For some of us who work from home, Facebook is the sort of space that gives us the feeling that we don’t. It’s like the office canteen: we go there to see who is ‘wearing’ what today; we smile at how pretentious our colleagues are; and we flaunt our flashy new phones, pens, cars, cats and children’s first prizes. It’s the 15-minutes-in-the-sun feeling that Andy Warhol promised us – outside of TV!

Every now and then, things of beauty and innate value pop up on Facebook. For stay-at-home moms like me (and non-moms as well) it’s a window into magic which happens elsewhere in the world of art and technology. Thanks to Facebook shares, I’ve seen lots of lovely films, art, craft, writing – and cakes! One of the nicest finds recently has been a 20-year-old book called The Rights of a Reader by Daniel Pennac. A friend shared a link to a hilarious promotional poster of the book drawn by Quentin Blake. The title was intriguing. Whoever heard of rights for readers? I ordered the book to find out.

A writer of children’s books, Pennac is also a parent and a teacher. And this book grew from his experience of trying to inspire a bunch of not-so-bright teenagers to read. Pennac examines three fundamental issues: how much small children love hearing stories; how wonderful it is when they discover they can put letters together and actually read; and how between parents and schools, we push kids away from books in the years that follow.

Pennac’s tip for getting kids – of all ages – to read is simple: read to them. If you are a reader, chances are someone read to you when you were small. This is instinctive with most parents. Present reading to the child as an engaging activity that you love, and the child will grow to love it too. I know this is true because my mom patiently read to me till the day I took the book out of her hands.

There are habits that foster reading – we all evolve these instinctively for ourselves as readers. Pennac calls these ‘reader’s rights’. It’s just that when we become parents and teachers, we forget them. Readers for instance have the right to skip pages. We all do this, but not many of us like our kids doing so. Also, readers have the right to not read and the rights to read anything anywhere. Even on the pot. I know that’s not a habit most Indian parents encourage.

There are many parental habits vis-à-vis reading that Pennac disapproves of. Monitoring children’s reading is one, as is the need to test kids and ask them to ‘describe’ what they just read. I’m guilty of both. Because I want to be a part of her life, I often ask my daughter what happened in the book she just read. She’s not always keen to do this, probably because as Pennac observes, ‘Reading is a retreat into silence… it is about sharing, but a deferred and fiercely selective kind of sharing’.

I love her reading Horrid Henry, Judy Moody and Junie B Jones. I never insist on ‘the classics’ or even Enid Blyton. But she wants to read Harry Potter – which her father and I think is too emotionally sophisticated for her. Growing up, our parents never ‘curated’ our reading. I find it odd that we should so instinctively want to control hers. Growing up, I read James Hadley Chase, Nick Carter, Sidney Sheldon alongside the classics – the one kind of book only sharpening my appreciation of the other.

To some of us reading is a special kind of oxygen. To others it’s not. And it’s important – Pennac reminds us – that we respect this difference. Along with conferring rights to the reader, both the book and the poster issue a stern warning: ‘Don’t make fun of people who don’t read – or they never will’!

Whether your child reads or doesn’t, hunt down this 20 year old book and read it.

Look, a Nest!

Anita Vachharajani

One morning, as Siya opened her eyes—

‘Come here!’ said Papa. ‘There’s a surprise!’

 Outside their window, in the mango tree

Were twigs, woven as tight as could be!

A pair of crows flew up from the ground,

One sat on the twigs, one flapped around.

‘Is it a nest?’ asked Siya excitedily,

‘Yes!’ said Papa. ‘For the crow family!’

The crows were busy collecting stuff—

Sticks and leaves and bits of fluff.

 

Brown twigs, plastic pieces—

Shiny papers full of creases!

 

Siya and Papa watched the nest grow,

Warm, brown, snug—a mid-air home!

 

‘When, oh when?’ Siya sighed.

‘Will there ever be eggs inside?’

One day, Papa said, ‘Siya, come here fast!

Look! Four eggs in the nest at last!’

