Thoo dhoop hai, cham se bikhar...

                 Strange ! how sometimes you sit at the keyboard and you know there are a plenty things to write about but there's this inner denial which doesn't let the fingers hit the keys. Somehow I have always have had this experience that 'pain', or you call a craving, a deep one at that or an extreme desire or just plain infatuation with just about anything....creates the urge to write... to tap the keys in a flow. Are words then answers to these human abstracts? Going through one of the blogs 'the pakhi series' suddenly brought life to the fingers that had refused to even touch the letters. Thanks to all the bloggers ! Thanks Reema !

                    There was this girl who was two and a half years old, lets call her Mini who was found always crying in the school where I taught. As it was a new school and we were sort of pioneers, acting as teachers, sometimes like moms to the nursery/junior kids, to the extent that we would even carry some 2+ year olds and take for a walk showing trees and stuff like that. The management allowed that ! I was a pseudo princi, my kid being five years old, so didn't take the chair but enjoyed doing whatever it took to run an English Medium CBSE school in a small township. Well this girl would always tag behind some teacher or the other. Once I got an opportunity to go for a proxy to her class and enjoyed playing with the nursery kids, indulging in all sorts of silly imaginations (I taught higher standards but this was sheer fun). Lunch bell rang and all the tiny tots ran towards their 'tiffin'bags and water bottles. Not Mini. So I brought it for her and finding no interest on her part to open it, I opened it to find a stale looking fried rice. No wonder the kid behaved the way she did. In fact I always felt this little one had some psychological hang up and trust me there are a few like that in all the schools and my heart went out for them but what can you do in a 'formal school' where you are expected to only 'teach subjects'. I started a game with Mini after making the other kids to share their lunch boxes with her. She was continuously crying. We brought a doll from the cupboard, and our conversation was something like this:

'Mini this doll is crying baby. Do something. She is sad'

'Ma'm why is she sad?'

'I don't know. She won't tell me. May be she will tell you because you are small like her Mini'.

Surprisingly our Mini stopped crying and what followed was just a pleasure to watch. She put the doll on her lap trying to put her to sleep, sometimes she kept it on her shoulder, moving her hands over the doll's back and like an adult talked to the doll telling her to sleep. I said 'Good the doll likes Mini a lot that's why she's slept'. Mini says,'No ma'm, its not mini, she likes Raju uncle'. I asked her who he was and she replied it was he who put her to sleep or cared for her when she cried because Mamma was in the clinic and Papa in the factory ! How role plays influence children ! Later I found the girl stayed in my street in the corner and she was always with a caretaker, an old lady and from then on whenver Mini met me somewhere in our colony, she would shout and wave. And once even refused to go back to her home.