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By Shekhar Kapur
Yesterday I spent the day doing a workshop with kids with learning disabilities. I came away having learnt the disabilities I have lived with, that I was never aware of .. Yes, some of the kids, aged between 12 and 17 were physically challenged. But all of them were acutely intelligent. Some were lost within themselves and I found were absolutely terrorized by a need to ’perform’ to prove they were normal. So had a problem with even responding to questions. Some were so comfortable about talking about their ’disability to learn’ in such an articulate manner that I was left wondering what their disability was ? Some were poets of such maturity that left me in tears. A couple composed music, wrote songs, played the guitar, and the drums. I did notice something common. All the parents were anxious to see their children behave ’normally’. That anxiousness so obviously created pressure on the kids. What disabilities did I learn about myself? I cannot get past reading two pages of a book without getting restless. I never have. I can only write, read or listen in a stream of consciousness. In the ’zone’ if u like. I obviously have ADD, no more or less than some of the kids I met. I felt a deep terror in my own heart as I saw a boy grapple with ’others’ need to perform normally, and his own terror of not being able to fulfill those needs. I remember that so well. I live with that even now. I am just naturally shy and have to battle that all the time. One young girl said that her problem was she could not understand math. What? I qualified and worked as an accountant - successfully - but did and still do not have an inability to comprehend numbers. You cannot get me to look at numbers without wanting to instantly run away. I have become a successful film maker now. How did I survive? Were the pressures on me as a kid to be ’normal’ not as high as they are in the current state of the competitive economy we live in? Maybe I don’t know enough, and need to study these kids more to realize the seriousness of the problem in a day to day life. But these kids go to special schools for the ’normal’ ones will not have them. Or don’t quite know what to do with them. Maybe they are different. Maybe we are all different. Maybe I am different. Maybe I just survived. The kids want to make a film. And wanted to know what it should be about. I realized that a lot of what they were doing was directed at pleasing the parents. For example the boy who wrote poetry, wrote the kind of ’nice’ things that a ’nice’ boy would be expected to write and show. But as he very reluctantly showed me his poetry that he had hidden, that he insisted was not really good, it was stunning. It was about loneliness, a longing for a friend, and a secret longing for death. No wonder his parents were a bit embarrassed about showing it. Others would have seen their kid as ’abnormal’. But it was brilliant. Here’s what I did. I suggested they made a film about absolutely nothing. That right, about nothing. I got them to get up and act in gibberish. The words meaning nothing, and if there was an interpretation, a meaning, it would emerge out of ’nothing’. It was fantastic. The moment you took away the need to be normal, to make sense of everything they did, the kids would not stop. The most terrorized got into the act, jumping in and being totally animated. And that’s the film they will make. Each one coming and interacting with the other and doing things with no meaning. After which they will edit the film to what they feel the other person meant. Each person will over-dub the perceived dialogues not of his/her own gibberish, but his co-actors. Shekhar Kapur, born 1945 in British India (in an area which became part of Pakistan) is a renowned filmmaker from India. His works include the Oscar-nominated Elizabeth (1998), a semi-historical account of the early reign of Elizabeth I of England, "The Four Feathers" and "Bandit Queen". In 2000, he was awarded the Padma Shri by the government of India. Kapur and his friend, Dr. Deepak Chopra, launched a discussion blog (www.intentblog.com) with a select group of their friends and family. The purpose of the blog is to promote original discussion by voices from South Asia, and especially India. Kapur posts regularly on the blog, often writing short personal poems.
