An exam is not an exam, Jispa!

I almost forgot to write this story down, but it deserves being there for posterity. It is something that Jispa will probably laugh over when she grows up and this one is seriously good.

One evening I come home and see Jispa having her dinner on the dining table. Jasmine was sitting on the sofa. I have no idea why Jasmine doesn’t like sitting for food with the entire family. I have spent the last 16 years coaxing her to do it, but she just doesn’t like it, or values it. I hate this aspect of her, but that is another story for another day. Bah!

So I come home and watch Jispa eating her dinner alone. I ask her whats up, how was her day. “bad” she replies. OK… now I am listening. So what happened, I asked her. “you finish and come here, I will tell you”. OK. I wash my hands and come to sit on the table and I am ready for dinner. “what happened today sweetheart?”. “I want mommy over here as well” she insists. Ok mom, you sit here and we all sit around the table for a chat. It was pretty serious, I assume. We all wait as the big thing is about to revealed. The she says “I will tell you but you will nottell me anything immediately afterwards. You can tell me later, but can’t get upset at me or tell me anything now.” “ok” what choice do we parents have in this case. Of course I agreed and gave her the freedom to talk freely without any repercussions. Then she starts “today was math test. It was horrible. The teacher gave us the papers ten minutes late and we were solving it and I couldn’t finish the paper on time”. “ok” I urged her one as I saw one tear coming down her cheek. “I think I am going to get a C”. “ok – how do you know you are getting a C” I enquired. “I calculated the marks. I know. This is bad.”

Now what to do with this. Math is important. Tests are important. Scoring is important, but crying over a test – that’s shit. I remember my childhood. School and studies were bad enough but this, this exam shit was way too bad. For many years after, I still got nightmares about not being prepared for exams. About going to exams late, about failing, about being blank… many such things. I think once I turned up late for one paper, once I studied the wrong paper and things like that as well. It was crazy growing up and managing exams. It was so stressful. One thing that I wanted in education for my child was – absence of fear from an exam. Everything else can be managed. Everything else is a function of the stress the kids put on themselves. Their hair is not ok, they have pimples on their faces, they like other boys, everything else – I really don’t care… that stuff is self-imposed. But exams – that’s one thing that is imposed by the parents on the kids in connivance with the teachers and the whole freaking education system. Exams are designed to kill you and make your life shorter in the long run but stretch it for eternity in the short run.

So what advice should I now give her? I start:

Ok. I hear you but if you give me permission to say one thing, may I say it. (she gives me permission) Cool. Thanks. First – I don’t care about your exam grades. That’s ok. More so – I don’t care about exams in general. I think they are too measly a thing to be upset about. So that’s my point of view, but if you now allow me to talk completely and freely, I can explain further. ( I get permission again).

So you couldn’t complete it, because you did not understand it or you did not have time? (it was time she said). Well then that’s ok. Math is all about speed and practice. They purposely are now raising the bar for you and getting you to know that now you area bug girl who needs to solve math fast. That’s important now going forward. The only way to get it right is to keep solving the papers, again and again. Chat with your teacher, tell her you want to improve and ask her how. Tell her you are not used to this and that you don’t have tuitions and you want to go beyond. So that’s about the paper in question.

