You can do many things in twenty-four hours. As a six-year-old, I completed an 80-page notebook of holiday homework in one day, and concluded my summer vacation on this note of aggressive warming-up for school.
That lesson was to put me in good stead on many further occasions. At college, entire projects were rolled out in one night, critical debts repaid by coaxing out further loans from other creditors in one day, and examinations scarped through with a 24-hour study.
History repeats. In one day, a little one at home completed a project on the Solar System after we let her squander 60 days on television, films and mall-hopping. While the 80-page composition was entirely my problem, the Solar System is not merely her responsibility. Thus I relearn that Pluto is 500 times lighter than the Earth, and Jupiter weighs 318 times more but despite the size is a fast spinner.
The Internet feeds us prompt pearls of wisdom. However, there isn’t one website that has truly understood the demands of the teachers in Dubai. The Web could take you in circles, feed you peripheral information but not the one you are searching – say, for example, the history of the national animal of India. All searches end in the Royal Bengal Tiger but the teacher wants the children to dig up which animal had preceded the RBT in bagging the honour. What for, don’t ask.
In my student days, the best gift one could ask for was the entire lot of notebooks of a senior, preferably the school-topper. Bookings begin months in advance, and the notes are copied down ditto. Rumour has it that mosquitoes have been killed and pasted in the exact four-lines for authentic replication and out of senior-student loyalty, and for a little luck too.
Abraham Varghese got the first rank, junior students whispered, because he sacrificed “mosquito blood” on the altar of every subject that is his note-books. Varghese hasn’t confirmed or denied the mosquito connection.
As a Grade 10 student, my big worry was a project on Automation. There was only one book in the Public Library that followed our index of topics, and it had fallen in the hands of our classroom “Reggie.” The snob won’t pass it around. I had to copy it all down in one night, from a friend’s only friend of Reggie, and he insisted that I skip a few words here and there to maintain manuscript originality.
I begged him to let me suffix Henry with a Ford. He didn’t budge, and so, for me, it was Henry F who took the honour for whatever he did. Not sure what, and you have to blame Reggie for my ignorance.
What odds we had to fight! Today’s kids have the Internet, parents willing to be serfs and…now, a hired writer.
I have been commissioned by my wife’s colleague to write a thesis for her nine-year-old son, who is happily vacationing in India. I can’t reveal the topic lest the poor boy get a raw deal.
Next year, I propose to put up an ad: For vacation assignments, please call …. Reasonable rates. Prompt delivery.
