|
At the
Labrynth Children’s Museum in Berlin last September, we had a reading from
Indian books. There were about 50 children and seven or eight adults at the
activity centre that afternoon, mostly 11 to 13-year-olds. At the end of the
session as the supervising adults gave thanks that their charges had
‘behaved’, a clutch of excitable kids surrounded me.
“You can dance?” a dark-eyed teen asked. Turkish. “If you will sing,” I
replied. “Okay,” he said and burst into “Bole choodiyaan, bole kangana, hai
mai ho gayee tere saajana, tere bin jeeyo naiyo lagda mai te mar jaavaan,
lejja lejja…’” rendering the Punjabi lyrics brilliantly. Others joined him.
Meanwhile, a young girl, her head covered with a hijab, thrust a book into
my hands, a scrapbook filled with pictures of Indian filmstars: Shahrukh
Khan, Preity Zinta, Kareena Kapoor, Hrithik Roshan. “They are soooo
beautiful!” she drooled. Another girl whispered, “You are Sandhya Rao. I
know Amrita Rao!”
These children know a lot more than we adults in the garb of teachers,
librarians, parents give them credit for. That’s for sure and that’s one
thing I have understood through interactions with children in various parts
of the world. Thanks to the Frankfurt Bookfair
I had some opportunities to
spend time in the company of many different kinds of children in Frankfurt
and Berlin.
At the Frankfurt International School, for instance,
the librarian was quite
obviously agitated that the children were going to be read a text (from a
book for children of course) about what goes on in the mind of a child who
has lived through the tsunami of December 2004. Necessarily, the text
touches upon death and loss and grief.
In deference to her concern, I read aloud only up to a point where the
details of the tragedy are impending. But the children wanted more and they
pressed me to read on. They wanted to hear it all out and, more than that,
they wanted to share what they themselves knew. In an after school in
Berlin, the children disclosed how a teacher and a child from their own
elementary school had gone missing in Indonesia in the tsunami. They wanted
to talk about it and understand what had happened. These children were only
about nine years old. In Chennai, children who had been directly and
traumatically affected confided that they felt comforted by the fact that
now at least others were getting to hear their stories through the book.
Adults argue about stories and pictures and words that they are sometimes
“too region-specific,” or “culturally alien”. Often they will actively
shield their children from books that are supposedly ‘different’ from what
they know or see or are familiar with. Yet, in schools across Sweden, for
instance, children 10 years and above know about the practice of caste
discrimination in India. In every class in every school came this opening
salvo: “Why do you have castes in India?”
Shocked, I asked how they knew, at that age. “It’s in our textbook,” they
replied. And there it is: There are four different castes in India, etc etc
etc. So they want to know all about it and keep asking questions. We had
discussions on this in every class.
In Sweden, adults asked how children would understand the adventure story of
Pippi Longstrump, a highly independent nine-year-old girl who lives alone
and who puts adults firmly in their place. “Will you change names, or adapt
the story to Indian conditions? Will they understand?” they worried.
The answer came after reading aloud to a group of girls in a Mumbai
municipal school in Santa Cruz about how Pippi rides to school on her horse
just so she can enjoy Christmas holidays like other children, and then makes
a fool of the teacher by asking some fundamental questions that I am sure
children often want to ask… There were no concessions to cultural
differences, Pippi came packaged as she appears in the original Swedish. The
answer came after the girls got over the initial shock of discovering the
existence of such rebelliousness in a book, then discovering that it must be
‘okay’ since an adult was reading it out aloud to them, and then
sitting
back to enjoy the story and identifying with Pippi in spirit and in some
cases perhaps even in fact, in their imaginations…
Then, there was a group of 7 to 9-year-olds who loved to roll their tongues
over all the Swedish words and names in the Pippi stories. “Villa Villakulla!
Villa Villakulla!” they would chant like a mantra. “Pippi Lambemoze!
Pippilotta Ephraimsdotter something something something Longstrump!”
Is it that we adults have the problems? That we prefer a world of children’s
books that we can control? No complex questions? No funny ideas? And
certainly no questions for which we don’t have answers?
Can’t really blame ourselves sometimes, though. I remember a time, some
years ago, with a group of kids in a local Chennai school. Would you like to
change the end of the story, I had asked thinking maybe at least this would
engage their interest. That was all. Salivating, they pounced on my poor
little harmless grandma’s tale and transformed it into a bloodbath while I
concentrated on exercising maximum restraint on facial and other muscles.
Kids at SOS Tambaram also salivated and pounced upon this same grandma’s
tale at their resource centre. One pulled out the English version and
started to read out, herself, hesitatingly, aloud. Another pounced upon the
Tamil version. Taking turns, they read aloud the whole book, page by page.
By the time they finished, a crowd had collected and then it was a free for
all with everybody pulling out English and Tamil versions of books and
wanting to read aloud in pairs. We had to pay attention!
As I couldn’t but notice young Ekatha the moment I spotted her, the only
brown face in a sea of peaches and cream and roses at the Jens Nydahl
Grundshule in Kreuzberg, Berlin. As my friend Tina and I walked into the
hall, “Vanakkam!” the very German children chorused. “You?” I asked, looking
towards the brown face. Yes, she nodded and exchanged secret smiles with her
classfellows. When she heard I was from India, she said, “I am from Sri
Lanka. Do you know my father?”
Yes, children recognise no boundaries. They are the T20 generation. They
know more than we give them credit for.
|
