To ma'am with love

Remembering Yashoda Balakrishnan

Mrs CY Balakrishnan was housemistress of Pankaj House when I joined school as a nine-year-old in 1971. I recollect her matter-of-fact kindness to a homesick child: she was caring without being cuddly; a firm advocate of the futility of self-indulgence.
Like any valued student-teacher relationship, ours changed as time passed. As I look back down the years and try to excavate memories to write this, I realise that, for more than thirty years, it was a relationship simply based on deep mutual affection. I also now perceive the extent to which my thinking and my approach to life were influenced by her.
While most of the adults around us, faculty as well as administrative and housekeeping staff, tended to have the superstitious, ritualistic mindset that prevailed in those days, she was one who had no religious picture or idol in her house. I remember once in senior school, having noticed this, I asked her if she believed in God. She gave me a “how silly can you get” look, as if I’d asked her if she believed in ghosts, and replied, “I thought you were a Mathematician!” She then told me, in the same tone as she would explain a theorem, that people who think mathematically must first question everything, and then believe only what they experience for themselves rather than what others tell them to believe.
Till then I had not particularly thought of myself as a Mathematician. I now realise that, if I took up Pure Mathematics as my subject at University, it had to do with my first Maths teacher who helped me not just to learn the subject but also to love and enjoy it. In later life when I saw how so many school children are taught Maths, how many fear and hate it, how many solve problems by memorising techniques rather than understanding their application – I remembered Mrs Balakrishnan with gratitude. In Junior School we even had a Maths Club, started by her, where we learnt Maths concepts through games. A few years later, when I became a lecturer in Maths, I inherited her books of Maths enrichment activities – a collection I treasure and browse occasionally even today. Long after I gave up studying and teaching the subject, I continue to value the first-principles approach to solving Mathematics problems I learnt from Mrs Balakrishnan, and use the same approach to solving life problems too.
At thirty-six, she herself had faced tragedy: her husband suddenly died an untimely death. Their son was just five. She had led a sheltered life and was in shock for a time, but somehow propagated strength within herself, reasoning that she was not the only one to suffer in life. Over the next few years, she took systematic steps to acquire the skills and education she needed to be able to live independently and give her son the best education.
Girls at Lawrence School, when Mrs Balakrishnan joined as a teacher, remember her very fondly as a young woman who, with her new teaching techniques and cheerful nature, brought a breath of fresh air into their dull academic lessons. Several years later, when I joined, she was one of the senior teachers, still forward-thinking and no-nonsense; perhaps more strict than she once was, perhaps not. One of the things we Pankaj House girls loved most about our housemistress was that she loved to cook. She not only loved to cook, but she also loved to feed others. She would cook large amounts of food and give it all away. When the mood struck her, she would send Poovi, her devoted long-time attendant, to the market to bring fresh ingredients. Tempting aromas would fill the dorms. Then Poovi would come out with a tray and whoever was around would help themselves. Parents who came to visit their children or to take them home for weekends would get fed. Some of her creations were absolute genius. If anyone asked for a recipe, she would explain that she just added things that happened to be within reach at the time, and never measured. That is why (she would continue) even when she cooked the same dish again it would always taste different.
I suppose I secretly admired this bohemian approach to cooking because when the day came that I was faced with my own cooking range, I began to do just the same. Decades later, I continue to pour salt or sugar or masala into a dish without measuring (often with disastrous results). Every time I do this, I remember Mrs Balakrishnan.
Over the years, I wasn’t just thinking about Mrs Balakrishnan but also very much staying in touch. She and my mother had become good friends (all those weekends getting fed had worked their magic), and we went to see her quite often, sometimes together and sometimes separately, in the different cities where she lived after retiring from Lovedale: Calicut, London and Delhi. Sometimes we would stay over. We always felt at home. There would always be super food, and parcels to take back. One of the important things about these visits was that she would update us on news about everyone we had in common. I wasn’t the only one staying in touch with Mrs Balakrishnan. OLs across the decades would call, write and visit. Here was another life lesson.
On 19 March 2014, we made our last visit to meet Ma Balu in Delhi. My mother had said, “It’s been too long! Let’s go see her.” After an absolutely wonderful time with her and her family, sharing special memories down the years, looking at old photographs, yakking away into late that night, we returned home to Pune next day. One week later, suddenly and unexpectedly, my mother died. Less than a year later, Mrs Balakrishnan passed on too. I miss them both.

