108

-
108 the auspicious number in Hindu Mythology. The jap mala has 108 beads. The total 9 is a good number by Feng Shui and denotes the fame area or the fire element. As children the numbers meant so much. Dates and vacations and exams went hand in hand. If our parents had booked our train tickets then that date took a comletely new meaning.
Then it was marks. There were no grades when I was studying. Everything was broken down to numbers in black and white. No grey areas like today's schooling. The teachers justified why a student got X marks. In the literature and language papers, the answers were subjective. The best answer was read out in class by the student who scored the highest. There was a high level of fairness. No grades were cut because the child behave in a particular way in class or was talkative. The child s behaviour was separate from the child's marks and the teachers in our school understood that very well. Each spelling mistake was circled or underlined. There was no ambiguity.
Now, when I see my child's grades and try to fathom things out of it, there are no straight answers. The teachers say its the overall performance of the child in school. I don't want to compare but I want to know if the answers written were correct then why does the grade not match. Am I into marks? No. I feel bad because I am not a competitive mother and neither are my children so. To the extent that the children do not come and tell me who did what in class or what teacher said.
I see my friends who are teaching their children so much and I wonder what is wrong with me. I keep hearing from these Moms that the world is competitive and if we dont keep up, the child will be left behind. New Age moms are like this only and new aged moms are like me. Life is a number game.

Today is my Dad s birthday. May he live to be a hundred and three, its a Hap Hap Happy Birthday.

Comments

  1. MallikaDecember 14, 2011 at 3:16 PM

    Wow...!
    Amazing my Ben...:)Happy Birthday to Uncle.
    You have company here...i also never bother much about marks, more importantis that they are happy going to school, make good friends n hav a good conduct!
    Guess we are different...:))
    love lots
    Malli.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Nange Paon in Navratri

-
When I was working and staying in the hostel, I kind of stopped believing in most festivals and rituals. I thought all this was some weird things which people did, it had no scientific base and why should I follow anyone. In the college hostel, vacations were time to go home and not connected with any festival except Diwali. Sophia College hostel was a cocoon in the heart of South Mumbai. The campus with an old palace building was a quiet oasis with trees and birds, in the mayhem of Mumbai. No festival touched it unless the college celebrated it. The Polytechnic had rock shows and one Dandiya night every year, which it soon stopped having by 1988. Only celebration was the Vegetable Biryani in lunch on Sundays. The Polytechnic hostel did not even believe in pampering the children with food. Memories of bread being there round the clock for breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner. For them, while the non vegetarians ate eggs for breakfast, the vegetarian had bread. And then when non vegetaria...
Read more

Shraddh period in Hinduism

-
According to the Hindu calendar, this is the shraddh period going on.  For fifteen days in a year, the ancestors are remembered and prayed to. No auspicious events / ceremonies take place in this time. People use the tithi/date of death to invite a Pandit and feed the departed soul. It means you remember the person passed away, give food to the Pandit and the crows. People keep a cooked meal on the terrace. They try to make the favourite food of the departed person. My memories are of my Grandma mixing and crushing all the savouries with her hands and when it was in form of  a paste, my Uncle would go to the terrace and throw the food for the crows. Crows in Hinduism are considered messengers of the departed souls. A lot of people feed Gathiyas to the crows for the full year. If your ancestors are happy, then your life goes well ,is the general belief amongst Hindus. The shraddh period falls exactly between Ganpati and Navratri. One does not buy a house or have...
Read more

Antakshari

-
Today we were playing antakshari at the Holi get together. We did not know any new songs so naturally only the golden melodies were being sung. The whole generation playing antakshari was singing the similar era songs on the alphabets they got. I realised a couple of things. In English language there is no game like Antakshari. How many sentences end with I or The? How can you sing when most songs start with I, The, Once, When and How?I cannot resist explaining the game, we all grow up with, in India. Antakshari means Ant : end , Akshar: alphabet ie last letter of the word. Akshar also means God. It also means God has the last word. Its a game with two teams and we call the teams as  'party'.  We say "Baithey baithey kya karein, karna hai kuchh kaam, shuru karo antakshari , le ka Hari ka naam." Translated from Hindi, We are sitting idle, lets do some work, lets start antakshari, starting with God's name. In Indian games, there is a lot of religion or belief in Go...
Read more