Writing Alphabets & Numbers

It is interesting to understand how the school taught neha & nidhi to write numbers and alphabets. They can now write from A - R and from 1 - 10. I don't remember how I learnt to write them nor do my parents. And that is the reason for this post. I remember having sharpened (or should I say rounded :-)) my handwriting quite a bit on the good old "four line" books when I was about 10 years or so. So much so that my written text would look like an array of jilebis from far.

In the first two months at school, the kids were taught to recognise and draw basic geometric shapes like point, line (standing line, slanting line & sleeping line), circle, semi-circle, square, diamond. They were asked to trace the dotted line of pictures on their home work books.
After two months, it was assembly time:
1 = one standing line + one sleeping line
2 = one semi-circle + one sleeping line
3 = two semi-circles
4 = one standing line + one sleeping line + one slanting line
5 = sleeping line + small standing line + semi-circle
6 = semi-circle + go in
6 is interesting. So is the alphabet that resembles it - G
G = semi-circle + go in + come out

I guess they'll teach kids the upper case letters this year, lower case in LKG and cursive style in UKG.

My kids (like most other I've seen) write C inverted (like this - ) ). I tried to google out as to why kids do this but couldn't find. If somebody knows the answer, please post a reply. Here is my theory of why they do it :-)
C is one of the only two numbers or upper case letters that can be constructed using only one of the basic shapes - just a semi-circle. The other alphabet is O and you wouldn't know if your kid wrote a O or inverted O. Zero is similar to O and hence I discount it from this count. When kids have to assemble at least two shapes, they do it well; they become careless & overconfident when it is just one shape.

Taare Zameen Par

Yesterday, we went & watched Taare Zameen Par. It is not often that we watch a movie on its 3rd day. Veena visits movie theatres about 2 or 3 times a year and I fare much better at about 10 per year. (remaining 8 or 7 with my HP friends). So it was out of the ordinary that we both watched this movie this early and not just that, we took neha & nidhi along as well.

Their first movie in a theatre was "Ekalavya" at PVR. They hardly enjoyed it. They watched the big screen in awe for about 15 mins, then walked & played in the open area in front of the screen (we had deliberately taken the first row) for about 30 mins, enjoyed pop corn for 10 mins and cribbed that they are bored for the rest of the movie.

That was about 10 months back. TZP was their second movie. We thought they might enjoy TZP more cos its the story of a kid, they can recognise some settings in the movie (school, class, drawing...). They did watch it intently for most part. They got bored only when little Ishaan was not on the screen.

My opinion of the movie - very well made, its like a work/well prepared book. you can see & appreciate the work aamir khan has put on the subject & movie. It touches all the parental chords in your body (hey, i just realised paternal is an anagram of parental, hmm, interesting what does that mean, if you jumble up parental feelings you get paternal feelings? :-))

To me, aamir is the best actor in the last 20 years and stands alongside amitabh on my list of favourite actors. In many ways he is similar to kamal hassan in that he tries diffrent things. While Kamal mostly experiments with his looks/acting style, Aamir apart from those also tries different subjects, is trying direction in this movie and is surely more thorough in research & effort. The outcome is a great movie and I'd recommend it to every parent, teacher and anyone who cares for kids. If that list leaves someone, I'd recommend a silly entertainer called OSO to them. In short the story is about a dyslexic child facing the challenges of the world & getting beaten into a shell before a teacher helps him overcome his problem.

I asked neha & nidhi what they thought the story of the movie was and what they liked & disliked in the movie today morning. The story according to them is - ishank (& not ishaan) is a good boy whose parents, teachers scold him for no reason and then an uncle comes and helps him by singing to him, help him paint. Ishank & Uncle are the good boys while all others are bad boys & girls. Ishank's mom is a bad girl too.

