A love story that comes straight from the heart...Shubhra is the Director of our organization, and is usualy caught up with writing and responding to a zillion mails and queries , attending series of meetings, looking into the nitty gritties of project activities and outcomes and actively encouraging brainstorming sessions. In between all this, in the 10am to 6 pm time span, we often dont get a chance to peek into her real self. However, a welcome break in the form of a 'documentation workshop' came up in August where some 25 of us in the organization were invoved in some serious writing sessins! It was as an assignment in this workshop that we got that 'peek' into our Shubhra di's self- her childhood, her school days, her fancies and thoughts...we learned about her first love...we got to know her so much more. In narrating her own life events she raises up some very poignant points on literacy, schooling, childhood and education. Her write up on her love story with the world of ideas, stories and books will charm every reader...take a look!
A Love Story
Shubhra Chatterji
I grew up in a small town in Bihar. I was admitted to a convent school when I was four years old. The school was housed in an old fashioned bungalow with tiled roofs. The rooms were small and cramped. I remember being taken to a classroom where a strange looking creature was saying something in a strange language which the children were repeating with gestures. My first encounter with education was formal education was followed by a flurry of activities in the shape of scaling the boundary wall, a sprint through the busy main roads, frantic chase by the gatekeeper leading to the arrest of the culprit and handing over the latter to concerned authorities amidst howling protest. Later on I came to know that the strange creature I had seen in the class was called sister and that the school was full of similar creatures who spoke in an alien tongue but were essentially well meaning and kind hearted souls.
I enjoyed my school days in spite of the fact that the education offered there was quite traditional and boring. Actually, school to me meant a whole lot of other things – friends, the playground with all its accessories, the pranks we played.. Studies were incidental to the whole exercise. There were times when I was thoroughly bored with the classes and feigned head ache to escape to the sick room, but it never occurred to me to question the relevance of it all, so steeped was I in my middle class mind set. Besides, I never had any exposure to any other kind of learning, so I accepted the system ungrudgingly – the grill of examinations, the drudgery of repetitive work, temper tantrums of teachers and the unimaginative punishment meted for committing grave sins such as being talkative and inattentive in class. The only thing that really bothered me was partiality of teachers, injustice, meanness of others and betrayal of trust.
I wish I could remember the day when I first learnt to read – in the true sense of the term. My only memory of my early literacy training in school is the fact that I was a left hander but forced to change my hand preference as it was felt that it was ungainly to be a left hander for a girl. Perhaps, due to this I had difficulties with the orientation of letters, while learning my alphabets. I just could see no difference between the inverted F I wrote with the correct form, and failed to understand why I always got an ugly red cross mark from the teacher. I was taught English and Hindi in school. When I was six years old, my parents felt that as a Bengali I should also be familiar with my mother tongue. I was given a copy of “Sahaj Path” with which my parents tried to teach me to read Bengali during the weekends. Sahaj Path, as everyone knows, is an excellent Primer and the illustrations are simply wonderful. But for some reason I developed an illogical fear of the book – the illustrations transformed themselves to scary moving forms, with lives of their own. One day my father saw me cry bitterly with the book on my lap and decided to put an end to my ordeal. My Bengali lessons thus abruptly came to a halt. My mother was very unhappy with this rejection of my Bengali roots – she felt that I was doomed to have an incomplete existence because of this. But something strange happened a year later. I came across a copy of Children’s Ramayana written in Bengali. It had a few black and white illustrations and I somehow got interested. I started reading the book with the little memory I retained about the Bengali alphabets. I still remember vividly, how I strung the words together and read the first sentence and the meaning hit me like a bullet. I actually had made a great discovery – that written words meant something ! Before I knew I had read the entire page and had understood every single thing that was written there. I got sucked into the enchanted world of a king and his three queens who were each given a bowl of magic payesh that would give birth to four wonderful sons.. I just could not leave the book. I was in a trance. I ate and bathed and slept, but my real me was not in these acts. It was in some other realm, in a magical world created by my imagination, where the characters that I was reading about were more real than anything else in the real world around me. I still remember the physical pain I felt when I came to the tragic end of the tale and started crying my heart out as though I had lost something precious.. When my mother found me weeping, she asked me the reason. Somehow I had a feeling that she would not understand and I lied to her saying that - I had a headache. Her anxiety thereafter made me feel guilty but I stood firm in my resolve not to divulge the truth.. The next book that totally captured my imagination was a Bengali children’s version of Alice in Wonderland. So complete was my mesmerisation with the book that I started leading a dual existence for quite some time. When I was about eight years old, my parents bought me a set of Children’s Encyclopedia which had wonderful sepia toned illustrations. It opened up to me a whole new world - stories from the Bible, origin of the Universe, Grimm’s Fairy Tales. These were all in English. Initially I would just gaze at the illustrations and get lost in them. But when the illustrations could no longer satisfy my curiosity, I started reading out of sheer desperation even though I frequently hit upon words that were totally unfamiliar. I do not remember whether I succeeded in understanding what I read, but I do recall that I kept reading and re reading them till the mist gradually lifted... I still remember the smell of the silky pages, the slightly rough touch of the elegant leather bound covers, the embossed golden letters in the spine. My infatuation had now matured to love. A turning point in this love story happened when I was in Class VII. My class teacher, a sweet natured nun, introduced me to the world of classics. I started with the abridged versions but soon transitioned to reading the originals as the former could no longer capture my imagination. By the time I reached adulthood, I had finished reading almost all the famous classics in English and Bengali. They helped me to shape my thoughts, hone my emotions and refine my sensibilities and define my outlook on life. . Looking back after all these years, I feel that somehow the entire process of school education remained somewhere in the periphery in my growing up years - a necessary and unavoidable part of my existence. It was the world of books that that had given me my real education.
