The last days of our teens

My daughter is a teenager.

She has big plans and bigger dreams. When I hear her talking of where she wants to study next, the countries she wants to travel to, the cities she plans to live in, the kind of house she wants to build....... one part of my mind says-Yeah, I also thought that way, once upon a time

Those were the dreams.

This is the reality.

The reality isn’t all bad. The sad part is that me (and a lot of us) have become too jaded to dream. We have resigned on our hopes. We have given up on trying so many things.

These are the last two days of our teens.

Let’s celebrate today, before the years turn into twenties.

Let’s go out and party, laugh at the same old jokes and sing the same old songs, just as tunelessly at full volume.

Let’s look at life with hope, waiting for the adventures to unfold, for special people to come in and for new friendships to unfurl.

Let’s try believing once more that there is a world out there waiting for us to step in and make the change.

Let’s celebrate friends and friendships again. To prioritize them above tasks and responsibilities and remind ourselves again just how much fun it is just to have fun.

We can still dream about all that we still need to do and discover.

Let’s start with some more hope.

Our days of twenties are right here.

The years to make the dreams of the teens come true.

Let’s live them to the very best.

Watch what you like; but study what the system wants...

The last post triggered memories and alot of angst about the school-college education system in our country.

This whole subject-stream selection was traumatic for me. From wanting to study Literature and History, I qualified as an Engineer but never worked as one.

The elder kid went through the same difficulty during subject selection but luckily, she had only two possible streams of study in her shortlist.

The younger one had to make her choices last year, but she is still confused.

It is because, unlike DTH and Cable operators who were forced by TRAI to stop making us pay for ‘bundle packs’ and let us pick and choose the channels we wanted to watch; the education boards and colleges still insist on ‘bundles’. If you like Math -but select Economics instead of Chemistry or Physics in high school-you don’t qualify for any of the Engineering or Medical entrance exams. That’s another thing that you want to go to Engineering college because the top global banks go there for campus recruitment.

I thought times had changed. I though the ‘Doctor-Engineer-or nothing’ philosophy had faded away with the last century. Now the kids have choices. Now there are so many other options.

But when we got into the college application mode and I started looking up the numbers, I realized so much that had not changed. Law and Design have got added ‘acceptable’ careers. Liberal Arts has become a new entrant-but are still being looked upon as fancy-rich-kids colleges instead of something that can change a person’s life, lift a family out of poverty kind of a career. So, lakhs of students still spend the best years of their lives slogging to clear entrance test.

Private colleges step in to provide for the burgeoning numbers, at burgeoning fees. And as for those who cannot afford them, and do not manage to grab those 0.5% seats in good government institutions, what happens to them?

The Race

Do my blog posts give the impression that my life is one hectic race?

Compared to the life of sixteen and seventeen year-olds, it’s a walk on a travelator.

My younger kid has now reached the stage where she had to make life decisions. Which subject to choose? What does she want to become? Which ‘competitive exams’ is she going to prepare for?

My kid is very competitive; in sports. She has had meltdowns before tournament finals (now she is more mature, she just glowers at her opponent till the other person loses nerves). She feels like she will let her whole class down if she doesn’t win all the class events for them. She even aims at winning long-distance runs (geez, you aim at completing them, not winning, the other sibling is shocked). But when it comes to ‘competitive exams’ she blanks out.

And I don’t blame her.

I found the whole scene so sad when the elder one appeared for her entrance exams. This was the scene in front of one of the 'examination centres'. 

I couldn't click one of the the multiple training institutes who had set pop-up stores across the pavement and the guys passing around brochures and pamphlets with photos of alumni-top-scorers in entrance exams.

And those for entrance exams for design institutes. Just around 50,000 students competing for about 60 seats in the ‘General’ category. I was glad it was not Engineering with around 10, 00, 000 students in a blood bath for 7000 seats. I did not even look into the NEET numbers.

Why do things have to be this way?

Because we have the world’s fastest growing population!

And also, because the percentage of children fighting to go to good colleges is spiraling every day.

Children want to go to IIT because they are taught that’s the key to a golden future. How many of them want to get into IITs to become Engineers? How many of them even remain Engineers as professionals?

But then, I am told that they get the option of becoming Investment Bankers or even international journalists, because they went to IIT to become Engineers.

Where does this leave the ones who actually wanted to become Engineers? Oh, they should have worked harder then (attended 2 more coaching classes in parallel) or started earlier (moved to Kota in 4^th standard).

I can fully understand why the kid would rather run in a marathon.

Making Sense of an Ending

A seventeen year-old in my neighborhood jumped to his death.

His parents are devastated. I, like most of the people who have known them for years, shocked to the core. I had thought I’d tell me daughters about the incident only when they came home for the holidays, when we could have a longer conversation. But bad news travel fast and it was my daughter who asked me for ‘details’.

Then I had to write to them. I write to them often but this time I did not know what to write. Why am I putting parts of it in the public domain? As a prayer from a mother who hopes that no parent has to live through this.

What happened?

He jumped from the 7^th Floor.

Why?

Only he knew what was going on in his mind at that moment. Anything else we say would be an un-called for assumption.

What other details can I give you?

His parents will be in pain for a very long time. It is like he stabbed them and went off, leaving the knives in.

We are all shocked. We, who knew him as a much loved child a friend of our children, are now not sure how to talk to our children.

Say yes to everything, because we don’t know how you will react to a ‘no’? But then how will you face the number of times the world says ‘no’ to you? Be around, keep a check on all your activities, your internet time, your interactions? But what if that sends you off in a more remote corner, interpreting out protection as intrusion? Trust you, leave you to your own space-but what if that leaves you feeling alone or isolated or vulnerable?

