the moon this morning

Was out for my walk really early. My favourite artists singing just for me… my shoes making me feel like I was barely touching the ground… a wonderful ‘winter’ (if I dare call it that in a city like Bombay) breeze surrounding me… and what made it perfect was the most perfectly rounded… evenly glowing moon hanging dangerously low… I’d never seen the moon so low… almost felt like if I stood on my toes and stretched up my arm, I could touch it!... I would take a round of the walking track and wait for that turn which gave me the sight of the moon…
And as I got back home and settled into my favourite corner with my cup of tea, I get a message from S..’full moon and rising sun in the same sky right now…’ and though my dear friend is so far away, I felt like it was a moment we had shared together… ‘you’re looking at my moon!’

I’ve thought about it so many times… that when I look up and see the moon or the stars, that someone somewhere… far away.. that I care about so much… must be looking at it too… and in that one moment, distance did not really matter… we were both enjoying that together though apart….

S… it was lovely getting that message and the many others that you send which so surprise and so please me : )

art exhibition...

We walked around quietly… an empty office had magically transformed into a gallery that housed paintings by some of the biggest as well as the most contemporary artists in the country… I watched my ten odd students stop and lean a little closer to canvases… some stood there with their heads tilted and a puzzled look on their faces… ‘this looks complicated didi’, said Aarif… I watched them with just as much interest as the colours and forms that held them captivated… ‘didi that looks like ghond painting,’ smiled my smartie pants Naaz… ‘and I know this artist didi,’ said Sali… We looked a little longer at the jayshree burman in all its glory…
I think I loved watching them discover… fascinated by the techniques… asking me questions that I felt ill-equipped to answer… 3 whole floors of art work… and I thought Raju, summed it up best, ‘didi I have a headache…there is too much here that is beautiful…’

‘the beauty is you…’ I felt like hugging each of them closely… love watching them discover…love watching them express themselves… they make me feel alive… they let me be all that I am… they don’t care about all that I won’t be…

And then back at class as they sat and watched Sali do her own magic on my palm with her cone of mehndi… a little ritual we started a few years ago… I watched her focused face and steady hand as the rich olive green paste formed the most intricate and intriguing designs on my palm… a cool sensation spreading to me in the humid evening… the delicious fragrance filling the air in a subtle quiet way…here I was surrounded by my favourite artists in the whole wide world… anything they created was pure… original… and out of true passion… my most precious exhibition was right there in my class every Saturday… my freedom… my world… my art… was now so mingled with their’s…

assessments

Its assessment time in Akanksha again!! It’s a time when the entire team is in the centres assessing kids on math language and values.
As usual, this time as well, I’ve come across some wonderful little moments that leave me smiling, laughing, thinking and simply feeling lucky to get the chance to work with children and learning over time to enjoy as well as value it.

So I ask this beautiful girl with big round eyes to give me a word that rhymes with ship…. She thinks… looks up confidently and goes, ‘didi, another ship!!!’ …left me smiling for a long time.

So I’m really pushing myself by scoring math assessments… not my strongest point and certainly not what I live to get up each morning and die to do…
so the question is - name the units of measurement for the following:
height, weight and length…. And I find one bizarre set of answers that makes me stop and think…
unit of measurement:
height – book
weight – sugar
length – clothes
made no sense, till I thought about me as a kid…
my dad used a book to measure my height…
we were always made aware of the fact that too much sweet stuff would make me fat…
and sure I was always pulled up in school for the length of my skirt!!
Wow… how creative… is all I could think…

2 days… 2 stories… with 2 more weeks to go, I’m so excited about what interesting little kids I’m going to me : )

happy birthday pa!!

It’s my pa’s birthday tomoro…
Gosh he turns 57… he really does not feel that old…
I was once asked who inspires me… and I thought of my pa… I can never get one image out of my mind… every Sunday, he would give our car washer the morning off...and would take my little brother and me down to help clean the car… it was an early morning Sunday ritual for us… we would be put to work… I loved working my soapy water into a crazy foamy state in my mug with a thick paint brush… I used to make the white strip on the tyres shine… and my brother used to be the tiny one who was sent into all the little corners of the car that we could not reach… he used to love using the hose…
But the fun part really was when he used to get us to start pulling out all the weeds around the building and cleaning up… I used to love taking the ‘sheek’ broom and clean the place… pick up rubbish… wet the earth… so so so much fun… and mom would be making us special breakfast and freaking out when we entered the house all messy…
Love some of the memories he made for us… taught us so much in his simple ways.. he never preached… did it first and we simply followed… what a special person…
I don’t know how we will ever become the kind of parents they have been…
Happy birthday dear pa…

gandhiji's birthday

irthdayits wonderful to have a day off in the middle of the week… its gandhiji’s birthday… and while the Akanksha students have so much planned from blood donation drives, to giving tours of Mani Bhavan, to street plays…. I was not sure whether I wanted to be a part of this…
I think its great for the kids to be learning about service and change at their age… and its wonderful to watch them feel empowered…
For me, I don’t think I want to do anything all that public and sporadic… I feel service has to be something I decide to do with myself and myself alone… it has to be the little things everyday with as many people as possible… its things I would never write about… things I would not bring up in a forum for affect… no… that defeats it… I’ve seen people do ‘service’ with the real intention of being able to narrate the story and that puts me off…
Service has to be the way you treat the people in your life and those in the ‘fringes’ or margin of it… it has to be sustainable… it has to be about more than a few hours in one day… its has to be about making the decision to change yourself for yourself…

I did nothing worthy of being called ‘service’… I don’t do service… I just do what I feel in my heart is right… spent the day with 2 people that I love a lot and have been neglecting terribly… spent the day just watching them look happy and basking in that… spent the day telling myself I was the luckiest girl in the world…
I really have all that I could ever want… and I thank god for thinking I deserve that…