first appeared in The Old Lawrencian, the newsletter of the Old Lawrencians Association, Lovedale 2Q 2015

Dame Touch

We were five girls in a class of thirty-two. What I remember most about those days is an intense camaraderie between the girls. We were one unit, thinking alike, walking in step, sharing a bond of affection that was going to last forever. We often knew what the other was about to say before she said it. And we were permanently ravenous, particularly after meals, when we made a practice of haunting the kitchen to ‘scrounge’ for extras. For many of us, even our handwriting was close to identical. It still is.
The boys inhabited a shadow world, a khaki blur. They were an alien species with their own characteristic idiom and figures of speech, and brusque ways of relating, which we viewed with some apprehension. Occasionally a boy would do something dreadful, for which he would get caned. Violence against girls was not permitted.
We sat in the same class but were separated by a heritage of apartheid, which allowed no physical touch and frowned on conversation and even eye contact.
One of the things I remember about those days is the clear conception that Lawrence was originally a boys’ school. We had the impression that a few girls had been graciously permitted to attend but their numbers were kept restricted.
When I tried to verify this information, my friend Joseph Thomas (Aravalli 1957) wrote back with reasons by which it could be concluded that our school, founded in 1858 and though originally intended for girls also, did actually start as a boys’ school and eventually became co-ed in 1949.
Why then, more than twenty-five years after that, did it still seem as if it was a boys’ school that admitted girls on sufferance?
Could it possibly be because in those days, it wasn’t just Lawrence that was a boys’ school but that the whole world was meant for men, and women were tolerated provided they fulfilled certain conditions?
It was indeed a time, as Joseph pointed out, when most parents hesitated to send their daughters away to boarding school even while sending their sons. From this it might be concluded that none of us girls at Lawrence in those days were from oppressive families which discriminated against us on the basis of gender. At home we were given equal opportunity. We had strong female role models in our families. At school, too – if memory serves me right – the Maams were just as strong, opinionated and bossy as the Sirs.
And yet, the girls in my time never achieved on par with the boys.
Years later, when the time came to select a school for my daughter, I was advised to send her to an all-girls’ school. A friend who was an educationist (a few years later she became Principal of Arya Vidya Mandir school in Bombay) told me about studies which showed that girls in a mixed environment tend to conform to preconceptions of feminity. In a co-educational environment, she said, they were found to have a tendency to suppress their natural skills and potential in such a way as to remain subordinate and inferior.
To me this was a new idea, but thinking about my time in school, I felt it might contain a germ of truth. At Lawrence, in our days, it was always the boys who topped the class. In my batch, we never had a girl who ‘came first’. In the year above my class, Nalini Ambady sometimes did; the year below had Hema Nayar and the year below that had Vinita Babulkar, who were known to have broken that glass ceiling. I remember this wisp of trivia from the distant past with clarity, perhaps because it was such a rare and wonderful thing.
In our days, even we privileged ones were nurtured at school to a division of roles. Girls had needlework classes; boys had carpentry. When two of my classmates, Claire Pereira and Kanchana Chandy, jumped through the hoop of fire at the Founders’ PT Display, they were apparently the first girls to ever do so in the history of our school, and were not succeeded by other girls for some years to come.
Whether it was academics, extracurricular activities or athletics, the girls’ achievement paled against that of the boys. But whether this was due to statistical probability or a meek submission to what was then seen as the natural order of things, remains unclear. Nowadays, as everyone knows, Indian girls, despite the continuing deluge of pressure they withstand, fare uniformly better at examinations than their male counterparts. New studies inform us that this is because girls have been socialised to be more sincere (an observation that neatly creates an inherent possibility that perhaps boys are more intelligent).
Every generation faces the churn of roles. As new social ground is broken, new and often frightening spaces of freedom emerge. At the same time, insidious new tyrannies unexpectedly establish themselves.
Our young men are no longer oppressed by the need to be the sole providers of their families. In the past, men often sacrificed their education and their youth to go to work to support their widowed mothers, get their younger brothers educated and their sisters married, before they launched into starting their own families. Today their energy is focussed on ‘careers’, invariably on futile promotion, increment and position, to the exclusion of health, leisure, physical environment, personal growth and relationships.
Our young women, meanwhile, are gradually being emancipated from the traditional wisdom in which a woman’s body is a sex commodity and a baby machine of family proprietorship. And yet, despite the heady ecstasies of sexual freedom, it seems unlikely that they will ever shake off the oppressive demands of their fragile biology, making them perhaps even more prone to abortion, cysts, fibroids and hysterectomy than previous generations (with infertility appearing as an added bonus). Unreformed slaves of public opinion, will they ever be free of the urge to starve themselves, to depilate, and to crave that a diamond ring be offered them on bended knee by an earnest, sincere and dependable male?
When I visit school and interact with the students now studying there, I get the impression that the girls are much smarter, and more confident and sophisticated, than we ever were. The boys appear more vulnerable. Could it be the pendulum swinging the other way? Perhaps the influence of our female HM, an absolutely unthinkable entity in our days? Or just my imagination?
first appeared in The Old Lawrencian, the newsletter of the Old Lawrencians Association, Lovedale 2Q 2015
'Dame Touch' is an evocative expression peculiar to the language used by inmates of The Lawrence School, Lovedale.

