With Love from Dubai

I am at the NESA conference at Maggie Moon's engaging workshop on Writing Workshops and making them work for you and the kids. Literacy - hurray! ;)

If you know what the balanced literacy model is, then this is something teachers and students worry about a lot - and learn from even more. I tried to put this up right after we had our own little balanced literacy workshop complete with mini-lesson. Maggie conferred with me and researched my clumsy writing, complimented it and taught beautifully... I had a false start. And Miss Maggie suggested I try being in the moment.

Anyway, as a souvenir from Dubai, here's what came of it:

I have a list of nouns running through my head and the one that sticks out is fear. How Greek of me, even being quite Indian! I think fear is different from nervousness because it cripples you. Nervousness is annoying but sometimes, possibly, maybe even energising. Its familiar buzz creeps up on you in an exam, and you think you just might pull this one off. It’s there when you’re playing a team sport and yet you’ve still got all your faculties working.

AFTER THE CONFERENCE
In the moment...

Looking up the trees, with their still leaves, I can see nothing except spots of sunlight here and there. I am wondering where they are and if they’re still floating. Do they have wings? Or do they just look like ghosts? How will I see my mum if she is shapeless? More importantly, I couldn’t talk to her if I wanted to. And I have so much to say to her. I want to hug her and bury my face in her skirt. I am mad at her and I want to yell back and cry and say it wasn’t fair to say ‘Get your homework done or else…’ or ‘Well, we’re inviting the neighbours for the party even if you and D don’t get along!’ And then I want to say sorry. But mostly, I want to cry except right in my chest, it’s too lumpy and knotty and tight for tears. Ugh.

I am ten. I am standing on the pavement on a road in Madras, with vegetable shops lining one side and little hardware shops lining the other. We were walking along and we had had a pretty peaceful afternoon. There were actually clouds to alleviate the burning heat – yay! My mum had exclaimed at the great price for cabbages somewhere and I had managed to nod knowledgeably. We were talking about stories, after that. Little Women, maybe, and how I wished my cousin hadn’t spoiled the ending for me.

And then…. gone. Just like that. I have looked in all the shops nearby and I can’t see her familiar figure or the colour of her dress. I am convinced this is it. Something’s happened. If there’d been a kidnapping, it would have been noisy. This is something weird – the end of the world. And I cannot move off the pavement. Aaaaaaaaaahhhhh.

Meesai Machismo

So such a serious blog name doesn't mean I am usually a serious person. Maybe INFPs are the intense kind generally. But maybe being a joker is a defence strategy I've developed over the years to a fine art ;) This preamble simply to say you're going to get no soul-searching outta me tonight. If any of you are reading, and are committed to handlebar meesais, you should probably not read any further! Coming up: one full-blown rant on unfashionable facial hair types.

I call them meesais and not moustaches because they are prolific in the motherland. And I associate them with the oh-so-Tamil man - and woman, for that matter - and self-satisfied smirks of fatal attraction possibilities! Get this for example:

http://il.youtube.com/watch?v=S7C_5NB4bSU&feature=related

Ha! My dad had a pretty big moustache and other people I respect do - and my mum swears that without a moustache every weakness of the mouth shows so that one can only giggle in response to 'hello'. My poor mother. Still I am scarred by encounters with the meesai.

I walked out of school one afternoon, blazing hot 1 pm sun. And I walk circumspectly edged against the wall that lines the long, narrow driveway into the alma mater, knowing every incoming car knows the schoolgirl comes first. I was 11? 12? Anyway, I'm swinging my starched, A-line not-long-enough, not-short-enough skirt, holding my unwieldy lunch basket and shifting 13 kilos from one shoulder to the next (such troopers we were) until I'm nearly certain I don't have any more shoulders. And I'm glad school's done for the day, when who should come along but Biker Dude, in wanna-be black sunglasses and all-black shirt and jeans. He only gets classified dud in retrospect though - so I don't know how coloured my historiography is! At the time, I chose to name it The Curious Incident of the Uncle in the Afternoon. He must have been a little younger than the going rate for uncles generally, with handlebars that vied with his bike's for symmetry and attention. And he tried, from a distance of several yards in a harmless attempt at humour, to block my path. You know it - you go left, they go right, and you do that little dance, so often unintentional. And then he grinned - and oh sorrow, he waggled that meesai at me. I crossed the road. Dance over. No, 'hello, uncle, I'm studying in 3rd standard' opp for you, bud.

Scarred.

Again, switch slides to another after-school journey back home. What do we have here? Policeman combing his badge of honour down either side, twirling it manfully in the face of a police bike's rearview mirror. Guffaws of laughter in the backseat. More tarnishment of the poor meesai.

Not so scarred, but etched for life.

Upward curls on pot-bellied policemen. Tarnishment - check.

Prerequisite for the upswung lungi, symbol of extreme proprietorship, Mallu and Tam landlord images, swaggering but uncreditable machismo. Like, check this out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aCShcWz5XQ&feature=related The moustache is what you get ID-d on. No entry into Kerala's hottest and most exclusive, or TN's for that matter, without.

