Tight Rope Walk

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There is a stunning color photo in today’s Deccan Chronicle (19 October). A seven or eight year old girl with a serene face lit up by an almost yogic concentration. She is high up in the air balancing a column of 5 converging earthen pots on her tiny head. She is riding a single wheel grimly on a tight rope on the busy Punjagutta Road. A common enough sight in India.

The caption reads: “…For all the protestations about protecting children, especially the girl child, police and government officials were conspicuously absent”.

I am sure the ‘police’ kindly allowed the show with a ‘consideration’ for the ‘girl child’. And the ‘government officials’, if they were pressed into service would have dragged her away and put her in a school with ‘free and compulsory’ education.

Having seen these shows in my childhood village in the early 50s, I know all about the ‘Dommari’ tribe who make a living out of this hazardous family calling. I used o close my eyes when a months-old baby used to be flung from one end of the tight rope to the other in the safe hands of the sender father and the receiver mother. The training starts apparently from the womb……like Abhimanyu. The girls are not allowed to ‘ossify’ their bones…they remain as supple as rubber bands…they would break if not trained continuously from childhood.

Sad and cruel…..but what about Nadia Comaneci who made such news with her first ever perfect 10 point Gold Medal in the Montreal Olympics Gymnastics? Her training too started early in life and was even more rigorous and pitiless, with the Communist Rumanian Government bent on winning Olympic Gold Medals during the Cold War.

Put our tight rope walker in the school and she would be a fish out of water. A girl child forced to work for a meager living without any danger to her life as a maid servant in a posh household is one thing; and a born tight rope walker is quite another!

Without being facile, let us admit that life is a tight rope walk for more children than most. And that there are certain inborn genetic skills coming down from generations. The Hamiltons and the Bernoullis were cut out to do Science and nothing but science for generations; and the world is a better place for letting them do it. And there are girl children of weavers who astound one with their genes and early training and keep up our foreign exchange kitty in a floating condition. Gandhi knew all about it.

What a government ought to do is search for talent and encourage it from childhood; but not to force everyone into a straitjacket. Choice is the word! Alas, today’s front page story (with a photo of a smiling Sibaljee) is that he has decided to raise the cut-off of Class XII marks for IIT JEE to 80%.

The US knows all about what I am talking. So they have a Bill Gates who failed to complete his college,

I knew of a family of geniuses…..6 brothers who all did well except the last one (by the way, they too are all Sastrys-;). This last kid couldn’t ‘matriculate’. He was standing first in all subjects in the Board but English. He failed in it 3 times scoring 5, 8 and 5 marks out of 100. I am told he is running a Chess Academy to eke out a living. He would have been a brilliant mathematician but for the straitjacket.

I was a teacher for my living for a good 42 years willy-nilly. So I know that there is something called ‘aptitude’. While at IIT KGP one of my back-bencher students in Physics approached me in his Fourth Year for a recommendation letter. He wanted to quit Physics midway and take up his family calling which happened to be ‘business’. He went on to do his MBA in the US and turned out to be a wonderful entrepreneur earning millions of dollars for India exporting software packages and generating employment for many of our kids. Physics would have killed him.

Neither me nor my wife have an aptitude for music. So I taught my son shuttle badminton from an early age and he did turn out to be a ‘blue’ for his Hall at IIT KGP. But one day he came home from his KV school in Class X with a trophy. I asked him what he won it for and he replied: “Music”. I was stunned when he said he was playing Bongo for his House for a couple of years since they pressed him into service whenever needed.

I at once engaged a ‘tabla’ master for him, who used to visit our home late in the night. I asked his teacher why he turns up so late. He replied that throughout the day he is employed to ‘teach’ tabla to campus kids who have absolutely no aptitude for it but to please their parents and make a living for himself. So, before going home he comes to our place as the Port of Last Call because he doesn’t have to ‘teach’ my son…only show a couple of new beats and listen with rapture as my son repeated them effortlessly. He said he would do it for pleasure and not money!

And in Class XI I had to stop his tabla classes much to the chagrin of his teacher because I had to myself ‘coach’ my son for the bloody IIT JEE. He went on to do his M. Sc. in Industry Chemistry there but now earns his decent living doing software for which he turned out to have a FLAIR!

And on inquiry we found that his first cousin dropped out from college and grew up to be a professional percussionist visiting the US regularly and making a big splash and a great living…his mom was the late Principal of a renowned Music College.

After clearing his B. A. in English (failing in one paper for not reading an unreadable book on Amundsen’s ‘Expeditions to the South Pole’) R. K. Narayan was walking up the stairs of their University College with a filled-up application form for M. A. in English. Fortunately he was met by a senior of his coming downstairs who advised him to tear up the forms if he wanted to keep up his love for English.

Ask Shyamal about ‘aptitude’!

And then talk about Life as a ‘Tight Rope Walk’!!!

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