Being Six

I was six years old. Yes, six. A lot of this story has much to do with my age which is six.

I hated school. I had just started it, by the way. But I knew I was going to hate it. Forever.

Every morning a big green bus would come for me. I would be at the bus stand with my mother and would burst into tears just looking at it. I didn’t really know what I hated more–the school or the school bus.

I would get into the noisy bus and be squashed into a seat with two other children dressed identically in blue—like me. I didn’t really like them.

I would swallow my tears and be brave. Some days I wouldn’t bother and would cry unselfconsciously. Howling at the top of my lungs would be a better description.

This particular day I decided to follow the latter course. The usual scene followed. The other two identically dressed children would cover their ears. And then the conductor would come and talk to me. First, he would console me, be nice to me. And then when his patience ran out, he would raise his voice and ask me to shut up.

A nice woman traveled in the bus. She was a teacher and a friend of my mother’s. When I entered the bus after yet another dreadful day at school, she would smile at me. I liked her smile. Her name was Evelyn.

This particular morning, she was not sitting very far from where I was sitting .And in a few minutes she enquired what chaos was all about. I guess someone told her.

She came up to my seat. She sent the identically dressed blue clones to her seat and then smiled at me.

“How are you doing today?” she asked. I didn’t oblige and bawled away, oblivious. She tried for a while and I started to talk a bit. And I stopped crying.

I was hiccuping tremendously by now and explaining to her that I hated my school and also my mother (her so-called friend) for sending me there. She agreed and said that school was a bad place to go to.

“How old are you?” she asked me. “Four,” I replied promptly.

I was six years old, mind you. But I told her that I was four. I had suddenly felt very embarrassed about crying in front of everyone. Six year olds didn’t cry. It was shameful! Four year olds were allowed to cry.

And so I told her that I was four.

I sat in silence after that. She continued talking to me. But I hardly heard what she was saying. I was consumed with guilt. Tremendous guilt.

Did she know I was lying? Sure, I was small made and everyone usually found it hard to believe I was six anyway. But did she know? My mother may have told her that I was a big girl. A big six year old girl. Did Evelyn aunty know my deep, dark dreadful secret?

For the first time in my life, I was glad to see the school approaching through the window. I smiled and said goodbye. And rushed into the school, relieved.

All day I thought of nothing else. Four years old. Would she believe me? How would I go back home in the same bus? What if she called up my mother to find out if I was really four years old? Would she tell that dreadful conductor? Maybe she would even tell the girls who sat with me. I imagined them laughing at me. “She thinks she’s four years old. She’s actually six!” I imagined Blue Girl One saying. “Six year olds don’t cry!” I imagined Blue Girl Two saying.

The day passed by too fast. And it was time to step into the bus again.

I mustered all my courage and raced into the bus not looking at the place where Evelyn sat. She was there all right. I could see her yellow sari from the corner of my eye. The job was done!

If I didn’t make eye contact, I wouldn’t have to converse with her again.

The next day, I did the same thing. I didn’t look at the place where she sat. In fact, I didn’t look there throughout the bus journey just in case she was turning around looking for me. I almost cried in relief when I reached my bus stop.

I did the same thing the next day. And the next. And then the next.

Crying in the bus was strictly out of the question. I didn’t want to attract attention to myself!

Months passed. One day I somehow mustered up the courage to look at the seat where she sat—just a peek.

I didn’t see her.

This time I peeled my eyes to look for her, not only around her seat but all around the bus in case she was sitting somewhere else. I couldn’t find her.

That evening I asked my mother why Evelyn Aunty hadn’t come in the bus. Was she sick?

Oh no, my mother explained. Her husband had been transferred two weeks ago and she had gone with him.

“Where?” I asked. “To Leh,” my mother said. Was that far away? Yes, very far. Was she coming back? No, she wasn’t.

The next day I howled in the bus as loudly as I could, much to the amazement of a very bewildered conductor and to the annoyance of the Blue Clones.

-Vandana Sebastian

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The Dreamy Dryad

The distant star gleams,

On a blushing pink sky;

The world seems drowned,

In the lark’s melodious cry.

The trees are ablossom,

With dimpled dainty flowers.

The Dreamy Dryad dreams,

With her eyes gazing afar.

Little Dreams slowly evolve,

From the swirls of the soul.

One by one they emerge,

Crowning the day in gold.

The moon is all aglimmer,

As the sun slowly sets away.

The sky is a hollow of dreams,

Churned by airy hands for the next day.

The fairies flock the rippling pool,

To drink to their heart’s content.

The elixir of life-so sweet so eternal,

Flowing as dreams all along dreamt!

The horizon is drenched,

In velvet purple and gold.

The wind god plays the breeze

Singing tales of new and old!

The Dreamy Dryad beholds with

Her spirit drunk in bliss

As with a sudden sweeping blow,

The sky with stars is kissed.

Magic brewed in the sky, in the land,

An orison is played by nature’s hand.