As regards exams, come on kid. It never the exam. It’s the preparation. I have always pushed you to prepare right for the exams and not bother about the results. Results are important but only as an indicator of the preparations you put in. Exams are over rated. Don’t push yourself on this. I have always had a hate hate relationship with exams. They never did do well for me. You have to figure a way to attack the question papers and game the system. In eight grade, I once failed a Hindi paper. Mom flunked a year in 4^th or 5^th grade when her mom was in US. That too in History or something. Its ok. It doesn’t matter. In my final year in economics, I just about passed. I got a 36 on 100. Today I teach economic concepts to people. When I first saw the paper, I distinctly remember, that I thought I was going to fail. I had obviously underprepared myself for the exam and I was shit scared. I remember then gathering myself and telling myself, if I fail this paper then 90% of Maharashtra will fail. I am better than 90% of my peers. So I spent 30 minutes just thinking of how to attack this paper.  Which questions can I write the most without even knowing anything. I will attempt and attempt well. I will write and write long. I will not give up. I then remember for writing non-stop for the next two hours. I wrote so much that my hands got tired. I wrote so much rubbish and about anything and everything I could write about. I wrote. If today, I see that paper I will probably die of laughter. But I wrote. No exam could get the better of me. And I passed! I was so excited about passing. It was such a relief. My other scores ensured that my aggregate went up beyond 60 (62%) and I got first class. Mom managed a 35 in the same paper and Vinu managed a 26 and got 9 marks grace. It was an epic paper.

So Jispa – exams are a piece of shit. Don’t give it more importance than they deserve. Go ahead, study for a paper. Give it your best, but please, please don’t cry after the paper is done. It’s over, enjoy, have fun. Learn from there on. Exams are bad things. Don’t give them importance in your life. Study. Study hard but learn more. Have fun giving exams. Write whatever you think is right, write anything, have a blast and come out happy. Whatever you do, don’t get stressed by an exam. Kick its butt, but don’t get stressed by it.

I work hard and try and build a career with pays decently well and I save money. I try to read and teach. I do everything so that some of the basic stuff that I hated while growing up is avoided in your life. The scare of exams rank up there amongst the top things to hate and remove from your life.

Jasmine thinks I am a bit too lenient on this. But I really don’t care. When we conceived Jispa, I was clear. I was going to love my child and have a few things that I will dream for them. I wanted a healthy child, a child that could do good in some sports, a child with insatiable curiosity and a child with little stress to perform – at least little or no stress from me. AND definitely – NO EXAM STRESS.

Now that I think about it, my dad was pretty advanced in his thinking. He told me that till the tenth standard, it is my job to push you to study. After that it’s your problem. True to his word, he never did give me any grief on it afterwards. The least I can do is advance that by two years. Now Jispa is in 8^th. It’s time to back off and to let her pursue what she wants to do and how she wants to do. Basically – let’s not see the grades and stress out.

Enjoy! This is the age to enjoy life and studies not loathe it.

travel to learn

The fun bit with being a client is that you have agencies trying their best to vie for your attention. Of all places that I have gone thanks to work, this month I found myself in Russia.

Moscow to be precise. I have had a fascination for the place ever since childhood. Russia, the big super power of the world and an ally of India, against the mean big consumerist USA! Oh what a fool I too was. The communist country collapsed under its own weight and then came Peristroika and complete confusion. I don’t think Russia knows what they are anymore. Whether they are a controlled or a free market economy or a political nation.

But I was super happy to see Moscow. These are cities that will not normally be on your tourist radar. I am happy that my work has taken me to these places and I was able to add to my experiences. Jispa has to find her own experiences that take her places. I feel bad for Jasmine though. I would love to take her places that she hasn’t been to before.

Travelling abroad is a real irritating thing for me these days. The fact that you going abroad means you are spending a whole lot of money and then you really want to make the vacation count and take in as much as you can. You have to do a lot of research and you have to plan and figure and do everything. It’s a painful process. I then suddenly realized that I have been a real pain. A complete ass. Now I am making a decent sum of money. Our daily life is small and our daily requirements do not really amount to much. We can after we have accounted for all our expenses manage to spend that money once a year.  Jispa wanted to go to Greece and I agreed but then when we researched we realized that June July is peak season with long queues and high prices it may not be the right thing to do. And then in any other season we would get a smaller break and then I would love to go for at least two weeks! So we ditched the plan. I feel so mean.

