Learning By Doing (Part I) - Dori's Cakes

Often I run into people who are curious about kids that don't go to school. They want to know about these children's lives, skill-set, interests, aspirations and future. This made me realize the need for a collection of profiles of some homeschooling children. In this "Learning By Doing" series, I plan to feature such children who are learning and honing their skills and thriving in their lives.

I recently interviewed Dori. She lives in Gurgaon with her twin younger siblings and parents. It is a typical middle class setup with all the constraints and opportunities of urban living. Dori has been a home-baker for a few years now. Here is her interview, translated from Hindi:

How old are you, Dori?

D: I will turn 13 this March.

How long have you been homeschooling?

D: I never went to school, except for six months when I was very small.

I know you like to bake. When and how did you get into baking?

D: I always liked to hang out with my mom while she cooked. When I was around eight, I used to watch cooking shows on TV. There were shows on baking. Since my mom never baked, I didn't have any idea about baking. But I was quite fascinated by it and I wanted an oven. My mom wasn't sure if we would really be using it enough to justify the expense involved. For about a year there were a lot of discussions at home to evaluate all the relevant perspectives. Finally when I was nine, we bought an oven. I watched some videos on youtube that helped me get started.

How was your initial baking experience?
D: I made dry cakes (with no icing) for family and friends for over a year. Then one of our friends suggested that I learn how to decorate cakes. This deeply interested me. She wanted to pay me for a special order of their anniversary cake. I was particular about not joining classes for kids because I didn't find them to be useful earlier. So my mom helped me join the baking classes that were meant for adults.  After sometime I felt the need for a mentor. Through my mom's contacts I got introduced to a home-baker, Arbuda.  I asked my mom if I could learn from her. So I lived at her place for a few days. I saw how she was working on different kinds of orders and how efficiently she was managing everything.  After I came back home I put into practice what I had learned. When I ran into difficulties that baffled me I always called Arbuda aunty and asked for help. And she would help me with tips, fixes and ideas. She is now a professional baker, running a bakery in Noida. 

What else do you bake?

D: I bake breads too. Initially I couldn't find the right kind of yeast. My dough didn't rise at all. Then I stopped baking breads for a few months. Later I went to some bread-baking classes. There I saw what kind of yeast they were using, how they were using it etc. After developing an understanding about this, I started baking again. Slowly I gained confidence in myself. Now I bake pizza bases, pav buns, muffins and cookies.

Typically who do you get orders from?

D: At first it was from my friends. Then it was from my friends' neighbours.

Have you got orders from people who you don't know?

D: Yes, I have baked for people not known to us. During diwali I got orders for 50 boxes of chocolates. These are special chocolates made during the festival using compound chocolate; they are shaped and wrapped to look just like diwali crackers and fireworks. They sold very well. We actually delivered some of those boxes by courier service, to customers who were not known to us.

What kind of specifications do people have when then place a cake order?

D: They tell me what kind of cake they want. Sometimes they specify a theme, for example doll or hawaiian or cosmetics theme. Preparing for their theme takes me about a week. I design the decorations, make cut-outs and practice. Everyday I work a little bit on the theme.

Can you compare the price of your cakes to the ones sold in the market?

D: My basic 1/2kg cake is Rs. 280. Market prices vary from Rs.300 to Rs.350 for a similar one. Theme cakes are expensive. I calculate the customization cost after baking, based on the expenses incurred. 

Did you study the market prices before arriving at yours?

D: Yes, I studied the market prices with my mom. Market study helped me understand the various factors involved in pricing a product -- ingredients, energy, transportation, labour, packaging. My mom explained to me why certain cakes were priced high. I don't like pricing my cakes high, I keep them on the lower side. Once I saw a theme-cake in the market that was just like one of my cakes. Its price was Rs. 1600 whereas ours was for Rs. 1400. If we plan to have a stall at an event, we study the demographics of the place in advance and adjust our prices accordingly. I also learned about the whole sale market and the enormous difference in prices between whole sale and retail markets.

How many cake orders do you receive in a month?

D: Three or four. I can't take more orders.

Have you had any orders for bread yet?