The Dreamy Dryad whispered along in pray,

“God be blessed, blessed be man!”

-Sandhya Ramachandran

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The Raconteur

I think I’ll start off by telling you a story. Once upon a time, there was a person who lived in a glass house in the middle of the sea. One day, this person decided to burn all the bridges leading up to the glass house and it was warm and lovely in the glass house because of all the flames from all the fires surrounding it and though they were all creeping in to engulf the glass house, the warmth of the fires was rather nice and everyone lived happily ever after.
When you are a child, every story you ever hear happened once upon a time and no matter what happens, no matter how impossible the odds are, at the end, everyone always lives happily ever after.
The first time I encountered a narrative in which everyone didn’t live happily ever after was when I was eight. The protagonist, who was a good man, strove against impossible odds to escape from the prison he had been imprisoned in for his participation in the freedom struggle – but was eventually captured and hanged.
I didn’t understand this ending – mostly because I’d grown up on a staple diet of stories where good things happened to good people and bad things happened to bad people and that was that. It’s probably wrong to bring up children on those stories – because they grow up and realize that the world is nothing like that and are absolutely flummoxed. And rather disillusioned – and sometimes, the confusion and the disillusionment never really leaves.
I mean, the stories that we are told often shape us in ways that we may never really fully understand. They often lend us the lenses through which we see the world – they tell us which role to place ourselves in the narrative of our lives. If the narratives we’ve been told are nothing like the narrative we live in, it’s pretty impossible to reconcile the ensuing conflict.
When you don’t know what to believe in any more, when you’ve lost any moorings of faith that allowed you to interpret the world around you, when the absurdity of the universe in general and your life in particular stares you in the face – what do you do?
When I was a kid, sometimes I’d lie in my bed and sort of play dead and think – right now, right now, someone’s giving their first piano recital, someone’s getting mugged, someone’s getting married, someone’s contemplating suicide, someone’s singing along with the muppets, someone’s blowing out the candles on their birthday cake, someone’s scuba diving, someone’s getting murdered, someone’s wishing on a shooting star, someone’s writing a song, someone’s crying themselves to sleep, someone’s reading a book that will change them forever, someone’s working towards an invention that will alter the course of humanity, someone’s flying a kite, someone’s watching their child take his/her first step, someone’s packing their bags to go on vacation, someone’s trying to count all the stars in the nightsky and so on and so forth until my head began to reel at all the possible somethings that all the possible someones were doing all over the world. Then, it seemed so magical to be part of this expansive scheme of things – all these little things working towards some greater purpose – to a grand narrative. There I was, on my bed, hugging my stuffed rabbit and pondering over these things – contributing in some tiny yet significant way to the running of the universe.
Then, I grew up and learned that the truth is that there is no grand narrative – there is merely the here and the now and even the here and the now are just words and the truth is that all words mean something but no word really means anything.
I would give anything to be that little kid again – to believe in that grand narrative once again – to unread all the existentialism I’ve ever read – to believe that all the confusion and misery and unhappiness that everyone is always going through will finally lead to something that’s actually worth something. I would give anything to believe again that my life and everything I am and do and say, that all of it means something, that all of it is not inconsequential.
Amrita V

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Urban Heat Island: The Hidden Truth

It is a common fact that when we go to a rural area, we find that the temperature is much lower there than what it is in an urban area. An important reason for such an occurrence is stated by the theory of Urban Heat Island, which for most part, has gone unnoticed by most of us.
According to Wikepedia, a heat island refers to any area, populated or not, which is consistently hotter than the surrounding area. With this background, they further define an urban heat island (UHI) is a metropolitan city which is significantly warmer than its surrounding rural areas. This phenomenon was first described by Luke Howard FRS in the 1810s. The temperature difference usually is larger at night than during the day, and is most apparent when winds are weak. UHI is evident during both summer and winter. The main cause of the urban heat island, as proved by the study, is modification of the land surface by urban development which uses materials which effectively retain heat. As population centers grow they tend to modify a greater and greater area of land and have a corresponding increase in average temperature.
To elaborate on the cause, one major factor is the low vegetation cover in Urban Areas and the lack of property of reflecting back the heat , of building materials such as concrete, used in the construction of buildings. Such materials have a tendency to trap and retain the heat from the Sun. This results in the temperature soaring up during the day. At night, when the surroundings are cool, the buildings then release the heat in the atmosphere. This pulls up the average temperature of an Urban Area, which seems to be hotter at night too.
Moreover, the study shows that the tall buildings within many urban areas provide multiple surfaces for the reflection and absorption of sunlight, increasing the efficiency with which urban areas are heated. This is called the “urban canyon effect”. Furthermore, the buildings block the way of the wind which bars the option of cooling by convection. Waste heat from automobiles, air conditioning, industry, and other sources also contributes to the UHI. High levels of pollution in urban areas can also increase the UHI, as many forms of pollution change the radiative properties of the atmosphere.
Thus UHI has a major impact on temperature and also uses it as a medium to exhibit itself in this atmosphere.
Other major impacts include changes in the wind pattern, development of clouds, fog, humidity, rates of precipitation. Due to upward movement of lighter winds (when heat is released back into the atmosphere at night – the air gets heated, becomes lighter and hence rises ), there’s also an increased risk of thunderstorms in such areas.