I grew up in a small town in Bihar. I was admitted to a convent school when I was four years old. The school was housed in an old fashioned bungalow with tiled roofs. The rooms were small and cramped. I remember being taken to a classroom where a strange looking creature was saying something in a strange language which the children were repeating with gestures. My first encounter with education was formal education was followed by a flurry of activities in the shape of scaling the boundary wall, a sprint through the busy main roads, frantic chase by the gatekeeper leading to the arrest of the culprit and handing over the latter to concerned authorities amidst howling protest. Later on I came to know that the strange creature I had seen in the class was called sister and that the school was full of similar creatures who spoke in an alien tongue but were essentially well meaning and kind hearted souls.
I enjoyed my school days in spite of the fact that the education offered there was quite traditional and boring. Actually, school to me meant a whole lot of other things – friends, the playground with all its accessories, the pranks we played.. Studies were incidental to the whole exercise. There were times when I was thoroughly bored with the classes and feigned head ache to escape to the sick room, but it never occurred to me to question the relevance of it all, so steeped was I in my middle class mind set. Besides, I never had any exposure to any other kind of learning, so I accepted the system ungrudgingly – the grill of examinations, the drudgery of repetitive work, temper tantrums of teachers and the unimaginative punishment meted for committing grave sins such as being talkative and inattentive in class. The only thing that really bothered me was partiality of teachers, injustice, meanness of others and betrayal of trust.
I wish I could remember the day when I first learnt to read – in the true sense of the term. My only memory of my early literacy training in school is the fact that I was a left hander but forced to change my hand preference as it was felt that it was ungainly to be a left hander for a girl. Perhaps, due to this I had difficulties with the orientation of letters, while learning my alphabets. I just could see no difference between the inverted F I wrote with the correct form, and failed to understand why I always got an ugly red cross mark from the teacher. I was taught English and Hindi in school. When I was six years old, my parents felt that as a Bengali I should also be familiar with my mother tongue. I was given a copy of “Sahaj Path” with which my parents tried to teach me to read Bengali during the weekends. Sahaj Path, as everyone knows, is an excellent Primer and the illustrations are simply wonderful. But for some reason I developed an illogical fear of the book – the illustrations transformed themselves to scary moving forms, with lives of their own. One day my father saw me cry bitterly with the book on my lap and decided to put an end to my ordeal. My Bengali lessons thus abruptly came to a halt. My mother was very unhappy with this rejection of my Bengali roots – she felt that I was doomed to have an incomplete existence because of this. But something strange happened a year later. I came across a copy of Children’s Ramayana written in Bengali. It had a few black and white illustrations and I somehow got interested. I started reading the book with the little memory I retained about the Bengali alphabets. I still remember vividly, how I strung the words together and read the first sentence and the meaning hit me like a bullet. I actually had made a great discovery – that written words meant something ! Before I knew I had read the entire page and had understood every single thing that was written there. I got sucked into the enchanted world of a king and his three queens who were each given a bowl of magic payesh that would give birth to four wonderful sons.. I just could not leave the book. I was in a trance. I ate and bathed and slept, but my real me was not in these acts. It was in some other realm, in a magical world created by my imagination, where the characters that I was reading about were more real than anything else in the real world around me. I still remember the physical pain I felt when I came to the tragic end of the tale and started crying my heart out as though I had lost something precious.. When my mother found me weeping, she asked me the reason. Somehow I had a feeling that she would not understand and I lied to her saying that - I had a headache. Her anxiety thereafter made me feel guilty but I stood firm in my resolve not to divulge the truth.. The next book that totally captured my imagination was a Bengali children’s version of Alice in Wonderland. So complete was my mesmerisation with the book that I started leading a dual existence for quite some time. When I was about eight years old, my parents bought me a set of Children’s Encyclopedia which had wonderful sepia toned illustrations. It opened up to me a whole new world - stories from the Bible, origin of the Universe, Grimm’s Fairy Tales. These were all in English. Initially I would just gaze at the illustrations and get lost in them. But when the illustrations could no longer satisfy my curiosity, I started reading out of sheer desperation even though I frequently hit upon words that were totally unfamiliar. I do not remember whether I succeeded in understanding what I read, but I do recall that I kept reading and re reading them till the mist gradually lifted... I still remember the smell of the silky pages, the slightly rough touch of the elegant leather bound covers, the embossed golden letters in the spine. My infatuation had now matured to love. A turning point in this love story happened when I was in Class VII. My class teacher, a sweet natured nun, introduced me to the world of classics. I started with the abridged versions but soon transitioned to reading the originals as the former could no longer capture my imagination. By the time I reached adulthood, I had finished reading almost all the famous classics in English and Bengali. They helped me to shape my thoughts, hone my emotions and refine my sensibilities and define my outlook on life. . Looking back after all these years, I feel that somehow the entire process of school education remained somewhere in the periphery in my growing up years - a necessary and unavoidable part of my existence. It was the world of books that that had given me my real education.
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