D: No. I am not there yet. Currently I bake breads only for our family.

Do you have a wide range of baking tools and implements?
D: I have many of the basic tools that are needed -- spatula, brush, electric beater, muffin tray, turn table, serrated knives, mold, fondant cutter. We bought them one at a time from my second baking year onward, whenever there was a pressing need. Sometimes I don't have the right tool to work on a certain aspect of a theme. I then prepare a cut-out using a make-shift, improvised tool. We don't always resort to buying because of the expense involved.

I would like to hear your thoughts on the health implications of baked products, a lot of them being sweet. 
D: When I was very young, I used to have a lot of cake at parties. I didn't pay any heed to my mom's advice on health. That changed when I started baking; since I knew exactly what and how much went into making a cake I didn't want to eat it.  Basically there was too much maida, oil and sugar. I realized that that was not healthy for me.  This realization has urged me in to looking at healthier alternatives in baking.

What have you learned about the food industry so far?
- I now know that the cakes in the market contain emulsifiers, preservatives, stabilizers and artificial flavours. But good cakes can be baked without any of these. 
- Traditionally cream meant butter cream. This is expensive. Now low-cost non-dairy whipping cream is widely used in the food industry; this cream has oil or soya bean and has longer shelf-life compared to butter.
- Regarding breads, I came to know that "healthy" breads, like whole wheat bread, contained bread-improver (for longer shelf-life), extra gluten and caramel sauce (for colour). There was nothing really healthy about the "healthy" breads in the market.
- Regarding chocolates, I learned that there are two kinds -- compound and coverture. Compound chocolate contains vegetable oil and cocoa butter; it is easy to use this chocolate in baking recipes in warmer places like India. Also this is cheaper than coverture chocolate. Coverture chocolate contains only cocoa butter and thus it is quite expensive. Typically all the chocolates that we find in India are compound chocolates.

Suppose a new baking experiment failed twice or thrice in a row. What do you do then?

D: Sometimes I just try again. At other times I get disappointed. At times my mom helps me understand what went wrong. Then I make some changes and try the recipe again. Sometimes I abandon that project, take up something entirely different and come back to it after a break.

Can you tell me about some challenges that you faced while baking, in these four years?

D: Whipping cream and fondant behave differently during each season due to temperature and humidity. During the rainy season when Delhi's humidity is very high, working with icing becomes increasingly difficult without running an air conditioner at home. These were practical problems. When I talked to other bakers they said that we needed to have an AC. But we didn't want to get an AC just for this purpose. I have now learned to alternate between refrigerating the icing and working with it in a very swift manner. 

Putting a price tag on my creation is another challenge. I am worried if it is priced right and not too high. I also wonder about the authenticity of the compliments and feedback I receive -- if people  praise my work because I am a kid.
My cakes are egg-less. Given this self-imposed constraint, it took me a long period and countless attempts to achieve the moisture, softness and spongy texture that are characteristic of market cakes.

What are your thoughts about formal studies?

D: I will take my class X exams and not anything before that.

What else do you do?

D: I play football with my friends and I go to football classes. I like quilling. I make birthday cards, ear rings or necklaces using quilling. I like cooking millets, momos and noodles. I have also taught some baking classes in an alternative school. Sometimes I volunteer at a restaurant run by another homeschooling mom, Shruti. She introduced me to food photography, which is my current interest. She has been of tremendous support to me whenever I have wanted to cook something new or different.

What else would you like to take up in the future?

D: I want to make  my own fondants to sculpt my cakes; I use ready-made fondants now. I want to do a lot of other things too. I want to be a teacher. I am very interested in kitchen gardening and composting. There is talk in our apartment complex to implement community composting. I am actively involved in this along with three other kids. We are looking for volunteers and contacts to learn  about low-cost community composting models.

Thank you, Dori!

Some of Dori's creations:

An Evolving Polyculture

"Burn this ghastly pile of thorny plants". We repeatedly heard this from the local people and farm workers when we had uprooted a lot of thorny shrubs and trees. The pile was about 7' tall and 20' wide. We didn't have the heart to waste that much biomass, much less to produce so much heat and smoke.

