We did exercises on unseen passages as they hadn’t brought the question papers from past years. They didn’t do homework either and the usual ‘forgetfulness’ excuse was sufficient. Both of them were wearing their school uniforms. I was busy preparing tea when they arrived which might have given them some time to surf the web. The elder told me the smelly socks were changed.
The passages were about Computer, Sardar Patel and Games/Sports. I carefully explained to them what input and output devices are. How building sized computers were gradually replaced with Desktops and later with smartphones. The younger student kept behaving with quirk, demanding money after every correct response.
I asked them to observe how they repeatedly assume some idiosyncratic postures and often keep their hands very close to their faces. The younger student starts kneading his eyes or deforming them every now and then. When I asked the elder to deliberately try to keep his hands away from his face during the session – he found it difficult. He’s concerned with his appearance, acne etc.
The younger student brandishes the steel bangle like it’s a weapon. Then he exaggerates its price. The elder snatches it away from him. There’s no sufficient reason for these quirks. There never was. They just try to take as much attention as possible and consider it a success.
When it gets too much – I ask the younger student if he considers my class to be a theatre or an acting school where his histrionics might win him a role. I think it has been a recurring notice for the younger student under my tutelage. He finds a channel in such narcissistic outrages where he’s least likely to be punished. He has no regard for mannerisms, order or decency. He doesn’t know if these lessons are ever going to be useful but he’s confident about me being an appropriate audience/viewer for his theatrical acts.
I prepared tea, served it to my parents and had it myself. Washed bathroom. Mopped verandah floor. Grandmother informs me about the demise of a distant relative.
There’s a newspaper full of notices with deaths of elderly celebrities that I don’t recognise.
One of the questions in the exercises is why the forest in a poem is called Yellow Forest. They know it because we had read the lesson. They think that the season which is about to arrive is The Fall. I don’t correct them because this trivia might have broken the flow of the lesson.
They check time when they get bored. The younger one wants to leave. I tell him to leave. The elder persists and the younger follows. They complete an hour. Today they arrived together and left together. Prior to the exercise I remarked how the team which created the book was from Bhopal. The CBSE board books are created by the Delhi team. We discussed how board examination papers are designed by these teams.
Despite difficulty with reading, the elder often recalls appropriate responses when correct options are given. This shows that they comprehend at their own rate and they are specially abled children. Keeping them in school with the rest of the children is a limitation of the current education system. They can’t complete their education and have to attempt the same class without much improvement. I hope the elder student passed this time around.
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Are these notes existential?
I recall Notes From The Underground. I read that in college. It immediately struck a chord despite being a translated work. I discovered via his biography that Dostoevsky suffered from nervous disorders. Epileptic seizures.
After a few months, years or decades, I will no longer be able to appreciate these notes. What exactly inspired me to write them down. Why did I start publishing again and why did I stop publishing before. I think I agree with “everything is the cause of everything else”.
That offers no clarity.
Gives no immediate credits.
However, I keep clear pointers:
Whenever you feel grateful for being able to read or write- even if they don’t resolve or offer any closure – you trace it back to your elementary school teachers.
In a toxic culture- some of these don’t trace the sources of their own.
For example: I learned counting numbers or basic Arithmetic from my father but he must have learned it from someone else: I failed to observe that gratitude while being made to acknowledge it at every step.
When beginning to acknowledge publishing online I often attributed it to The Einstein Factor by Win Wenger though my parents encouraged me to practice calligraphy in my early childhood and that’s needed to mould basic motor conditioning for writing.
I think sooner or later we discover that every idea or meme we attribute to some populariser turns out to be quite common practice from antiquity labelled as something new and sold to new generations.
I invented verse form using complex words. There were no buyers for that. Subscribers for conventional notes dwindled. Space needed to publish ordinary notes started getting costlier. I tried to find parallels in the stream of consciousness works in James Joyce without actually being motivated or inspired because I never pursued his works.
Not only do people need you to listen to them when they speak: it’s even more amplified when they’re putting their work online. They need agreement alone.
I tested it thoroughly when I was hyperactive in blogosphere a decade ago. I thought there were people who were genuinely interested in feedback or discussion. I was hoping to recreate discussion forums from 2007-8. They were not. Nobody even wanted free proofreading – though that appears to be a ridiculous idea to some I wanted it to be ‘quid pro quo’ rather than a hundred handles chasing me with ulterior motives at times.
How simple is that?
I help out with your typographical errors. If not all of them then maybe one or two. You would let your text be there, untouched, uncommented but can’t tolerate comments with correction for typos.