In around 2008, we had planned to got o Hong Kong and then the economy went kaput and we felt scared and did not go to Hong Kong. I think that was the biggest regret I have had with respect to Jispa and taking her to vacations. I think while she was growing up she would have enjoyed Disney Land. I have always wanted to go to Disney land as a child but never did and I wanted my child to go to Disney land. I am feeling like a joker now that we cancelled the plan. I so goddamn regret it. So now we have a 14 year old kid who hasn’t been to Disney and because her father was a jerk.

Now I realized that I wasn’t taking her anywhere else as well because of the same reason. SO we ended up doing a lot of India vacations. Not that India vacations are bad. You can get to see a lot of what is interesting in India. It can end fun and enjoyable and enriching as well, but there is of course a lot of enrichment that can be done outside India, that will completely help you expand.

One interesting thing in Moscow that I noticed was that Moscow built the most amazing dense network of underground tube stations. All the lines cross the city and try and connect people. They started this following the British and I think they picked up steam after the world war. In the heart of the network they built a circular line through which every other line would crisscross. Obviously these would be the most used lines by the people. These station on the circular line were chosen for beautification and beautification in a totalitarian regime is nothing but propaganda. The stations are amazingly beautiful. One has beautiful stories depicting the great Russian history on the ceiling, one has absolutely magnificent stained glass and the other has statues of brass alongside the platforms.

Everyone saw it as beautiful, which they were, but I saw it for what I think it was – propaganda. The tube stations are used by the proletariat for their day to day life, and it would be impossible to miss the main circle line on your daily commute. It is here that these monuments were built to the glory of the working class, instilling a pride of being a Russian.  A lot of the statues were about humble people working and of course believing that this work is going towards nation building. The poor people are always fed on dreams of a greater society working for a greater good. No book comes close to explaining this within the communist context than Animal Farm, which explains how the poor and the hardworking just have to work harder and harder. Large beautiful nameless generic statues are built honoring the hard work and selfless dedication of these beautiful people. You are supposed to look at them and find yourselves in them and believe that your boring drudgery is a part of the greater purpose.

This is also one the reasons we honor the soldiers through another long set of nameless statues. The tomb of the unknown soldiers is a perfect example. These poor kids went off to battle and died saving the motherland. These wars are fought on the behest of idiotic politicians who put these young brave soldiers in front of bullets without much care about these lives.

When we in corporate life took a lot of these structures and ideals onto the organization, we too took these ideas and put them as at the hall of fame thing. We inspire and make professionals believe that this is the glory of life, we make them believe that we are what we are thanks to the effort of the common worker who slogs his ass out from 9 to 9 leaving his health and family at the altar of the common greatness and shit like that.

What a pain. No wonder I have never received an over achiever award ever in my life. I have never won anything like that – no best student, no best worker nothing. I don’t think that I have ever received any incentive for anything either. Just end of year bonuses. Nothing else.

I guess I am proud of that. The only real award I received was in college, ”principal’s special award for extra-curricular activities”, that’s it. That was good enough for me. I won that for basically not attending class but doing all sorts of fun things in college. I was put on the college magazine as one of the stars of the college. Hah!

So yes travelling is fun and you do get to learn a lot, and the further you travel from home, the better it is for you. Any pretext is good, as long as you travel. So I am planning to do so as far as I can afford to. Let’s see. I plan for sure to go somewhere in the next summer vacation that Jispa has. Till then, this vacation, I am going to the Indian Himalayan foothills this Diwali vacation. A cheap simple vacation where the most of the learnings are going to come from the train ride that we will be taking with Jispa after a really long time!

meeting the master

Lets start with something crazy

Reality is what we take to be true,” pioneering physicist David Bohm asserted in 1977. “What we take to be true is what we believe. What we believe is based upon our perceptions. What we perceive depends on what we look for. What we look for depends on what we think. What we think depends on what we perceive. What we perceive determines what we believe. What we believe determines what we take to be true. What we take to be true is our reality.”

What I take to be true and what I therefore believe my reality to be is largely shaped by the one man in my life that I met and had the good fortune to work with. Dharen Chaddha. I worked only for a year with him in consulting only to come to a conclusion that consulting is not the thing for me. I would much rather prefer the boring life of a working doer than an intellectual life of a great consulting master.

