A slightly inaccurate and completely unnecessary post I wrote a long time back and took down soon after. Now it seems harmless. All that angst is gone now. Mostly. Nevertheless, I'd just like it to be out there.
Supreeth Ravish's A Series of Unfortunate Events - Part 1
I never quite found out why my parents had me 10 years after my brother. I guess they weren't thinking much. I really think they should not have done that. He was 40 years old when he had me. He would be 58 when I turned 18. Don't you think about that stuff before having kids? When you have that big a generation gap, it's hard to get along as friends. I never looked at my brother as a friend. I never shared stuff with him. We never sat on the porch on a rainy day and talked about life and love. Do brothers do that? Well, mine didn't. My parents made my brother out as the exemplary child. So naturally, I was made to look up to him. And in some ways, it was good. I started reading because my parents always pointed out that my brother read a lot and I didn't. I was eight, he was eighteen but they didn't seem to notice that. When JS Mill could learn Greek by he age of three and read Herodotus and Plato by the time he was eight, why couldn't I pick up an Oliver Twist? I'm not saying anything but JS Mill had a very strict father who was determined to make him a genius. I had a father who had barely enough time for me who was determined to make me determined to become a genius on my own. But I had to shut them up so I started reading those children's illusrated classics. And soon, I started liking it. And soon I moved on to books with lesser pictures and then to books with no pictures at all. So that was one good thing which came out of this horrible parenting and I'm really thankful for that.
***
Supreeth Ravish's A Series of Unfortunate Events - Part 1
I never quite found out why my parents had me 10 years after my brother. I guess they weren't thinking much. I really think they should not have done that. He was 40 years old when he had me. He would be 58 when I turned 18. Don't you think about that stuff before having kids? When you have that big a generation gap, it's hard to get along as friends. I never looked at my brother as a friend. I never shared stuff with him. We never sat on the porch on a rainy day and talked about life and love. Do brothers do that? Well, mine didn't. My parents made my brother out as the exemplary child. So naturally, I was made to look up to him. And in some ways, it was good. I started reading because my parents always pointed out that my brother read a lot and I didn't. I was eight, he was eighteen but they didn't seem to notice that. When JS Mill could learn Greek by he age of three and read Herodotus and Plato by the time he was eight, why couldn't I pick up an Oliver Twist? I'm not saying anything but JS Mill had a very strict father who was determined to make him a genius. I had a father who had barely enough time for me who was determined to make me determined to become a genius on my own. But I had to shut them up so I started reading those children's illusrated classics. And soon, I started liking it. And soon I moved on to books with lesser pictures and then to books with no pictures at all. So that was one good thing which came out of this horrible parenting and I'm really thankful for that.
***
Indian education follows what is commonly called the "10+2+3" pattern. The first 10 years of your schooling is divided into primary (first to fifth standards), upper primary or middle school (sixth to eighth standards) and then secondary (ninth and tenth standards). Then you have senior secondary (eleventh and twelfth or plus one and plus two or First PUC and Second PUC, PUC being Pre-University College). And then come three years/four of college which gave you a bachelor's degree. And before all this, you have the Pre-Primary, the Kindergarten stages. And there, we had two divisions - The Lower Kindergarten and the Upper Kindergarten (LKG and UKG). But you know that. I just wanted to show you how ridiculuous it sounds when you spell everything out like this. So far, I've done the 10 + 2 part.
Indian education follows what is commonly called the "10+2+3" pattern. The first 10 years of your schooling is divided into primary (first to fifth standards), upper primary or middle school (sixth to eighth standards) and then secondary (ninth and tenth standards). Then you have senior secondary (eleventh and twelfth or plus one and plus two or First PUC and Second PUC, PUC being Pre-University College). And then come three years/four of college which gave you a bachelor's degree. And before all this, you have the Pre-Primary, the Kindergarten stages. And there, we had two divisions - The Lower Kindergarten and the Upper Kindergarten (LKG and UKG). But you know that. I just wanted to show you how ridiculuous it sounds when you spell everything out like this. So far, I've done the 10 + 2 part.