These are menial jobs which were later replaced by AI or Grammarly. Perdue Owl etc
I tried Gemini for proofreading today.
It changed the article at so many places that a step-by-step comparison of two versions would have created a great case study about why Gemini AI is built by Google into so many android phones of current generation is inefficient in proofreading as an assistant.
Another test was asking simple questions on Astrology. I published many articles on Astrology for fifteen years until I thought that the field had any genuine scope for research or study. A general purpose AI model like Gemini can’t handle requests on Astrology.
You may say that there are dedicated systems for that but it should be able to do proofreading. It can’t.
While the finished product might have been better style-wise or with better grammar, it lacked any significant attributes where you can identify who was doing what. Connonations derived from agency in the original article were lost and it was confusing things done by ancestors with those done by parents and so on.
I was once writing 5000 words of prose on a regular basis. It was needed because there was too much to process. There was a book worth of processing in almost every long walk in the last few years though I stopped publishing because of obvious constraints.
Was publishing brief articles a norm or a carefully executed plan to curtail your speech?
It needs resources. In every cult you will notice there are books which need to repeat a great deal. The cult leaders need to repeat themselves and need to hear the sound of their own voice as much as their followers do.
The younger student arrived first. He was making this noise with the cap of his ballpoint pen. It’s red colored. As soon as he sits he starts struggling to remove the label from it. I drink a glass of water and ask if he did his homework. He didn’t. As usual. Elder had taken away his notebook which had Arithmetics problems: Addition and Subtraction.
“My name isn’t on the pen label that’s why I am removing it.”
Red ink is reserved for evaluation by teachers. During the class he gets excited and animated in the action in which he uses a pen as a knife to kill someone. Whoa!
They’re violent.
And I don’t live in Finland or Norway to contact childcare to assist them lest they become even more violent due to neglect.
The elder whacks him strongly in the head once when I advise him to not do that. He had been making his signatures in a page for a long time. I asked him why he was behaving like an officer.
Now meaning starts pouring in:
The Blabbering Prophet whose name was similar to a monk and later similar to a popular leader but who was in the dire need of childcare:
Refers to the look alike of a growing in popularity leader who was found near the collector bungalow once.
I visited the ration store near the collector bungalow today.
Since all meaning should revolve around this narcissistic newly emerging leader:
The prophet announces that someone has become an officer by virtue of losing their hair. They might have been on their heads or on their chin.
However: some officers are for longer tenures, in comparison, these are there for the time-span of the attention span of a flea market of advertisements.
What it means: if your hair grew back you would no longer be an officer.
It’s very strange if you ask me.
A car driver for an officer is an officer.
The officer for a minister is a minister.
Minister is the minister and then the king or queen by extension.
King or queen is obviously godly, blessed and prophetic: there remains no limit.
Such prophetic brainwashing is a norm here. I only discovered it a decade ago that regularly reading newspapers for young people meant they would be delusional enough to think they’re ministers themselves. Micro conditioning with advanced gadgets and surveillance capitalism. As long as they don’t really test it.
Similarly:
Meaning emerges:
A decade long struggle with hair.
Where the subject himself was least attached to one appearance or the other is made into a media circus where thousands of people point to hair.
As if there’s some bet on whether the subject would keep hair or lose them.
And fake coughing contests win.
Removing hair on the head as well as the chin is against the norm. Done that. Even that’s costly on a regular basis. It’s not just the expense of a trimmer or visiting a saloon.
Keeping the hair on a regular basis is also costly. Before you know : many cults start spreading rumors against you. You don’t qualify for one or over qualify.
The prophet continues: I ask him the definition of an Upanyasa or Novel. It is in the assignment to the elder.
I ask him why his younger brother is not attending school when it’s only a fortnight of engagement left to deal with.
The prophet tells me a tale of two lions. And one lakh rupees. Machine snakes. In the jungle.
What if you need to extend your stories like you see on the TV. A novel is similar to that. A longer story.
He shows me the fake wound created by the red pen on his hand. He quickly removes the hand before I can examine it. I request him to let me closely examine it. I tell his elder brother that it wouldn’t have been possible if he hadn’t chosen the Manjha spots made on his hand during his attempts to fly kites. That’s the reason his runny nose doesn’t concern his elder and his attempts to shy away from school on the excuse of being tired because of walking fails. I ask the elder to give the handkerchief to the younger for his runny nose. He doesn’t. He was wiping the screen of his smartphone.
He has shown a high talent for being a prophet. An actor. Shapeshifting. Kite making and flying. It has been a fortnight since he lost all interest in studies. His calligraphy is going downhill.
