Anand was an ‘alternative’ pupil. If the classroom represented a rigid box within the confines of which all the pupils did their thinking, Anand existed well outside it. Physically present, but mentally ‘in another place’ or more appropriately ‘in a different place’.
In Year Three, he grasped the concept of division more easily through the process of repeated subtraction and not from memorising times tables. “See, if I take four three times, then that’s the answer to twelve divided by four,” he’d say, leaving his peers scratching their heads. Maths being a difficult subject to grasp in the first place, this used to irritate the teacher — Miss Radha — who, understandably, didn’t wish at this early state to let on to pupils that mathematical sums could be solved using more than one method.
A Rubik’s cube was procured for Anand midway through the term. He’d be seen, brow furrowed in concentration, working on aligning the colours on each side while his classmates, pencils and erasers in hand, scratched, scored and finally found their way to solutions.
In the English period, he was the first to memorise Herbert Asquith’s The Elephant — Here comes the elephant/swaying along/with his cargo of children/all singing a song ...
“What song do you think the elephants were singing?” asked Mrs Chaturvedi, whose husband himself had confronted a wild elephant one time in his youth on the tea estates at the foothills of the Nilgiri. The answer she anticipated was “trumpeting” or even trumpeting noises from the eight-year-old children who might not know the word itself.
“Miss!” said Anand shooting his hand in the air. Ah, Anand again, thought Mrs Chaturvedi, wishing for once it could be someone else. It is after all difficult for a teacher teaching a class of 35 and finding repeated success or response from only one — the same one!
“Okay Anand, what’s the song do you think?”
“The baby elephant walk, miss?” came the reply.
Even Mrs Chaturvedi didn’t see this coming and so couldn’t suppress a cheerful smile.
“My grandpa has the record, Miss. He plays it sometimes on the old record player.”
Mr Rajan, Anand’s grandfather, was a retired military man, a colonel no less, who himself had grown up rubbing shoulders with western points of view, coupled with an endless supply of western music that culminated in his retirement years with Radio Ceylon that later became Radio Sri Lanka.
By the time Anand had reached grades Eight and Nine, frustration and a sense of being unchallenged were beginning to set in. In geography, for example, he knew all that was being taught on rubber in Malaysia, rice in Myanmar, fishing in Japan and the Trans-Siberian Railway, including the spelling of Vladivostok and he asked for more ... and more ... and was often told, in euphemistic terms to “shut up”.
In this way, he had to elicit his grandfather’s help in borrowing outside reading material to sate his thirst — and in this way, he learned that Rasputin did indeed come of peasant stock, that perestroika dealt with restructuring and glasnost inferred more openness. The same with Malaysia — in between its fame for rubber and the Petronas twin towers lay a wealth of unexplored reading riches: The palace with bamboo walls, the longhouses.
“It wasn’t easy,” says Anand now, “I don’t think I was a model pupil too. I was always restless, distracting, wanting attention until I got something to keep me absorbed. Even at college, at the risk of sounding high and mighty, it was difficult to sit and listen to lectures which were sometimes merely time fillers, gaps in your entire life.”
Anand’s plight no doubt is that of the advanced learner — one never easy to handle in a classroom — but it does bring to mind a saying by the poet Robert Frost, which is in alignment with Anand’s view: Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.
Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.