The scenes that impacted them are

(i) when ishank is sitting with 2 stray dogs and one of them is sleeping on his lap

(ii) when he fights with his neighbourhood kid & the 2 dogs circle them

(iii) ishank is standing on the parapet wall in his school overlooking the valley - they thought he was stupid as he could fall down & die

(iv) ishank's dad scolding & slapping him - this hurt them quite a bit.

Aamir khan plays the teacher. He looks a little unconventional to be a teacher even in our eyes cos of his dressing and is so cool. Neha & Nidhi could not recognise him as a teacher at all. They could recognise every other character who plays a teacher role as that. They refer to him as ishank's uncle. I asked them why they thought he is not a teacher. They said cos he sings to the kids and sits with them on their bench and plays with them.

Hmmm that is a grave stmt and has me in a thinking loop for a while now. Why is it so hard to do those things with kids. For Teachers & Parents. TZP surely is a thought provoking movie and I'm learning. Thanks Aamir.

Fit for cows

Yesterday Neha returned from school and frowned at veena "ಏನಮ್ಮ ಮಕ್ಕಳು ಬಾಳೆ ಹಣ್ಣು ಹಾಕು ಅಂದ್ರೆ ಹಸು ಬಾಳೆ ಹಣ್ಣು ಹಾಕಿದೀಯಾ?" (amma, instead of putting banana that kids eat, you've put banana that cows eat, in the lunch bag). I know the expression that neha wears when she talks like that. I captured that expression today morning when we were waiting for the school van. It would have been something like shown in the snap.

Veena was taken aback by the comment and wondered what it meant. She had to jog her memory about an year back to understand neha's comment. When we were staying in h'nagar, there used to be stray cows on the street. They weren't stray actually, an insensitive man had a cow shed and also used to sell firewood. After extracting milk to sell, he would let the cows on the street to find some food & clear their bowels. They were a big nuisance and numerous efforts to drill civic sense into that stupid guy's head had failed. Kids love banana and we used to buy them regularly. If the bananas were not consumed in time, they would ripen to death and turn black. We used to let kids feed such bananas to these stray cows.

So it turned out that the bananas veena packed in their lunch bag yesterday were a little more ripe than usual (not black or close to black as neha exaggerated). The expression in the snap is not exactly what she wears in these situations. That is artifically created and hence little exaggerated as well. Suits her. She will probably fight with me about this snap 5 or 6 years from now. I'm ready :-)

I'm also attaching a snap of nidhi that I took today morning. She bought her elephant today to play for those 5 to 10 mins before the van arrives. When they see this blog, they search for how many photos I've put of them. This post should have just carried neha's snap but I'm putting nidhi's as well to make her feel good. I have to be conscious of their sensitiveness when I fill up the real estate on this blog.

Perspectives

This is the view of one property adjacent to our office. You can see a swelled up well (its a huge well like the ones you see in villages plus rain water collected next to it in a man made ditch; you cant make out where the ditch ends and the well begins) and open space where they have even cultivated some paddy(not shown in the pic). The surprising part is my office is not situated on the outskirts but is in the heart of bangalore - bannerghatta road. The adjacent vacant land and well belongs to Christ College who probably don't know what to do with that huge land (more than 2 acres acc to my visual estimate) that is lying idle.

The above para was a digression from this post's topic. Look at the AC fans that line up the inside of our office campus and next to the compound. The office building is 13 floors and hence they have these huge fans lined up on the periphery to cool the interiors. These fans make the parking lots noisy and hot. I hate them for that.

About a few months back, our office had a arranged a "get your kids to work" day on a friday. I could get nidhi along with me. neha was down with viral fever and hence could not make it. They had arranged some actitivies for kids that day - talent show, tattoos, caricature sketching... When Nidhi saw this line of noisy fans, she got very excited. She exclaimed "appa there is a train in your office and you never told me that" She thought people come to office in this train. Before that, I could never see them as bogies of a train. I find them cuter these days.

