Oscars and Tea

Jenna watches the Oscars Monday morning over a cup of tea.

Hardly anything gets Jenna up before eight in the morning these days. Now that we have no work to accomplish on a day-to-day basis, Jenna finds it utterly appropriate to rise no earlier than 8:30 or 9 am. I can hardly blame her. Most places of business in India do not open until at least 10.

However, she did manage to rouse herself Monday morning by seven. Not so she could read the morning paper with me, or begin a new exercise regimen, or study for the LSAT. No, what was calling her out of bed at (nearly) the crack of dawn was the live broadcast of the 83^rd Annual Academy Awards—the Oscars. Though shown in primetime in America, the movie awards show came on at 6 am in India. For the truly hardy, E!’s Red Carpet show started at 4:30. (This proved too early even for Jenna. Luckily Indian TV re-broadcast it on another channel. So we were presented with the odd time-warped reality of watching Natalie Portman talk about her dress with Ryan Seacrest on one channel at the same time that she accepted the Best Actress Award on another.)

If you think it odd that awards for American movies are broadcast in India, remember that Indians still hold up America as the paragon of pop culture. Students in Tirur expressed a love for Michael Jackson and Justin Bieber before the name of any Indian musical artists crossed their lips. At least five channels on Indian cable broadcast English-language movies 24 hours a day with English subtitles so viewers can practice their speaking skills as they watch such Hollywood flops as Crank and Legion. Despite living in India for six months, I still have a remarkably up-to-date picture of Katy Perry’s love life and Charlie Sheen’s ongoing escapades.

India is just as enthralled with celebrity gossip as America is, maybe more so. The only difference between the two countries, as far as I can tell, is the breadth of their respective celebrity universes. In mostly Christian America, there is one God and an ever-growing pantheon of Hollywood stars (swelled by the preening ranks of reality TV noteworthies). In mostly Hindu India, the situation is quite reversed. There is a teeming mass of Hindu gods but only a very selective cast of Bollywood heroes and starlets.

In India, you read about the same eight to ten Bollywood personalities over and over again, and they all fit a particular type. Katrina Kaif is the ‘new kid on the block’, a beauty who critics say lacks any notable acting skill. Priyanka Chopra is the ‘sex symbol striving for a more serious image’. Her latest role has her playing the lead in a movie based on a Ruskin Bond short story, where she kills a series of husbands in whom she finds some fault. Deepika Padukone is ‘the girl next door’ whose image not only graces movie screens but Nescafe and Reliance Mobile advertisements all across the country.

For the males, Shah Rukh Khan is the heavyweight—a ‘nice guy finishes first’ kind of story. He projects the affable yet genuine image of a young man most Indian parents would love to arrange for their eldest daughter’s marriage. Salman Khan is the ‘bad boy’, an edgy star known just as much for his off-screen troubles as his on-screen successes. And Aamir Khan is the ‘intellectual actor’, married to a screenwriter named Kiran Rao, he makes more show of playing down the Bollywood glitz.

Of course, benignly looking down upon this glamorous universe from his perch high atop the fray is none other than Amitabh Bachchan, hands down the most famous Bollywood personage ever. (He was quickly referenced in the movie Slumdog Millionaire a few years ago.) Amitabh is still around making movies, touring the country, and hawking mobile phones and life insurance.

Jenna has said—on several occasions—how handsome he remains at 60-plus years of age. Admittedly, he is tall, slim, tanned, with a distinguished, trimmed gray goatee. Though I think his exaggeratedly circular glasses make him look like an overgrown Harry Potter. He recently cemented his pedigree when he married his son off to former Miss World Aishwarya Rai (maybe the only Indian female besides Padma Lakshmi most Americans would recognize).

All this is to say, that watching the Oscars at 7 am over tea is a rather mundane thing for Indians to do on a Monday morning before they go to work. It is just another chance to watch the beautiful people and comment on what they are wearing.

Cricket: It Is More Than an Insect

A crowd of Indian men watch Sunday's India-England Cricket World Cup match outside a TV store near our guesthouse.

I cannot imagine many Americans liking cricket, a sport in which teams can play for more than eight hours and still end in a tie, but India goes crazy for it. In fact, the Subcontinent is widely acknowledged as the premier venue for cricket. And though England invented the sport, the British Empire’s former colonial holdings—India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Australia—have come to dominate the modern game.

I fact, England has never won the International Cricket Council-sponsored Cricket World Cup since it began in 1975. India won its only Cup in 1983. Australia has won the last three Cups and comes into the 2011 version slotted number one in the world rankings. Though many commentators have been arguing that India (the world No. 2) is the favorite because India is hosting this year’s event.

With all that as background, India played England today in Bangalore in a World Cup match that, I have to admit, was quite exciting but ultimately disappointing because at the end of nearly nine hours of play, the teams tied. This, in fact, is quite remarkable. Without getting too much into the intricacies of cricket, I can say that both teams scored exactly 338 runs. I know little of these things, but the TV announcers were atwitter, saying things like “Legendary match!” and “Unbelievable, unforgettable event!”

Jenna and I ventured out into Calcutta today, wondering if maybe we could find a sports bar in which to watch the match. We felt it would do us good to experience it in the midst of a crowd of frantic Indian partisans. There was no luck, though, in finding such a place. India dearly lacks a ‘sports bar’ culture.

