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| My two boys with their cousins Adeep & Eshan |
On one such evening walk the sky
was slightly overcast with a smattering of white and grey clouds over long
patches of blue. My elder son pointed to the blue in the distant sky and asked
me, “dad, what is that?” I encouraged him to find the answer by himself. “Think
about it”, I told him. After a few seconds he answered, “Sea”!
My wife merely smiled at him. As
a doting young mother, she neither wanted to correct her son nor wanted to
reprimand him for being silly. I took up the job and explained to my son that
the blue in the sky was nothing but sky itself. He looked at me with disbelief.
He wrinkled his brows and looked one more time at his ‘sea’. Taking the
geography lesson further, I told him that seas are a meeting place for many
rivers. Bhutan is a landlocked mountainous country and the majority of its
people have not seen a sea. To people living in the mountains, seas are in the
sky, in the tiny imagination of a child or even the matured fantasy of an
adult.
“Where is the sea, then?” my son
continued. “Can we go to see one?” I drew an impromptu map on the footpath and showed
him where we were as a country. “Look, this country south of us which looks
like a taproot is India. And on the shores of India we can find the sea”.
I remember the first time I
actually touched seawater was when I was attending an international training
programme on rural development at Pataya, Thailand. I think it was the South
China Sea. As I cupped up some water in my hands I had been disappointed. The
water in my hand was not blue but grey, brown and dirty. “Where is the blue
sea?” I had wondered as I surveyed the coast of the polluted sea.
In the mountains we feel much
closer to nature and everything that comes with it – worms, insects, beetles, butterflies,
birds, animals, grass, bush, trees and mountain after mountain. In my country
religion is a way of life and mountains are everywhere; where one mountain ends
another one begins. And religion and nature have a common path and a peaceful co-existence.
We name our mountains and highlands after gods and goddesses. Gods and
goddesses in turn protect our mountains, passes, valleys and the wild. There is
a reverence between man and nature!
In Bhutan going on a picnic means
sharing food with the birds and the monkeys. I often feel sorry for the many
men, women and children around the world who have not seen a tree in the wild,
touched a beetle as it claws its way out of the dung, seen a bird carry twigs
to build a nest on the areca nut tree, or fed rice husks to the tiny tadpoles
and school of fish in the mountain streams.
My son is in standard III. He has
seen nature from a close range. He has heard nature in its natural tone not
just through the narrations in the National Geographic channel. He has seen
monkeys jump from tree to tree and not squeak in tiny rusted iron cages in the
zoos. He has seen birds fly about in full regalia and not merely flap their
wings at the call of the jester in the park. He has even seen a snake when one crossed
our path on our way back home after visiting my sister in the village. Last
December I took him on a vacation to the neighbouring Indian town. There we saw
a motley crowd gathered around a bearded man playing on his gourd pipe and a
grey snake slithering around in apparent dance steps. My son was scared of the
snake and terrified of the charmer.
However, my son has not seen the
world. His world begins at home and ends at his school classroom. He has
recently been introduced to map reading as a part of his environmental studies.
He now knows that there are many more countries besides Bhutan. He recognizes
the map of North America when I show him a slightly flattened photocopied
version of the map; for that is how his teacher introduced the map in the
class. He finds it hard to understand that in many parts of the world people
drink water from a bottle. He finds it amusing that cows in other parts of the
world deliver condensed, powdered or packaged milk for he has seen the cows in
our village give white and delicious liquid.
Lately, my elder son has started
showing interests in news and current affairs. As with most child of his age,
he watches a lot of television. Although Cartoon Network with its myriad of
characters and Pokemons is his favourite, he often ventures into Natural
Geographic and Animal Planet. At times he is compelled to sit over BBC and CNN
with me. He finds an analogy in much of what is shown, be it CNN or Animal
Planet. “In your news I see that people are killing other people. In Animal
Planet, I find one animal killing another”. He looks at me. I know he is
looking for an answer.
Today my son cornered me again.
He asked me, “dad, what is earthquake?” I said “earthquake is a shaking of the
earth…” He folded his tiny eyes, looked at me curiously and asked, “How does it
happen?” Now, I have forgotten my twelfth standard geography except for the
formation of an oxbow lake. “Don’t worry”, I said, “you will learn about it in
your class five or six...” He was not convinced. He wanted to know then and
there. I was caught on the wrong side of my intelligence. This was not the
first time either. He did it the day-before when he wanted my analysis on the
content of the TV channels. Within 72 hours he caught me napping twice. How
long can this pretension go? How far can I be a hypocrite? How long do I
pretend to be a walking enclyclopaedia??
I quickly gathered my composure and said, “I don’t know. I have
forgotten the details…”
I know he was not satisfied with
my stance. I have a feeling that from that day he has begun to realize that his
old father doesn’t know everything after all. To an eight year old, his father
is the epitome of knowledge and a reservoir of answers. Last month when my son
asked me a question and I was unable to answer, he had remarked quite dryly:
‘didn’t your teacher teach you about this?” At his age he is able to find answers
to most things that he needs to know from his teachers. He would expect that I
would have been taught everything by now. I think at the end of the day, it is
better for your son to realize that his father is no know-all fellow. I feel
much better since the day I decided to give up.