Siya stood there as quiet as a mouse,

Watching Mr Crow fly around his house.

Mrs Crow sat with the creamy-green eggs,

Tucked safely under her chest and legs.

Now every night Siya sighed,

‘When will the babies come outside?’

Then one day, Siya was pulled out of bed.

‘Open your eyes, you sleepyhead!’

Siya blinked and rubbed her eyes—

The nest in the tree held a lovely surprise!

Four little mouths, pink and opened wide,

Four tiny bundles of fur, eyes shut tight.

Suddenly there was so much to do—

Up and down the parents flew!

‘The babies need to grow big and strong,

That’s why the crows hunt all day long!’

For a bit, Mama Crow stayed in the nest,

She guarded the babies without rest.

How they ate! Big mouths, stretched wide,

Worm after worm disappeared inside!

Siya watched as the baby birds grew

Bigger and fatter, and feathered too!

Mama Crow taught her babies to fly,

Up and down the tree—not too high.

‘Soon,’ said Papa, ‘They’ll fly away,

And have nests of their own one day!’

And one morning they flew up high,

Over the trees and into the sky!

Siya watched as the birds flew far away,

Would they come back some day?

Bio: Anita Vachharajani lives in Mumbai and loves watching birds. She also loves reading and writing children’s books.

In Hindi films from the ’70s till the late ’80s, the new-bahu-of-the-house made it her job to dismiss traditions. She refused to breastfeed her children for ‘the sake of her figure’ (SHUDDER!); went to parties; taught her kids the twist and the rumba; threw out her weeping in-laws, and, significantly, foretold a switch from the matrubhasha to English.

My cousins and I watched these films enthralled. They wept; being younger, I just gaped. Somewhere these films mirrored our lives, because in the ’70s, as second-generation immigrants of a certain class to Mumbai, we were already losing crucial links with our mother tongue, Malayalam. We went to English medium schools, spoke Malayalam only with older people, and parodied the ‘Mallu’ accent. We weren’t taught to read and write Malayalam because we already had English, Hindi, Marathi, and later, French, to deal with.

This shedding of the mother tongue would return to fascinate me years later when I studied Linguistics and learnt about language loss. When individuals and communities slowly let go of their mother tongues, a point may be reached when no one speaks the language any more. Many languages across the world and in India have ‘died’ for socio-political and economic reasons.

In 2010, Boa Senior – the only surviving speaker of one of the Great Andamanese group of languages called Bo – passed away. With her death, her ancient language, full of stories, songs and myths, is now extinct. And Bo is not the exception. Ket, a Central Siberian language with links to the Navajo of America, is down to its last 200 speakers. With every language we lose, we lose a part of our shared history.

Today, fewer people in cities teach kids their mother tongues – their reasons range from the socio-economic, to the psychological and the political. I’m often asked why parents should teach a child Marathi, Punjabi, Kannada or Oriya when they have to go to school and study English or Hindi. It’s a perfectly valid question. I am a Malayalee who reads, writes and thinks in English. My husband is a Gujarati, who is literate in his language. My mom and I speak good Marathi, and both of us read it too. Hindi is all around us – in films, songs and casual conversations.

But we still screwed up. We just couldn’t keep up with the simple rule of teaching babies multiple languages: one person talks to the baby in one language exclusively. This way there is no confusion; the child knows that this specific ‘code’ or structure will work in this ‘domain’. And, miraculously, most children can learn multiple codes and structures. Since ours was a mixed marriage where we also worked together from home, English became our lingua franca, and unfortunately, by default, our child’s mother tongue.

Teaching kids multiple languages does not impair their intellectual growth. In fact, the more ‘codes’ and structures you impart to kids – without confusing them – the sharper they tend to be. Knowing more languages can delay age-related mental decline. Being multilingual gives you a better ‘ear’ for languages, a sharper memory, better communication skills, and a deeper understanding of different world views.

