Meeting an Old Enemy – Add Gel

I met an old enemy recently. One I’d forgotten about. One buried deep in my memories.

A friend of mine made me meet the enemy on a random afternoon. Even after all these years, there was no mistaking it. The familiar off-white cap, the metal clip. The refill inside with the earwax like gel above the ink.

There was no doubt. This was Add Gel. 

For many years, Add Gel was the bane of my existence. I grabbed the pen like Nobokov and sighed. ‘Ah! Add Gel, the curse of my life, nightmare of my childhood. My joy, my sorrow. My yay!, my woe’.

For nearly everybody from my generation, Add Gel was a source of constant tension. When I see my friends suffer from anxiety, I have no doubt that Add Gel was an early contributor to their anxiety issues.

Before Add Gel arrived, the world of stationery for students was divided into two groups- Pencils and Pens. It was a black and white world. Or should I say, a Permanent Black and Royal Blue world.

Pencils were the first writing tools we were trusted with. They were supposedly easy to write with, but had a tendency of breaking at the tip. You had to carry a sharpener and eraser along. The marquee pencil of the era was Natraj 621 Pencil. For girls, there was the Apsara Flora – the exact same pencil but with pink flowers on white, so girls could keep in touch with their feminine side.

It is not a coincidence that Natraj chose maroon and black stripes – the Nazi colours – for their pencil. For I have seen the innocent pencil put to extremely cruel uses. I have had the sharp edges of the pencil squeezed between my fingers and twisted by cruel teachers. I once saw a classmate place a sharp pencil on the bench when someone was about to sit. Our white uniform led to a traumatising patch of blood on the guy’s posterior – a gory, unwarranted prequel to Laaga Chunari Mein Daag. I have seen guys keep a sharpened pencil in their pant pockets. Only for the tip of the pencil to pierce their thigh like a Viking spear.

Only when we graduated to 5th standard, were we considered worthy enough to use pens. The world of pens was further divided into ink pens and ball pens.

We were told that ink pens improve our handwriting, so they were preferred. Teachers of subjects that actually mattered – like Math and Science – never bothered about the pen you used. But it was the Hindi and Social Sciences teachers who were finicky about the use of the fountain pen. I have never understood the emphasis on handwriting. At the risk of sounding pompous, I have very good handwriting and even taught Calligraphy for a while. 

The story of how I stopped teaching Calligraphy is an interesting one. I was teaching the kids in my workshop about strokes and obliques, when an old man tottered into the workshop.

‘What is going on?’

‘Sir, Calligraphy. Ahem…like the art of beautiful writing’. 

In classic Old City Hyderbadi style, he asked-

‘Yeh seekhe toh kya hota?’

And I had no answer. Actually, kya hota? Kuchh bhi nahi hota! 

That incident made me realise how useless of a skill, how vestigial a good handwriting is. I have never come across anyone famous for their handwriting. Or someone famous who had good handwriting.

I sometimes wonder – after all those punishments and impositions – when teachers retire and sit down over drinks – do they drunkenly admit that they fucked up with their emphasis on a good handwriting? That they hadn’t imagined a world with smartphones, social media and the Internet. That nobody would actually write anything after graduating from college?

Fountain pens came with their unique set of problems. You needed to carry an ink pot to fill your pen. The pens themselves came in a few basic designs. The basic Camel/Camlin pens with a thick base. The startup MyMuse now sells them as vibrators on Instagram. There were the Chinese/Hero pens that wrote smoothly, but the nib was as fragile as Indo-China relations. The expensive ones came from Parker, peddled by Amitabh Bachchan. The proprietary refills were as difficult to find as a hit by Abhishek Bachchan. Perhaps, as a warning – the series of Parker pens was called ‘Beta’.

The ink from ink pens would leak into your pocket, your books, your bag, and eventually your soul. The earliest version of Bluetooth 1.0 was when we got Camlin ink on our teeth. You were surrounded by the smell of ink, and filling an ink pen was an experience as pleasant as trying to mount a Camel/Camlin while it’s looking for water in Rajasthan. You needed an ink filler for the process, and you better carry one along. ‘Cos if you used a syringe, you got strange looks from one and all. ‘‘Are you doing drugs? Do you know that people prick you in a dark hall with a syringe and a note ‘Welcome to the world of AIDS”?

