Many people commented that I
ought to stick to subjects the girls are familiar with. They have a point, and
I often do. But the same people also regretted
the taboos. They forget that the unfamiliar is always threatening and that if
one remains mired in the familiar, one loses the ability to tolerate anything
else. Witness Pakistan.
Education should teach the
mind to stretch and extend knowledge to where experience cannot reach, like
those extendable poles with which you reach remote corners of your ceiling to
sweep away the cobwebs. You do not need to visit China to know that a sampan is
a traditional Chinese boat, or to visit the moon and see traces of the lunar
landing to know that man has been there (our old cook, for those who remember
Gulzar used to say years ago that that was all American propaganda.) So why restrict your children or your students
to the familiar?
But above all I use rhymes
and other things that may or may not be rooted in the sub-continent because
these girls are so grounded in the mundane, so stuck in the wretched and the threatening
that they have no opportunity, not a single one, of being in touch with the
absurd, neither in reality, nor in Urdu literature.
Yes Alice is rooted in an
English Wonderland, not in the sub-continent, but the sub-continent is no less
wondrous. Why, instead of those tragic women forever hanging over stoves and being
driven to tears because they cannot be married, or because they are and possess
mothers-in-law can we not have Aisha, a heroine on PTV who jumps down a mouse hole and
eats first a gulab jamun and then drinks a flask of lassi and finds herself in
Toba Tek Singh where she meets an inebriated mouse (he had kanji or daru, not
beer)...why not?
