Things have been different this time round. Yes, Aneesha has improved. She reads a lot faster, focuses on her work and at least before her pencil hits the paper, she is always going for A - "easy, peasy," is her preferred turn of phrase. Yes, a lot has changed since she entered a 'real school.' Exam after exam, where grades have vacillated violently between C and A have taught me that at the end of the day it's not the paper grades rather the brilliance from within that matters.
Helping me with this philosophical take is this timeless R.K.Narayan classic. Swami & Friends, which was first published in 1935 by Hamish Hamilton has gone into several re-prints since. I have a copy of it in my Nani's home in India, left in the hope of setting that library if and when we do return to our shores. The copy that I am reading now was picked up at the Vijitha Yapa Bookstore in Colombo and guess what it's the 37th edition. Such is the charm of the book.
The story is as simple as it comes. 10-year old Swaminathan (Swami) is a student of Albert Mission School whose life changes when the smart Rajam enters the school. "He (Rajam) was a new-comer....He spoke very good English, exactly like a European; which meant that few in the school could make out what he said."
I'm not going to read too much into that, it's already been done by many others. Let me stick to the key characters. Swami also has four other friends - the mighty Good-for-Nothing, Mani, the brilliant Sankar, the Monitor Somu and Samuel, the 'Pea' who had nothing outstanding about him.
When Swami decides to befriend Rajam, this tightly knit circle of friendship threatens to break away. They survive that test, but it is the tests that remain an imposition of the education system that break them.
As I revise Sabki Surahi and other lessons and the test sheets of the various Hindi books that a 7-year old and their parents have to grapple with, I wonder how much has changed since 1935 when Narayan first published this classic?
Children remain children, doing everything in their power to escape the drudgery of homework for the charms of the playground. I was like that once. They re-visit their course books only when threatened with the gravest of threats. In my days, my mother's rose cane was enough of a deterrent, these days, it's more likely to be "no tv, no playstation."
The pressures of the system remain, parents being parents want the Swamis to keep up with the Rajams. It's a tough job, as Narayan showed us, but someone's got to do it.
