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The twentieth century epic, The Wasteland begins by complaining that April is the cruelest month. Thousands of students across the globe would emphatically agree with the poet: It is the time of exams, the mad scrounging around for notes and papers documenting the learning through the year. Meal times are thrown off, as are unnecessary items from daily routines, like walks with friends, play sessions in the park, movies, even open hearted laughter and sleep.
One gets used to seeing teenagers roaming around lost, with shell-shocked gazes, uncaring of where or who they are; when addressed, they sprout out portions of the academic material they plan to conquer before 4 am descends. This is especially true in South Asian families, which typically revolve around their teens’ academic agenda, and consequently, the pressure increases for them.
Ever since kindergarten, sometimes even before that, we, the South Asians tend to push our children to be overachievers, to read at an earlier age, write better than their peers, compute faster than the last time, and memorize photographically. We often compete over whose kids’ school work is most challenging, and whose kids are class toppers. Somehow, our children’s academic success is intrinsically woven into our self-worth, and even though our children roll their eyes heavenward, they are equal participants in this friendly rivalry. When my kid shamefully brought home a B in her latest Math quiz, I complained to my non-Asian colleagues at work about how she is getting lazy. People stared at me as though I had lost my mind; some were even more confused because they thought I was bragging about my child’s perseverance in her studies and couldn’t figure out exactly what the problem was. I could only stare back and exclaim, “But she’s Indian!”
This situation is easy to relate to irrespective of exactly where on the globe one is, since our ethnicity is more a part of who we are than the place we find ourselves in. |
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My memories of weekends as a teen in India consist largely of Saturday morning extra classes of Sanskrit and Trigonometry, study-sleepovers at friends’ houses, and night long sessions filled with Chemistry formulae. Once a child entered 10th grade (or standard, as it was called back home), all the neighbors, relatives, and family friends would shake their heads in recognition of an age-respected tradition and warn the teen to “buckle down and study” non-stop for the next few years.
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I did not mind that too much, actually, since all my peers were in the same boat as I; the only thing I resented was that I missed too many movies because I had to study. This was not a real loss to me, as I have caught up with the movies since then.
When I reminisce about those days with my non-Asian friends here, they are horrified at the depravity that defined my youth. No outings to movies, eateries, or the park? They exclaim in despair.
However, unlike what my non-Asian friends imagine, I think of my youth as being some kind of a golden age, during which everyone danced attention to me, spoiled me with choice dishes to improve concentration, showed genuine interest in my latest academic achievement, and agreed that my dedication boded well for my undeniably bright future. As a teen this was the highest commendation I could have earned. Instead of scrounging malls to keep up with the latest fashionable clothes and accessories, along with my peers, I scrounged through theories, postulates, ideas, utopias, and poetry. Coming of age for us was conquering exams which tested our familiarity with material, as well as our ability to recall it on demand. It was a golden age because adolescence, which is popularly referred to as “the awkward age” was transformed into some kind of a hectic quest, when the no-longer-children-not-yet-adults were encouraged to concentrate on the only part of their being which was still graceful, their intellect.
Nothing validated my importance to my community more than the fact that everyone’s routines and agendas revolved around mine.
I did not feel the need to seek any other kind of acceptance; I know I am not alone in feeling this, since “my mom doesn’t understand me” was never the theme of any conversations I had with my peers. Moreover, I do not remember feeling any substantial gap in communication between me and the older generations, thanks to my total immersion in my “studies.” My fondest memories of my father are of afternoons when we both talked of Tagore’s poetry and analyzed Shakespeare, of Sunday mornings when he explained the anomalous expansion of water, of dawns when he unraveled the mysteries of astronomy, and of after-dinner sessions as he helped me revise the Mogul Empire’s contributions.
Here, ages later and leagues away, I seek to convey this part of traditional up-bringing to my child and I am afraid I might fail. Often, what I perceive as being important and what my kid considers priorities are diametric opposites. Like her non-Asian peers, she wants to spend her weekends “chilling” at the Mall or catching the latest “chick-flick.” In spite of my trying to be tolerant of differences between our worlds, I must confess to more than a twinge of unease when I drop her off at a rendezvous site, as I think of how heavily this afternoon of hanging with friends must weigh on her academic calendar. I worry that her intellect is being fossilized when I hear her talk of the clothes her friends wear and where they shop as she helps me put together the evening meal. She refuses to get up at 4am to watch the dawn sky change, or have me explain any concepts she might be struggling with, though she assures me she “got it all under control.” I have no idea what uncharted waters she explores on her forays into Wikipedia, MySpace, and You-Tube, which remain alien lands to me. I constantly worry that she will emerge from her adolescence with little more than a litany of painful mistakes and a really unsound work ethic. |
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But I worry too hastily, and as usual, lack proper faith in the younger generation. My child comes home from her outing and disappears into her room, pleading to be excused from watching the latest Hindi movie with me. She doesn’t need her dinner (she took care of her food requirement on the outing), starts scribbling in her agenda (her friends made plans to tackle the latest World History project during the outing), and postpones doing her laundry since she has a quiz the following week and must prepare for it.
This amazes me as well. The Exam Season, the Cruelest Month has not spared my daughter, even though the way she battles it is so different from what I am used to. For my teenage self, a productive studying environment would have been a quiet place, well stocked with many pencils, ball-point and fountain pens, rough papers, notebooks, and reference texts. For my teenager, such a space would result in nothing more than a nap! She needs her radio on her favorite station, the internet fired up with at least 3 sites open, her cell phone on conference call, and her agenda within arms’ reach.
This Exam Season also serves as one of the many constants in both our lives. To her, as it was to me, spring is the season of mad preparation for exams, both State and local. She is used to getting extra homework at this time in form of extra FCAT drills; she anticipates weekly quizzes in all subjects, which shall be graded with greater rigor and more meticulous attention to detail; the greater part of her weekends are devoted to workbooks, papers, projects, and exercises. I find that she too is, like I was, focused on doing the very best she possibly can, and expects her academic performance to form one of the major corner-stones of her self-worth. It comforts me, in a strange way, that like a “normal” South Asian parent, my agenda revolves around her academic calendar, and I worry about somehow sneaking in healthy, intellect-sharpening, memory-improving foods into her.
The Exam Season seems to have immigrated with us and could be credited with our need to excel at whatever exams and tests are thrown at us, which equates to our pursuit of high professional goals. The Cruelest Month seems to have migrated into our children. They, too, it would seem, have understood the very logical yet often elusive correlation between doing well in school and being successful professionals.
I am reassured as I step away and look at my child and her peers, a group of ambitious kids who are determined to change the world. They do compete with each other academically and are conscious of their class ranks. They look for clubs, volunteering opportunities, and extra-curricular activities that would enhance their academic performance. If the bottom line for my teenage self was marks and percentage, the bottom line for my kid is GPA and percentile.
My household does not fear April, and the exams, quizzes, projects and drills that precede this cruelest of months. We are stocked up on graph paper, highlighters of all colors, tri-fold project boards, internet subscriptions, and scientific calculators. Like my kid, I too am prepared: I have renewed my Netflix subscription and stocked up on all those movies my Exam Season had demanded I sacrifice. |
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