The University Entrance Quagmire

 The University Entrance Quagmire

How does one negotiate this quagmire? There is so much muck thrown in there, of different ilk, that most parents struggle to traverse it.

In the days of a previous life when I taught Secondary school, the Careers Department would interview each child and try to help them through the maze. The end of the school year, with exams approaching, and teachers teaching less furiously, I would have time to spare. Especially as the A and O level exams finished early in the year. 

Students would come up to my table and talk to me. J was one of them. She was a lovely child in a group where most of the students were out to create as much disruption as they could. I asked her what she wanted to do after she left school. 

'I'm going to be a doctor,' she said without hesitation.

Mmm. I was trying to break it gently. 'Will you get the grades needed?' I asked, J was an average student, and she would get three or four O levels, but she would not get A and B grades. She had the kind of personality, which would make a great G P. Kind, considerate, caring. In my mind I wished her well. But -

She must have read my mind, I thought when she added. 

'I'll get a place at Barts. 

'My brother qualified from there. He is working in Canada now, but he'll come back to make sure I get a place.'

I left the job that year and a few years later I met some old students at the hair dresser's. So I asked about their year-group. J, apparently, was now two years into her medical course at Barts. And I thought this happened only in India!

Later I came across teachers in fee-paying schools who had graduated from Oxford or Cambridge, and easily got their charges into their old colleges. As for predicted grades, I tend to take them with a large pinch of salt. If the teachers like you, your predicted grades (they genuinely believe they are being impartial) tend to be good. If you are untidy, unruly and uncouth, you got damned. So, I'm glad Universities will now look at actual exam passes. 

No one doubts that the system is unfair and complicated. However, it is good to know that the marsh is being dragged and some of the muck cleared.

Kerala Marriages -- 2020 Style.

 I came across photos of two marriages in Kerala, from two weeks ago. Since then I cannot decide whether to laugh or to cry.

The bride was drowning in gold necklaces. Her wrists were not showing in the photo but she had an inch-wide band of gold on her upper arm. She was a pretty girl, about twenty years from the look of her, and she was almost tilting under the weight. 

I looked at the pictures of the shamiana (the tent where the ceremony is performed). On one end the bride and groom were placed on a raised dais -- no escape. She was gaudily attired in bright red and held a bouquet of large red roses in her hands, compounding the image of a sacrificial offering. Did this level of gaudiness and excess come recently, or was it a gradual descent into opulence displayed and waste sanctified? In a country where so many do not have enough to eat or survive? Especially today, with Covid restricting movement, so many families who live on daily wages have no income at all.

I looked at the decor in what appeared to be a large hall, a venue probably dedicated to weddings. The walls were pasted with flowers and red cut-outs. There was something like a half-circle of a frame behind the couple who were on show, made of coloured cloth and wire and tinsel. The whole thing looked silly and laughable.

In my youth marriages of all communities were quite sparing in time and cost. I used to quip that it was a quick approval of the elders for a couple to copulate and live together. 

I got married on a September day in 1957. Nair weddings take place in the night and I remember the tent was made of bamboo and coconut fronds. The ceremony itself took about ten minutes. Garlands in front of the sacred lamps while the swami chanted, three times round the lamps holding hands. Now you are single, now you are not, off you go, The event took place in our front yard and the women crowded round the windows to watch. Dinner after, on plantain leaves, seated on grass mats on the floor.

My trousseau consisted of eight cotton saris and one wedding sari. The wedding sari was a white Benares silk with a gold motif. It became off-white over the years and the gold dimmed, a lot like my marriage, I used to think. Jewelry was sparse and barely noticeable. Looking back, what was remarkable was how quickly the life-changing event was accomplished.

A new fashion is for rich families to schedule weddings in Colombo,while Sri- Lankans come to Chennai to get married. All very strange and inexplicable.

Now, if only the money spent on these public spectacles was distributed to the very poor, for their education, for their food and their general survival. I hope it will happen.  Perhaps the government could get a law passed capping the wedding extravagances.

Euphoria for U S

Euphoria for U S

 I am so full U S election-related thoughts , I am uncertain where to begin:

I am concerned that the Trumpet is planning rallies -- his favourite modus. Hope the Proud Boys and the White Supremacists will not think this is a call to arms. If Trumpet incites,even by a hint...

When Biden started winning I kept hoping that he would consider the 'Bad Cop' problem in the U S immediately. I am relieved to notice it is one of his four immediate targets. Bad cops, of course, have to be managed by the local precinct heads. Why are they staying schtum about this? Don't they care about what is happening on their patch?  The 'shoot first and look afterwards' practice seems to be common practice in some Southern states. How many black men and women have to die before the government takes responsibility and punishes the cops and the precincts? I am glad Biden and Harris have flagged this one up. A strategy is needed to stop cops using blacks for target practice, before the event rather than after.

I am delighted that America will now come back into the comity of nations, return to the W H O, re-sign up to the Paris climate agreement . Climate change must be the most serious threat to our world, and we are painfully slow to react to it. We are sleep-walking into a global calamity. Individuals can do much -- take their cars out less, use paper bags instead of plastic,plant tress... Countries can invest in green energy, in retraining for this , in fulfilling the promises they make over white wine and roast meat in the climate conferences. Thunberg is correct to call it hypocrisy.

What is our own blond horror going to do about this? When are we going to stop worshiping fossil fuel? Can we believe anything Boris and his small coterie of Tories say?

A pinch of honesty from all concerned would be a beginning.