Sunday, August 13, 2006 ||
12:35 AM ||
Ever since I decided to do my Ph.D on Calligraphy and its instructional practices, I became a vociferous reader of anything that even remotely smelt of Handwriting. I soon became busy with preparing instructional models, that would finally set forth the ‘much-awaited’ celestial fusion of music and handwriting instruction, and remained all too concerned about the intricate technicalities that any instructor would be bothered about – perfect body postures, impeccable paper positions, fine finger movements, accurate shoulder tilts, flawless chair arrangements, ideal writing instruments, coarse erasures, gross malformations, deviant letter reversals and what not. I was damn sure though, that I would make a difference.
And the future seemed all too bright, when after traveling a good couple of hours from Trivandrum city, I found myself face-to-face with the Head of a Government Lower Primary Tribal School. Located amidst thick lush greenery, the school remained isolated from the rest of the world, situated way inside a forest tribal settlement at Palode, abuzz with cicadas. A long narrow hall divided into four, by cardboard separators; made up the classrooms for Grades 1 to 4, at the end of which the Headmistress, along with her meager teaching staff of three, put up a brave front, to ensure that her petite school community of less than a fifty children, benefited perhaps a little more than the midday meals for which they turned up without fail, learned the alphabet and numerals in the process, and diligently saw to it that the alarming drop-out rates remained minimal.
I had painfully selected the Music of the Seas, one of Bhaskar Chandavarkar’s compositions to set the paradisiacal scene for my experimental study, since I felt the Sitar would work wonders on my subjects. Which was when I realized that the basic amenities for teaching handwriting - a pencil and a sheet of paper – were something that my students are not too familiar with. I had to cast aside my musical aspirations for the moment, and provide them with these and more, if I were to introduce them to the miraculous swoops and whirls of the English alphabet. I couldn’t be too concerned about class lighting or furniture, because there wasn’t any to start with. I had to grapple with a few other bottle necks, that I never knew would lie in store for me. Even as I held their frail fingers to aid them form their first ‘A’ ever, they whispered to me that they haven’t had their breakfast, and were fervently waiting for noon – Couldn’t all this writing wait?. It was only when I saw for myself, a shack that somehow managed to stay up on its own, that he called ‘my home’, that I sensed it wasn’t fair on my part to have blamed him, for having torn the books that I had bought him. I got to know that it was a bit too demanding to give them lectures on cleanliness, when most of them had barely a scrap to cover themselves up with.
It was an absolutely different world out there, and for once, I saw the stunning absurdity of it all. Slouched on the bare floor, beside them, I could see the bizarre forms that they made on the paper, better. The recorder that had long lost its purpose lay abandoned; the never-tiring cicadas took its place. Postures and tilts went for a royal ride. Chaos and cacophony ruled the roost. And at the end of it all, they proudly proclaimed that they have mastered English. The proof lay in the flourishing scribbles on the soiled sheets, for all to see!
