether he is the victim of mistaken identity, as his family claims, that is for the authorities to ascertain, but he certainly deserves the right to live with dignity like others prisoners and most definitely the right to die at home among people who care for him,  irrespective of …….well everything!

Dear David…

The memory I am about to narrate came to me out of the blue as I was making my way back home this evening. It took me back a couple of years – 2007 maybe 2008, I’m not too sure. I remember sitting on board a tiny little bus, my friends and I making our way down a narrow dirt road towards the Bible College we were going to be staying at for the next ten days. We were in a little village on the outskirts of Secunderabad, India – to work with the local kids and minister to their families.

I was with a group of people I had travelled with often, we had the most amazing experiences working together in villages, volunteering at rehabilitation centres, teaching children in prisons – and each experience left us more and more enriched.

That afternoon as we sang and laughed and listened to our South Indian friends rattling off random words in Telugu just so that they could have the pleasure of hearing us mispronounce them, I noticed that our driver had a little boy seated beside him. The dreamy eye lad all of four or five years old was so amused by us city folk. Every time he heard us laughing, he laughed. He clapped along to our songs, smiled from ear to ear while we screamed at each other and watched us intently as we shared stories, probably trying to figure out what it was that we were saying.

Over the next ten days I got to know little ‘Dabid’. He was such a sweet fellow and even though he didn’t understand a single word of English and I didn’t know any Telugu – a special friendship was forged. David sat beside me at dinner each evening. He introduced me to all the kittens that a stray had given birth to behind his cottage on the college campus. He brought me biscuits when he saw me making faces when I was served rasam  at every single meal. David became my friend. His parents kept in touch with me for a couple of years. They sent me photographs and little notes with David’s messages when he began attending a local school. Through those letters and photographs, (all of which I still have tucked away in the bottom shelf of my cupboard back home in India) I watched David grow. I prayed for David whenever I remembered to. I wished him well. I wondered if I’d ever be able to meet him again.

But time passed, life happened, the letters stopped and I never went back to Secunderabad.

I wonder where David is today. I wonder if he finished school. I wonder what he turned out like. I wonder if he had the kind of opportunities kids like him deserve.

I’m so grateful for the opportunities I’ve had to meet people all over India and the chances I’ve had to volunteer and work closely with them. But the worst part of it all is that they remain memories, locked away, relegated to the recesses of my mind only to be brought back suddenly – when I least expect them.

We had an amazing ten days working with the villagers in Secunderabad that year.  Street plays, home visits, children’s programmes, puppet shows…the works! I met so many families, so many precious children and so many wonderful people who showed me what contentment really means – being happy when you have nothing – absolutely nothing. But of them all, I remember little David most fondly and I hope and pray things turned out right for him.

Sometimes it’s not about the journey or the destination but about the people you meet along the way. – Anonymous

GAME OVER for ‘Chalk and Talk.’

A couple of years ago U.S President Barrack Obama predicted that education needed ‘sweeping changes’ and that modernization and the integration of Educational Technology (EdTech) was the way to go about it. I don’t think enough educators around the world recognize or agree with the significance of Obama’s clever calculations. The world is indeed changing rapidly and how we approach education will determine the kind of effect and influence teachers have on learners today.

As a teacher, every pore of my being is convinced that the educational community is poised at the brink of something explosive, something colossal. These are exciting times for schools around the world. Teachers, parents and students all around the globe are turning to the revolutionary power of modern technology to transform the way children learn. Like an excited reader wanting to skip pages to get to the exciting revelation at the end, there are times when I wish I could see that far ahead and get an understanding of how far the reach of EdTech really goes, but I guess getting there one step at a time has its own charms as well.

The boom and revolution of technology as we know it, has impacted our lives as profoundly as the printing press, the wheel or even instant coffee. Technology has permeated and has spread through to every facet of our daily lives; it was only a matter of time till its repercussions were felt within the walls of the classroom.

‘Chalk and Talk’ has been the standard pedagogical approach to teaching-learning for the longest time now. I remember the long lectures and didactic lessons I sat through as a child, trying my best to copy down or absorb every morsel of information that was thrown my way.  I also remember the funny smell that lingered long after my clothes had been covered in the fine white dust that flew off the blackboard every time my teacher asked me to ‘rub the board’. I don’t mean to sound like I come from the stone ages but you get my drift, right? We’ve come a long way since then and classroom dynamics have undergone titanic sized transformations.

Classrooms do not look, feel or function like they did ten or fifteen years ago. Everything has changed and its ramifications are mind-boggling. The best teachers in my opinion are the ones who adapt to these changes. The ones who are prepared to sacrifice their many many years of experience at the altar of new learning. The order they once knew has given way to controlled chaos. The nature of the teacher-and taught relationships has been revamped and everything has become freer, looser, and frantic even.  Convention has failed….and there is no better time than now for invention and innovation!

So how does EdTech fit in to the larger scheme of things? I have come to believe that EdTech has got to be at the center of any educator’s vision for his/her pupils. I recently read somewhere that ‘knowing has become obsolete’. How true that is, if we can teach our children the skills of using EdTech to collaborate and discover new information for themselves, we have indeed taught them 21^st century skills that will empower them for the future.