"The problem IS the solution" says Bill Mollison, co-founder of Permaculture. With this thought in mind I searched through Mollison's Design Manual. I found the south east Asian design of Palm circles useful and appropriate. Here is how we customized it:

We dug a shallow, circular trench around the thorny pile and mounded the soil (from the trench) on the outer side. We planted 8 coconut saplings around this trench. This formed a circle of 27' diameter. The coconuts were about 10' apart. These were interspersed with banana and papaya. We once grew a small crop of peanuts on the berm. We are now growing pumpkins there.

After three years, this circle and the area around it has become home to all these volunteers:

wild passion flower (creeper covering the thorny pile),

Crotalaria juncea (Indian hemp or sunn hemp),

Clitoria ternatea (creeper with beautiful blue or white flowers),

Crotalaria striata (leguminous shrub with lot of yellow flowers) ,

Calotropis gigantea,

Dodonaea viscosa (shrub),

Holy Basil (Indian Tulsi),

Thai Basil,

Wild Tulsi,

Medicinal herbs,

Rosella (gongura),

Tridax procumbens (ground cover),

lemon grass.

These plants together with the ones we planted (i.e. coconut, banana and papaya) have created a small paradise that attracts a lot of butterflies, birds and bees. The vines keep the thorny pile under a perennial green cover, thus helping with moisture retention and decomposition. Thanks to mainly the indefatigable termites, the colossal thorny pile has shrunk to a mere 2'  mound. A scoop of the soil from underneath the pile now features a beautiful biomass-rich crumb. And all this newly created fertility is slowly oozed out to the plant circle.

A portion of the circle showing Coconut, Bananas and Papaya

The decomposing thorny pile with passion flower smothering it

Aerial view of the circle

According to Bill Mollison, as the coconuts grow the fallen coconut fronds are piled up in the center. This reduces labor when compared to conventional grid-style coconut groves. The pile in the center thus becomes the reservoir of nutrition and moisture. 

The circle is always under mulch with the banana suckers we remove periodically. We once used wasted cardboard to mulch the berm. This brought in a lot of termite activity that enriched the soil.

Initially we flood irrigated the circular trench once in a few days. Now we have laid a drip line. The perennial mulch and drip irrigation put together brings down watering significantly. This circle has gone without water for weeks in a row. The bananas and papayas from this circle are healthy and tasty. We are waiting to see how the coconuts do.

Light And Dark Matters

A few years ago, a disturbing realization came upon me and it was:

Homo sapiens is the only diurnal species that carries out normal daytime activities after sunset.

The discord created by this realization led me to understanding the health implications of altering our environment to suit our ever-changing comfort levels; and also to making changes in our lives to realign ourselves with natural cycles. In this blog post I will write about this journey. The only environmental factor I take into consideration here is light.

According to archaeological records, Homo sapiens started walking the earth nearly 200,000 years ago. We are still biologically the same as those initial men and women. But ever since the advent of artificial lighting, human race doesn't experience natural light and darkness the way it did for thousands of years. 

Thoughts and questions such as these bothered me deeply -- Artificial lighting is hardly a century old technology. What is a century or a few in geological time scales? Not even an insignificant blip! How can our evolutionary needs for light and darkness change in that short amount of time? Won't human body's mechanisms, that have evolved to take in natural light and darkness as their cues, go awry because of our modern ways of living? Natural light and darkness are free for everyone. But still how many actually meet the human body's requirement for these? I moaned for the terrible loss of natural light and darkness from most people's lives. 

First, some science: The color components of visible light include violet, blue, green, yellow, orange and red. White light is a mixture of all these lights. So is the visible light component of sunlight. The blue component of the visible light spectrum is known to wake us up and keep us on our toes by secreting a hormone called cortisol. Following the natural cycle of the sun, as the day wanes so should cortisol production. As the sun sets, in response to darkness a hormone called melatonin gets secreted. This hormone plays a key role in regulating our sleep. This beautiful dance between cortisol and melatonin maintains the day-night cycle and circadian rhythms.