We did, however, find, crowds of young men standing in tight huddles outside TV stores, peering in through the glass windows at the flat-screen Panasonics broadcasting the match. Chai-wallahs would take advantage and pull up to these small crowds with their iron pots and dole out scalding cups of tea to the onlookers.

Save for these isolated flocks of cricket fans, the streets of India’s second-biggest city were pleasingly quiet, preternaturally devoid of foot traffic. Jenna and I had a fine time strolling down Park Street, one of Calcutta’s most commercial lanes. Empty sidewalks and shuttered store fronts are all we saw.

The length of a cricket match makes it an affair in which you can come and go at your leisure. Take a walk. Go grocery shopping. Run an errand. Do some work. And you can still flip on the TV and find half the match is yet to be played. This laconic pace also makes the big moments—when a batter gets out, for instance—all the more exciting. It is kind of like when goals are scored in soccer. The American sports psyche has never well adjusted to such games, where long bouts of dull play are punctuated by a few quick moments of intensity. We like our action to be constant and frenetic. It is no mistake that the US does not field a cricket team for the World Cup.

On the other hand, India’s culture makes her citizens particularly well-suited for cricket’s circuitous format. After all, this is the same country that has as one of its most popular television broadcasts a 94-part dramatization of the ancient Hindu epic The Mahabharata, which was laid out on Indian cable over the course of nearly two years. Viewed in that light, a nine-our cricket match seems rather fleeting.

What's In a Name?

A typical street scene in downtown Calcutta.

In ancient times, as the Hindu legend goes, when the goddess Kali died her royal consort Lord Shiva was so saddened that he picked up her body, placed it on his shoulders, and began dancing. He intended to destroy the world with his dance such was his despair over Kali’s death. The other gods realized Shiva must be stopped and called on the great protector Lord Vishnu to save the day. Vishnu sent his famed chakra, or flying disc, hurtling towards the dancing Shiva. The chakra cleaved Kali’s body into 52 pieces. Kali’s toe, as legend has it, landed on a spot along the Hooghly River—a tributary of the holy Ganges—in present-day Bengal. A temple was dedicated on that spot and a village grew up around the temple. The village was named Kalikata. And in time, that village would grow into one of the largest cities in the world and would serve for more than 200 years as the administrative capital of the British East India Company.

The city was Calcutta, an Anglicization of Kalikata. In the late 1990s, the name Calcutta was changed to Kolkata, as India went through a pique of cultural reassertion, renaming cities and streets with handles that hearkened back to the Subcontinent’s native tongues. Bombay became Mumbai. Madras turned to Chennai. New Delhi dropped the “New” (and Old Delhi became a historical enclave within the larger city).

As a consequence, you can tell a person’s familiarity with a given city in India based on which name they use for that city. Most people both in and out of India call Mumbai by that modern name. But true natives of that place still call it Bombay. It is the same with Kochi, Kerala’s biggest city. Outsiders refer to it the way they see it printed on tourist maps. But Keralites all call it Cochin. An even more pronounced phenomenon surrounds Kerala’s capital Thiruvananthapuram. (Try to say it; I can’t.) It used to be called Trivandrum, and that is what most Westerners and Indians from other states call it. But proud Malayalis love to babble out the name Thiruvananthapuram because they are the only ones in the world who can say it correctly.

In a growing sense of familiarity, then, I have found myself referring to Kolkata this second time around as Calcutta. Despite what maps and newspapers would have you believe, Calcutta is still very much Calcutta to those who live here. Kolkata is used on all official signage. You see it stenciled on the Metro and sewn onto policemen’s uniforms. But nobody around here says that name.

When the visa official interviewed us the other day, he asked, “When did you first arrive in Calcutta?”

When our guesthouse manager met with us to discuss our stay, she said, “And how do you find Calcutta?”

When we visited the ATI office, Sangeeta, our old trainer, said smilingly, “Welcome back to Calcutta.”

I have been surprised, indeed, to feel welcome back here. It was this city, after all, that intimidated Jenna and I so much back in September. So different it was from anything we had ever experienced. So rambunctiously celebratory of all its human excess that shops and restaurants, barbers and bathrooms literally spill out into the streets and all manner of human business is conducted in the open under the sun.

Six months ago we could barely take it. It was Kolkata, with all the foreignness and cultural difference that name suggests.

Now, is a different feeling altogether we get. Jenna commented the other day, “It feels dead out here,” as we walked to the Metro stop. Indeed, the avenues appeared wider than I remembered. The people seemed less hurried and numerous. The sky was bluer, the wind cooler, and the trees literally greener.

I will allow, of course, for the change in the seasons. In September, the tail end of the monsoon season made Kolkata’s weather damp and humid. And the city may have seemed a bit livelier for the impending durga puja, the biggest public holiday of the year.

Yet, it was not just the exterior changes I noted but the interior ones as well. I felt more at-ease, more comfortable. Lord, more at home. I found myself both understanding and anticipating the challenges of the city. This time around, I carry loose change in my pocket to give to the beggars I know I will encounter. This time around, my appetite is piqued by the smells I get from the many roadside stands simmering dahl and grilling chapattis. This time around, I find it not difficult at all to haggle over a mere 10-rupee difference in the price of a street map.