Veils

I wore a veil once. Semanti and I fancied ourselves glamorous Egyptian beauties and tied little chiffony bits of fabric round our noses and posed for a photograph outside the Girls’ School at Lawrence, also known for various reasons as Red Fort. We were fourteen. We perched our knees stylishly on the garden bench and smiled bashfully into the camera. Semanti was gorgeous – she still is. My knees were stout and lumpy – they still are.
In those days, the bulky knees were a source of deep misery. You have to be fourteen and pasty looking, which I don’t suppose you are, to understand how acute this was.
In later years, I tried to convince myself that the fat had been, all along, just another kind of veil. Like any veil, it included elements of both protection and oppression, each encroaching on the other in a subtle dance – changing position, intertwining, first one sidling ahead and then the other.
The oppression, I told myself, (quoting from the feminist literature and pop psychology fashionable at the time) came from society – horrid, unsophisticated society – where thin was an officiously-defined aspiration. And the protection was created for a sad inner core which couldn’t bear to reveal itself and therefore sheltered under layers of fat.
Finally one day I faced myself with the sad truth that I was fat because I overate and if I stopped overeating, I would eventually stop being fat. Moreover, it was ok to be fat, you could still be loved and comfortable (and healthy) and all those other things that we wend this mortal plain striving to achieve, and if eating was such a great pleasure, then – well – what the hell.
Meanwhile, I had acquired the habit of scrutiny, of keeping a careful watch on precisely which factors of existence served as veils, and which ones were real.
Make-up, of course, was an obvious veil – but then so was beauty. One who projected beauty had the freedom to develop, underneath, in any way they wished – but were equally prisoners of the fact that not many would make the effort to uncover that reality.
Wealth, social position, and material achievement were, of course, veils. They protected one from hunger, cold, loneliness, crowds, dirt and other distasteful possibilities. But they subjugated one with insidious suggestions of conformity to norms laid down by others.
Conformity itself was a veil, suppressing your wants, your identity, your uniqueness, just so that you could feel you belonged even when you didn’t really belong.
Arrogance, snobbishness, superciliousness – even sophistication – these were veils that hid the trembling uncertainty within.
Friends were a veil to cover loneliness.
Maturity was a veil to cover the inadequacy of upbringing.
Even illness was a veil that cloaked despair.
Emotions were veils, too – they veiled each other like anything, anger covering up for fear, fear suppressing sadness, guilt masking resentment, fear of rejection masquerading as entitlement – and under it all a deep, deep sadness, the sadness of basic unlovability.
Was anything, then, real? Or was it true in the end that we were all so controlled, so dominated by that most delicate of all veils of existence, maya as the ancients named it, that no matter how sincerely we shone a torchlight within ourselves, no matter how rigorously we worked to uncover the One which truly existed, maya was a permanent fixture in the sidelines, engulfing us in subtle ways and duping us with images of individual immortality.
First appeared as ‘Veiled Meanings’ in Sunday Mid-day on 12 Nov 2006

India, a software superpower

In 6 Autobiographical Chapters

Chapter One (The Application)

To,

Recruitment In charge,

Hi-fly Technologies.

Subject: Application to offer myself for the openings in your firm.

Respected Sir/Madam,

This letter is in response to your advertisement calling for engineering professionals. I intend to offer myself for the career opportunities you have in offing.

It is with no ambiguity when I say that every engineering professional aspires to have their careers kickstarted with a start at your esteemed organization. Your renowned organization's name is synonymous with "Technology and Development" and it is hard not to have heard of you, especially among the engineering fraternity.

As of you to know me, I am attaching herewith my personal academic and other information in my resume for your kind perusal.

