The Late President and My Class.

          Two days after President Kalam died, I asked my class what they knew about him. Blank stares greeted me (that’s the norm when I ask anything). You had a day off, I prompted them. Why?

One hesitant hand was raised. A cautious voice said: “He died, no Ma’am?” Once I nodded a ‘yes’, everyone said they knew, and the familiar chatter began.

          Me: “Did you read about it in the papers?”

          A confident, choral: “No.”

          Me: “Did you see it on the news?”

          Some ‘yesses’, mostly ‘nos’ piped up, followed by giggles at my methods of getting updates. “Whatsapp,” they all agreed loudly and clearly, was their source for everything, from learning about deaths of VIPs to whether safely hiding/sleeping indoors during an eclipse was ‘real science’ or superstition.

          Even as I was framing questions in my mind, they were rapidly twiddling finger-tips on their phone-instruments to get the answers. One girl complained: “So slow the connectivity is here.” The thirst for knowledge is easily quenched when it (connectivity, not thirst) is fast.

          I asked them the names of India’s past presidents in no particular order. These were the answers I got: “Ambedkar”, “Manmohan Singh”, “Gandhi”. Patience, I told myself, they’re naïve, they’re young, they are here to learn.

          The scowls on my face prompted them to read the correct answers from their fluorescent screens: “Pratibha Patil (first woman President, no, Ma’am?), “Nilamasanjivareddy” (in one breath, followed by ‘he’s dead, no, Ma’am?’), “Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed” (the first syllable caused a burst of laughter. I reminded myself, they’re at ‘that’ age.), “Sar-va-palli-radha-krishan” (carefully, correctly pronounced) and all the others. One said: “… was President from 1912 till 2002.” I had to explain to them that tenures were not the same as lifetimes. What did you learn in school, I asked them meanly. They took that question literally and chanted: “…English, Hindi, maths, science, social studies.”  

          But once I told them how ‘the Buddha smiled’ and how an event in Pokhran changed forever how the world looked at India, I had their attention. I gave them the pacifists’ anti-nuclear-weapons’ point of view as well. They remembered that they had studied a chapter on Dr Kalam in school. Not one recalled what it contained. Prodding helped, as did the ever-accessible google-guru. Interest aroused, they browsed for more gyaan. They wanted to know the difference between a President and a Prime Minister, a Governor and a Chief Minister. They knew, but vaguely. Most of these students have cleared their high school boards in the last three years. Questions that I couldn’t tackle were also bounced off me: “why do we need governors/presidents?”

          As more information about Dr Kalam trickled in via the internet through the cacophony I heard: “Shillong is a Christian town”, that “Kalam was influenced by two Hindus” and “a 96-year-old Air Marshal got up from his wheelchair to salute him”. The last was uttered as if it was a miracle: Kalam, in death, had made a disabled person walk!

          Then they got more valuable information about his work as a scientist, his books, his lectures and his love for teaching. There was a gender divide: the boys told me how he missed becoming a pilot, and the girls told me how simply he lived. Both were impressed that his parents had neither money, clout nor contacts to prod him on his way up. The rags to riches bit struck them the most. “No money for tuitions also,” one told his/her neighbour.

The talk steered towards our own ethics, morals and integrity. They agreed they diluted all three when convenient and that they shouldn’t. I comforted myself: at least they are honest.

          We moved on to other current topics. Yakub Memon wasn’t put on the agenda because I had strong doubts they’d heard of him. I would have had to do a lot of talking, so we skipped all national headlines and homed in on the bank-robbery at Mapusa. A spirited debate ensued about who was responsible. The watch-man, said some, because he’s responsible for security and guarding. The cashier herself, said others, for she’s responsible for the cash. The manager, said a few, for s/he’s responsible for whatever happens in the bank. All those present, said a handful, for in teamwork, like the glory, the blame has to be shared. In that noisy classroom babble, one voice stood out. That out-of-the-box thinker had this to say: “So sad, no, for the robbers. If they had covered their faces, they wouldn’t have been caught, they would have been rich today.”

          I wonder what President Kalam (may his loved and respected soul rest in peace) would have thought of that point of view.

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