In all the little ways that a visitor can show his growing familiarity with a city, I have found many in these first few days back in Calcutta. Maybe the most noteworthy, though, is what I actually call it.

FRR-Oh No!

Maybe I would have had more luck at the FRRO if I had worn my Kerala dhoti.

Travelogues about India invariably feature stories about the country’s infamous bureaucracy. In his book City of Djinns, William Dalrymple recounted the laborious process it took to get his visa certified, which involved more than a half dozen trips to a dark and dusty office in Delhi.

Jenna and I had been relatively lucky in this regard. In our experience, government services like customs and the post office have worked with an efficiency that is, if not rapid, at least no slower than their American counterparts. For instance, the Tirur postal department successfully delivered eight packages shipped from America to our apartment without losing a single one. And airport officials in Kochi successfully found my parents’ suitcase after it was lost on their flight from the US over Christmas.

Our luck changed on Monday. On that day, we visited the Foreign Regional Registration Office (FRRO) in Kolkata in order to register our student visas. (For background on why we had to leave Kerala and return to Kolkata to do this, see an earlier post entitled: “Oh Visa, My Visa”.)

We already knew we would be in trouble for we had failed to register our visa within the requisite 14 days of arriving, which would have been way back in September for us. Yet, we had also been told it was simply a matter of paying a fine.

The FRRO in Kolkata is on a commercial stretch of AJC Bose road near the Victoria Memorial, a short Metro ride from where Jenna and I are staying. When we arrived Monday, we were pleased to find the office neat and orderly with no lines, unlike the chaotic FRRO we had visited in Delhi, which was in turmoil registering dozens of Afghan refugees. Our feelings continued to be lifted when we were directed to an official after waiting only a few short moments. So far, the ugly Indian bureaucracy had yet to rear its head (though the office we were in still had heaping stacks of moldering paper).

“Your purpose here?” the official said in a clipped tone. He was a slight, middle-aged man with glasses and salt-and-pepper hair complemented by a neatly-trimmed mustache and goatee.

“We have to register our student visas,” I said, handing over our accordion file of documentation—copies of our passports and visas, a letter from the American TESOL Institute, a letter from JM school, receipts from guesthouses we had stayed at, a note confirming our residence in Tirur for the past four months.

The man flipped through the papers. He licked his fingers as he turned the pages. His eyes scanned over the documents. He clicked his tongue and looked up at us, over his glasses like a schoolmaster.

“You are very late. Your passport says you arrived in September,” he said.

“I know,” I replied, taking a deep breath. “We simply did not register then. It was a mistake. You see—“

“A mistake, yes!” the man said, cutting me off. “A big mistake. You cannot come to India with a visa and not know the regulations. That is very irresponsible on your part.”

Jenna and I sat there placidly as the official off on a diatribe. “It is the same in America, your own country. American immigration is very strict. They do not treat Indians that well. Indian students in America are treated poorly if they make a mistake on their visa. We have regulations here, just like in America. What am I to do? You have made this mistake.”

As he was speaking a young man had come up to the desk and poured the official some chai in a small clear plastic cup. The chai sat on the edge of his desk steaming while the official spoke.

“I believe we can pay a fine and we can still register,” I said, nervous bile rising in my throat.

“Yes, a fine. One thousand, three hundred and ninety-five rupees. One. Three. Nine. Five. Rupees,” he said, enunciating each number with heated precision.

“Yes, we have that. We can pay that,” I said, starting to get out my traveler’s wallet.

“You also must write a letter,” the official said.

I stopped rummaging in my backpack for the wallet. “A letter?” I said, rechecking the list of required documents I needed. I saw no mention of a letter.

“Yes,” the official said. “A letter stating your own ignorance.”

“Our what?”

“Your ignorance. It was your ignorance of Indian visa policy that caused this problem. You did not register when you should have registered because you were ignorant.”

“A letter?”

“Yes.”

“Stating my own ignorance?”

“Yes.”

“My own…stupidity,” I said, feeling the tension rising in my voice.

“Yes.”

“What exactly should this letter say?”

“You can word it however you want. But it must make the point that you failed to register because you were ignorant. It was not our fault. It was your fault,” the official said. This all seemed to conclude the matter, for he put all our papers back in our file and handed the file back to us. He began sipping his tea, as if to say the interview was finished.

“We need to come back tomorrow, then. With our letter…the letter of ignorance,” I said, as we got up form our seats.

“Yes, anytime tomorrow after eleven. But we take lunch from 12:30 to two. Then the office closes at 4:30.”

We left frustrated and a bit confused.

“What was that about a letter?” Jenna asked. “What are we going to say?”

“I guess it will start something like this: ‘To Whom It May Concern: We are idiots.’”

Come Around the Campfire

A scene from around the campfire at JM on our last night in Tirur.

Jenna and I pose with some JM students on our last night in Tirur.

Jenna with one of her 'favorites'.

Students and teachers dance around the campfire during the Bharat Scouts' weekend retreat.

The gym teacher Prakash, who has a fine singing voice, led the group in a traditional Hindi song.

A group of students takes the mic and belts out a Bollywood tune, to the delight of the other students.