I hope to meet you in person and prove to you, my ability and deservedness to associate my services towards both our interests.

Yours faithfully,

Saaz Aggarwal

Chapter Two (The Interview)

Good morning to you madam. Myself Saaz Aggarwal. I am extremely most grateful that you are abling to consider my applications. I am very hardworking and sincere person. If you will give me opportunity I will forever grateful. I will work very very hard and you will never be causing to complains. My technical skills is very excellent. From childhood itself I am doing websurfing and I enjoy to computer games too much. So my mama-papa they are telling to me that you must have to become software engineer. Software engineers is very hard working and getting foreign opportunity also. Further, my communication skills is also perfect and I am having leadership abilities to demonstrate. Now I will tell little about myself. Myself Saaz Aggarwal. I am very sincere and hardworking person. Upto fifth standard I am standing first in class every day. I am very brilliant by nature and was getting into engineering colleges in many states but have chose to continue further studies in Pune itself. In hobbies I am solving aptitude test and CAT papers daily. Everyday I am enjoy the cricket on TV. Please to give me opportunity in your esteemed organization and I will never regret.

Chapter Three (My Date Of Joining Is Also My Birthday)

Good morning to you all of you my dear friends and superiors. I am not thinking any other company in whole world is bringing cake for each and every single employees. I am very extremely happy and lucky person to join company who is giving so much individual importance to all of the individuals and today is my birthday also so thanking you very much for birthday cake and celebrations. Today is my first day of working in company. I am very bright and fresh youngster. I am think to learn great deal and contribute to growth of company. I will be very hardworking and never complain about all the situations. My family is told to me that I should try my best in all the things. I will try to my utmost to satisfy my superiors in every works they are telling to me. I look forward to very long and fruitful associations with all of you my very dear friends. This is company to be exactly like family to me and I am extremely very happy, nobody can feel so happy as I am feeling. After many years I will work and company shall gain many benefits from me and I too shall grow along with company.

Chapter Four (Going On Site. One Month Later)

Now I have finish to my induction training. I am learning too many things about dotnet and so many nice-nice Microsoft technologies. All the colleagues are very friends. Company has offered many nice nice facilities and facilitate paying of electricity bill, telephone bills and the like. We are having too nice supportive environment in company. Next week ago I am going to put on live project in client-side. I will getting some allowances and the like. Next week I am getting loan approval to take bike. I shall bring peda for all the friends and superiors in office. My office is too nice place and we are enjoying many Japanese classes also.

Chapter Five (My HR Department. Six Months Later)

I was thinking that my HR manager was liking to me very much. Every time when I am seeing her I am saying hello with very big smile. She is also smiling and looking very much happy. One day she was telling to me that you must fill up training feedback form. I am ticking to every box is “excellent” so I am thinking HR manager will be happy with me. Now my six months trainee periods is over and I think so my performance is very extremely good so we shall be skip probation periods and HR will be going to do my confirmation in performance review. However such is not the case. I am be continue in probation only. My many other friends are there in other companies and this time all companies are giving 20% pay hike to all employees however here we are not getting. I am think so management is got confused in expansion mode.

Chapter Six (The Application. Ten Months Later)

To,

Recruitment In charge,

Cocacolasys Infotech.

Subject: Application to offer myself for the openings in your firm.

Respected Sir/Madam,

This letter is in response to your advertisement calling for experienced software professionals.

I intend to offer myself for the project opportunities you have in offing.

I am very intelligent and hardly workings 3 years experience Project Leader with extensive knowledge of Japanese language and cultural habits. I have worked on large number of Japanese client side projects and have become familiar with lot many Japanese peoples and cultural habits. I was also about to past Sankyu level of Japanese language certification however project pressures came and I was working daily till 2 p.m. in the morning so therefore I was unable to prepare for examination. If I was getting opportunity to pass examination then surely I would have been getting 70% or 80% marks. If I am sent to client side project in Japan then Cocacolasys Infotech will be getting my very good benefits.

As of you to know me, I am attaching herewith my personal academic, experience, and other information in my resume for your kind perusal.

I hope to meet you in person and prove to you, my ability and deservedness to associate my services towards both our interests. However please to excuse me from sitting for aptitude test. My aptitude is being very excellent. I am having 3 years experience and aptitude test need not be required for senior members of development team.

Yours faithfully,

Saaz Aggarwal 

First appeared in Sunday Mid-day on 7 May 2006, as part of a series in which Saaz parodied a range of humour writers, using their voices to tell Bombay stories.