***
Somewhere between LKG and UKG, my brother disappeared. No, he didn't die. My parents just sent him away to study in mysore, a thousand miles away. There're two different tales as to why this needed to be done and I'll leave it to the reader to decide which one is sadder. The official story is that they wanted him to complete his high school (secondary i.e. Ninth and tenth standards) in Karnataka so that he would be eligible for the Karnataka quota for a certain competitive examination for entrance to engineering colleges in the state. The unofficial story is that they caught my brother helping a classmate copy in his final exam.
So my father came in and shouted at the teachers and threatened to sue them and the whole thing was very embarrassing so he decided to put him in a different school . Wait, what? you must be thinking. Son cheats in exam so dad yells at the teachers? This is where it gets interesting. You see, my father did not believe that my brother cheated and felt he was being wrongly accused. So did I, until yesterday, when I asked the brother before writing this.
So my father came in and shouted at the teachers and threatened to sue them and the whole thing was very embarrassing so he decided to put him in a different school . Wait, what? you must be thinking. Son cheats in exam so dad yells at the teachers? This is where it gets interesting. You see, my father did not believe that my brother cheated and felt he was being wrongly accused. So did I, until yesterday, when I asked the brother before writing this.
My brother had, in fact, thrown that crumpled sheet of formulae at his friend. And that was the truth. But he couldn't tell that to my father. The reader needs to understand that my father was not an evil man. He was merely ... old fashioned, old-fashioned being a euphemism for he could sometimes get unreasonably anal about stuff. See, my father always maintained that theft was the greatest of sins and all other sins were derivatives of theft. When you kill a man, you steal his right to life. When you lie, you steal his right to truth, he used to say. Oh wait, I think that was Khalied Hosseini. Sorry, my bad. My dad was anal about people lying. And he had a bad temper. He didn't get angry much but when he did, you would not want to be in a 500 metre radius.
So my brother had helped someone copy in an exam. Strike one. He had got caught. Strike two. Now imagine how he must have felt when my father knelt down and held him by his shoulders and asked him if whatever he had heard was true. This was his last chance. His do or die moment. And he didn't back down. He closed his eyes and swung hard. "No dad I didn't copy I just saw a scrap of paper lying down and I thought it shouldn't be here and so I was going to throw it out of the window when the teacher saw me she must've misunderstood I didn't do anything I swear". Any other father would've gone Seriously? That's the best you can come up with? Do you take me for an idiot? But not my father. My father believed in his children. Because his children didn't lie. Because that was how he had raised them and they knew lying was wrong so why would they do something wrong if they knew it was wrong? *cue vicky's my logic is undeniable from I, Robot*
So he dragged my brother into the school, pushed him in front of his teachers and asked him to tell them the same thing he had told him. And my brother, always the dutiful son, repeated the tale. And the supervisor objected, saying that she clearly saw him ... "Listen ma'am, I don't know what kind of education you give YOUR children but MY children have been taught enough to know the difference between right and wrong. And my sons would never lie to me".
They had decided to withold his results. As to why it got to this point, I'll never know. This whole thing should not have taken long; an apology, an appeal to the student's academic record (which was supposed to be quite good), a mention of some of the prizes he had won representing his school (which I'm told were many) and a polite question on what should happen to his future, his career, should they do this was probably all that was required. They should've cut off a few marks from his paper, given him a warning, let him go. But that was not what happened.
The decison to hold back his results was harsh, uncalled for. To father, this was OUTRAGEOUS. Because his son was being punished for a crime (yes, it was a crime, there was no doubt about that. pfft.), a crime he most certainly DID NOT commit. And it got on his nerves when the teachers kept insisting otherwise.