Ball pens were convenient, but were not given respect in society. Your ball pen of choice was either the arranged marriage pen –  Reynolds 045 Fine Carbure. Then there was the dependable Cello Gripper. And the trauma inducing Linc Starline – in which the ink stuck to anything it found like a Symbiote. 

Ball pens were easy to hold and carry. And since this was the 90s, the usage of plastic wasn’t frowned upon. Greta Thunberg’s parents were in school, and with the liberalisation of the economy in 1991, people were simply happy to be surrounded by colourful plastic in pens, tiffin boxes, and cricket bats. For all practical purposes, ball pens were the preferred pens. When not under the watchful eyes of our teachers, we all chose ball pens over fountain pens.

Exploiting this dichotomy in pens, entered the villain in the market – Add Gel 

Gel pens provided a unique opportunity to satisfy both the parties. You didn’t need to fill ink into the pen, and yet the writing looked like a fountain pen’s. You needn’t look like the blue-tongued genie in Arabian Nights, and still develop a good handwriting and go on to become the next Boutros Boutros-Ghali. 

There was one issue, though. Add Gel pens cost 25 rupees. And even if you managed to get hold of one, the refill itself cost 15 Rupees. 

15 Rupees! Kids of today won’t be able to fully grasp the value of 15 rupees in the 90s. Sometimes, the entire amount of pocket money given was 15 rupees. The price of a film ticket was 15 rupees. Suhaagan ka sar ka taaj was 15 rupees. Har student ka khwab was 15 rupees. Pen might be mightier than sword, but using an Add Gel was as expensive as a sword back in the day. 

I have had friends who cut the refill and used the remaining gel as hair gel. And others who sucked on the gel, making them look like failed characters in an X-Men audition. 

But it wasn’t just the price of the pen and refill. Add Gel had another cruel trick up its sleeve. The refill was notorious for running out with astonishing speed. Sit down to write an exam, and the ink would run out before you could say ‘Atal Bihari Vajpayee’. On a good week, an Add Gel refill would last you a week. But if the punishment meted out to you was to write ‘I will not talk in class’ a 1000 times, the refill would run out in two days. 

An Add Gel refill was enough for exactly ONE social studies exam. Or for writing ONE love letter (including all the practice sessions and iterations to the final letter). Which meant that you couldn’t use an Add Gel for all the extra-curricular activities required of a pen. Like drawing goggles on Gandhi in the history text book. Or playing book cricket. Or to sign your name a hundred times on the back of the notebook. Because along with a good handwriting, you needed a solid signature to become the next Elon Musk. 

Which meant that you were caught up in the pocket money debt trap. You first bought the Add Gel, and then began saving up for the refill when it ran out. Like owners of electric vehicles who go through Range Anxiety, you went through a Refill Anxiety. But with the smooth writing and convenience, you were hooked to the evil pen. In a few weeks, you were like a meth addict – desperately looking for your next hit at the stationery shop. 

*

Like Narasimha tearing open the stomach of Hiranyakashyap, I removed the wrapper. How had the pen aged? How did it survive the onslaught of the Internet, iPads, and magic pencils? 

The wrapper advertised that the pen still came in four colours – red, blue, black and green. There was some bullshit about Japanese technology, along with the tagline ‘World’s Finest Gel Pen’. 

‘World’s’? Was this a global phenomenon? Were kids around the world tortured by this pen? Was this Japan’s revenge for Hiroshima Nagasaki?

The price was hiked to 50 rupees, which probably made sense. At least the brand had survived two decades. I couldn’t say the same for some of my favourite childhood brands – BSA SLR, Nutrine, and Ravalgaon. In a way, I was happy that the pen had survived. 

It still wrote smoothly. I looked at the pen. Why did I harbour such strong feelings towards an inanimate pen from 20 years ago? Was I a psychopath? 

Add Gel wasn’t trying to harm me. It was a company selling their product at a mentioned price in a newly found capitalistic economy. So why was I so angry about it? Perhaps my anger towards the brand was unjustified.

And then, I saw the bottom of the packaging. And found a quote that said ‘Quality First. Cost Second’. Not only was the cocky quote put on prominent display, they had trademarked the quote too! 

This was a cocky company that prided itself on selling premium products to children who were struggling with their pocket money. 

