Reminiscences

               The time we'd like to recall here were the days in the early turn of this century when we had made our new home at the RajDhAnI of Delhi. For our 12 year old self, the experience was frightening, as our command of the rAshtrabhasha of Hindi was dismal at best. Although, we had a not-so-brief period of evening Hindi lessons when we were six or seven, those really did not amount to much. Having enrolled for prAthmic, we had to drop classes after a few months as our itinerant lifestyle involving a move every three years, necessitated another. But as a consolation, we did not have to scratch from start, as our command of the basic aksharas of Devanagari was quite good thanks to those lessons.

              

  As preparation, our pitAshri quizzed us on simple Hindi sentences one night. We still recall one of those – "Sonia Gandhi Congress party ki adhyakshA hain". We were intelligent enough to make out that it was something about the Congress party and the said lady, but 'adhyaksha' was beyond our comprehension or deduction. So we got mildly irritated and brushed it aside saying we knew enough to manage somehow (!)

               

First few days in our new class were difficult. We spoke good English, but it is difficult when you don't know the language. To our advantage, the school where we enrolled had a good number of students from the land of parashurAma, as the school was run by Christian missionaries from there. It was also our first brush with learning Sanskrit – it was our third language after English and Hindi. For several days we were clueless in the rAshtrabhAsha classes, satisfying ourself with disturbing our neighbour to ask a few meanings here and there. We concluded that nothing was going to change unless we took extra tuitions outside of class. And so, for the next year or so we used to go two days a week to a very nice lady in our apartment society, to get the hang of Hindi.

               

This period also saw us display a general slack in academic performance. Till before coming here, we used to be among the top three places of our respective class. Now, we found ourselves in the late tens, and even early twenty once. It still is a wonder to us that we managed to pass our very first Hindi exam. What surprises us now more than this fall-back was the fact that we couldn't care less about it. In hindsight, we feel that this attitude may have arisen due to the drastic shift in the education systems that we had seen so far and were seeing now. Until then, we were schooled in the art of cramming. The better you cram the more you are rewarded. But in this new place, focus was on knowing, at least to a reasonable extent, what one was studying and not just cram. We did not realise it then, but we sense now that we did not adequately see this difference and continued with the method that we were familiar with; so the result was less than good. This was quite apparent with the subject of Mathematics, where we got hit quite hard.

              

An important factor, which we see now, with the benefit of hindsight, was that of the difference in the curricula followed. Earlier we had the one prescribed by the Matriculation board of the Dramila (Tamil) desa. But at the RajDhAnI we were put through what is an ICSE curriculum. We had no idea about all this during our time there. We were a normal teenager who found himself having to adjust to a new environment. The Maths was very different, some of which we had never seen were had been done by the class here. This early scar has, we are afraid, remained with us. Not as a lack of ability, but as a lack of fluidity. It is one of the facts that we regret, because it is our belief that excellence in mathematics happens only with an early foundation. There may be exceptions, but this is a general trend.