"Gift Culture" left me itching to give

We were traveling in Tamil Nadu with a large group of people that included extended family and acquaintances. The last leg of our journey was to last four hours and it necessitated certain preparations on my part. Aparna had just recovered from bouts of diarrhea and her body, as if to make up for lost time, was frequently wanting to be fed. So before boarding the bus I wanted to pack some food for her. Keeping in mind the heat and humidity here, which shortens the life of cooked vegetables or lentils, I picked up some plain boiled (white) rice wrapped in banana leaf and newspaper from a nearby restaurant.

We made a stop at at the temple town of Thiruvidaimarudur, not too far from the entrance to the temple and by the side of a large water tank that often accompanies temples of antiquity in South India. On three sides, the tank was surrounded by ordinary houses.

As expected Aparna was quite hungry when we got off the bus. I opened my little banana leaf packet and started feeding her morsels of not very nutritious white rice. My distant aunt, who was traveling with us, walked towards us and was appalled to see what Aparna was eating. With a certain firmness, she said, "Hema! Don't feed this to your child. This is not nutritious. I can knock at someone's door and ask for some sambar. I don't mind asking a stranger just so Aparna can eat well." She didn't wait for my reply. She dashed towards a nearby house and the next moment I saw her knocking at the door. The door was opened by a slightly puzzled middle aged man and a little boy. The man silently listened to the unusual request, sent word to his wife through the little boy and then disappeared inside.

We waited for a few minutes wondering what might happen next. I could hear my aunt mutter impatiently, "I don't understand what is taking them so long. I would have cooked a feast for someone who knocks at my door with a child in her arms". In another few minutes, to my pleasant surprise, the lady of the house showed up with a bowl full of hot sambar. She went on to say that she can get more food for us if we wanted. The sambar was delicious and Aparna quickly ate what she could and then Abhinav ate the leftover. Filled with gratitude, we thanked this wonderful lady and boarded the bus again. Still reeling under the unexpected generosity of this stranger, I gushed about the incident to my aunt. But my aunt didn't think it was significant. "We do this all the time, dear. This is nothing special." was what she said.

I noticed that I was now itching to reach out and give to others more than ever. Maybe "Gift Culture" is contagious.

-- Hema

Writing Tamil. No, wait, Hindi really.

Now that we are in Tamil Nadu, I feel the need to learn to read/write Tamil. I talk about this to my kids as well -- I ask them if they want to learn to read Tamil too. Aparna shows no interest but Abhi says he wants to write Hindi. Okay. That doesn't quite follow from the earlier conversation but nature has no straight lines and I have learned to not be surprised with this child.
Abhi says, "First, teach me the Hindi alphabet."

I reply, "I don't know the full alphabet but I can show you how to write words."

Perhaps because the older brother is interested, Aparna is now interested as well.  So I sit down, flanked on either side by a kid, and start to write some words they know. Since both of them speak Hindi we are not attempting to read/write it while at the same time trying to learn the language, which is a different order of beast altogether.
I write, "आम" and "Aam", "अभिनव " and "Abhinav", "कुत्ता" and "kutta", "भूत" and "bhooth", and so on. Along the way we make frequent stops to talk about "matras" (diacritics) or the process of attaching vowels to the consonants. Soon we have a small collection of words, with a significant number of vowels, consonants and matras. We now begin to construct new words from old. Either one of them volunteers a word, or I suggest one to write. One of them suggests "shit", so we write "टट्टी" and "tatti", and as I sound it out they both laugh. No surprises there, scatological explorations are always funny. We continue like this for about forty minutes and then it is time for bed.

The next day Abhi wakes up with an idea. He has been working on a comic strip, and now he wants to write it in two languages. As he constructs the strip, his new idea is to leave all the speech bubbles blank. He wants to make a xerox copy of the strip and come back and fill in the speech bubbles, English in one copy and Hindi in the other. The copying will come later. For now he numbers the speech bubbles and on a separate piece of paper writes his dialog, first in English and then keeps coming to me for help with writing the Hindi version.
Some of the things he writes:
"Meanwhile..." and "इस बीच...",
"Ha! I am here." and "हा!, मैं आ गया ।",
and so on.

