The case of the shapeless bricks

Dedication: To all those classmates who vanished one fine morning

“Gosh…learning disability…for a journalist…don’t tell me…,” buzzed in Anupama’s SMS. All I told her was that Taare Zameen Par was my story too. I didn’t contradict my friend though I was talking about the discipline part rather than the dyslexic theme of the Aamir Khan film. After all, I still see letters dancing and numbers fighting. (Hope my employers – present and potential – don’t read this.)

I was not dyslectic. But printed letters do dance, turn cursive, hide behind the other, transform to an altogether different script while retaining the meaning. Even after so many Hollywood inventions – bodysnatching aliens, falling meteors, rising waters – my most horrifying doomsday scenario is about letters losing its meaning. A day when I was surrounded by mysterious notations of hieroglyphics.

Perhaps even Gabriel Garcia Marquez had a hidden fear of melting letters to write about it in One Hundred Years of Solitude: "Thus they (inhabitants of Macondo fighting loss of memory) went on living in a reality that was slipping away, momentarily captured by words, but which would escape irremediably when they forgot the values of the written letters."

Without letters, mankind may or may not survive, but I would be back to the helpless kindergarten dropout. It took immense patient from my mother and my best teacher, the late Cicily Jose, to befriend me with the letters. Even when I accepted that a certain letter could stand for a certain syllable, I refused to write it the way the learned wrote. An O was an O whether it was drawn clockwise or counterclockwise.

As I was beginning to put spirit into script, came the next teaser. Algebra…a+b led to more complex formations when it should have simply read what it is – ab. ABC and XYZ assumed totally impossible values…in fact they were shamelessly polygamous letters ready to go with any value. For the second time in my academic life, I felt hopeless. Red ruled my mathematics answer sheets.

As soon as I stepped out of the theatre, before I send SMS to select friends recommending the movie (two months after the release), I met another friend Mrinal Sen on the road. Before I could tell him my impressions, he told me: “I had this problem. Letters just flew away.” He even did his math problems the day Ishan Avasti the dyslexic protagonist did.

The most beautiful scene in the movie was the surprise math test in Ishan’s class. The dreamer boy just took the figures (3 and 9, supposed to be multiplied) on his animated journey to space, where he won a game by replacing the planets with given numbers. The answer to the only attempted problem was 3! Scenes later, his drawing teacher reveals to him that the problem is as simple as climbing a stair!

Sen would also let his figures fight among themselves to come to a conclusion and, surprisingly, arrived at the right answer. But his teachers were smarter. They insisted on method. They didn’t care if the answer was right or wrong as long as the student didn’t imagine a space journey or stair flight. No, my boy, don’t be smart. You have only one way of looking at it.

Udayan had a cross-cultural take on the film: “The elder brother (who tops the class and excels in badminton) is British and the younger one (who follows his own brain and finds himself bogged down) is French.” Even the British have reformed their system, but India refuses to grow from Lord Macaulay. Don’t mind the massacre in the classrooms, let’s fit another brick in the wall.

I have often bumped into this sadistic HR question: ‘List a couple of your achievements’. I may not impress the examiner if I said this: 1) I read ‘The Unicorn Expedition’; 2) I wrote 652 words on education. But they are praiseworthy achievements when seen through the eyes of a child bewildered by the ant-like creatures on his textbook.

Ray of hope: Kendriya Vidyalayas make TZP a must-watch

Postscript: Had planned to write about the tyranny of disciplinarians and the end of imagination, but was carried away. Some other time, perhaps.