There is something just so mystic about wandering in the darkness and into the woods. The intermittent gusts of chilled wind, the shadows of  the branches meandering round the corner,  the winding trail that leads to yet another destination, the high rising hills exacerbating the vastness of the valley ahead, the rustle of the leaves hinting the plausible presence of the rightful owner of the land and the distant sound of a wild animal reclaiming his territory – all accentuated by the spell of darkness.

The ‘manipulated’ side wants to be teleported to the comfort of the bed while the wild side seeks to explore the silence behind the silence and the depth of the darkness. As the equilibrium shuttles, the brain succumbs to the calls – not to give in but probably to re-establish that some situations remain best undefined.

Once in a while, a relaxed walk in the woods in darkness is probably what is all that is required to set things straight.

 Credit: Anoop Erakkil

Pic: Courtesy-Anoop Erakkil

Written on February 19th, 2012 , Adventure / Travel

Yesterday I felt miserably lost and figured I wasn’t doing anything worthwhile staring at the screen. I took a quick shower and decided to take a stroll. Left at about 1749 and decided to walk down to the Shangumugam beach about 6kms from my house. In a sturdy pace I hit the beach and returned back on a different route. Thought process all through the walk was nothing intellectual. Just random strings buzzing in and out. Got back home and hit the bed pretty early.

What happened post this is something that really got me thinking. I saw this amazing dream of me strategically and miraculously surviving from a historic fort that was giving in to torrential waters from an ancient collapsing dam. Looks like we[Not really sure 'Who'] were walking across this really huge dam. The water is quite transparent and is sparkling blue. All of a sudden we sense the water level going up. People start running helter skelter and there’s a mad rush to get across to the safer contours. Funnily there’s also a set of people who’re lazily walking around. Then there’s an immaculate focus on a few people trying to help others cross. and even before we know most of us are in the water. A few know how to swim, rest are left dangling underwater on to crevices on the stone formations. [The water is pristine blue and transparent.] Somehow the whole setup changes and is now of a historic fort and water gushing into the minarets and tombs. As I’m lost in the waters, I see the gates of the dam opening up. I turn around. My mind still knowing this to be a dream tries to understand the logic. It senses that one of the gates pulls in horizontally towards the left thus creating a huge space for the water to fill in; leading to the water level subsiding in the reservoir. Finally it so happens that most of us are safely stranded on the ruins. People run around to find their dear ones. Atharv and Pranav – two of my kids finally find their mother who for some reason talks about people spitting in the corners and smoking up. A kid comes and thanks me for flinging her away to safety from the moving flood gates. There’s suddenly a big crowd moving towards us. Happens to be a politician coming to address the crowd. A few of us take offence and start throwing him and his followers in the water. The itouch morning alarm rings and I’m up. All fresh. All happy. All excited.

This has been the most colorful, action filled, thought provoking and reflective dream that I’ve dream’t till date.  Not just because of what the brain visualized during the dream but more because of the effect it had on me and my mood the morning that followed. Today I seem to be in my top spirits and I’ve finished almost half of what I planned to finish today. This got me to wonder, If a dream really motivates one to be more productive and rejuvenates, can we program our brain to subconsciously create interesting stories and play it when the body is taking rest? Do dreams really mean something? Do they really connect the dots that haven’t been joined in reality?

I’ve always thought dreams are a manifestation of what your body really wants to see or do. The brain sub-consciously feeds in actions or words from your conversations and visual memory and twines a story as days progress. At one point of time when it gets the trigger – not sure what, it releases the story for you to explore. Probably my trigger was the sound of the thundering waves at the Shangumugam beach clubbed with the stress that the body underwent because of the 13km walk. Well, that seems to be a good start to analyzing the triggers behind dreams!

Written on November 3rd, 2011 , rambles

Yet another day was coming to an end and the people of the land were tending their chores. It was all one peaceful ambiance with just minor disruptions here and there.  To help manage the affairs, the architect of the land decided to pull up a few responsible men and women and give them the authority to administer sections of the land..Well, ‘Decentralization of power’ as they call it. And then, things changed. With just one word, rose eleven kingdoms all powerful and energetic. And within minutes, the Kings and Queens swore at the altar to uprise their just formed kingdoms. Ministers, Treasurers and Soldiers were deputed and responsibilities bestowed.

Ever since then, things have drastically improved. The men and women now have something really concrete to look forward to – a structure, a pattern and above all rejoice in the powers that they otherwise would not have. There’s now an aura of peace in the empire and the subjects seem to be showing quite some interest in strengthening their kingdoms.  As days progress, the architect is still working out the finer details as to how the empires could be allowed to rule in mutual peace and still compete with each other for mutual benefit.

Welcome to Class of IIA at Epiphany- Where we play the Age of Empires with real Kings, Queens and Ministers!

Looking back, it’s kind of funny how just a random idea seems to be making so much of an impact on the kids. Ever since we divided the classroom into groups and gave them this theme to build upon, things have quite changed. Behavior management in the classroom has tremendously improved and almost every objective that is taught, once related to the theme even in some abstract form is investing the kids so much. It has also given scope to introduce an awesome value system in the class, which I’ve been trying in vain for the past 8 months to integrate in my regular classes. This coming friday, if things work well, I hopefully would be able to introduce them to the barter system and eventually trade and commerce. The options seem endless…

While biking back home today, I wonder why this idea didn’t strike me when I was scouting for a proper theme for my class late June, last year. There’s just about 25 instructional days left for this academic year to come to an end and I probably could have invested them a bit more had things ‘clicked’ before. But well, I guess thats just the feeling of not doing enough, that every teacher experiences every single day in his/her life. Really hoping this new system evolves into a robust framework and also if nothing works, I still can now be proud of founding eleven dynasties, not just in my dreams but in reality!