But as a parent, I firmly believe in going with your child’s specific developmental needs. If you live in an environment where it is exposed to many languages and it’s coping well, great. But if there is a problem and the doctor suggests that you to stick to one language only, please follow that advise. To get my kid past a developmental hurdle when she was two-and-a-half, we were asked to talk in just one common language: in our case, English. Today I’m sad she doesn’t speak Gujarati or Malayalam, but I’m relieved we got past that logjam.

To preserve the world’s fragile linguistic diversity, UNESCO celebrates February 21 as International Mother Languages Day. Do your bit for linguistic diversity – talk to your kid in your mother tongue a little. You’re not just teaching her words – you’re sharing a whole history and a unique worldview!

As a boyfriend-starved college student, I knew one thing for a fact: the dreary Sahara desert of my lovelife was made more wretched by the fact that I had been to all-girls’ school. Boys were like exotic, strange creatures to us. We only met them inside the pages of books. In college, where they appeared in human form, we had no idea what to say to them.

While the co-educated girls seemed to make male friends easily, our little gang of girls-schooled late-bloomers found ourselves in fairly splendid isolation. We weren’t sad about it, of course, but we did conclude eventually that all-girls’ and all-boys’ schools were the earthly representations of hell. It was weird, because unlike the co-ed girls, we were actually very uninhibited, we laughed loudly, talked a lot; were witty, uncensored and hilarious. What we were not able to do was have normal, relaxed friendships with boys. We swayed from being arch and flirtatious to completely stern and reproving.

My little girl goes to a mixed-sex or a co-ed school. One day, in Senior KG, she came home and told me that a boy had put his head on her lap and kissed her. Images flashed through my mind: Silsila. Rekha’s head on Amitabh’s lap. Mist. Flowers touching. Bees buzzing. Major coochie-cooing. I sat up with a start and asked my husband if I should go talk to the teacher about this Emraan-Hashmi-in-the-making. ‘No!’ replied the co-ed schooled man, ‘You’ll just traumatize the poor boy!’

Feeling traumatized myself I remembered my mother’s utter terror of co-eds and her dire warnings against sending her grand-daughter to one. Mom went to a convent school and then studied engineering while staying in a girls’ hostel run by nuns. The Mother Superior there often warned them with these wise – and rather poetic – words: ‘Whether a thorn falls on a grape, or a grape falls on a thorn, the grape is the one that gets hurt. So STAY AWAY from college boys.’ The story usually sent me into peals of laughter, but that day the thought of soft fruits and sharp objects terrified me.

Post that, there have been no romantic overtures so far and we have reached Class 2 without any major hysterics. But I’m slowly beginning to wonder if mixed-sex education is the solution to the world’s ills that I had imagined it to be.

Studies show that co-education makes children conform to gender stereotypes – in the UK, for instance, girls in same-sex schools did better in Maths and Science, just as boys in same-sex schools did better in Languages. I personally feel that same-sex schools allow you to grow up without being sexualized too early.

We live in fairly frenzied times. The films and adverts our kids see are full of highly sexualized images of picture-perfect girls and women. Even on children’s channels, ads talk about milky, age-defying skin and tangle-free hair. I fear that when you grow up in a co-ed, there’s going to be the added peer pressure of always appearing attractive to the opposite sex. Can you be yourself, gender-unstereotyped and perhaps un-cool?

In my kid’s class, the boys won’t play with girls, because they are girls. And some girls giggle about who ‘loves’ whom. Er, I thought co-eds made you rise above all that crap? Once when my daughter was cribbing about her boy classmate hitting her, I told her I went to a school with no boys in it. Her eyes widened. ‘Reallllly??’ she squealed, ‘But WHY?’ Umm. Just. Then I asked if she’d like to go to a school with only girls. Wouldn’t it be nice? No, she shook her head vehemently. ‘Boys are fun. Only girls would be boring.’

Interestingly, many studies show that overall children in co-eds are under a lot less stress than their counterparts in same-sex schools. That must count for the ‘fun’ bit. I know what I ‘m going to do though. I’m going to sit in a corner and hold my breath till kid finishes her ‘co-education’.

Wake me up when it’s all over, dude.