One of our most memorable times in Tirur was saved for our final night in town. On Saturday, Jenna and I, along with our roommate Jaime, went to a bonfire at JM School. The bonfire was part of a two-day retreat conducted by the school’s Bharat Scouts—the Indian version of the Boy Scouts (though the Bharat Scouts are co-ed).

More than 40 students participated in the retreat, which started Saturday morning and went all day, with several leadership and teamwork-building activities led by a group of JM teachers. The Scouts were also set to go on a hike the following day to a hilly area near Palakkad, north of Tirur.

In many ways, the bonfire was reminiscent of the campfires I had sat around at Boy Scout Camp when I was a kid—the familiar smell of burning wood, the sharp sensation of smoke burning your eyes, the sight of dancing embers licking up towards a starry sky.

In other ways, though, the experience was totally Indian. Instead of songs like “John Jacob Jingleheimerschmidt”, the students belted out Malayalam classics and hit Bollywood movie tunes. At one point, the students feverishly broke out into Shakira's hit song "Waca Waca", the song used as the anthem of last year's World Cup.

They danced incessantly around the burning blaze and forced me to join their rhythmic motions. (There is embarrassing video of this but, fortunately for my sake, the Internet connection is too slow to download it properly onto the blog.)

At one point, the teachers and students insisted Jenna, Jaime and I lead the group in an ‘American campfire song’. In desperation, we latched onto the simplest thing we could all remember: “Kumbayah”.

“It’s got to be faster,” I muttered, for I had noted the speed of all the other songs the students had been singing. (Indians, I think, like their music fast with a pulsing beat.) I sang out the first verse alone at a speed that would be considered entirely inappropriate for the spiritual song in America.

“Kumbayah…my Lord. Kum-Ba-YAAAH!”

Jenna and Jaime joined in on the second time around. By the third time through the verse, some of the students had picked up on the simple words and were hesitantly singing along, nodding their heads. By the fourth time around most of the group was singing with us, their voices more brash and confident. By the fifth time, they had gotten bored, realizing this tune was not really that danceable.

They still clapped when we concluded, however. Though some of the kids had quizzical looks on their faces.

The night concluded with some of the students acting out skits in Malayalam, which received much uproarious laughter from the kids and teachers. At the end of the night, the group stood around the dying fire and concluded the evening with a short prayer. Then, they all lept from their seats and sprinted towards a few classrooms which had been set aside as sleeping areas for the night. The students would be spending the night laying on the benches and tables normally reserved for learning during the daytime.

After some long goodbyes, taking pictures, and giving a few hugs, we struck out for our apartment in the dark. A nearly full moon lit our path along the same road Jenna and I had walked almost every day for the past four months. It was hard to believe it was the last time we would be walking it. But we could not have thought of a better way to end our experience at JM.

Goodbye to All That

Images of some of our students in our final week at JM.

The other day as Jenna and I began to sort through our belongings in Tirur—separating what we will take with us to Calcutta from what we will leave behind—I came across some dusty papers stacked up in a corner of our bedroom. They were papers from JM, the very first assignment we gave our kids our first day teaching back in October.

We had done a ‘get-to-know-you’ activity. We had asked the students to complete a series of simple questions: draw a picture of your family, write down your birthday, write and draw your favorite hobby, and write your age. For Jenna’s students, who were younger, she asked them to draw a picture of their ‘dream job’ and also draw a picture of their favorite animal. For my students, who were nearly high school age, I asked them to draw their home and write the name of someone important to them.

I found myself distracted from packing as I slowly leafed through the tilting pile of paper. I scanned through the sheets, I spotted a few names I recognized and chuckled at some of the drawings. Some students had quickly breezed through the assignment, scratching out their answers in near-indecipherable lettering. But others had shown an astonishing amount of care and dedication.

I hated to throw them away, but I also did not want to lug a good five pounds of paper in my backpack. So I made a compromise. I decided to tally the students’ answers and put up the results of my unscientific straw poll on the blog. You the readers now get, what I think, is a fairly telling ‘snapshot’ of adolescence in Tirur. Keep in mind, this survey is wholly amateur and the results detailed in this post only come from about half our students (392 students to be exact.). At some point, we must have thrown away or lost the other half of our students’ papers.

With all obvious caveats in mind, here is what I can say about our students at JM Higher Secondary School in Tirur:

--71% of our students come from families of five or more members. We asked students to draw who they live with, and many times this included grandparents and in-laws. The biggest family depicted was 13 members.

--Only 3.5% of our students are only children. Only one student comes from a single-parent home.

--32% of our students claimed their favorite hobby was a sport of some kind—football, cricket, badminton—making recreational sports the most popular out-of-school pastime. The next most favored hobbies were playing on the computer (20%), reading (17%), and watching TV (13%).

--With a whopping 68%, Kerala is by far the most common place that my older students claimed as their ‘home’. ‘India’ (28%) was next, followed by ‘Malappuram’ (22%).

--34% of Jenna’s younger students say being a teacher is their ‘dream job’. Following that are ‘doctor’ (26%), ‘pilot’ (23%), and ‘engineer’ (14%).

--50% of Jenna’s students also say their favorite animal is a cat. Rabbits are next (9%), followed by chickens (8%). Dogs only garner 7 percent. Not surprising for a mainly Muslim school, since that faith looks at dogs with great distrust.