Written on February 8th, 2011 , Teach for India Tags: ,

Over the past few months, there’s a lot thats been happening; but for some reason I just didn’t take the time out to visit this space. With the school closed down for the Christmas break and keeping up with the self imposed rule of updating my blog every year-end, here’s a quick snapshot  of ‘my’ 2010.

This year has been quite interesting from various perspectives. Looking back, the major checkpoints[not necessarily listed in order] this year  would be:

  • Ran the infamous Auroville half marathon and vowed never to stop running!
  • Resigned from Infosys to join TeachforIndia. [leaving an awesome team behind and making one profound shift in my career.]
  • Met Paruammai, attended a close friends wedding and more importantly explored Kerala like never before.
  • Joined TFI and reveled in the five week long induction programme.
  • Couldn’t resist the temptation to do the Katraj-Sinhagad night trek [Twice on successive weekends!] amidst the rigour of he institute.
  • Missed spending quality time with family!
  • Reported to Epiphany School where I’ve been teaching IInd grade kids for the past six months and probably continue to do so for the next 1.5yrs.
  • Paid obeisance to the rain god by trekking the Kenjalgad fort [First monsoon trek by DH.]
  • Hiked up to the Ahupe village to take some time out and celebrate yet another important milestone.
  • Visited the Khadakwasla dam.[Failed executing  the rock band idea though!]
  • Revisited[Hiked] Koraigad, Rajmachi and Ratangad.
  • Rode to Khadakwasla dam [Got back to the byke after a long break of 5 months!]
  • Registered for the MBL course by Distance education mode from NLSIU.
  • Visited the Korlai fort [Didn't byke this time!]
  • Registered for the Standard Chartered Mumbai Marathon[My first Full Marathon!] and raised about 9500Rs. for TFI.
  • Ran the Pune Half marathon.[ Well, actually ran a 25!]
  • Turned 25 Years! Woohoo!
  • Ran the Goa River Marathon.
  • Witnessed Shreks’ [a co-fellow] wedding in Vizag.
  • Was gifted a Hookah, a mobile speaker , some invaluable coupons and a heart rate monitor!
  • Realised that I could afford to save more than I thought I could.
  • Squared in and took some real important decisions.
  • Vowed to stick on to Ubuntu TOTALLY.

Well that kind of summarizes the year that’s been till date. Tomorrow hopefully I would run a sweet 30k to siphon off 2010  and usher in 2011 and for some reason, I have this gut feeling that the next year would be even more eventful than this year.

Wishing you [And myself!] an awesome and happening year ahead….

Written on December 30th, 2010 , rambles, Year End Sign-offs

Couple of  hours back I opened my student tracker,  just sat back and started mulling over how each of my kids have changed over the past few months. As I went through the list reading each of the kids names, images of the kid kept flashing in and out of my mind and most of them, so turned out to be of those moments when they were being ecstatic or really happy. This made me wonder how we as humans tend to capture/remember only the positives or the cheerful part in our relationships. But as a teacher, am I not failing my kids in not noticing their negative behaviour and working to get them back to their normal self? Am I doing justice to them by not stopping what I’m doing and not taking that extra time to pay attention to that minuscule behavioral change? How many times have I swept a behavioral change under the blanket and continued with my class/session? How many times have I ‘neglected’ a kid in the rush to finish off a topic/objective?

Sadly in retrospect I seem to recollect more than one occasions where I’ve failed noticing/paying heed to the change. This could probably be one of those reasons why a particular kid did not perform well in a particular objective; a reason why a particular kid did not receive me with the same enthusiasm as he otherwise would have and this is something I’m really beginning to appreciate in this role as a teacher. Every moment in the classroom you end up dealing with the emotions of 46 kids out there. Human to human interaction is the utmost priority. When I go back to my classroom in twenty days for the second term, this is one thing that I have to keep in mind always.

Talking by numbers, my kids have progressed from a class average of 25% to 56% in Math, from 17% to 59% in Grammer and from 28%[-0.1 Grade] to 85%[1.5 Grade] in RC. Thats some significant progress that the class has made. But again, the class average does not necessarily represent the overall growth of the classroom. There still are kids like – Sarfaraz, Nabil, Aditya More, Meghana and Yash Pawar who need to make tremendous progress if they have to be on par with the other kids. I guess that is where the main challenge lies.

Today, I visualize my classroom as a circular board resting on a pivot. I being the pivot and the circular board,  a playground where my 46 little ones decide the dynamics of the classroom from inside. My responsibility is to  maintain the equilibrium and I need to be extremely flexible so as to adjust and re-position to the external stimuli and the dynamics created by my kids so that the whole system remains in equilibrium always. The next fortnight I guess is all about figuring out how to maintain that equilibrium, about how I push myself to my limits of being flexible and making that transformation something sustainable…

Written on November 1st, 2010 , Teach for India Tags: ,

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