Sleep-wake cycle from Dr. Eliza Klearman's website:

Now let us see how modern ways of living cause disruptions to this optimal cycle. Most of our houses are not built to let much sunlight in. Most people don't get exposed to sunlight in the early morning hours. Also because of being indoors at work or school, there is never enough exposure to sunlight during the day. But there is plenty of exposure to light in the evening hours when our bodies (evolutionarily) can't handle it. Now with the devices we suddenly have bright blue light in our lives in the evening when there used to be moonlight or darkness, just a few decades ago. This delays (may also inhibit) the onset of melatonin production and causes sleep disruption among many other problems. 

A little bit of anatomy: Human eye has two kinds of photoreceptor cells -- rods and cones. Rods are responsible for vision at low light levels and cones function when there is bright light. 

Human settlements now have well-lit homes, roads, public transport and indoor spaces. I was curious to know what happens to rod cells when there is no dim light at all for many years. I couldn't find any pat answer online. My guess is that the rod cells lose their efficacy since they haven't been used. I have seen the difference in night vision between city folks (used to a lot of artificial lights in the evening) and village folks. In the absence of a bright light in the night, the former can't navigate even in their own apartments; a dim light or darkness just doesn't work for them. Village folks on the other hand are undeterred by darkness outdoors and are confident about their unaided night vision.

All this understanding helped us realize that many conscious choices had to be made to realign ourselves to our evolutionary needs. We now live on a farm where we are outdoor a lot during the morning hours, soaking in a lot of sunlight. In the evening hours we have only warm-yellow LED lights (max 3w) lighting our indoors. The blue component of these lights are insignificant. Dev has a pair of blue light blocking glasses which he uses when needed. We have installed a blue light filter software on our computer. In the night, while sleeping, we have no artificial light indoor or outdoor. 

If you are interested in exploring this subject further, here are some pointers:

Dr. Satchin Panda on the importance of darkness

https://www.darksky.org/

Harvard University's research on blue light and sleep

Dyeing & Dying

Even in a village like ours, these days it is hard to find middle-aged or elderly people with grey hair. Pretty much everyone dye their hair jet black. For a few decades now, this has been the norm in cities.  Acceptance of the natural process of aging is fast getting obliterated. When we fail to accept our own aging, we are likely to fail to accept the aging of our loved ones. We are likely to hold on to people who should have long been gone. To elaborate on this, I would like to bring up a personal example.

For several years, Dev’s dad (papa) was severely diabetic. When he was over 70, he was diagnosed of (advanced stage) Parkinson’s.  Later he broke his pelvis which restricted his movement further. Being far away in California, we felt that the only help we could extend was to employ a caregiver. This lessened the burden on Dev’s mom during the day. She still had to care for papa in the night. This was slowly taking a toll on her health, since she couldn’t ever get a good night’s sleep.    

When we moved to India in 2012, we stayed with Dev’s parents.  That was when we realized the futility behind what was happening there. Papa’s life was being extended by prolonging his dying.

His face was absolutely expressionless. He had very little flesh on his bones. He could hardly move, eat or talk. He needed assistance with everything. We could smell the decaying bed sores.

This left us wondering about life, “What’s all this medical care for? For keeping a dying man in bed a bit longer? How do poor people deal with such situations?” Also we strongly felt the need to reassess the situation by looking at it from papa’s perspective.

We initiated a conversation with Dev’s mom to understand what was keeping her going. We came to know that she was not given the full picture of papa’s illness. She didn’t really know how bleak the situation was. We slowly and carefully divulged the medical info that we had access to. We wanted to gradually decrease all the medicines except pain killers. After an initial period of resistance and reluctance, she followed through.

I wanted to focus on helping papa be happy – however short-lived that was for. I used to sit by his side, sing to him, and once in a while feed him some ice-cream (his absolute favourite). During one such feeding he hurriedly said “Quick! Quick!” and tears started rolling down his sunken cheeks. After a few weeks papa had a brain hemorrhage and was taken to the hospital. He was in coma. Again, we had to make the difficult decision of bringing him home and not prolong his stay in the hospital.  At home papa was hooked up to an oxygen cylinder. In a few days, with some of us next to him he passed away.