So now he has another reason to learn to write Hindi.


- Dev

After the bull was butchered

By August 2011, we had made up our minds to move back to India and live off the land. To get a first-hand experience of such a living, I started volunteering at a local organic farm in Cotati in Northern California. This farm had some vegetable beds, chickens, horses and pasture fed cows and bulls. I was working 5 hours every week, doing all kinds of odd jobs in the farm. Since my kids (8 and 5 years old then) were being homeschooled, this was a part of the learning experience. Their "learning" involved picking veggies when they were ready, eating tree-ripe fruit, enjoying time with the farm animals, collecting eggs from the chicken coop, relishing fresh butter and occasionally listening to parts of intense discussions about global economy, climate change, fossil fuel etc.

One day, the owner of the farm told us that he was expecting the local butcher. They had decided to get rid of the 2 year old bull that had contracted an infection. Being vegetarians, we dashed out as soon as we could. We got a glimpse of the big red truck that the butcher had come in. On the way back home, my kids and I discussed the options that the farm owner had, given the current scenario. It was interesting to observe the insights they had about this incident.

Two days later we returned to the farm. The bull was obviously gone and I was asked to clean the fenced open space (roughly 30' X 60') he had lived in. The ground there had caked cow dung. I was to scrape a few inches of the rich deposits and add it to the new compost pile. It took me two hours to finish the job. I had never done this kind of manual labor before. Something about this seemingly mundane job touched me deeply. 

I was thinking of this wonderful gift that the animal had left behind and how this gift will enrich the soil on the farm. Two years of life-span and no trace of waste that would pollute the place where the animal lived!! This seemed phenomenal to me. I began wondering about the amount of waste a human in its place would have generated. 

Thoughts and emotions were racing in my mind: "we, humans, are much smarter than this bull that had died
(at least we like to think so). But our intelligence seems to be detrimental to the state of the Planet. With all our intelligence, we have caused irreversible problems like global warming. Are we really smart? Or is the bull that died smarter than us?"

Interestingly, the farm owners started using the phrase "the bull in the deep freezer" when they had to refer to the bull that died. I was left wondering if this dead animal was now consuming more resources than it ever did when it was alive.

- Hema

Today's Schools, Deforestation and Global Warming

Deforestation and Global Warming are closely coupled and we all know that. But what about our schools of today? How do they relate to these?

Well, today's schools are quite resource-intensive. They are one of the biggest consumers of paper. I have observed pre-schools and alternative charter schools in America for a period of 9 collective years (I have two kids that went to pres-school and elementary school). Also, I know the state of affairs at schools in India. The picture is not much different.

Do you know how much paper was wasted over your child learning ABC's? And how much was wasted over 1,2,3's? I say "wasting" because, if the learning process is different the consumption and medium would be very different.

My grandmother in India remembers using sand as a medium to learn to write. Students were asked to use their index fingers to trace a letter or number on sand that was spread over the floor. This approach is used by some Montessori schools even now. The next generation (my parents, in 1950's) was introduced to slate and chalk. Paper made its way into kindergarten when I was in school in late 70's. Each generation has seen a overlap in the medium used -- as kids at school, my parents used both sand and slate; I have used both slate and paper.

The current generation primarily uses paper. The increasing workload at schools can only mean increasing demand for paper. Now add population growth to this picture and you can see why and how today's schools contribute toward deforestation and global warming.

Does the current generation of children know that they are using up their oxygen-giving, rain-giving trees? Do they know that the previous generation (i.e.we, their parents) is still busy deforesting and can never undo the damage done? How can we continue doing this injustice to our children? How can resources be exploited in the name of learning and education?