Neha did not let me sleep in peace till I took her to office. I got both of them to office on a weekend. They were amused by the cubicle walls all round the office and instantly figured out a game to play using them - hide & seek. Since I'm 6' 2'' and can see above cube walls of most offices this again was a surpise to me. I never thought you could play hide & seek in the aisles of an office. There are many times, you want to hide yourself from people in office. If only cube walls are over 7 feet!

Some Silly Snaps

I was browsing all the snaps I had taken on my cell phone. These snaps are the more spontaneous ones unlike the regular camera snaps where kids are dressed up and are posing. I saw some really stupid poses and silly photos. Here is the collection that neha & nidhi will be embarrassed about when they grow up :-)

# Snap 1 - Taken in home town mall last Saturday. They posed in front of a huge ad hoarding. Nidhi wanted a snap of her touching the girl in the ad.

# Snap 2 - This ain't silly but cute. They used to love the play home that they were going during their 3rd year - tender lily play home at gavipuram. They would usually get ready before time and sit on the steps in front of the house (the rented house at h'nagar where we stayed for a couple of years) waiting for veena to get ready and sharada (care taker) to come and drop them to the play home

# Snap 3 - Wearing juttus! check the art on the wall that they have created with crayons and pencil. It costed me 8k to get that rented house repainted when we left.

# Snap 4 - Nidhi sitting in a basket on the street in front of the house. I don't remember the exact reason but i know it was a mark of protest for something we didn't buy her.

# Snap 5 - kids wearing my shirts

# Snap 6 - As you could see in snap 4, the street was very close to the house (or there was minimal area in the compound). So we had got this half door done to disallow kids from rushing to the street. This half door was around 3 feet tall. Neha & Nidhi used to watch the kids playing on the street by standing near the half door. Nidhi would stand on her toes and was tall enough to see beyond the door. Neha devised a method to view the street. She would balance on the skirting and lean against the door. She used to do it pretty well. Just one day she forgot to wear her something on her bottom and I clicked :-)

# Snap 7 - A more recent snap. Nidhi applied a little more makeup.

# Snap 8 - Few months back, we went to puma store to buy veena jogging shoes. Kids hid themselves in the racks and were playing hide & seek with me while veena was picking her shoes.

Odds

There are about 7 million people in Bangalore and 2001 census said 47.5% of the population is women. Assuming the same sex ratio exists in 2007 as well, that means 3.3 million of the population is women. Now what is the portion of this size that has kids under 5?

If you divide the 3.3 mn roughly into three pieces - single, young mothers & older women, we are talking about a million young mothers (sounds huge but let us go with that assumption).

Now stats say that chances of fraternal twins is 12 out of 1000 births. Since fraternal twins are dizygotic, the kids can be of any of the three combinations with equal chance (boy-boy, boy-girl & girl-girl). Not related to this discussion but FYI - identical twins are rarer than fraternal twins - 4 out of 1000.

So the chances of two girl fraternal twins is 4 out of 1000. And Bangalore should have about 4000 female fraternal twin siblings.

Now what are the chances that two such pairs sit on adjacent tables in a SLV restaurant on a Saturday evening?

Very Low odds I suppose cos this had never happened in the last 3.5 years. Also there were about 8 other empty tables in the restaurant at that time to consider if you really want to pin those chances very low.

While enjoying rava idlis & chaat at SLV, JP Nagar (if you are a food freak like me you should visit that place :-)) We were rather refreshed to meet a family similar to ours. Husband, Wife & Twin girls. The girls are in their 4th year too and about a couple of months elder to neha & nidhi. We stared at their kids and vice versa followed by little nods with partners to confirm and then we started talking - "are they twins, how old, names, how tough is it to manage..."

That pair is named ananya & amulya and looked very similar initially. A second look and closer observation of their features indicated that they are very different in fact (as different looks wise as neha & nidhi). Even in that pair, the second one seemed more dominant physically. Amulya was donning nidhi's role in that family.