But the main point is that Dharen gave me almost all the intellect that I claim to enjoy today. The best part was that he did not do it by trying to teach me or by trying to inculcate something in me. He was just there. He did what he did and I could just not help but be affected by it. His presence was enough. I merely worked with me and then later on inculcated in myself all that I thought I could learn from him. Reflection, silence, thought, ability to paraphrase conversations, patience, taking people along, using wisdom received from others, actively listening, believing in the books people write… everything. In short, I would say I learnt to think from him. That is the greatest gift anyone can give anyone else. The learning on how to think. How to approach, how to behave…

I am an atheist or an agnostic, but I have a God, and I have met him. He stays in Bangalore.

I haven’t had the chance to meet Dharen in the 13 years since I left the firm. How could I? What does one do when one meets God? How can I talk to him? What do I talk to him? I would feel so weak and so dead. What would happen when I meet him. Hence I must have spoken to him only a few times in the 13 years. But I never ever had the guts to ever meet him.

Hero worship is a funny thing. You can worship someone forever and have a dronacharya – eklavya relationship but when they come in front of you, you don’t know what to do. Dharen is my hero. I want to think like him, work like him, communicate like him. I am nowhere near as good as him, but I want to try and bring in the best of what I can inside of me, what I have learnt from him.

So this time, I was with family in Bangalore, I messaged him and he promptly called back. With family, I had an incentive… I wanted Jispa to meet him once. I wanted to show her my God, my inspiration and a lot of credit for what and where we are right now. So we did plan to meet him. I asked Jispa “you want to meet my God?” I told her about Dharen. She knew a bit and she knew that I treat him thus. She was ok. I explained to her that he was the greatest influence on my life and my thought so far and I would love for her to meet him once, at least. She was game.

When we went there, as we were reaching I was wondering how I would react. The mere thought of him would bring tears to my eyes. Now I know what Elvis fans would feel like. Many times whenever I have spoken about him to anybody or thought deeply about him, I can’t help the tears that come in my eyes. I choke up and it’s difficult to control. So I was wondering how I would survive meeting him. What would happen, would I just break up, would I just collapse, what would happen.

As we reached his home, he came outside to greet us. There I had to fight back my emotions and stop myself form crying out then and there. Jasmine noticed it and then spoke about it. Ya. That one was tough. So I managed to stay ok meeting him after a long time. !3 years.

The meetings went off well. We chatted on a few things. I have always believed that he struggles to talk to common people. It is difficult for people like him to come down to our level, though I am sure this is something that he will surely not agree to. But I have seen him, think and wonder what to tell or talk. Then he would make his point and it would be laborious as he tries to explain the point he is making, carefully choosing his words. If the person on the other side is not quite as sharp then it would result in a really funny conversation. At momentum, we would laugh at the client’s inability to grasp Dharen’s words of wisdom. People have to move up to appreciate it and to completely grasp the complexity that he brought to the table with his words. Clients struggled, normal people struggled and that was one of the points that I knew was the final clincher as I decided not to consult anymore. If people can’t take the wisdom of Dharen, then I have no chance here. I could not meet anymore jokers and try and convince them on the intelligence of marketing or business strategy. In many ways I thought he was too intelligent and way too sharp for the clients he was consulting.

I then asked if I could show Jispa the study room. Dharen said “sure, but the study room has been shifted to a new room, but let’s see it nevertheless”. We took Jispa up and while we were going up I was telling her about an experience that made me think of Dharen as some kind of super human. We were working on a project in his study that was full of books and then he suddenly asked me to remove one book, that he pointed out. It was “Eldest Son: Zhou Enlai and the Making of Modern China, 1898-1976”. He then took the book and read a few pages from the start and then pointed out to the paragraph he wanted from it and then he asked me to read it. I was dumb struck. It was one book out of the millions he had read and he just picked it from nowhere and then it was a paragraph from this thick book that had struck him. And he had the ability to get it back again. This was Dharen for me. This was the genius I would revere and I would never be able to match up to. This was the legend that I passed onto Jispa.