- Hema

Soapnuts to Summation

It has become customary for my daughter (6 years) to play with soapnuts everytime we visit my friend's place in Adyar. That evening, as we were getting ready to leave my friend's place, my daughter was busy decorating their stairs and said that she needed some more time to finish the decorations. I got curious about what she was doing. She showed me her idea behind the decoration -- one soapnut on the first step, two on the second step and so on till the tenth step. She was quite pleased with herself when she got to the tenth step and was ready to leave.

On the way back, during our bus ride, I was still pondering over the soapnuts decorations. I didn't quite know, until a day later, what was fascinating me about it. The next day I woke up with the formula (n * (n+1))/2 in my head. I must have remembered from my school days (thanks to all the memory work!) that this formula is used to sum a series of 'n' consecutive numbers ranging from 1 thru 'n'. But I didn't know how to arrive at this solution. At school, I was good at remembering stuff that was needed to score well. I didn't understand any concept deeply, neither did I need to! 

For the first time in my life I really wanted to solve a math problem. The urge was so strong that I couldn't sleep that night. I was getting increasingly frustrated about my inability to solve this seemingly simple math problem. The next morning I was still at the problem while half-interestedly working in the kitchen. Later in the afternoon, we were preparing a garden bed. That's when it occurred to me that each pair of numbers (1,10), (2, 9), (3, 8), (4, 7) etc. in this series added up to 11 !! The rest followed fairly effortlessly. This gave me tremendous satisfaction, which I had never experienced before at school -- even when I scored 100% in Mathematics exams.

I was enthusiastic to share this experience with my children and started out with a picture of stairs with 10 steps and decorated it just the way my daughter had done before. I asked them to see how many soapnuts were used in that decoration. Later I asked them to imagine a staircase with 100 steps and asked them to see if they can figure out how many would be needed in this case. They both got interested in the problem and I left it at that.

- Hema

Contradictions

Some of the inherent contradictions in our everyday modern lives:

• planning for a secured future for our children and not willing to compromise on our personal comforts that cumulatively cause devastation of our planet (thereby robbing the security off their future)
• being concerned about the environment and driving a car (or any motorized private vehicle)
• buying organic foods packed in plastic
• buying organic produce that are not grown locally
• keeping our houses clean and putting out the garbage (after all, the garbage gets somewhere on this planet, it doesn't just magically disappear)
• wanting to stay healthy and not paying attention to the source of the food we eat
• concerned about global warming and using a clothes' dryer, air-conditioner or any such modern convenience

I have personally been through all of these contradictions in my life. Every single time I was aware of the gap between what I wanted to do and what I actually did, I cringed. I carried that pain in my mind and body. I didn't want to continue that way. I am currently exploring options that would reduce, if not eliminate altogether, the contradictions in my life.

- Hema

Inheritance or Loan?

I wrote this article in February, while we were still living in California:

Kids. I brought my kids into this world, whose state is compromised by the choices

I make for them.

My choice to drive them to get "educated",

my choice to drive them to special classes,

my choice to drive them to play dates or field trips etc.

Each one of the above was attempted with a good will but in the process depleted the

very place that they need to survive -- our one and only Planet Earth. After all, oil/gasoline/petrol

is not a renewable resource.

I was constantly torn between being a provider for my children and being an

advocate for this Planet. I realized that convenience was an easy trap for us, the

grown-ups, to fall into; the price is unfortunately paid by the future generations. This

didn't seem quite ethically right to me.

I started questioning every one of our outing:
"is this trip to the grocery store really necessary? can I do something else too and get the most of it?"
"do my kids really need to have this play date that involves driving?"
"can I find something locally that is equally entertaining and avoid driving?"
"why are my kids more special than the kids starving in poor countries?" etc.

Thus we started staying local, walked and biked a lot. For the most part, the kids were not restrained

to their car seats for more than a few minutes.

- Hema

“We do not inherit the Earth from our parents, we borrow it from our children.”