There are a hundred ways in which we can go wrong. But is this the solution?

We have just one life. And that too is limited. Some beliefs say we are born over and over again but then that will be as a different identity, a different life altogether. Death is final. And every death is so sad. The death of a child, that too when it is deliberate and avoidable is the saddest.

Maybe he thought it was his life and he had that right to give it up because he didn’t want to live it anymore. What makes a person decide to take his own life? Depression, desperation, frustration, loneliness, losing all hope, not being able to ‘face’ the world, running away, or the desire to punish someone-making them regret forever? Or is it just that overwhelming moment? For everything there is a better solution.

Maybe he thought there was no other way for him. Everyone is looking for the reason now. If anyone knew the reason, before he took this step, they could have helped. Maybe if he had talked..

There will be phases in life where there is no hope, where your struggles may seem too tough to carry one, where you may not see the point of going on (I wish I could save you from such sadness forever, but it’s a reality which happens to everyone). But there is always a way out.

J.K. Rowling suffered from severe depression. She channeled it into imagining the ‘Dementors’ and the 'Dementor’s Kiss'-a fate worse than dying because all happiness and hope is sucked out of life. Everyone can’t write a 'Harry Potter' but everyone can survive, find a new hope, a new reason to live. It takes a lot to break out of these phases, more than conjuring up a Patronus from happy thoughts, though that is a good begining. Talking helps-massively.

There will always be a way out. Talk to us, your friends, strangers, anyone. Keep talking. Keep the human connections alive and you’ll find a way. Be a friend. There would be people around you going through such a phase but you’ll be unaware if you don’t talk enough. You could be a tiny light for someone. Make someone’s life happier. Make your own happiness. Make something from your own life. It can be as beautiful as you let it be. (No, don’t take it as more gyan from me-this is just what I wish for -a beautiful life for you).

My Story: The High School Trauma

(This post is a continuation of my story from the earlier post  
This happened a generation ago. I have tried very hard not to repeat my parents’ mistakes. But I am sure; I have made plenty of different ones. I just hope that my daughters deal with them in a better way than I did. )

Mummy meant well. Being a teacher, she  was well-informed about the benefits of CBSE over the archaic state board syllabus and so she changed my school in 11^th standard. Yes she also wanted me to be away from the strong peer pressure, my existing group of friends, and begin again as a focused student.

I did not want to be a focused student. Getting better marks on subjects I anyway didn’t want to study didn’t make much sense. As a teenager who drew on the company of her friends for oxygen, it felt like the end of life to be forced to cope without them.

(My imagination and my emotions were always dramatic (rather melodramatic) as per conventional norms. But that’s how I think and feel. Yeah, even now J.)

I did try to fit in. I made a few friends, kept up with my studies, tried to do all the right things, but it was tough.

I missed my friends from the last ten years, practically my entire lifetime. I missed the old familiar school where each room, each corner was full of memories of growing together. I hated the new routines, the new uniform, just the feeling of going to this new school every morning.

I also felt harassed. I was the new girl in class. A class half-filled with hormonal boys, nurtured on bollywood notions which generally told youngsters that girls fall in love with you if you keep irritating them. I couldn’t discuss these nuisances at home. I had learnt that my parents’ way of protecting me was imprisoning me. There would be more questions, more restrictions more tension.

If I had friends to share the Archies greeting cards with the long, complicated proclamations or the torn slips of notebook with ‘shaayari’ sneaked into my bag, I might have seen the romantic or the comic side to things. But I was alone. And I felt hunted and miserable.

I called my friend and poured out all the angst. She agreed that I needed to take some drastic action.

We decided to change the school-back!

What followed after that phone call with my friend is coming up in the next post but the questions still remain:

The state board/CBSE/ICSE variances remain along with differences in their syllabi, their grading patterns, the different criteria colleges use to score these grades are still painful and so unnecessary. Why can't we have a uniform system?

We need the variances where they matter more-in the subjects a student wants to study.
We need variances in the way students with special needs are taught.

The world has changed in the last quarter of a century.
Why has nothing changed in this area?

As they enter a new world

Kids grow up fast. I too had heard the cliché so many times. But sentences become clichés only because we use them so many times; live them so many times.

My daughters are in 8^th and 11^th grade now. Their world is so different from the one I used to blog about. It is beautiful in many ways, scary in many others.

Earlier I used to worry about day-care, maids, PTMs, sports days, birthday parties etc. etc.

Now I worry about the world outside, social media, their career decisions and higher education. In fact education is the biggest worry on my mind right now.

We were extremely lucky to find a school which imparts the kind of education we believed in. The girls grew up exploring, experiencing, and enjoying (well, most of the time) their education. But now the long tentacles of the formal education system, the ‘board exams’, the subject-package choices, and the college entrance systems are closing in.

I find it particularly scary because I remember what the system almost did to me.  It’s almost been a quarter of a century since then and it is still the same system— the one which we keep blaming the British for; the one which we haven’t done anything to change; the one which we ‘dealt with’ in our own ways; the one which now our children have to live through.

I wish I could do something to cause that change.

Since writing is what I can do, let me start with just that.

I, like many other students, did not get along with the system. I suffered and eventually 'dealt-with' it, but I still remember the pain. I’m trying to re-live and share those experiences here, in the hope that I can help my girls ‘deal with’ it in a better way. And maybe reach out to more parents, educators, students who can together create a new system—one which may not be perfect, but at least a lot better than our current one.