I decided to use the pen till the refill ran out. And when it’s done, I’ll fling the plastic body as far my eyes can go. Or fling it at the annoying pigeon that does vocal exercises outside my balcony, proving that pen is indeed mightier than sword. I will carry the pen to the plastic recycling unit and watch it get crushed to fine dust. 

I am not a psychopath, after all. It’s an evil pen. 

Fuck you, Add Gel! 

***

“Aye, Shoo! Why are you talking?”

As a student in school, I was the Class Asshole.

The perennial backbencher, I would sleep, talk, or day dream. If it was Maths class, I was an ostrich, trying to bury my head between the others in class. If it was English, I was a meerkat, peering out of my hole, making some noise, grabbing attention. For the other subjects, I generally switched between ostrich, meerkat, and hippopotamus.

In our school, talking was a crime. I swear. Students would get report cards sent home with the remark – “He talks a lot” or “His marks will improve if he reduces his talking”. Once, my friend got a remark saying he was getting spoilt because he was talking to me.

The whole thing pissed me off. I mean, what is the big deal about talking?

But then, that was our school. Where talking was among many other grave crimes – entering another room, whistling, singing a film song, and reading a book.

Of all these, it was this big deal about talking that pissed me off the most. I mean, children are children. They will talk. And when the teachers would ask me ‘What do you have to talk so much about?’, I would feel like screaming, ‘I’m not a goddamn 40 year old, things still surprise me.’

There are a million things that a kid would want to talk about. How do you explain to him that Pythagoras’ 2500 year old theorem is more important than the hot girl in class? How are Harappan excavations ever going to be more important than his favourite cricketer – his personal hero?

So I kept on talking, and got thrashed like a carpet seller thrashes his carpets to clean them. I have had sticks broken on me, been pinched, slapped, boxed, and once, even been given a langdi by the hostel warden.

The sad part is, most people from my school still think greatly about the way we were brought up.

The sadder part is, I never really stopped talking.

The saddest part is, the teachers never got it, and went on thrashing.

**********************************

Now, life has this way of screwing you over in such a beautiful way that you can’t help smiling.

After all these years, after all these jobs, I teach school children in Kurnool. Classes 5 to 8.

And I have to deal with the exact, same issues that I faced when I was a student.

I never shout, or raise my hand. So I am the cool teacher.

I smile, I crack jokes, I encourage the silent students to speak, and spend half an hour before every class, thinking of the most interesting way to teach that particular concept. Through stories, quizzes, videos, or games. Also, every now and then, I give them two minutes to discuss, so that they can blurt out that thing that’s on top of their minds, and on the tips of their tongues.

And in spite of all this, I find that some of the kids aren’t interested. Some of them are talking to the person next to them, others are looking out of the window. Some are staring at me blankly, like the kid from Sixth Sense who sees dead people.

It drives me nuts. I am tempted to scream.

But it just needs a second to take me back to my own school days, and think about what I would have done. And I am calm as the Buddha all over again.

It has been five months now, and I can safely say that the students trust me a little now. They know I am never going to hit or shout at them, and this means they trust me a little bit. Over these months, there are two important things I have learnt.

1. Training and Sensitisation: In most schools, teachers are selected on the basis of their academic qualifications. But like Kapil Dev was miserable as the Indian coach, a great student is never going to guarantee a great teacher.

Even after securing the job, the teacher is never trained. Which means that in the first few years, there is some josh to be a good teacher. But without any sensitisation, after a point, the kids seem like ten year old tadpoles who can be made to toe the line by raising your voice. The ones that don’t, can be tamed by delivering a nice, tight slap. After a point, they stop seeming like children – with individual needs and concerns, and they seem more like a herd of sheep.

2. Assholes make better teachers: Most of the teachers in schools are the studious sort. The ones who never broke a rule, never spoke out of turn, and turned in shiny report cards at the end of every test.

How will these people ever know what it means to have something to say in class while the teacher is talking? How will they ever realise that for the kid, there are more things going on in the mind than angles and triangles? These teachers have lived such a life of discipline that they will never be able to empathise with the ones who are not reflections of their own ten year old selves. And that’s why, assholes make better teachers.

***********************************

So now, when a kid talks in class, I don’t say, “Aye, shoo! Why are you talking?”

I know why the kid is talking.

I try to beat the thought in his head, by putting in a more interesting one. And if I fail, it’s ok. I understand.