These numbers lead me to a few conclusions. First, our JM students, generally speaking, have many deep family attachments. The majority (more than 70 percent) live with at least four people and many of these live with extended family—grandparents, in-laws, aunts, uncles, cousins. The effect this has is untold and beyond the ambit of my little survey, but I cannot help but conclude that the students in Tirur have a more stable family environment at home and are made more accountable by their elders for their schoolwork than the students I taught in Houston.

Second, the recreational habits of the students in Tirur show a good balance. The most popular activity outside of school is, thankfully, playing sports. It is not surprising to see that ‘playing on computers’ is a distant second, but it is encouraging to find that ‘reading’ is a more popular activity than ‘watching TV’. The results might be influenced by the level of disposable income in Tirur. TVs at home are not universal and personal computers are rare. Therefore, students must be more imaginative and active in what they do to fill their free time.

Third, the ‘dream jobs’ espoused by Jenna’s students show a striking amount of realism and rational ambition. The top jobs are teacher, doctor, pilot, and engineer. Good jobs that are attainable with the correct amount of drive and hard work. Anecdotally, both Jenna and I found it rare for students to say their ‘dream job’ was to be a ‘professional athlete’ or ‘singer’ or ‘actor’.

In sum, what I get from looking wistfully at these surveys is that kids in Tirur, indeed, have the freedom and complaisance to be kids. By and large, they come from solid family backgrounds, they pursue playful out-of-school activities, and they have formulated ambitious but realistic visions of their futures.

In contrast, the kids I taught in urban Houston had grown up too fast. Frequently, their family lives were in turmoil. They had been exposed unhealthily to sex, drugs, and violence. And many of them held fantastical notions of their careers and ambitions.

Looking back on it, only once did I have to correct a student at JM for writing something inappropriate on that ‘get-to-know-you’ assignment. The student had said one of his favorite hobbies was ‘drinking beer’. When I tapped him on the shoulder, he scratched it out and re-wrote ‘football’ in mortification.

JM proved to be a different world than I was used to. And that was not always a bad thing.

Under Pressure

Bina and Rini outside their Tirur home. Rini is home studying for the Board Exams.

Regular readers of this blog might remember Rini. (If not, refer to an old post entitled, “Rini of Tirur” in the blog’s archives.) Jenna and I met Rini early on in our stay in Tirur on the Muslim holy day Eid al-Adha. At that time, Rini impressed us then with her independence, her self-confidence, and her well-articulated English. She seemed to be a girl who knew what she wanted and where she was going in life.

I am happy to report that Jenna and I got to visit with Rini one final time before we leave Tirur on Sunday. Rini had been away for most of the intervening time at boarding school in Thrissur, which is about a 90-minute train ride south of Tirur. She is a Plus Two standard student (the highest level of secondary education in India), and she is currently preparing for the high-stakes Board Exams in early March. Her school gave students two weeks’ leave so they could concentrate on studying for the tests.

The Board Exams, to say the least, is a nerve-wracking affair for hundreds of thousands of ambitious Indian teenagers. Imagine the ACT or SAT. Now imagine if it lasted an entire week instead of just one day; that it asked you essay questions instead of multiple-choice; that it challenged you with topics ranging from Calculus to Organic Chemistry; then imagine that it determined whether you got to graduate high school or not and that it also had a significant bearing on what college you were accepted to after matriculation. If you imagine all this, then you have the Indian Plus Two Board Exams.

A recent editorial in The Hindu showed a student weighed down by a futuristic looking contraption strapped to his back with a scientist busily writing down figures on a notepad. A woman dressed in a sari—assumed to be the fictional student’s teacher—gestures towards a road sign that says, “Board Exams”. The teacher in the cartoon is saying, “Don’t worry, son. It is all for your benefit.” The student looks troubled and dyspeptic with sweat beads popping off his forehead.

The cartoon’s point, I think, was to convey the immense amount of pressure placed on Plus Two students by the Board Exams. With one set of exams, their futures are determined, their ambitions realized or denied, their dreams fulfilled or shattered. In addition, a nation which feels such a need to develop into an international superpower (based primarily on its reputation as an IT hub) finds a fresh crop of whiz kids to burnish that image but with no clear option for the students who fall short.

For her part, Rini expresses a desire to attend one of India’s prestigious IITs (or India Institutes of Technology), which were famously praised in Thomas Friedmen’s The World is Flat. “I would like to go to IIT-Chennai or IIT-Bangalore,” she says matter-of-factly. “My dream is to be a civil engineer. The IITs are the best schools.”

“But you must study hard to get into those schools,” says her mother Bina, whom we had also met earlier. Bina evinces the typically ambitious agenda Indian parents have for their eldest children, and backs it up with a strikingly blunt assessment of her daughter. “Bina is lazy. She needs to study more. She is also fat because she is lazy.”

For an awkward moment, Jenna and I stare at Rini (who has been sitting serenely by her mother as she says these things) and wait for her reply. We wonder if a domestic row will break out in front of our eyes.

Instead, Rini cracks a smile and chuckles, “Mother, I am fat because I eat a lot. It has nothing to do with me being lazy. But yes, I am lazy. Too lazy. Other students have been studying all year for these exams. I just started last week.”