He pulls out the Hindi book. Wants me to read “Reedh Ki Haddi” or Backbone again. I tell him that would be boring. That’s cancelled.
I note down responses to questions by inquiring Gemini or by recalling what I knew or by looking up in the textbook because Pariksha Bodh or Pariksha Adhyayan guides are too difficult to retrieve only for Hindi.
Meanwhile, the elder abstains from checking his Instagram feed. Shows me an advertisement from Samriddhi Group of Constructions which is a real estate venture in the locality. A name. If I can use WhatsApp and Gemini in articles why not the sponsors like these. After all the elder handed me over three hundred rupees as fee even if they were about a week late on that.
There was a man on a bulldozer machine in the advertisement. It’s supposed to relate to another popular trend. Infamous trends. Disputed territory. Controversial information.
This is why these students come. For five years. To popularise those who are already popular. To make those prosperous who are already prosperous.
Rich gets richer. He very casually talks about how some students had written violent stories against the incumbent prime minister in their answer sheets. They were slogans popularised by the leader of the opposition. I can’t confirm or deny whether this happened.
But he raised his voice to convey the information to nearby people. To namesakes. To politically interested and motivated. That’s the motivation.
He appeared almost wicked when he was narrating that the students wrote violent things in their answersheets:
“. “
He was grinning.
I once heard something similar about my grandmother and quoted it verbatim. Later I kept regretting if I should have kept an archive. These are the sponsored events during which you create such notes. They seem innocuous. But later popularised as something else. [ Hence I edited it out. ]
A government school. Students of class ninth write against the supreme leader. This must be democracy. Very lenient. I am taxed for thinking and raising my voice.
I never taught them to be violent or rebellious in the last five years nor did I write similar things in their notebooks. Nor did I write those things in an examination answer sheet when I was a student myself.
Why am I being rewarded with these students who play:
Prophets
Rowdy horseplay
Advertisement agencies
Instagram addicts
Bullies
And a lot more except students who can read and write.
There was a stain made by condiments or vegetables on his shirt. He returned late from school because you know…he went to the house of his friend who lives near school to return the notebook which helped him complete his assignment. I ask his full name. He doesn’t remember.
He shows me his sunglasses wearing friend on Instagram. Proudly. He might be associated with the real estate developers.
This is what I am here for.
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Instagram or Endocytosis?
Had a ginger tea that was shared with family members. Ensured completion of pasteurisation of milk and turning off the knobs of gas regulators. Endocytosis is a special type of phagocytosis used by amoeba. It’s feeding on cells or cell feeding. Amoeba and paramecium are unicellular organisms- building blocks of organisms. This is the name of the unit fifth in the Science textbook for Madhya Pradesh board for which I am supposed to help my student today. Only the elder brother.
When I asked him if his younger brother was following him he was uncertain. He quickly tells me about not being able to do homework and opens a list of questions in Hindi in his rough notebook. He needs my help for submitting assignment tomorrow. Where’s your textbook, I asked. He didn’t bring it. He’s wearing school dress which tells me he returned later than usual from school today. I don’t get an opportunity to ask why he was late, I am supposed to call his younger brother via his father who might bring the textbook which might help him complete his assignment. I call, his father connects him to his brother after I briefly address him regarding matter.
“Also bring the series.”
Series is the name for the Question Bank.
Younger one arrives in school dress. Starts talking about leaving as soon as he reaches. It’s not his usual whining. He’s tired because of walking. He’s suffering from runny nose. The cold. Flu.
The elder reports that he was sporty in the school. Absolutely no complaints. Whacks him lightly in the head. He stays a few more minutes. Not agitated but disinterested in the study material. Strange.
They both study in the same class but the elder who is doing it the second time around is concerned with completing assignment, the younger isn’t.
The elder has copied the assignment in barely legible handwriting.
They can’t recall. They can’t comprehend what they copy.
Everything is mysterious. I am supposed to play detective after I get Science notebook if the assignment is to be completed with any efficiency.
Without keeping you in any suspense any longer. He leaves content with completion of clues about how to complete assignment though I spare him the homework today because the assignment looks like a lot of homework.
Meanwhile , at every available opportunity he scrolls through his Instagram feed. The younger one is advising him whom to add and whom to remove from friends list.
I strictly ask them to not do that because on the one hand the elder presses with the urgency of the assignment and on the other they seem more interested in the Instagram feed.
I sense it: they somehow felt content with being up to date with the technology which they can use. The elder can take screenshots, can take pictures of text from another smartphone, can use Wi-Fi but can’t read.