Because, as a student in school, I was the Class Asshole.

HOW CIVICS BECAME HISTORY

Back in school, every subject would have its own set of ardent followers. Students who loved the subject, did the home work, and went about their roles as students dutifully.

Maths and Science was lapped up by the brilliant, the rankers – the ‘Ramu is a Good Boy’ prototypes who studied well and made parents proud and neighbours envious. The arty-farty group of the class would read English and languages. The geeks in class would love Computer Science.

Amidst all this, if there was one subject that no one truly gave a fuck about, it was Social Science.

If all the subjects were houses in Hogwarts, Social Sciences would be the Hufflepuff among them. There, but unnoticeable.

I think it also had a lot to do with the teachers who taught Social Studies. Maths teachers were strict, English teachers were sweet. Science teachers were Dr. Jekyll at times and Mr. Hyde at others. Social Studies teachers had nothing distinct about them. They would walk into class, do their work, and step out, all the while carrying an air of detached enlightenment.

And that’s really sad. Because Social Studies could easily be the most interesting subject taught at school. The sheer range that could be brought into it is vast, and could sensitise children to so many ideas at an early age.

But then, there is the NCERT. The National Council for Educational Research and Training, the body in charge of publishing stunningly boring books that reduce the most exciting years of a country’s history into dreary, brown pages of text, accompanied by a barely visible, grainy image.

It didn’t help, either, that the subject in itself was fragmented into three bits – each with their own set of weird teachers.

HISTORY:

If one were to make a history text book, there couldn’t be a better country than India to do it on. Home to the oldest inhabited city in the world, India has been the home to many civilisations, trades, wars, kings, queens, and their tombs.

There were gory wars, triumphant monuments, philosophical inscriptions, and so much more. The people friendly measures by Akbar, the brave wars by Shivaji, and the brutality of Alauddin Khilji could have been the stuff of exciting novels. Instead, they were reduced to mere pages of a book. Taught by a teacher who seemed to walking in her sleep and talking in her sleep.

In the later years, there were the World Wars, and India’s Nationalist movement. Again, apart from glorification of a few of our leaders, there wasn’t much context to put the facts into. No wonder then that these facts were merely reduced to something you mugged up for the exam.

GEOGRAPHY:

Now, with geography, we don’t have much choice. I mean, there is only one earth, and there are seven continents, and some 30 odd states in our country.

Working within these barriers, the NCERT came out with another outstandingly mind-numbing book. If we want to avoid alien invasion, all we need to do is release a Class 6 Geography Text Book into outer space. If an alien ship comes across the book, they’ll realise there is no point in attacking this planet.

Surprisingly, I remember only two words from all the Geography I learnt at school – Black Soil and Alluvial Soil. I can’t remember anything else that I learnt in Geography. Also, the fact that we had a teacher who would often mistake us for yaks and bring out his cane and whack the hell out of us, didn’t help my learning process.

CIVICS:

In my opinion the most important of all the three subjects, but it was given the least importance in our curriculum.

The amount of footage that Civics got was laughable. 10 marks out of 100, and 4 out of 25 in Unit Tests.

Seriously, who is going to study for a subject that counts for 10 marks at the end of the year?

Even if you skipped all the classes, did none of the assignments, didn’t attend any Unit Tests, and knew absolutely zilch about the subject, what do you lose? 10 marks. Big Fucking Deal.

I felt sorry for the Civics teachers sometimes. I always imagined that the Physics and Maths teachers must be sniggering at the Civics teachers behind their backs.

So, at the end of it, Social Studies became a subject to display your mugging skills. How much raw data you could swallow, and then how much of it you could spew on the paper. There was no analytical skills involved, no new skills taught, no real world connections to make. Nothing.

Zilch. Shunya. Nil.

Which is not to say that we fared badly at these subjects. Oh no, sir. We mugged up, stuffing ourselves with information of all sorts. And we puked it out magnificently, out surpassing each other, adding another 90 marks to our Final Percentage – that cruel determinant of everything our lives would be after that.

*******

Now, when I look at myself, and others from my generation, I realise how wrong it all was.

I don’t speak in Sankrit these days. I don’t count more than three digit numbers. I know nothing of the Periodic Table and show my little finger and leave the room when Science is being talked about. I do use English though, for my writing.