“How much do you study each day?” I ask.

“I get up at five in the morning for namaz (prayers). Then I go back to sleep…” Rini says.

“See! Lazy!” Bina interjects, playfully slapping Rini’s shoulder. Rini laughs again.

“I get back up around six and study until lunchtime. I take a nap in the afternoon, then study several more hours in the evening.”

“So, maybe eight hours a day?” I push for more details.

Rini squints her eyes, “No. No, probably around ten.” Lazy indeed, I think.

I thick textbook entitled Topper’s Manuel for Organic Chemistry sits heavily on the coffee table between us, stacked atop a pile of local newspapers. I absent-mindedly flip through the book, which is in English. However the book’s practice problems and helpful hints appear as impenetrable to me as Malayalam script.

“Is this yours?” I ask.

“No, it is my cousin’s,” Rini replies. “She is around here somewhere,” she continues. “But I have a book just like it. My cousin is a year older and took the Board Exams last year. She did not get a good enough score, so she must take them again.”

My eyes stop on a problem. What is the drug that best fights malaria infection? A) aspirin, B) penicillin, C) chloroquine, D) percotomel

I read the question to Rini. “I believe it is ‘C’,” she says. I check the answer at the back of the book. She is right.

After another hour of idle chat—and a few more practice problems—Jenna and I take our leave. Bina and Rini take us to the front door. “Good luck,” we tell Rini.

“Thank you. I will do my best,” she says with a shy smile.

We shake hands and Jenna gives the two women short hugs. It is yet another farewell in our final week at Tirur. But something inside me suspects this is not the last I will hear of Rini. Maybe if Thomas Friedmen ever writes a follow-up to The World is Flat, I will read about her in that.

Love Is in the Air

It is not a skirt, it is a dhoti. And it was my Valentine's Day gift from Jenna.









My Valentine's Day 'surprise' for Jenna: cake and a card.








I figured since Valentine’s Day is a holiday most Indians do not celebrate, I would get a pass this year. My wife thought differently.

Jenna bounded from the bedroom this morning with a broad smile on her face to greet me as I grumpily made coffee in the kitchen. “Happy Valentine’s Day, sweetie! I have a surprise for you,” she said lovingly as she reached up to kiss my scratchy, unshaven cheek.

I froze. Oops, I thought.

It turns out Jenna had decidedly not forgotten about Valentine’s Day and had bought me an authentic Kerala dhoti, a traditional sarong-type loincloth worn by men everywhere around here. I had been saying for weeks how I wanted one for a souvenir, and on this morning, I was pleased to be holding one in my hand. Made of thick cotton with a light blue stripe rounding the edges, it felt comfortably heavy in my hands.

I sheepishly looked up at Jenna. “I’m sorry. I didn’t get you anything. I thought we weren’t having Valentine’s Day because, you know…” I shrugged my shoulders pathetically.

“It’s okay. I know. You being here is enough of a present,” she said sweetly, and kissed me again. How do women know the exact thing to say to make you feel like an even bigger jerk than you already feel?



In a small measure of recompense, I stole away from JM this morning while I was not teaching and dashed back to the bakery near our apartment. I bought some pieces of cake that had pink icing and were topped with Maraschino cherries, I hustled back to the apartment, stole a card from a pile of blank ones our roommate Jaime keeps, and whipped up a Valentine’s Day surprise for Jenna.

The improvisation worked. When we got home today, Jenna smiled brightly and said, “You remembered after all.” And I shrugged, as if it was part of plan the entire time.

As for Indians, I get the impression that Valentine’s Day—like Facebook and pop music—is seen by the older, more tradition-bound generations as an unwanted Western incursion. A particularly curmudgeonly editorial in The Sunday Express begged in its opening paragraph, “Somebody please retire this Valentine’s Day. All these pink balloons, red musical cards, and messages on FM radio are irking this [writer].” Though I cannot say I disagree with the editorial’s overall message that ‘true’ love is hard work that should consume every day of a relationship and not just a once-a-year holiday.

However, there was nothing guarded about our fellow teachers’ reactions to the candy conversation hearts we brought to work. Jenna’s mom had enough foresight to mail a bag of the traditional Valentine’s Day treats in mid-January. The staff openly loved them. They grabbed handfuls and twittered at the tiny messages, showing them to each other, and stifling giggles.

Santosh, ever the aspiring Casanova, went around showing one particular heart to all the female teachers. “Kiss me! Kiss me! Kiss me!” he said, quoting from the heart he held in his fingers. The women looked at him askance, and I called out to him: “Be careful!”

At least for one day, love was (sort of) in the air at JM.

Faces of Payannangadi

The youth of Payannangadi: some boys who live in the houses behind our flat. The boy in the navy blue shirt in the middle and the one in the neon blue shirt in the left corner attend JM.

With just a little more than a week left in Tirur, Jenna and I are starting to take stock of our surroundings here. For the past four months we have lived in a district of Tirur called Payannangadi. We have gotten to know our neighbors pretty well despite the language barrier, and we have come to realize we will miss them once we leave. Followers of this blog deserve a closer glimpse at the faces we have come to know, trust, and depend upon in our time in Kerala.

The Watchman: Mohammed Ali (named for the prophet, not the boxer) is a retired businessman who spends his days hovering around Payannangadi, keeping a lookout for anything out of the ordinary. A good man to have in your corner.

