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...The first variety were very old and shrinking and shriveling and smiling and shining retiree granpas who traveled home to home seeking to teach kids of tender age for a princely monthly pay of Rs 2 (Father's take-home was all of Rs 30 then of which another Rs 2 went for house-rent)...
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I soon graduated, as an unwilling accomplice to my didi, to the second variety of home tutors.
These were youthful unemployed pass-outs from Father's high school waiting to be absorbed as 'contract' teachers anon. They had none of the charm of the old and retired teachers and they were prone to be abrupt with their wards.
The one I remember with awe was named Gundu Dikshitulu (again a South Indian Brahmin lad) of 16 or so. He replaced our lovable Laxmi Narasaiah Sir and I was forlorn. He didn't teach us any memorable Telugu poems...he started us with counting numbers:
"okati (one), rendu (two), upto vanda (hundred)". And asked us to repeat them then and there...he thought we were Sakuntala Devis in budding, and whenever we made mistakes, didn't take kindly to us unlike our good old teacher who just used to smile.
And there were unwritten rules that he couldn't touch my didi who was all of 5 by then. So he used to show me up as her example by awarding me exemplary punishment...no, not by beating me since I would then shoot my head off and his beating would be heard by my mom. He would simply pinch my thigh and I would start howling. And if my mom came out to find out, he would smile at her showing me up as an actor and he the innocent victim of my acting. Mom would get back into her kitchen and would tease me later on as a lout. And didi was of no help since she enjoyed my discomfiture...Didis can be pretty heartless ;)
Fortunately for me Gundu Dikshitulu got his job in a far-off village pretty soon and left us in peace.
Then we were enrolled in what was called a Veedhi Badi (Street Corner School). There were only four streets in our village and each of them had a Veedhi Badi.
If you thought they were regular schools with a midday-meal scheme and toilets and classrooms and periodic inspections by government officials to extend their grants for one more year (after pocketing bribes from headmasters), you would be surprised.
Each Veedhi Badi was housed in the verandah of an old man who could afford to seat about a dozen kids in it and equip it with an excuse for a blackboard.
We would all troop in as per our whims after our ablutions and our early morning milk or coffee. And take an empty seat on the mud-caked floor. There was no segregation of sexes. And the old bespectacled man would come out into his verandah after his ablutions and tiffin and ask us to open our bags. These contained just our slate and a box of slate pencils.
Our slates were not flimsy like the modern ones. They were hefty and enclosed in heavy wooden frames and were practically indestructible...we used to fight with them as our weapons after the class was over and nothing happened to them or us.
Our slate pencils however were as delicate as our morals and used to break every once in a while...they were designed to do so like the pantographs and overhead traction lines...the pantographs are designed to wear out faster than the traction wires which are expensive to replace.
The slates were very efficient absorbents of the dried up clay the pencils were made of and left white patches on the slate. And after a week the slate became useless...you can't overwrite white on white. And so they had to be periodically cleaned. Water was of no use...it couldn't tease out the clay from the slate.
So the school kids discovered a remedy. They found a wayside plant that grew like a weed in our jungles. Its leaves were juicy and when rubbed on the slates they yielded enough juice that slid into the pores of the slates and stayed there sticking to the clay residing there. All we had to do then was to take a piece of wayside cotton and rub it off on the slate...the cotton absorbed the juice and the clay sticking to it...miracle...we called the leaf:
'Balapala Aku' (Slate Pencil Leaf)
And felt as if we were in the Indus Valley Civilization we learned of later on.
Our surrounding hamlets didn't have streets or street corner schools. So the parents of their rustic kids used to send them to our Veedhi Badi whose old man used to charge them at a subsidized rate of Rs 1 a month. These poor chaps had to get up an hour earlier than us and run to our posh village.
I made friends with one of them, Pentaiah (not a highbrow brahmin like me), but who stayed with me all through our high school and became a Block Development Officer (lots of 'extra-income' there).
One day after we became fast friends he invited me to his village, Nellaturu, three miles way. And my mom agreed for a day's outing for me.
I then found that there were no roads to Nellaturu...we had to walk by the famed rice fields of our Nellore District. And he was an expert and I a novice. We had to walk on the precarious nano-dams that separated one field from the neighboring one. These were a foot high and were wet, and reversible...when the field on the right had had enough of water, the farmer would take his spade and break the bund at a strategic place and the water would flow down to the neighbor's farm on the left, all of which were half an acre at most.
It was on that trip that I saw a memorable sight that has vanished now. There was this ditch in which rain water was let in and stored...rainwater-harvesting of the olden times. And a kid would stand by it with his bucket while his father would be walking to and fro on a makeshift water lifter. It had a column and a cross bow both made of dried up palm trunks. And a lever mechanism.
Folks found out that legs were sturdier than hands, and waking to and fro is simpler and aids woolgathering more than bending and lifting...a thing I discovered half a century later.