Then he led us to the study where a smaller fraction of the books where there. As we just walked around, Jispa pointed out to the book – the eldest son. Yes it was there. The same book, that made the legend in my mind. I picked it up and looked at where I had found the passage. There it was – the passage, with a blue pen mark. I showed it to Jispa, there it’s still here, and this is the very same book. At this point or hereabouts, I broke down. Literally broke down.

At this point I just couldn’t control. I was laughing but I was crying also at the same time. It was weird, crying for no reason; a surfeit of emotions running through. I couldn’t pick any reason I should cry except that I was in the company of my God.

What a moment – My daughter on one side, my guru on the other and the book of the legend in my hand and Jasmine looking on.

Afterwards I asked Jispa about it. I don’t think I have cried in front of my daughter before. She said ya – you were laughing and crying at the same time. Short of fainting, she said that I probably behaved like what her friend would if would have met her rock star hero. Yup. Dharen is just that for me.

I was happy that the family met him. I don’t think there would too many instances later. Jispa must know who was one of the most important influence in my life and by that logic – a largish influence on her life.

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When Dharen saw the paragraph in the book that I was referring to he said – Yes. Zhou Enlai was shaped this way as he was the eldest son. I resonated it with that paragraph perhaps because I was also ‘the eldest son’ and that’s why it had an impact on me.

The paragraph from the book -

“Why, why did people love him?” one of two American newsmen asks me that evening. “After all, he made a lot of mistakes. Why is it that people weep when they speak of him?”

It is difficult to say why. Except that, somehow, because of him, we all felt life was worth living. Even when everything went wrong. “Perhaps because he never forgot to care. Even his mistakes were because he cared. He couldn’t help caring. It was bred in him. He was the eldest son.”

Eldest son, eldest grandson. In the Confucian scholar families of China, the eldest son was marked out for uncommon responsibility and duties. The eldest son, or failing him, the eldest grandson, must provide care and education for all the younger male children in the same generation as himself and for their offspring. He must also provide comfort, food, and lodging to the two generations above him, parents and grandparents. He must be a model. A model of filial piety, of traditional virtue, upholding family honor and status, sacrificing himself always so that the family will thrive.

He is the embodiment of the Confucian tradition, the magic bond with the past, his life one of unending care, responsibility and abnegation.

Tsunghuai, a young man of forty, says to me, “I think that Zhou Enlai, throughout his life, was unconsciously marked by the fact that he was eldest son, eldest grandson.” 

A lot of this I think is me but the problem is that I am the youngest son, the youngest grandson. While I grew up I believed that I must be the model of filial piety, of traditional virtue… blah blah…. So that the family will thrive. But there was one problem. I was the youngest son, the youngest grandson. On both sides. The youngest son has a different role to play. He has to be the rebel, the growth, the ability to push it all out. But I was different. I was confused. I held values that were not expected of me. I had a tough time I think in the end trying to balance the two opposites of what I feel and what I should be.

I think a lot of this is the opposites reconciling inside of me when I go about my teaching. I am the older guy but also the youngest cool son. I should have the ability to relate to the kids while giving sage advice as to what to do in life. I think as I grow older I am probably losing that deft touch and that ability to connect with the kids. There is an age a life stage and a role. These need to be relevant to each other to create an impact. I think I had my chance while I was really young and learning along with my teaching these kids. I think I must reinvent myself and look beyond what got me here. What got me here will get me there. Possibly I have to change it just a little, not too drastic, just a little change here, a little there. So I continue to be relevant but yet retain my core that makes me, me.

Gowing up is reinventing yourself every few years, trying to manage the change around you so that a little of you is there while a lot of you is changed. Or risk being irrelevant to the environment around you.