Party boys: Anshawd (on the left) helps his father with an electronic repair business; Shafik (in the middle) helps his brother Anwar (pictured later) run the corner store, and Rafi operates a clothing store in Tirur's central market.

Chai-wallah: Mammooty runs a small tea stall right outside our flat. He has been doing it for more than 30 years.

Aneef owns Zain Bakery, a new establishment that serves delicious fruit shakes and shawarma (diced chiken in pita bread.)

Anwar runs the corner store where we buy most of our groceries, including milk and biscuits everyday for afternoon tea.

The barber Hamza, who has cut my hair a couple of times in Tirur. He speaks very little English but does a wonderful job going off old pictures of my with shorter hair.

The Internet guy: probably our best friend in Tirur, Nahas the manager of Netway Computers, the Internet cafe Jenna and I frequent daily.

Super Bowl?

America's biggest sporting spectacle reduced to ungrammatical coverage on page 15 of the newspaper in India.






Minnesota Vikings fans will be glad to know that nary a soul in Kerala either understands or cares that the Green Bay Packers just won the Super Bowl. Rather India has its sporting eyes set on the upcoming ICC Cricket World Cup, which is being hosted by India and Sri Lanka this year. The mega-event is set to begin in just under two weeks and will be played over the course of nearly 50 days at several sites around the Subcontinent. Teams representing 14 countries--all of which except the Netherlands are former colonial holdings of the British Empire--are chasing the cup. I imagine results from the ICC World Cup will warrant as much coverage in American newspapers as the Super Bowl got in India.

***
Meanwhile, Tuesday was my final day teaching at JM's 'upper campus', the school for high school students on the verge of graduation. Though Jenna and I do not leave Tirur for almost two more weeks, the 'upper campus' students begin their final exams next week. Therefore, my services will not be needed, and I say 'goodbye' early.

Since I only spent two half-days a week at the 'upper campus', I did not anticipate feeling as nostalgic as I did. I bought the staff a small cake in celebration, hopefully letting them know how much I appreciated their hospitiable attitudes during my stay. The staff at the 'upper campus' is an extremly cohesive bunch, bright and energetic. The students proved a challenge, but I feel that I am leaving at just the time when I was beginning to witness noticeable progress in class. For that, a part of me wishes I could stick around to see how these kids grow in the future.

Me with Vinod and Santhosh, my two best friends at the upper campus.

The celebratory cake, inscribed with the message, "Thanks, J.M.H.S.S."

Upper campus staff digging in.

The Arrangement

Santhosh. Who could turn down this guy's proposal?

Ladies, Tirur’s Most Eligible Bachelor is off the market.

Our friend Santhosh, a Biology teacher at JM Higher Secondary, announced today that his wedding has been ‘arranged.’. That is the vernacular in Tirur. It’s not: “Oh, I’m getting married!” It is always, “My marriage function is arranged.”

The lucky girl is a 26-year old Physics teacher from Calicut named Ambili, an acquaintance of Santhosh’s uncle’s sister-in-law.

“My uncle call me and say, ‘I have a girl. You need to meet’. And we met a week ago,” Santhosh told me on our free period Monday. “I went with my best friend to Calicut. We went to her house. I walk in and see this girl. Everyone is there watching. I come up to her and ask her name, what she do, what she like. She asks me the same. We hug and that is our arrangement.”

“Did you kiss each other?” I whispered, feeling like a gossip.

Santhosh’s eyes widened in horror, “No! No, no, no! Of course not! That is not until marriage function.”

He informed me the wedding was set for early May. My shoulders slumped. I told Santhosh Jenna and I planned to be back in the US by then.

“You come back, no problem. You must. You are my intimate.” Intimate is Santhosh’s word for BFF.

“But Santhosh,” I said reluctantly, “that costs a lot of money.”

“You are American. Money no problem.”

I told him exactly how much money it would be for both Jenna and I to book round-trip plane tickets from America to India and then translated that figure into Indian rupees, an amount, incidentally, that is more than what Santhosh makes in a year at JM.

“Oh,” he said, then paused. “But you can stay at my place. You won’t have to pay for food and accommodation. You must come.”

I shrugged my shoulders, “We will send you a gift.”

Santhosh’s eyes brightened, his sharp eyebrows lifted. “Yes. Yes, that would be nice,” he said. “American commodities are very good. I would like that.”

I think we had reached a compromise.

Give 'em the 'Stick'

Classroom management, India-style.

As far as I can tell, many Indian parents come from the ‘spare the rod, spoil the child’ school of discipline. A right spanking is a common sight on Indian streets, as are quick slaps to the back of the head, discreetly employed shoves to the shoulder, or the firm grasp on the upper arm.

Teachers, likewise, have few qualms with using ‘the stick’ to enforce classroom rules. Most staff members at JM carry around their own personal ‘stick’—a thin bamboo switch the circumference of a pinky finger. One teacher has even smartly labeled her stick with her name, so that no other teacher will make off with it.

I first saw the ‘stick’ method of discipline at JM’s upper campus a few weeks into our stay in Tirur. A line of tardy students waited patiently outside the teacher’s lounge until a staff member came along and demanded they hold out their palms. Each did and, in turn, received a swift whack on their hand. Then, with slumping shoulders, they walked to class.

