The Smell of Mud
Personal Essay
One of the principal advantages of being a visiting faculty staff-member in College, as opposed to a permanent one attached to an academic institution, is that, for the most part, you are your own mistress. If you are lucky, you get inducted into colleges like Vivek College, Goregaon, with a Principal, with principles, whose academic degrees are not just on paper, but who is truly ‘educated’, and has her hand on the collective pulse of both staff and students.
I am one of the lucky ones.
After my lectures, I have the whole day to myself and I don’t have to rush anywhere. Which is fortunate.
There is a school attached to the College, within the same campus. When I reach the ground floor, after my lectures on the 4th floor on the school side, I am met by shrieks of laughter and merriment from a hundred voices. It is the ‘games’ period, and six divisions/classes of kids have descended from their classrooms. With several Physical Instruction teachers keeping an eye on them, the kids are free to play anything they choose. So there is hop-scotch going on in one corner, and a game of tag in another, while ‘kho-kho’ and ‘kabbadi’ are being featured in others.
Waves upon waves of sheer energy and childish joy filled the ground, and permeated the atmosphere around these young kids. They travelled all the way to me, standing, a mute spectator, watching the scene before me, with joy and wonder.
The ‘ground’ is a quadrangle, with an open courtyard, surrounded on all four sides with closed, broad corridors. There is a volley ball court there, which sometimes doubles up as a football ground, too. The children run around like mad, in the mud, kicking up clouds of dust and getting dirty, falling down and picking themselves up again. Not one single person has a mobile. No one is standing in corners and turning up their noses at things, or not participating.
For those 45 minutes, every single child, is getting another shot at childhood.
And then I think of all the ads for new schools and kindergartens. ‘Does your child want to be a rocket-scientist’, they ask brightly. Or, ‘ let your six-year old child learn coding!’ And we have pictures of cute scrubbed children sitting before computer screens, or knowledgeably mixing something in a beaker or test tube and holding it up to the light, looking intelligently dazed. I can see parents fighting over trying to get their children into these schools, all wanting them to ace whatever needs to be aced.
One of my friends told me about a child in the second standard, whose teacher recommended tuitions, for, wait for it, pronunciation. So the tiny tot is going for a pronunciation class that charges, wait for it, 25000 Rs, wait for it, for a month!!!! So you learn grammar in the Primary school, and the kind of grammar you are taught is mind-boggling, to say the least. We used to learn grammar in a vague, desultory way when we were in the tenth standard or something. I found something truly terrifying in the 12th grade English textbook that I was teaching, called First Conditional, Second Conditional and Third Conditional. I have no clue what it meant then, or now.
I don’t know much about the curriculum of Vivek school. They probably follow the State Board-prescribed syllabus. But the very fact that their students get to run and play and laugh and shriek without inhibition makes all the difference between this one school and others. I have no doubt that they will also become rocket scientists when destiny leads them to it. But they will be rocket scientists who know the smell of mud, the sound of laughter, the taste of rain, the sight of monsoon clouds…and the touch of a friendly hand helping him up after a fall.
Do you know what mud smells like?
