School Of Adversity

Authored by Gaurav Jha, Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana
On my first day of school, Mum and Dad thought I’d participate in all existing and extinct forms of melodrama and be crying with the oceans in my eyes. I did not. I just fed carrots and cauliflower leaves to those rabbits in the cage and got absolutely thrilled when they nibbled on my fingers. And when Mum didn’t find me on the bus stop in the afternoon, she had to get into the bus, find me on the last seat, and wake me up from a First-Day-At-School, Kick-crap-Window-Seat, Bottle green to grey uniformed Dream.
That was over 17 years ago when I started my school at DPS, Ranchi, and now after completing my graduation from Visva-Bharati University of Tagore—a place that taught me and made me that I wouldn’t have learnt and been otherwise, I am a fresher to this esteem agricultural university of Punjab. That’s how much, and since how long, I’ve been in hopeless love with school. And that’s why, every time I’ve visited the village school in Bonerpukurdanga, a tribal village near Shantiniketan in West Bengal, to volunteer the initiative of the students of Agriculture and Social work Department of my previous University, it has physically pained me to see how many children cannot go to the kind of schools that can do to them, what mine did to me.
Those kids—they walk to their school Shishu Siksha Kendra each morning, sometimes on feet, sometimes on tattered and cobbled footwear, some to learn lessons from their didimoni and some to have a stomach full of meal at the mid-day. They bring school-bags that are stitched and re-stitched with thread. They carry books that are glued together from falling apart. And souls that no amount of cobbling, stitching and gluing could repair. And when the empty souls voice out a chorus “amra sabai raja” (We all are Kings) the reflection radiates their will to reach the zenith and have the same pair of converse and extra clean outfits that they see in us.
When you speak, they listen to you with an urgent hush, like you’ve never been heard before. They’re too scared to ask questions to us when didimoni(their teachers) stands beside and too unfortunate to find the answers themselves. When you talk to them, their answers are a monumental confusion between an excited pride, and a terrible grief. Pride for having taken up the challenge to educate themselves, and grief for everything else. They don’t laugh at each other’s mistakes. They don’t know when they make one. And they express more in one-and-a-half sentences of perfect Bengali than you, with your entire vocabulary, could ever imagine to. Teach them Science, or teach them Math, teach them Language, or teach them Morals, they will haunt you back with eyes that teach you far bigger secrets of the Universe than what’s written in all those books that you have studied from your journey from classes to semesters.
It’s been nine months since I first entered a low-income school classroom and that too four classes running simultaneously in a single room with only two didimonis shouting the lessons. In all this time, I might not radically change the lives of the children I came across, but it surely made me realize that my idea of a better world starts from free and equal education to all. Every child should know what it feels like to read Malgudi Days and Tom Sawyer. To know how to work on a computer. To get an A+ in Geography. To figure out if there’s a difference between the Democracies they study about in books and are a part of in their own country. To know how Earth began with a Big Bang Theory. To find and lose themselves in a long division. To read about what happened to those in The Holocaust. And why. To understand Projectile Motion. And finally, to know what it’s like to pick a career, fall in crazy love with it, and let it kill you.
It’s already sad that we live in a world where good education comes at a price but admission to terrorist training camps are for free. It’d be sadder if we didn’t want to do anything about it.