More tarnishment. From a colonised, conditioned, Peetru. If you don't know what that is, embrace your identity in Madras terms.

Headless Driving ;)

Ever heard that expression '... like a headless chicken'?? Well, I think I know its equivalent now. I've never understood, always thought it was a heartless comparison, and it usually put me off my curry ;)! Now, however, I feel like said chicken. Decisions, decisions.

Someone wisely reminded me a couple of days ago that God has these questions already answered in his perfect plan. It is comforting to remember that... That however much 'headlessness' I encounter in my everyday decisions and interactions, He's got it covered. So tonight I am going to put my goals down on paper. These are my goals. Some of them I know that God put on my heart. Others I can simply trust him with. Much of my wondering boils down to this one question which I wrote down in a blog post, on another blog.

What is it about missions and worship that makes me cry and hurt so much both with happiness and longing?

I sometimes wonder if this decision-making process would be easier if I weren't in India, in Chennai. Some day soon I'll blog more about this - hopefully it'll make you guys laugh! It almost seems as if one is answerable to everyone else but God and oneself here. Suggestions, opinions, ideas - they all become quite categorical, and turn into moral issues. And I have to struggle hard within myself to focus on the One person who must influence all my decisions, to whom all my answers must point, in the final instance. I've taken a pretty major career decision on that one pivotal idea. Now to stick it through! Whether I choose a job in the corporate sector with a fat enough pay-check for those goals, or go the teaching route on this school contract and gain the international corporate management experience in the evenings, or take up a position abroad, I'm hoping pretty hard to choose the shortest way possible to be doing both those things.

D'you know that involuntary cringe when your patient but ever so slightly annoying SatNav lady wheezes: 'Tu-urn missed! Go 2 miles and take the 2nd exit off the roundabout!... Tu-urn missed. Go 1 mile and...' Lol, and everybody in the car groans harmoniously... Uh. I'm switching on my SatNav, cranking up the volume to max. Ecce, dominus.

Hugs

I could do with a big, huge, I-am-never-going-to-let-go-even-if-you-fear-awkwardness kind of hug. There are hugs and there are hugs. Awkward side hugs, hugs with only one person kissing, the full, frontal-grab hug, the macho back-pat hug, the back-rub, the hey-look-our-noses-fit-into-our-shoulders hug... hugs at different angles... When you know someone is coming over to hug you, you switch into alert either welcomingly or with a mental uh-oh (you know what's coming: contaaaaaaact!) and bend over with gently bent arms to be ready. At this point, you and the other hugger have both completed similar preparatory manoeuvres and are at a 135 from the feet. This is the bum-sticking-out hug. There's the you-can-cry-if-you-want-to-I'm-holding-you hug.

That's the kind I want today.

Pastry and punctuation?

Well, I just felt like alliteration. Since my last post, I HAVE HAD a dosai... scrumptiousness. Not quite Woodlands or amma's standards, but who's complaining? Also, baked an intensely chocolate fudge cake for the housemates last night - SLUURRRP.

There was something I'd been asking about for a time - a yes/no answer. Today from God (and Facebook!) I've decided to consider it a 'no'. Sigh. That's what I came to log.

I don't know if I can carry it off this term. So much to do and so much more expected of me than I have done. I am scared. I am unable. I am trying. I have God. And that is that. Some more healing in the family recently - God loves them so much. And I am so glad that I have this crazy family whose craziness fits (mostly) perfectly with mine!

In my breaks, I'm reading Lynne Truss's apparently popular book - Eats (,) Shoots and Leaves. Makes me laugh out loud! Not that I agree on all points but she's growing on me. JW thinks it's geeky - eeerrm, well. Have you read it?

More pet hates...

This is making me laugh - I don't feel particularly resentful and yet my past two posts have been along the same lines!

So the world according to me would have no cliques or cliquiness! (Yes, I coined a word and I've got a perfect right ;) )

I teach. And like the majority of the rest of the world, I have been in high school. And college. And other places where community is built from a grassroots level. And I detest it when one student (or two or ten) is left out of a spotlight-stealing group. I actually go one step further and feel my hackles rising even when no one is left out (particularly) but there is a preference for certain types of people... There is a difference but a difference which, to me, means very little in principle.

I think, somehow, I always hated it. I've been both 'popular' and 'not-popular' - I've actually never been unpopular. Funnily enough, when I was rather in the not-so-popular group that I actually won a school election (which was pretty big in the day!). But I hate it when people get labelled without seeking out the label. For example, in the school I teach, one student is considered of lesser ability. By the students, I mean. Another is considered unfriendly. But the reason behind both isn't because of anything they've done... it's more because of what they've not done.

I could easily shoot myself in the foot here - because leaving some things unsaid or undone is just as bad as an error of commission. But with people in social situations, you never know whether something is because they don't want to or because they don't know how/because they do it differently. GIVE them the benefit of the doubt.

If you don't know how, take a year off and teach English or any other foreign language in several far-off lands ... NOW, for goodness' sake!