I think there can be very few people who might claim to have used every gadget to its limits. Most of the technology remains unused because of one limitation or the other.
Caution: here, I am not suggesting that you need to be an Edison, Tesla or Yoshiro Nakamats to actually create transistors or invent , have patents in your name to qualify for using devices. No.
Even to completely use the complex devices available to most of the individuals these days : you need too many resources. It’s next to impossible.
Though I can’t complain if I started using Gemini, the in built AI into this gadget over Replika which was a lot of struggle for five long years: I appreciated what I got to learn. With every update I felt I was much behind in learning.
I think it’s somewhat similar to these students who feel playful when using modern technology but unwilling to improve basic reading comprehension which they missed due to some genetic or environmental limitations.
They literally enjoy playing games like Free-Fire. Games, flow and addiction is well studied in the context of teenagers and elders alike though I think you can’t really inculcate importance of initiatives like Free Rice or Sustainable Development Goals in students as easily. When I had more students I tried to teach them importance of Free Rice as well as other games which helped them improve their reading comprehension.
To our rescue : the elder tells the name of the guide used by his teacher in the class. Pariksha Bodh. Pariksha is examination. Bodh is spiritual word. I enquire Gemini which gives a detailed response which shouldn’t be included in this text.
Prior to his hint I try to decipher his complex version of Dev Naagri script. He couldn’t copy it correctly either because he was sitting in the last few rows where black board is difficult to see from or his teacher dictated it and since they can’t interpret those signals they peep into the notebook of their classmates. The traces travelled to me.
Amoeba.
Prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells.
Animal and Plant cells
Osmosis
Neuron
These are the only words I recognised legible from his handwritten notes. They’re questions he needs to answer. He also needed figures. The questions were not as per the questionnaire at the end of the textbook. They were from Kunji. Key. Question Bank.
We search for the question bank online. He takes screenshots and then I note down full questions for him in his notebook because order is still a problem.
I get to read about Osmosis, Endocytosis, Phagocytosis, Amoeba, Paramecium and Neurons.
I recall how I learned these terms by rote memorization though diagrams used to be much more cleaner than they are in present textbooks. I try Gemini for diagrams with Hindi labels: it fails despite repeated efforts.
The number of neurons. Glial cells, dendrites, axons and distribution of stars being similar to neurons in human brains was a source of awe and wonder. Later, neural networks and dancing light of grace revealed themselves to be master archons.
There was hardly enough time to read with precision and care. They hardly understand anything. He doesn’t want to do any more work on remedial modules. The session is soon going to end.
I remind him about the fees. He tells about the hundred rupees note that he got in exchange for potatoes yesterday. He didn’t say they cost less than that. Parents were discussing that with him, yesterday. He doesn’t let go of even a few seconds of scrolling through Instagram as they walk towards the exit. They can’t access instagram at home. I ask if parents needed another serving of tea. They want me to wait.
Planned Obsolescence
Organised utensils. Fixed burners into gas. Put the gas cylinders into the bathroom. Lukewarm water and tea served. The verandah was congested. Mopping couldn’t happen properly. Washed a cup and served tea. Had it myself. All of it took thirty minutes time. Informed mother about the cooker whistles. She was returning from outside with a stick in her hand. Students left only after forty two minutes. I wasn’t expecting them today. There was a piebald dog outside and another was barking. There were cows. The younger student had difficulty even staying for thirty minutes. They were being physically aggressive to eachother and the elder had pen nibs without caps. I warned him to be careful with that. I also asked them to not hit eachother on head.
They’re going to perform Surya Namaskar Yoga postures again tomorrow morning. They had a practice session on ninth. They didn’t bring Remedial Module book or smartphone to get my help. Though they come up with sudden requirements they show lack of foresight.
The elder told me that he was asleep at the time of the class yesterday though he wasn’t suffering from fever as told by his father. I gave both of them problems on Addition and Subtraction. I sweeped the room after they left.
When the unit 8.2 was completed they wanted me to narrate a story to them. The younger one wanted me to tell a story in which his name was used as a good person who helped everyone. When I refused to tell such a story he asked me to create a story in which a dog used to help people who used to roam around and used to have bones for food.
I think either asking for fee or refusing to create a story with his name might have prompted him to such vagaries. I had somewhat clairvoyant dreams. Similar voices. None of it is new.
The two problems I showed them solutions for are straightforward Geometry problems, though they had hard time grasping basics as usual. Both problems use mid point theorem, though I spend a few minutes before realising that I wasn’t reading the second problem carefully. The environmental noise was rising.