Ma Gupu in Jehangir Hospital, Pune

The general ward at Jehangir Hospital, Pune, is a crowded kind of place. When I entered, I looked around for a while before I saw this spunky-looking elderly woman sitting upright near a window, reading the newspaper. Her back was to the sun – sunlight helps in healing she later told me, and she’d asked that they move her to a bed near the window a few days ago.
In case you’d like to spend some time with Mrs Gupta too, she’s in bed 166. They won’t transfer the phone line, but if you call ahead to check that she’s still there, it’s +91-20-26050550 or 26122551, and she now uses her maiden name, so ask for Nergis Barucha. She has been discharged, but is still using the hospital facilities until her relatives decide how she is to be looked after and come to get her.
She wasn’t sure exactly when that would be – “Maybe today,” she said. It kind of reminded me of the time when I was five and in boarding school for the first time (Nazareth it was) waiting for my parents to come visit me. “Maybe today,” I would think when I woke each morning and found, heavy hearted, that I wasn’t at home. But Mrs Gupta isn’t feeling sorry for herself or anything like that – she’s just waiting, practical, cheerful – only just a tiny bit worried about how she will pay the ayah since the money the relatives left when they last visited ran out a few days ago.
Since Mr. Gupta died seventeen years ago, she has been teaching at a school in Panchgani. She told me that she works from 8 in the morning till 7 in the evening. Her favourites are the 1st standard kids, but she still teaches Geography, French and English to classes 9, 10, 11, and 12. And she is very involved in running an English-medium school for underprivileged kids, too. One morning last month, she woke up and started getting ready as usual when she suddenly found – she’s not quite sure how exactly – that she’d fallen on the floor. She got up, tended to herself as best as she could (haldi and sugar, patted around for broken bones, bathed in neem water – you know Ma Gupu) and went off to work. It was only a few days later when she collapsed and had to be driven in to hospital. Here the tests showed her to be in excellent health and physical condition – except for the matter of one broken vertebra. That was three weeks ago.
“Everything happens for the best,” Mrs. Gupta told me. “In ’48 I broke a vertebra and it caught a nerve that affected my left leg. Now that nerve is free and my leg is fine! In any case, I’ve been working too hard. This is god’s way of telling me that I really need to rest.”
Ma Gupu then told me about how she found strength in the story of how a young Tibetan boy had jumped out of his monastery window when the Chinese broke in, hanging in terror to a ledge until he finally said to himself, “in the name of god, I let go!” It worked for the Dalai Lama, and now, when in despair, Mrs. Gupta says to herself, “In the name of god, I let go!” and let what will, happen.
While that’s probably what keeps her so cheerful and relaxed despite everything, it’s also probably why she blithely donated all the money left by Mr. Gupta, including his entire Provident Fund to Lawrence School, for the education of underprivileged children. And why, when a group of OLs got together last year and quietly sent her gifts of money, she put it in a Bank of Maharashtra fixed deposit when the manager promised her benefits of various kinds, but she’s in hospital today without insurance, and she doesn’t even have an ATM card.
Mrs. Gupta is eighty-one years old. I went to visit expecting to see an enfeebled, incoherent, bed-ridden invalid. But she was sitting in a chair, recognized me at once (we last met in 1977 when I was fifteen) and we chatted on and on. She asked after my parents, whom she remembered very well, and I spun out all the “happily ever afters” of my life for her. And she told me about her days as principal at Horseley Hills, and how Mr Gupta died, in Sardarshahr (a town in Rajasthan with, incidentally, the most god-awful roads you can imagine), just one month after they went there to start a school, She even told me about the time she took Ramesh Venkat* himself (a great favourite of Mr Gupta) to the HMs office for some awful misdemeanour. A doctor doing rounds walked by and asked how she was doing. “Preparing for a trip to Everest!” she said.
She wore a full shoulder-to-waist harness. “Makes me look like Jhansi ki Rani or maybe Joan of Arc gone awry,” she joked, and told me how when she’d said that to a group of youngsters visiting an accident victim in the ward, they’d replied, “No, no, ma’am, you look like Cleopatra!”
As I was leaving, I told her that I would spread the word in the OL community. So she said to pass on her very best wishes to all for Christmas and New Year.
In case you want more news about Mrs. Gupta and can’t actually come to Pune to visit her, feel free to mail or phone me, 9823144189. And in case you want to help, do get in touch.
*Present HM of Lawrence