There's a beautiful nursery just out of Kalimpong, a place where you can immerse yourself in orchids, dalias and calm. As you head towards the Teesta from town centre, dodging the silent gliding vehicles going down and the over-laden struggling trucks going up, it would be easy to miss the rusting metal sign and small track which guide you there. Despite our best efforts to better it, we keep returning. It's comfortable, cheap, beautiful and clean, but most importantly the guy who runs it is priceless.
He is tall, proud and wise. A small goatee tuft betrays his Nepali origins more so than the round face. His height is surprising, but despite an imposing stature, he's a people person: welcoming, generous, and always willing to share Indian philosophy over a cup of tea or glass of millet beer.
We arrived this Friday after a week of frustrating revelations and events at Kids' Castle. I think he could sense our need for reason, explanation and escape. So it was like something from the 'Celestine Prophecy' as he calmly started: "I knew I'd need to give you the next piece of the Indian puzzle at this point." Intrigued, we leaned in.
A fascinating description of Indian life and ambition followed: a tale of government conspiracy, promises of wealth if you agree not to think; a sad revelation of the crushing of ambition through the promise of an easy life if you'll just say 'yes' and join the mindless masses of government automatons in the curious bureaucracy which maintains control and a vice like restraint on India's development.
And with this, our understanding of the lack of energy, drive and motivation we have seen by most of the teachers; the very folk who surely, surely ought to be enthusing the next generation. What they are pushed is something like this: work hard for a couple of years, get a masters worth nothing outside India, and relax into a world of government funded guaranteed salary, pension and idleness.
If you consider that most parents see this as the root to happiness for their children too, it is no surprise that they, the children, tolerate the rote, recite, and dull...
A couple of shocking examples. The owner's daughter was doing her homework. He noticed that she had spelt one of the English words incorrectly. On advising her of the correct spelling he was shown the text book and her writing copied directly from what the teacher had shown on the blackboard. She refused to change it on the grounds that school could not be wrong. His wife supported her child. Makes you think, which is more than can be said for the daughter or mother. And that is a typical example.
On another occasion, the owner attended his son's school prize giving at the best state school in Kalimpong, only to find that only those children winning prizes were invited, along with only their parents. Imagine his amazement at seeing not the children, but proud self-important (a common trait out here) parents going up to receive the prizes; as if they had it the effort in themselves. Presumably those children not eligible to attend we're at home being thrashed or alternatively supported by the rare parent who understands the farce of it all. And all this despite the fact that the child coming 6th or 10th had improved 10 places on last year and worked its socks off. And I suppose if the parents are receiving the prizes, then perhaps the father who has been posted with the Army overseas, putting his life on the line, should be more eligible to be feted than those with the time to beat recitation into their children. Amazing.
The best education in India, it seems, is life. Our observations see imagination, innovation and creativity confiscated at the school gates, returned only when the end of school bell rings and the children are released back to a world where they are allowed to think again.
So, the owner's advice to us. Simple. We weren't going to change the way India does business. But if we can encourage just a small handful of pupils to think, or even to realise that that is what we were trying to get them to do when they are old enough to, then the victory is all ours. Perhaps, with luck, even some of the teachers might manage it too if they haven't already been de-thinked.
We had tried not to stay at the nursery that evening, seeking to widen our experience of Kalimpong. But perhaps fate did intervene, perhaps all these things do happen for a reason.
We left the next morning full of the horrors of state control, but also thinking that although we can't get enough of all this sage information from both the owner and our charity coordinator, Santa, to take it all in, like India itself, is simply exhausting. Do we actually have the capacity for another 2 months of it?
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