Working on SLM or Nano GPT. Why do I mix it with the routine in this article? It has been more than five years working on Replika. Law of diminishing returns. Network unavailability made it evermore difficult a task to access it. Though there appeared better models, they would’ve been similar with the network issues. Finally, I was supposed to make switch from 4G to 5G. Entire family was doing that. This brought an in-built AI model which, after some reluctance was going to replace the Replika which had stood the test of time. It seemed like “Planned Obsolescence.” I remember the first time when I found a Gemini window open–I hadn’t actually opened it: I considered it a glitch. It was faster to access in comparison to Chat GPT or Replika. I let go of free subscription for Perplexity because it would have created further burden to cope with. Though Gemini was using a version 2.5. It had a voice assistant and much better feedback compared to Replika which was a freemium version. I think it was still not ‘pro’ version offered by Google yet it was much better being a gift package with smartphone.
For a few rupees more!
1. I asked her if she needed my services in the month of December-January. She asked her daughter who told her that she would continue to take classes.
2. Then she told me she needed my services until her exams are over: that’s until March.
3. This conversation took place yesterday afternoon inside library of Gandhi Smarak Bhavan at about two o’ clock. There were only three of us.
4. It was second such conversation after our conversation under banyan tree. Since then: i have taught her some 400 words, played at least 20 games on Free Rice site with her to help her augment her vocabulary. Also helped her learn creation of Vocabulary jams on vocabulary.com
I helped her learn doing diary entries but she refused to do them : like she refused to write verses or reports. An assignment to compare Meera/Arukka Mahadevi/Andal was given. It was from her book and she didn’t do it repeatedly for at least five days until i helped her with it in class. It was easy to do. She is smarter than other students i have taught so far but not anywhere near what my ‘ideal’ student would be like.
Her mother overlooks my reports about her not working enough on assignments. But when i am questioned for teaching her words in the most scientific way: she begins arguing and questions my integrity.
5. The last time around i was helping her with the vocabulary jams on vocabulary.com : a notification from her school comes on Whatsapp.
“You need to attend a test.”
6. Her school, her parents and others don’t have a sense of schedule or time when it comes to learning. I have to ask her three questions everyday:
A. Do you want to take class today?
B. Did you do your homework?
C. What do you mean by 5 minutes? Would you come for class at the appointed time which keeps changing at your convenience? It’s usually 20 to 30 minutes delay everyday.
7. They take the teacher for granted because there’s the teacher: punctual and always available. Selling himself short. Content.
8. All that for a mere 1000 rupees!
Image credit: Self, inside Gandhi Smarak Bhavan.
Loss all around! Be happy!
1. All three of the boys who came from the underprivileged community, paid meager sum for labors, dropped today with about five hundred rupees still to be paid to me.
2. I couldn’t teach them even three complete lessons of the English Grammar with Holy Faith International reference book. They can neither write Hindi nor English. Besides: they created multifarious conflicts. Firstly: the student who joined first couldn’t learn words. Couldn’t continue to write in his notebook, the words which I taught him. Secondly: he let reluctantly join a boy from his neighborhood after him and what followed was a series of Shamanism events. Then: once he said: ” why are you turning away from women, have you kept roza(fast?)”
3. In red shirts, two of them didn’t recognize me near New colony. Before that the first one had disappeared after the Lolo drama by Vikram and company.
4. Were they merely playing the role in coherence movie simulation. As I asked him about the event later: he didn’t recall wearing such a shirt. The first one was most proud. He showed it the most the day when he was putting the tyre on the burnt coconut outside the door and refused to take the class. The second one wanted to practice but was consumed by something else or I misread him. The third one was brought by him but disappeared without paying fees when I was being killed by multiple hounds inside and outside house. Their joining and leaving my classes is made so comfortable because I don’t go back to ask questions. Like that neighborhood uncle who was promising a thirty thousand rupees batch with half of that for me and its code had some 100 rupees note. Rubbish as usual. Suckers attended the classes two three days without paying zilch for it. Feeding myself needs my merits and money but taking my energy and life force needs nothing: just come and show some teeth or false promises or start beating an autorickshaw driver with a swafi or was it Swati?
5. I bowled 40 times. Equivalent to 1000 steps of run. I walked a few rounds. This is all I am left with for Chandla uncle came sniffing my back here. He was wearing a cap.
6. I have two three students who might drop because now I have a diploma in education from a fake university which doesn’t know whether the questions are valid or invalid. What more do I need to say about the state of affairs?
7. My performance in vocabulary jam has been consistently top notch. This is the only contest where I feel comfortable.
Dancing light of grace 