I can’t say I approved that first time or the many subsequent times I saw a teacher take a stick to a student’s palm or an upper arm or even a thigh. (And, let’s be clear: when I say ‘students’, I am talking exclusively about boys. I have yet to see a girl get the stick, though I do not know if it is simply because their behavior is better or because there is a school policy against physically disciplining young women.) I still find it a bit unnerving to see a teacher (again: usually male) whapping away at a cringing adolescent for some unknown offense that the student is pleading against as the sharp blows reign down on his hand or arm. As a teacher in America, I am used to the notion of bearing a misbehaving student with patience and discourse, employing a long list of psychological carrots and sticks, and, at the most extreme, sending the student away to the office so someone with more apparent authority can suffer the problem.

The idea of using a bamboo rod as a form of immediate, physical intimidation is a taboo notion for many American educators, and, I think, rightly so. Corporal punishment was abandoned long ago in most realms of public education. (Though I would be lying if I said I never would have appreciated the handiness of a bamboo switch while teaching in the US.)

Anecdotal evidence at JM tells me the implementation of the ‘stick’ is not a very effective form of punishment. I see the same students getting whipped time and time again, meaning their prior whippings are not a deterrent. And I find the staff, in general, conducts the ‘stick’ method inconsistently. Some teachers resort to it almost daily. Other teachers appear loath to even have one in their hand. Still others joke with it, pantomiming the act of whipping a student and then laughing about it.

With all that said, I cannot report that I have stayed above the fray. Class VIII-D drove me to it.

Class VIII-D is a generally sweet but abnormally rambunctious group of nearly 40 students. The boys are brimming with energy, pinching each other, slapping each other’s backs, yelling across the room, chasing each other, pushing each other out of their benches, and ripping each other’s papers to shreds. The girls—as demure and shy as they are—are entertained by the boys’ antics, thereby encouraging them with their giggles and laughter.

I have found my American methods of discipline wholly ineffective for Class VIII-D. A palm in the air will stay raised for five whole minutes with no abatement in the noise. A few quick slaps to the teacher’s desk will raise a few eyebrows, nothing more. Lecturing in English, of course, does no good with kids who speak barely a word of it. (Lecturing did not work with American kids, either.) A point system garnered interest for a time, but then they grew bored with it.

One day two weeks ago, I approached Bindu—Class VIII-D’s home room teacher.

“This class…very wild. Loud. Playful,” I said, making a clownish face and waving my hands in the air to convey my point.

Bindu looked at me with a smirk. “Yes. Bad class. Bad class.”

“What can I do?” I asked.

“The stick. You need stick,” she said, pulling hers out of a fold in her teacher’s jacket like King Arthur brandishing Excalibur. She tried to hand it to me. I backed away, my palms up as if she were offering me a live cobra.

“No, no, no,” I said. “I can’t use that. The stick? No. Not for me.”

“Not use it,” she said, smiling. “Just show.” She held the stick up like it was a trophy, some primordial token won from another prehistoric tribe. “Show it to them. They are scared of it.”

I felt showing the stick with no intent of using it was not much better than actually whipping kids. Bringing it into the classroom, I felt, set a precedent for my teaching with which I was uncomfortable. Simply having it there in class meant I might use it or be tempted to use it. The students would draw one of two conclusions about me, neither of which I liked: a) I would now possibly whip them, or b) I was just a stick poseur who was too squeamish to actually carry through my threatened intent.

Bindu solved my moral conundrum by shoving the stick into my hand. “Just take it. One time. See if it works. But I need it for sixth period.”

Reluctantly, I took the stick to Class VIII-D. With an odd mixture of satisfaction and dread, I realized the sight of the stick in my hand had an immediate effect. The class, usually so rowdy at the beginning, became quiet in a remarkably short time. The boys straightened their backs and stared at the front of the class where I was standing. The silence of the room made me feel eerily victorious.

During the lesson, I kept the stick in my left hand the entire time. I used it as a pointer at the board. I used it to call out students. A few times, I slapped it against the teacher’s desk with a sharp thwack, to get the class’s attention. In short, Bindu’s advice had been correct. The stick—at least as an agent of intimidation—worked. I did not yell. I did not lecture. I did not feel frustrated. Instead, I felt effective and vindicated. The only tradeoff was that a part of me also felt a little like Bull Connor.

For the next couple of weeks, I borrowed Bindu’s stick before going to Class VIII-D. The mesmeric power of the stick seemed to hold. That class went from being one of my worst headaches to one of the highlights of my day. With the looming presence of the stick, the students’ sweetness overcame their penchant for rowdiness. Their intrinsic affability did not spill over into mayhem.

Yet, I wondered: how long would this work? The first time a student really challenged me or behaved in a way that clearly warranted a whipping, the class would see it was all a hollow threat. The stick, I feared, would then just become another casualty like my other previously tried and discarded methods of discipline.

I must say this is an ongoing experiment. I have continued to bring the stick to Class VIII-D up to the current week and have still had no cause to really ‘use’ it. With only two weeks to go at JM, I foresee that I might possibly get away with this ruse without ever being pushed to a crucial decision point. I just hope the students of Class VIII-D don’t get wise.