Tag: postaday

Date with danger

We were in Thekkady, enjoying the monsoon showers and the chilly breeze that came with it. Wondering what to do for thrill, we wandered through the shopping street when we noticed a poster from the Kadathanadan Kalari Centre for a show of traditional Kerala fighting techniques. It was rather a pricey ticket, which is understandable since they target rich tourists, but I had my doubts, too, about how much I’d enjoy it.

After about a half hour of sword and stick fighting, the team moved on to fire. I sat up excited. What spells dare and danger better than fire? And boy, what an act that was.

Danger

An uncanny realisation

an uncanny realisation

A few weeks ago I met with an old school friend. We had a lot to discuss about the last six years that had elapsed since we last saw each other. But of all things we spoke of, one stood out to me, nagging me from within.

She mentioned our school principal, Mrs. D. She also taught English Literature for senior classes during our time, and I had the opportunity to sit through her classes for a short 2 months before changing schools. The last thing I had heard of Mrs. D was that she had retired. I had no idea of her current whereabouts until my friend revealed it to me.

Mrs. D now taught English for adults from the comfort of her home. “Oh, nice!” I exclaimed when I heard that. I knew my teacher could never stop teaching, but I hadn’t thought of her moving on from enlightening school students to adults. Nevertheless, I was happy to hear that she had moved on and enjoyed retirement.

My friend continued her story. Everyone in school knew how much Mrs. D appreciated good music. She’d nod her head, smiling, whenever a student played the grand piano in the auditorium. And then she’d voice her admiration to the entire school during assembly. She was also a great pianist herself.

And so when my friend told me that Mrs. D still played the piano whenever she had time, I took a hike down my mind to those days when we’d file into the auditorium every morning, beating our feet to crescendos and staccatos. But the fleeting image burst like a gum bubble when I heard Mrs. D couldn’t play as often as she’d liked to because she had wrist pains and nerve issues. “Old age, you know.” My friend commented, offhand. It was just a matter of fact. At that moment, my reality stood still.

I hadn’t thought of my teachers getting old. I had been so busy focussing on my life and the changes I underwent that I didn’t even pause to think that my teacher had a life of her own—a life that went by just as mine did. My memory of Mrs. D was frozen in the classroom, and that I could walk into class tomorrow, flip the page of my text-book, and continue reading between the lines of Iago’s speech.

I hadn’t, even for a moment, considered that my teacher’s life no longer involved striding into class in a smart sari and not-so-heeled shoes. I hadn’t thought of her slumping on the couch in a sweatshirt, or watching television after 10 pm. Somehow, it never struck me that teachers are normal people, too, and that as they grew older, they’d also grow weak in the knees, stutter in their speech, and caress wrinkled skins.

It made me feel old to hear the reality of my teacher. She wasn’t as old as dying a natural death, but she was older than my image of her, and for a while, I couldn’t accept that. Here we were, standing at the airport, chatting away like a couple of adults discussing serious economic issues, when in truth neither of us felt adult-like at all. We had, of course, walked out formal education and into employment, but our memories still lived in the same school uniforms that we clad six years ago.

Oh, how much we hated Mrs. D’s rules. She made us all wear ribbons on our hair and would ensure our skirts reached well below our knees—the punishment for improper length being teachers undoing the hemming our skirts to make them longer.

Yet now, life had turned the tables on us and we just stared in longing into the mirror of our memories, that shadowed fondest part of our lives.

Knowledge

Daniel had spent days picking at circuits and nights poring over assignments. And now with a job in hand, he swelled with pride.

His engineer dad had taught him how vital an electronics degree was. He couldn’t rely on his childhood hobby of deconstructing circuits; he needed a certified document to make a good career. That way, he could make back the cash he shelled out as fees.

The first day, wanting to impress his boss, Daniel walked in crisp and clean. But he was the one impressed—welcoming him wasn’t a fancy degree holder, but his father’s old apprentice.

A May Day I never knew

It’s May 1, and where I live, today is a public holiday celebrated as May Day, Labour Day, or Workers’ Day. No matter what they call it though, for most people today is just a second Sunday. They wake up late, display fantastic gluttony for lunch, and spend the rest of the day on the couch, switching through channels on the television.

Every TV channel has special programmes lined up for today. They’re not motivational speeches and documentaries about how the labour laws came about, but movies, and interviews with film stars about what they like to eat at movie sets. And after a heavy lunch, people love to lay back and watch film stars flash their teeth at the screen.

It’s weird that we spend an entire day relaxing when we should be commemorating the efforts of the working class. However, for as long as I remember, May Day has been the same in my society: once in a while, a bunch of activists would organise a peaceful rally, and all shops will shut down for the day — because the cost of not doing so would be a hefty fine.

So when I woke up this morning, I expected nothing more. However, for the first time in my life, I was curious to know what May Day meant for the rest of the world.
May Day is an ancient spring festival in Europe, I realised with gloom. It’s a tradition where people celebrate soil fertility with social gatherings and games.

And here I thought the first of May was Workers’ Day. I dug deeper, and found out that the spring festival combined with many other seasonal festivals throughout Europe, to make May Day a popular holiday. It had existed for years before the International Socialist Conference decided to declare the same day as international workers’ day.

Workers’ Day is nowhere related to May Day — and that came as a shocker. We’ve always referred to the International Workers’ Day as May Day. As for the actual May Day, we’d never even heard of it.

Even my school book taught me that May 1 was for workers, when in fact, it’s something else altogether. We had learnt to appreciate the labourers amongst us, but we hadn’t learnt that the law came into practice only in 1904 overshadowing a centuries-old custom. I was appalled, but it wasn’t the first time that our education system had hidden parts of facts. The result? An entire generation of more than half of the world grew up oblivious to the fact that May Day traditions were older than Labour Day celebrations. It’s no big deal, you might think, but in a way, this makes me question everything I’ve studied in my history classes.