I recently took the plunge into using EdTech for myself.  Baby steps of course, I began using twitter and youtube to connect with my pupils online and what a treat it has been. I am still getting used to the idea of having my face on youtube but it’s my new educational blog that has got me most excited.  The blog has allowed me to introduce my students to the responsible use of social media. I love it when I see them use twitter to ask me course related stuff, but reading their responses on the blog and getting an insight into what they’re thinking and why they thinking that way has been both a revealing and rewarding process.

The multiple benefits of extending classroom conversations to the online world is truly remarkable. Suddenly, I find that I’m surrounded by little subject experts. The links I post, the videos I share and the information I direct them to through the blogosphere has ensured that the people I meet in class every morning are well prepared and raring to go. The depth and breadth of their online discussions, their research and their commitment to course work has taken on a complete new avatar.

I’m not blind to the fact that there are several potential drawbacks of using EdTech but those reasons are hardly enough to limit the innumerable positive effects EdTech can have on the teaching-learning process in 21^st century schools. My experiences with EdTech in the last few months have been overwhelmingly encouraging. These online learning communities have unparalleled power to self-instruct and to impart both knowledge and skill and I’m just glad that I can be a tiny part of it all, orchestrating modern-day magic, as it were.

Mahatma Gandhi with his economic use of words was ironically able to sum up the state of affairs teachers and educators across the world find themselves in today. Teachers, ‘Be the change you want to see in the world.’ EdTech cannot be viewed as an ‘add-on’. EdTech is simply a modern-day tool. It needs to be integrated and implemented carefully and that’s why the teacher’s role still remains most critical. Like the Chinese proverb states, today’s children were ‘born in another time’ and if we want to get through to them, if we want to connect with them and have a meaningful impact on their learning and on their lives we must be able to speak their language.

Embracing EdTech is no longer an option; it is a 21^st century requirement and the faster you get on board the more convinced of its extreme benefits you will become. I know it sounds daunting and can be nerve-racking for anyone who considers themselves technologically challenged, but I assure you  – baby steps…that’s all it really takes!

Choose Happiness, Please!

This afternoon I received an unexpected phone call from an old friend. Even before I had reluctantly answered the call, my mind was racing ahead of me, predicting the kind of conversation I was about to have. For the next fifteen minutes, I listened to my friend spout venom at the world. I knew it would be a couple of minutes before he would finally breathe or pause to ask ‘How are you doing?’

Some people I know choose to perpetuate a cycle of sadness. I mean they cling to their roles as victim or martyr long after their negative experiences have ended. They whine and cry and bring people down with their negativity and cynicism all the while choosing to wallow in self-pity and misery instead of letting go, breathing and choosing to move on. I hate having to smile and patronize these kinds of people. Making them ‘feel happy’ isn’t my responsibility.  We all have our burdens to bear. Trials and tribulations can be challenging and life-altering but they can also make us stronger. Unfortunately that’s a mindset that not many people possess. Many choose to stay stuck in a devilish limbo; bitter, angry, cynical and unconcerned about how their pessimism affects those around them.

Many people believe that happiness is a thing of chance – a result of the right wheels turning at the right time. It’s so easy to be happy when things are going right, when everything seems to be working your way, but when we have that narrow notion of happiness, we limit it to an offshoot of luck which if you ask me, it absolutely isn’t.

You see, happiness doesn’t just happen. It isn’t a well packed product one can avail when one needs it. Sometimes we have extremely good days and there are also days when we wish we hadn’t even gotten out of bed. It is on days like the latter that real happiness is harnessed or manifest. Do you know people who can smile even though their world is falling apart? I know people like that and I love being around them when I’m having a bad day myself. You see, being around these people has taught me that happiness doesn’t just happen – happiness is a choice. Your choice. No matter what your circumstance, we have the freedom to choose how we respond and react to all that transpires.

We’re all emotional beings. We go through so many different kinds of experiences that we respond to in so many different kinds of ways. Our feelings and how we deal with them shape us into the kind of people we eventually become. Some of us are born happy, the rest of us have to work towards it. I know happiness can sometimes seem out of reach, like reaching for a bubble or trying to catch a snowflake but I strongly believe that if the thing we value aren’t things, we can really be happy no matter what comes our way.

Happiness is a choice, I believe that wholeheartedly. Not the fuzzy, air head kind of happy. I’m talking about the kind of happiness that comes from grounded thoughts, peace of mind and genuine contentment – the kind of happiness that comes from logic perspective and an open mind and heart.

I hope my friend reads this post, it’s sure to pop up on his timeline. Maybe reading what I think will convince him to give happiness a try. At the end of the day, it really is a choice that he himself must make. As for me, I’m going to do something thing now that makes me extremely happy – I’m about to silence my phone, pour myself a glass of Merlot and listen to the haunting voice of Bonnie Raitt. Simple pleasures people, that’s the key.