My father was a very simple man. Johnny Lever made him laugh, Anil Kapoor made him cry and somebody accusing him of not having given his son a proper moral upbringing insulted him. And being insulted made him angry. He came on to them like a polar bear on a school of trouts, charging into the middle and ripping them apart left and right. And just when things were about to go out of hand ("I REFUSE TO BE SUBJECT TO THIS KIND OF TREATMENT"), the nice lady who taught history and lived on the same street and knew my parents interrupted and told them how this was probably a mistake and that he was a good kid and was very sincere and etc etc and so they finally let him off with a warning. But my father was not happy. He had wanted the teachers to apologise for being wrong about his son and for wasting his time. But that didn't happen. What had happened was that he had been insulted. And he wouldn't let his son be in a place where they did not respect him (as to whether the pronoun refers to the son or the father, I'm not quite sure). So he decided to move him to Mysore, where he was put up wit his uncle and aunt. They got him into a school which was nearby. It was also supposedly a reputed high school, whatever meant. And they were mighty pleased with themselves in the end.
What surprises me most about this story is that I was not even part of this decision. Maybe I was but whenever I'm told this story, I don't figure. It's like I didn't even exist. And so my brother went away and I stayed on, to continue his legacy. The good legacy, I mean, the one where he got prizes and stuff. The bad legacy was soon forgotten. And so was my brother. He just became this Gorakhpur waale Chacha kind of figure who visited once or twice a year and brought sweets. And mom would be in a good mood and dad would come home early and we would all play cricket together. And fifteen days later, he'd be gone and mom would be cranky and dad would come home late and tired and switch on the news and I would sit in my room and play chess by myself.
They had decided to withold his results. As to why it got to this point, I'll never know. This whole thing should not have taken long; an apology, an appeal to the student's academic record (which was supposed to be quite good), a mention of some of the prizes he had won representing his school (which I'm told were many) and a polite question on what should happen to his future, his career, should they do this was probably all that was required. They should've cut off a few marks from his paper, given him a warning, let him go. But that was not what happened.
The decison to hold back his results was harsh, uncalled for. To father, this was OUTRAGEOUS. Because his son was being punished for a crime (yes, it was a crime, there was no doubt about that. pfft.), a crime he most certainly DID NOT commit. And it got on his nerves when the teachers kept insisting otherwise.
My father was a very simple man. Johnny Lever made him laugh, Anil Kapoor made him cry and somebody accusing him of not having given his son a proper moral upbringing insulted him. And being insulted made him angry. He came on to them like a polar bear on a school of trouts, charging into the middle and ripping them apart left and right. And just when things were about to go out of hand ("I REFUSE TO BE SUBJECT TO THIS KIND OF TREATMENT"), the nice lady who taught history and lived on the same street and knew my parents interrupted and told them how this was probably a mistake and that he was a good kid and was very sincere and etc etc and so they finally let him off with a warning. But my father was not happy. He had wanted the teachers to apologise for being wrong about his son and for wasting his time. But that didn't happen. What had happened was that he had been insulted. And he wouldn't let his son be in a place where they did not respect him (as to whether the pronoun refers to the son or the father, I'm not quite sure). So he decided to move him to Mysore, where he was put up wit his uncle and aunt. They got him into a school which was nearby. It was also supposedly a reputed high school, whatever meant. And they were mighty pleased with themselves in the end.
What surprises me most about this story is that I was not even part of this decision. Maybe I was but whenever I'm told this story, I don't figure. It's like I didn't even exist. And so my brother went away and I stayed on, to continue his legacy. The good legacy, I mean, the one where he got prizes and stuff. The bad legacy was soon forgotten. And so was my brother. He just became this Gorakhpur waale Chacha kind of figure who visited once or twice a year and brought sweets. And mom would be in a good mood and dad would come home early and we would all play cricket together. And fifteen days later, he'd be gone and mom would be cranky and dad would come home late and tired and switch on the news and I would sit in my room and play chess by myself.
