Have you read Désirée by Anne-Marie Selinko?I read it when I was in school; I think it was the first really thick book I read.Yes, it came even before Gone with the Wind.I loved it so much that I read it again. And, I think, again.And then, I found an old, old copy of it at my grandparents' place, and how could I not read it again?It's the story of Napoleon's first love - the daughter of a silk merchant, Désirée Clary. When I read the book, all those things were just names to me. Marseilles, Stockholm, the Tuileries ...And then I went to Marseilles.There I was, thinking only about Alexandre Dumas and how close we were to the Chateau d'If. We went, of course, by metro. And guess what we found?It isn't easy to tell, but the second station on the line is Désirée Clary! … [Read more...]
Manjri Adventure
The bus-driver looked at the traffic piled up on the road ahead. We had to get to school and we were late anyway. The traffic was impossible, so he suggested that we take a detour through Manjri village. That's when our adventure began.We passed custard-apple orchards and a stud farm. We passed tiny nondescript nursery schools. We passed fields after fields, bumping our way through roads that had probably been created by bullock carts. I wondered what we would do if a bullock cart came towards us from the opposite direction. There was enough room for two carts to pass, but surely not a bullock cart and a bus! I was mistaken. Villagers are far more confident than city-dwellers when it comes to cheerfully getting their vehicles off the road and driving on, without even losing the thread of conversation with co-passengers. We passed a tractor that merrily went right off the road to let us … [Read more...]
Counterblast to Tobacco
While researching the history of the Stuarts, I discovered some delightful pieces of information.Elizabeth I did not trust tobacco - it made her sick. But she was also intrigued by it. Once, she bet Raleigh that he would be unable to tell her the weight of the smoke.Raleigh was, always, a performer. He weighed an ounce of tobacco and cheerfully smoked it. When he had finished, he weighed the ashes. The difference between the two weights was, he declared, the weight of the smoke.Laughing, Elizabeth acknowledged defeat, paid up and commented that she had often seen men turn gold into smoke, but this was the first time she'd seen a man turn smoke into gold.The rational James I disapproved of smoking too, but there's a reason why he's called the 'wisest fool of Christendom'.He published an anonymous pamphlet titled Counterblast to Tobacco, where he said that tobacco was 'loathsome … [Read more...]
Oranges in No Man’s Land
I find that so may writers seem to have a compulsion to write long, complex, layered work. So many new books are thick paperbacks, full of things happening on every page.Oranges in No Man's Land is not like that. Not at all.Elizabeth Laird manages to write a beautiful, heart-warming story in the course of just about a hundred pages of large print. The setting and characters are just so powerful that the story becomes not a book, but a moment in time. It's an eternal, timeless moment, captured by language.I know nothing about the history of Lebanon. I know nothing about the 'Green Line' or what that meant, but I agree with the critic who says that Laird's Oranges in No Man's Land is 'A tribute to the human spirit'.Ten-year-old Ayesha lives in Beirut, ravaged by civil war. Between the two parts of the city is no man's land, and only military men dare go there. But Ayesha's … [Read more...]
Book-Reading at Crossword, Mulund!
Blue Shoes and Happiness
A colleague of mine saw me reading the book and commented on how it looked like a children's book.Many people don't know yet that I spend more time reading children's books than anything else - and am not ashamed of it.This one was delightful, as Alexander McCall Smith usually is. It's the kind of book you can read slowly, knowing that it will not run away. You know that you won't forget crucial details that contribute to the plot. You know that the focus of the story is not the plot, but life itself. You know that ideas and thoughts will un-self-consciously find their way into description and dialogue. The name itself brings that sweet smile and says, "Hey, that's a book I want to read!"I took my own time to read it, chuckling at traditionally-built women, women who dream about shoes and men who dream about cars and garages. I remembered, once again, the fact that cliches are … [Read more...]
Travel Records
My sister and I looked around.Things seemed perfect.It was a beautiful morning. It was not raining. Shops were just opening; restaurant-workers were setting their chairs and umbrellas.In the middle of a square, we looked around for the perfect spot.We sat on our haunches and put our arms around each other. People on their way to work threw puzzled looks at us. We giggled.We weren't looking at our backpacks, so we threw an arm around them, just in case. Passers-by frowned. Some even stopped to look. We laughed out loud.We were in a public place, sitting awkwardly and uncomfortably in the middle of nowhere, hugging our bags and laughing delightedly. We were foreigners - very obviously so. I think some people were even getting bold enough to come and talk to us. We continued to laugh, holding each other tighter.The self-timed camera carefully positioned on a chair in front of us … [Read more...]
A Doll’s House
I cannot believe that Ibsen changed the end of the end of A Doll's House for its production in Germany! What happened to [t]hat slammed door [that] reverberated across the roof of the world? Ibsen agreed to make Nora go back to her children? Shocking!Almost as bad as Shaw making Eliza go to Mr. Higgins at the end of My Fair Lady, thereby changing the end of Pygmalion. But then, Shaw did not believe that he was giving the movie-watching public a happy ending. What kind of happy conclusion had a young girl going back to a cynical, selfish, middle-aged man?I remember how much of an impact A Doll's House made on me the first time I read it. For me, it was far more potent than An Enemy of the People, the text we had to study. It made me think about women, family, mother, role-playing.... I later read a beautiful tongue-in-cheek piece about how linking the woman … [Read more...]
Unit Plans
There's nothing, absolutely nothing, like teaching. You can be so joyously idealistic in everything you choose to teach!Planning my units on narrative and imaginative writing, and descriptive writing was almost as inspiring as writing itself. Well, not really, but you know...I made a whole plan on how to introduce the idea of story-writing. The effective opening. The appropriate ending. Dialogue, atmosphere, character, setting. For each, I mentioned resource material that I will use in class - pieces of music, video clips, extracts from stories and plays... Even pieces of cloth and chocolate. Because inspiration truly comes from anywhere. (And I'm not just being mean to students who have no desire to write - it's part of their course to explore abstract inspiration!) I planned classroom activities - group activities where the students begin with the same sentences and seek to explore … [Read more...]
Picnic!
I insist that the way I left school in the morning set my mood. People (read 'teachers and students') hate duty that takes them out of school into the hot sunshine. I exclaimed, "Picnic!" Other teachers laughed at me. I replied, "In the afternoon, I can complain; now at least, I'll go happy!"But even now, I'm not complaining. I went with a group of girls that was reasonably cheerful, willing to work and complained just a little. We were at a sericulture unit, learning about mulberry, lac and azolla. I found a mulberry leaf far bigger than my whole hand! I learned that azolla (which existed only in geography text books for me) can cause a cow to produce 1.5 times the regular amount of milk!We cut, pruned and planted. We dug, sieved the mud and laid the azolla beds. And I ate a one-rupee pepsicola.We played dumb charades and antakshari. What a lovely picnic it was! … [Read more...]