I see certain aspects of this narrative getting repeated in so many cases, among our friends and relatives. I see people wanting to hang on to the lives of dying ones too dearly. Our modern culture lacks mindfulness of death. Tibetan Buddhism, on the other hand, focuses a great deal on death. 

Here is an interesting article on "Death and dying in Tibetan Buddhism" from Frontline, PBS.

-- Hema

Helplessness -- actively taught and learned

Here in this post I plan to address a key issue with modern day parenting in affluent families, whereby the kids are actively taught to be helpless.

First I will cite some scenarios from our village:

Cheenu, a four year old boy, accompanied his dad who was a labourer working on our house foundation. Any middle or upper class parent would find the construction site to be full of hazards for a child of his age -- foundation trenches, big stone piles, people hand-carrying big stones etc. Obviously, Cheenu's dad didn't think so; neither could he afford to. His family situation was such that Cheenu had to be brought to work if he is off from school. Though it was a hot day (38 deg C),  Cheenu was as cheerful in this site as you would find a small child playing in a park. After sticking with his dad initially, he started mimicking what the other adults were doing -- which was to hand-carry stones. He took his job seriously. He carried stones that were big for him and wouldn't pick up anything that was not challenging. I was feeling sorry for this child and tried offering him smaller stones. He simply ignored me and continued working. I understood much later the condescending nature of my behaviour towards Cheenu and his work. And since Cheenu was not conditioned yet, his response towards me was authentic even if it would be considered rude or impolite.

Shephards' kids (less than ten years of age) carry a sharp billhook, climb a tree, lop branches and haul them home to feed their cattle. This is part of their daily routine. They learn to use this sharp tool, manuver their way up the tree with the tool tucked into their pants on the rear side. Girls learn to cook on wood-burning stoves from the age of eight or so. It is not considered particularly dangerous. It is not uncommon to find little girls cook a meal for the entire family. These kids also go to school. Young kids are indispensable contributors in such families. 

Now, I will compare and contrast the above situations with "normal" middle or upper class families.

Barring a few exceptions, these children are overprotected. They typically don't get involved in household chores and hardly get a chance to use the fire or tools. They are assisted by the adults almost always and they are not expected to take on responsibilities.

Here are some excerpts from some of our interactions with affluent visitors from the city:

- This family came with their eight year old boy. I suggested to my kids to take their new friend to get milk from our milk lady. The walk was hardly hundred meters. They had to cross a not-so-busy village road.  The mom immediately intervened saying, "Oh, my son shouldn't go. He doesn't know how to walk on roads. He will hurt himself in the traffic." Having observed this eight year old for a day, I didn't think that the mom's statement was true.  Nevertheless we dropped the idea.

- This child was seven years old. I had made some boiled eggs for lunch. At the table, he was watching my kids eat their egg and was waiting for one of his parents to show up and peel one for him. When Abhi suggested that he can try to do it himself, he was quite surprised. Apparently this suggestion was never made before at his home! With a bit of help, he happily peeled the egg and ate it.

- This time it was a ten year old girl. Knowing that pomegranate was one of her favourites,  I offered one to her. With a perplexed look she said, "but I have never peeled a pomegranate before. can you please peel it for me?"  We helped her with the process and noticed that she was happy to do things for herself.

Now, my musings about this:
Time and again I have seen that small kids have a strong desire to participate in the adult world by doing what the adults are doing. Although they initially resist the conditioning to give up independence, they eventually do become helpless. Kids that are expected to be helpless are likely to grow up into adults with the same attitude. We once had a twenty-five year old visitor who couldn't wash his plate or glass since he didn't know how to use a scrubber!

In hunter-gatherer societies, kids get involved in real life. They start using knives and other tools from a very young age.  There are many examples of this in the book "The Continuum Concept" by Jean Liedloff. Evolutionarily speaking, it must have been very important for little children to learn life skills and become useful and independent. If not, he or she would be a burden on the migrating tribe.

Repeatedly I see evidences to conclude that children meet the expectations, whatever they may be, of the adults around them. Here is another post I wrote earlier on this topic.

