Kurangu Pedal – and Memories
My husband watches more movies than I do which is most helpful. He acts as pre-screener and sifts out all but what I will like and makes excellent recommendations. He asked me to check out Kurangu Pedal (in the Tamizh language) the other day and I just started watching it (it takes weeks to watch anything fully since I spend but minutes each instalment). It immediately brought to mind numerous instances of my own childhood – of a type and style of playing that I fear does not exist anymore, at least not in cities, and a palpable reliving of the fears and anxieties of what one now realises were extremely minor issues but seemed the end of the world then.
I was in 2nd grade at St. Joseph’s Primary School in Makeni. We had just moved to Sierra Leone, it was my first year in that school, and the first test was coming up. The teacher, Mrs. Margaret Kamara, explained that we would do the test on a blank sheet of paper torn from our notebook and not in the notebook itself. When my father picked me up on his way from the office as he always did, I regaled him with the day’s (utterly innocuous) happenings and of the joyous (no sarcasm here – I was a happy student) event of a test the next day (my first ever).
While my father handled pickup and dropoff, my mother handled all the other aspects – bathing, grooming, feeding, packing food and ensuring that I had adequate supply of all stationery. Upon getting home, I duly reported that I had to tear a sheet of paper from my notebook for tomorrow’s test. Though very mild mannered, amma has always been a very correct, forthright and a wise person in every sense of the word. She said she would give me a nice, ruled foolscap (remember that term? – it was an extremely common British one for a particular size of paper) sheet to use for the test and I was not to, under any circumstances, tear sheets from my notebook.
I was utterly appalled. I have always been rather earnest (my friends say I took everything way too literally and unnecessarily seriously) and my five year old self was incredibly so. I spent at least 10 minutes trying to persuade my mother that the teacher would never allow that – it HAD to be a torn sheet of paper from the notebook – everybody else would be using that. I do not remember ever being so scared at that age – I was well and truly frightened of what Mrs. Kamara would say. Amma calmly said it would be fine. I insisted that my father talk to Mrs. Kamara about it while dropping me off. Amma assured me he would. He did. Mrs. Kamara, of course, had no problem – I wrote the test in a crisp new sheet and my classmates admired the sheet of paper too.
A few years later, when we moved to Chennai and I joined St. John’s English School, Besant Nagar, I never tore pages from anything, not even the rough notebook. I remember teachers would give us answers to textbook questions by referring to particular sections of the textbook (page 20, 3rd paragraph, second sentence then Page 21, 5th paragraph, fourth sentence etc.). We were to mark these in our textbook and then write them out as homework that evening. Marking up any book was a no-no at our home too. However, my mother, always reasonable, realised that this was a teacher diktat and agreed to my marking with pencil as long as I restricted myself to only the required brackets and question numbers. The habit stays – I cannot bring myself to mark or highlight any book. And I have given my children a lot of flak when they marked and/or (travesty, travesty) tore pages from their rough notebooks! To be honest, they were not too bad but would have still failed amma’s standards.
Kurangu Pedal will take all of us, albeit momentarily, to that kind of simple day when our worries were simple because life as a child was singularly simple with plenty of time to be bored and therefore to come up with interesting games without any sophisticated equipment. The movie brings alive all our own memories along with the emotion associated with them. Parents who did not hesitate to parent and a childhood not riddled with activities or competitions or striving to achieve the next thing ever earlier than everybody else…..
Related Posts:
