I was eight
or nine years old when a poem of mine won a prize in an ‘Aunty Wendy’s’
competition in the Illustrated Weekly of India. I pointed out my name amongst
the winners to my parents. Reaction: ‘good, good, have you finished your
homework/ had your lunch/ said your prayers?’ In my family, praise and
compliments, like sugar and oil, were rationed. If someone did exceptionally
well at academics, the news was drily passed on to neighbours and relatives
whose response (“Aanand zhaala” or “abhinandan”) was brief and momentary. Since
I didn’t fall amongst the praiseworthy few, I’m saying this from recall of my
observations. Paradoxically, if some other child did well, in kabbadi or
singing or doing cartwheels, nice words were overtly used.
If someone called a said ‘clever
child’ or even a mild ‘shabash’, to a
juvenile within our home, a vigilant aunt would promptly, publicly disclose a
couple of embarrassing traits to tether the child’s ego down to terra firma.
Morale, psychological trauma, were words restricted to dictionaries; praise, like
the rod, was used, but sparingly. The only indication that the adults were
pleased was that some halwa was made,
like for birthdays that weren’t celebrated as parties. Family’s encouraged not
with words. They paid fees, they walked or bussed you to examination venues,
stayed up nights when you had to complete projects, sacrificed goodies if cash
was needed for the same aforesaid project, chewed their nails to their knuckles
on result days.
When I first began to write, two
decades before computers saved shelf space, I asked my husband for a
‘scrap’-book to paste and store my precious cuttings in. His reaction: ‘Just
because some magazine couldn’t find anyone else’s stories to publish, you want
a scrap-book for the stuff printed with your name in it? One envelope, a big
envelope, that’s all you’ll need.’ But the scrapbooks were bought. And later he
dug into his meagre savings to buy me a camera. Encouragement came, but never
through words.
Since we were brought up to down the
positives, in adulthood, my husband and I and others of our ilk find it
difficult to utter a simple ‘thank you’ when complimented. The response to ‘nice
shoes’ or ‘pretty purse’ is “it’s nothing”. Even when congratulated for getting
a job, some people say: ‘It’s nothing.’ I don’t know what that means or is
supposed to mean, the utterance is because of conditioning, quite an Indian
trait.
When someone is asked whether s/he is
prepared for an exam, the usual reply is: “not really” or “hope so”. A
confident yes is seldom blurted out. Similarly if one is asked how one has
fared after an exam, if one has done well, one says: ‘ok’. If you say you’ve
done brilliantly and expect to score very high marks, you will invite strange
looks. Even marketing professionals of the old school, who could sell sand in
Rajasthan, were shy of circulating their own biodata.
Once, for an NRI relative, I cooked
something that he liked. He said it was good and I said: ‘Am glad you liked it.
It doesn’t always turn out this way. Next time it might not be like this.’ Or
words to that effect. He asked me whether I wanted to say that I was usually
better, that this time wasn’t good enough, or whether it was an accident that
it had turned out well and that usually my dishes didn’t turn out well. I had
no answer. I had parroted something that most of us say: I’m not that good.
Even when we are feeling good from inside.
The exception to this rule of
‘modesty’ is in the arranged-marriage arena where, I’ve been told, the scene is
the opposite: one has to invent, hightlight and project all the good points and
hide the negatives. Am beginning to wonder whether hereabouts marriage,
therefore, is a bigger deal than merit.
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