-Akhil Ramesh

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Switching From Plastics To Bio Plastics

Plastic Plastic Everywhere !!
We have been through the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Copper age, the Iron Age and the Steel age, named because of the dominance of these materials at that particular point of time. Considering the fact that the total volume of plastic production has surpassed that of steel, the last part of 20th century has been the ‘The Plastic Age’. And since then we are living in the age of plastics in which the usage of plastics has increased from around 5 million tons in 1950’s to 150 million tons at the present time. The consumption of plastics in Europe and U.S. is 60 kg and 80 kg respectively per person per year, while in India it is only 4 kg per person with a total annual consumption of 4 million tons only. Thus, India is amongst the lowest in generation of plastic waste. But that does not imply that plastic is not harmful for environment, so we have to work in reducing our plastic consumptions.
The advantages associated with plastics are that it can be moulded into complex shapes, have high chemical resistance and more or less elastic, thus having ability to be drawn into fiber or thin films. These properties have made them popular amongst the manufacturers of many durable and disposable goods as packaging material. However these materials have excessive molecular size of up to 1, 50,000 Da, due to which they are extremely resistance to biodegradation and persistence in the soil environment for long time and thus plastics have proved to be an aesthetic nuisance rather than a hazard. Most of the plastic will not decompose and their improper disposal is a source of environmental pollution, potentially harming our ecosystem.

-Akhil Ramesh
(akhilrameshv@gmail.com)

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Retail: The Big And The Small

Gone are those days when the Indian middle class was intimidated by supermarkets, departmental stores and mega marts. Supermarkets are no longer stereotyped as the ‘big, expensive stores’ in malls and posh areas where the rich shop, strutting around with their baskets and trolleys and where one cannot complain about the stones in the grain or negotiate the price. The common man now confidently walks into his nearest Big Apple, Reliance Fresh, Subhiksha, Food Bazaar etc. (an endless list…) for his daily grocery shopping, makes sure he avails every discount offer and walks out feeling happy and content. The emergence of the organized retail sector in India and its encroachment on the so-called prerogative of the local ‘kiranas’ has contributed greatly to the spurt in the rate of growth of the Indian retail sector.
 Organized retail is expected to form 10 per cent of total retailing by the end of this decade. Hypermarket is emerging as the most favorable format for the time being in India, which is getting a further push with the coming of multinationals. The question to be asked is whether this boom is necessarily a good thing. To answer this particular question, we must analyze the repercussions of the coming of organized retail in the form of supermarkets and hypermarkets.
Small traders and local banias definitely seem to be losing out on their business. The Indian customer, who earlier shared a one-to-one relationship with the local grocer and went from store to store for different items, now prefers the more organized form of shopping along with the convenience of finding everything under the same roof. The 40 million people employed in the unorganized retail sector certainly face a threat, particularly the illiterate and the old who cannot expect to find jobs in the ‘modern’ retail stores. Nevetheless, many ‘kiranas’ continue to survive as they retain tradition of credit.
The supply chain, on the other hand, seems to be undergoing a reformation under the present scenario. Poor farmers who have been deceived and cheated by middlemen for decades are now looking at interactions directly with big companies. Their economies of scale enable the companies to provide better facilities in terms of transportation and storage and the elimination of intermediaries ensures higher prices being paid to the farmers. The road ahead seems exciting enough with almost every big name in business announcing a retail venture.
The issue, however, still remains an open-ended one. Will the organized sector generate gains enough to compensate those who are losing out is a question which will be answered only in the times to come.
Vatsala Tibrewala

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Our Life Our World

The world is not fair,
One has to work hard even to inhale the air.
Life is not always easy,
It is in fact fast paced and busy.
One has no time to rest and love
To live life as one must.
Necessities have become a daily dose,
Standing and working all day on your toes.
The fast paced life and always moving has dragged all along,
But I wish the simplicity of the past to come back and undo the wrong.
So much has changed,
Lifestyles are ranged.
With the unknown future and forgotten past,
The present is shaking and wavering at last.
I Wish time would turn back,
I wish the glory of past comes back,
Where simplicity still lingers in air
And happiness is there to share.
The A world where there is friendship and brotherhood
And where love and peace stood;
Where borders and boundaries of land and heart are diminished,
Where anger and dishonesty are finished.
I know this sounds like a dream,
Yet it is a thought from my minds passionate stream
I know it is an illusion,
But it’s far better than harsh world and so called nuclear fusion.
Times are changing further,
We are slowly and gradually losing our world our mother.
With time all will be lost,
Our world our life our love is the cost.
Hope and hard work is all we have got
To save our world and be a happy lot …….
Aarshi Dua

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