Here is the cute contrivance:
...Posted by Ishani
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...The first variety were very old and shrinking and shriveling and smiling and shining retiree granpas who traveled home to home seeking to teach kids of tender age for a princely monthly pay of Rs 2 (Father's take-home was all of Rs 30 then of which another Rs 2 went for house-rent)...
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
I soon graduated, as an unwilling accomplice to my didi, to the second variety of home tutors.
These were youthful unemployed pass-outs from Father's high school waiting to be absorbed as 'contract' teachers anon. They had none of the charm of the old and retired teachers and they were prone to be abrupt with their wards.
The one I remember with awe was named Gundu Dikshitulu (again a South Indian Brahmin lad) of 16 or so. He replaced our lovable Laxmi Narasaiah Sir and I was forlorn. He didn't teach us any memorable Telugu poems...he started us with counting numbers:
"okati (one), rendu (two), upto vanda (hundred)". And asked us to repeat them then and there...he thought we were Sakuntala Devis in budding, and whenever we made mistakes, didn't take kindly to us unlike our good old teacher who just used to smile.
And there were unwritten rules that he couldn't touch my didi who was all of 5 by then. So he used to show me up as her example by awarding me exemplary punishment...no, not by beating me since I would then shoot my head off and his beating would be heard by my mom. He would simply pinch my thigh and I would start howling. And if my mom came out to find out, he would smile at her showing me up as an actor and he the innocent victim of my acting. Mom would get back into her kitchen and would tease me later on as a lout. And didi was of no help since she enjoyed my discomfiture...Didis can be pretty heartless ;)
Fortunately for me Gundu Dikshitulu got his job in a far-off village pretty soon and left us in peace.
Then we were enrolled in what was called a Veedhi Badi (Street Corner School). There were only four streets in our village and each of them had a Veedhi Badi.
If you thought they were regular schools with a midday-meal scheme and toilets and classrooms and periodic inspections by government officials to extend their grants for one more year (after pocketing bribes from headmasters), you would be surprised.
Each Veedhi Badi was housed in the verandah of an old man who could afford to seat about a dozen kids in it and equip it with an excuse for a blackboard.
We would all troop in as per our whims after our ablutions and our early morning milk or coffee. And take an empty seat on the mud-caked floor. There was no segregation of sexes. And the old bespectacled man would come out into his verandah after his ablutions and tiffin and ask us to open our bags. These contained just our slate and a box of slate pencils.
Our slates were not flimsy like the modern ones. They were hefty and enclosed in heavy wooden frames and were practically indestructible...we used to fight with them as our weapons after the class was over and nothing happened to them or us.
Our slate pencils however were as delicate as our morals and used to break every once in a while...they were designed to do so like the pantographs and overhead traction lines...the pantographs are designed to wear out faster than the traction wires which are expensive to replace.
The slates were very efficient absorbents of the dried up clay the pencils were made of and left white patches on the slate. And after a week the slate became useless...you can't overwrite white on white. And so they had to be periodically cleaned. Water was of no use...it couldn't tease out the clay from the slate.
So the school kids discovered a remedy. They found a wayside plant that grew like a weed in our jungles. Its leaves were juicy and when rubbed on the slates they yielded enough juice that slid into the pores of the slates and stayed there sticking to the clay residing there. All we had to do then was to take a piece of wayside cotton and rub it off on the slate...the cotton absorbed the juice and the clay sticking to it...miracle...we called the leaf:
'Balapala Aku' (Slate Pencil Leaf)
And felt as if we were in the Indus Valley Civilization we learned of later on.
Our surrounding hamlets didn't have streets or street corner schools. So the parents of their rustic kids used to send them to our Veedhi Badi whose old man used to charge them at a subsidized rate of Rs 1 a month. These poor chaps had to get up an hour earlier than us and run to our posh village.
I made friends with one of them, Pentaiah (not a highbrow brahmin like me), but who stayed with me all through our high school and became a Block Development Officer (lots of 'extra-income' there).
One day after we became fast friends he invited me to his village, Nellaturu, three miles way. And my mom agreed for a day's outing for me.
I then found that there were no roads to Nellaturu...we had to walk by the famed rice fields of our Nellore District. And he was an expert and I a novice. We had to walk on the precarious nano-dams that separated one field from the neighboring one. These were a foot high and were wet, and reversible...when the field on the right had had enough of water, the farmer would take his spade and break the bund at a strategic place and the water would flow down to the neighbor's farm on the left, all of which were half an acre at most.
It was on that trip that I saw a memorable sight that has vanished now. There was this ditch in which rain water was let in and stored...rainwater-harvesting of the olden times. And a kid would stand by it with his bucket while his father would be walking to and fro on a makeshift water lifter. It had a column and a cross bow both made of dried up palm trunks. And a lever mechanism.
Folks found out that legs were sturdier than hands, and waking to and fro is simpler and aids woolgathering more than bending and lifting...a thing I discovered half a century later.
Here is the cute contrivance:
...Posted by Ishani
*****************************************************************************************************************
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