-- Hema

Weddings And Funerals

Sanchayya was only 52 when he passed away recently. He lived in the village nearby and used to work for us occasionally. We had known him for six years. An honest person in spite of being very poor. Dead Sanchayya looked just as if he was blissfully asleep, not worrying in his usual way. His sudden death rattled us.

*

We immigrated to the US in the late 90's and lived there for thirteen years. During all those years we never went to any funeral or wedding. For us, funerals and weddings were events that happened in India. We had friends who were mostly of our age, not multi-generational. Unmarried friends traveled to India to get married. Growing up in California, our kids got to welcome many newborn babies of our friends. Typically grandparents would travel from India to help the young (working) couple during post-partum and with the raising of the newborns. Young Abhi once remarked that India was the land of grandmas. All the grandparents that he knew were from India. Death never figured in our lives. We got the news always over the phone from India. The kids either didn't know or remember the person I was mourning for. Not participating in weddings and funerals were gnawing at me. I felt that our (immigrant) lives were not complete.

*

When we moved to India in 2012, Dev's dad was already bed-ridden for long. We decided to spend a few months with him. All of us got to see the process of dying, slow passing away. He died one morning when some of us were right next to him. Our experiences there brought forth many inevitable discussions about life and death with the kids. In the last few years here we have seen the deaths of many people -- relatives, acquaintances and friends. Things slow down for some time after these events -- remembering the dead, mourning and contemplating about the cyclical nature of our lives. 

Locally there is a very high level of participation whenever there is a death in the vicinity. First of all they call off work. The practice is to definitely pay homage to the dead, anytime and every time they hear such news -- however remotely they were connected. Thus local people would go to a funeral every one or two months. Even if they were to take these visits customary, they are constantly reminded of death and its lack of bias. I wonder if this helps them accept death when it happens in their own family; many times I have heard them say in a matter-of-fact manner "his/her time was up. no one can hold back such a person".

-- Hema

Burning Hills

We get two spells of monsoon every year – southwest (July, August) and northeast (October, November). Thus during the second half of the year, the grasses on the surrounding hills provide food and nourishment to the local cattle.  Some fast-growing native plants have taken root on the hills and have started growing in to young trees. Come February, the effects of the monsoon are long gone. The soils are dry and heat starts going up (above 35 deg C). The beautiful lush green rolling hills are turning brown. The shepherds are beginning to think about buying cattle feed. The desperation for cattle food gets intense as days go by. 

One fine morning we hear crackling sounds in the distance. We know enough now to fear for the lives of all the thousands of creatures that have made their homes in these hills. The sound is now accompanied by smoke. In a few minutes we catch a glimpse of the raging fire. Man made. The fire displays its ferocity, leaping over huge boulders and engulfing everything that is in its way.

A road and a creek, approximately 300 meters, between us and the foothills of the burning hills. From the comforts of our house we helplessly watch the fire sweep from west to east. The scale of this fire makes it one of the most horrible and disturbing sights. The hills that were green in the morning are burnt to ashes in less than an hour. Grasses, young plants, thorny trees, nests, young hatch-lings, eggs, bugs, worms, snakes, wild hares. All wiped clean. Just so there can be new blades of fresh grass, if and when there are summer showers. The new growth can then feed the cattle for some time before the next monsoon sets in. Also walking up and down the burned hills will now be easier and less hazardous. This is a typical shepherd’s way of thinking.

Seven years ago when we came here looking for land I saw this man-made fire for the first time in my life. It left me unsettled for many days. I felt compelled to do something about it. But the ease and discreetness with which someone could destroy the life on the hills soon put things in perspective.
Wind, rain and birds ensure that a good mix of native plants come up on the hills. Why can’t these hills be allowed to have native trees grow big and tall? Those trees can then be lopped and fed to the cattle. After all, the native trees and shrubs (neem, palm, teak, muddy, avaram, caloptropis g., dodonaea v., Acacia spp.) don’t take very long to get well established. If only small sections of these hills can be left alone, untouched by humans (and the fire they make) we can create a paradise around us. But the growing demands for milk and meat won’t let that happen.
Such is the tragedy of the commons.

-- Hema