We have distorted notions of history, know practically nothing about other states and cultures, leave alone other countries and continents. We know very little about the electoral system, or what our roles as citizens are, and how we could make use of civic resources available to us.

If only Social Studies was taught better, it would have made my life so much richer.

Spare the rod, save a child

A few five year olds are waiting for their class to begin. They are chanting the class prayer before the period starts, and the teacher is lighting an agarbathi for the alter. Suddenly, the teacher notices that one of the kids in the first row opens one eye to look around. Immediately, the agarbathi is poked into his cheek. The child is scarred for life and years later, no one tells believes him when he says that it is actually a small dimple!

Like most of my generation, getting punished was a part and parcel of education. More so in my case as I studied in a spiritual school. Very early in life, we were taught about good and bad. About rewards in heaven and punishments in hell.

So when there is a lot of debate on the recent suicide committed by a child at a school in Kolkata, I was talking about it with people around me. My sister used to go to a tuition master and he was popular among parents because he used to hit his students. He used to go to Puri once in a while so he could a special variety of thin canes that were very effective. The parents would ask the teacher to resort to force if the student was lagging.

It worked for us. We listened to what the teacher had to say, did our homework in time. We thought thrice before breaking a rule, and had immense respect (and fear) for our teachers.

Look at the other extreme of the spectrum – the system of education in other countries, like the US. There, the teacher cannot touch the students. The standard of education is much lower than the standard in India. The children are worse behaved, and there have been numerous instances when children carry guns to school and begin shooting people.

Are we better off? Is it because we were scared of our teachers and this fear helped us in not committing mistakes? Most of the elders I have spoken to feel that this is indeed the case. One teacher also said that it is easy for us to sit and discuss morality in our homes, but a teacher who has to control a set of 35 young imps running about here and there, cannot do it by cajoling and coaxing.

However, there is a thin line between what is acceptable and what is ethical. Just because it is common does not mean that it is right.

Twisting a child’s ears, or rapping him on the knuckle might seem alright once in a while. But for a child who is not good at studies, it happens everyday, in every period. Not only is his self-esteem at its lowest because of the incessant pressure put on him by his parents, teachers, and peers, the beating adds to his complex.

And we are talking about children who are about ten years old. An age where academic proficiency does not mean success in life, and failure does not mean a child is doomed. Most of the time, the children who are hit are weak in studies. They are the silent, introvert children who are also bullied in class. The stronger, more popular children think that since the teachers are hitting them, it must be alright for them to do so too. The child gets drawn into a shell, and before he has even matured, he has become a shy, reserved young man.

Also, we have grown up in cities and towns, where we had to go to school no matter how strict the teacher was. But in rural areas, if the teacher hits the students too much, the child drops out of school. Is it really the way this is to be done?

If we think about our school days, each of us will remember this one teacher who was the most loved among the students. She was kind (and mostly taught English), she never hit anyone, and yet everyone listened to her when she spoke. We had one teacher like that. Her name was Loka mam.

Loka mam was my first English teacher. She never shouted at anyone, leave alone hitting. She was kind, always smiling, and always spent more time with the weaker children, rather than boost the ego of the children good at studies. If a child wasnt great at studies, but had a good handwriting, she would point it out to the entire class. She had a large repertoire of stories, and in free classes, we would ask her to tell us those stories.

She taught me in class 1, and then again in class 5. By then, I had developed a reputation of being a pest. But I was good at English and was developing an interest in the subject. Loka mam did encourage me in class. She introduced me to crosswords, and suggested books I could read during holidays. But she never tolerated my indiscipline. I remember one incident when I was caught in a huge fiasco and her class was going on when I was called to the Principal’s room. After her class, she came to ask what had happened. When I told her, she just looked at me, and I could see her disappointment. Since then, it was the look on her face that made me feel guilty. I made it a point to behave in her class, and generally avoided getting into trouble when she was around.

I have seen many teachers since and none of them, no matter how strict they were, never seemed to have as much control over the class as her. I sometimes think what was it that made all of us listen to her. We were never scared of her, she seemed incapable of hitting anyone. Why then did we behave? Why was English our favourite subject?

It was because with her, we saw that she wanted to teach us. She loved talking to each and every student, she wanted each and every child to do well. Children can be called immature, but even the most heartless child would not want to trouble such a person.

So do we really need caning?