Dr. P. Ravi Sarma talks to Kavita Chhibber The Indian community is perceived today as a highly educated, model minority where there is a strong emphasis on education. Sadly what most people don’t know is that 20 percent Indians still live below the poverty line according to census reports. I also realize having been involved in a scholarship fund for Indian American students that we have underinvested and continue to under invest in education. For many years we would get calls from families who had come here and were struggling to make ends meet. At times others came as sponsored dependents and didn’t have either the skills or the motivation to work hard and do well. Their children, even if they are bright, do not have the same opportunities as children of more successful families. What was heart wrenching was reading reports of those young men getting shot in convenience stores or gas stations leaving behind young wives and children who had not yet laid roots within the community, and ended up on their own. Most community organizations do not have the resources, infrastructure, voluntary power or the psychological desire to help these lost souls. The children of these families also struggle to get good opportunities. It is also very important to know that children of non-citizens are not eligible for financial aid through government grants, including HOPE scholarships. During the 90s there was an influx of computer programmers, and several of them had school age children but did not have financial resources to send them to good schools. I found out from my Jewish friends that when Glasnost happened and many Russian Jews were allowed to emigrate the Jewish community here made an extraordinary number of resources available to those refugees helping them settle down. A similar effort took place when European Jews came to the US in 19th and 20th centuries. They were supported with pooling of resources by the community and the bright students among them had excellent education and within one generation they had a number of highly educated Jews giving back to the community. I’m sorry to say I do not see anything like that in the Indian community. I see a lot of people with fantastic educational qualifications but none of them like to read. I often find myself in multi-million dollar homes which will have everything except a well equipped library. I manned the IACA (Indian American Cultural Association) library from 1984 to 1987, and when I left that was the end of the library. I don’t know if the doors of the library have been opened since then. We used to have the Anand Mela every year. It was the forerunner of the annual festival of India, and one year during the Mela, I had put some of the magnificent books we had in the IACA library on display but people were avoiding even coming to my table because they were afraid I may ask them to buy a book. I would have loved to have a south Asian book fair but most booksellers refuse to participate because they say Indians don’t buy books. We have the degrees but we don’t have the passion, the inquisitiveness to want to learn, to understand that the real beauty of learning comes from the love of acquiring knowledge and in the pleasure of discovery. Since 1993 I have been involved in a scholarship fund which I had wanted to start as an independent organization with the hope that all major Indian organizations will pool their resources together and contribute to. Unfortunately whenever I have approached any of these organizations I have been told, “We have our own scholarship fund.” Many of them set criteria that does not have anything to do with the young people who are looking for aid and they give a token amount of aid, just to say that they also have a scholarship program. We have well over 10,000 Indian organizations across the nation. Why can’t we get them to combine forces and help fund education? If you look at the Jewish community, you will see that while they invest in their synagogues, they also have a community center, summer camps, educational institutions and education funds. Go to New York and see how many Jewish universities you have there. Do we have one Indian university? I’m not saying that we should start an Indian university, but at least get the best of our kids to go to the best universities by providing full scholarships. There are so many underprivileged Indians, single moms that we need to reach out to. Your emails aren’t going to get to them. You have to step out on a regular basis to find these people and help them. Once we did try-we went with fliers to areas which had a large number of not very well to do Indians living in apartments. We asked them to apply for scholarships for their kids but didn’t get any response. I realized then that it is not enough to go to such places one time and expect a miracle. These people are trying to make ends meet and a long term involvement in education is the last thing on their mind. It has been twelve years since I started the scholarship fund and I still find it a struggle to get funding from corporate houses which happily fund educational and cultural activities of other ethnic groups. The reason for this is lack of awareness by corporations. As a community we have not been able to educate these big corporations about the value we bring as a We really need to do something about it. Our children will be competing against a global world in the next several years. It is even more important that we join forces as a community and give our children the educational tools that will equip them to face that competition. Dr. P. Ravi Sarma, MD, FACP is a practicing physician in the field of Hematology and Medical Oncology. He has previously been affiliated with Emory University School of Medicine and has served as an active Indian community leader in the Atlanta area for many years, participating as a speaker, guest panelist and interviewee for various media and organizations. By Mary Annamraju Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it. Proverbs 22:6 Before moving on to my chosen field of study, I had the rich and rewarding experience of working with some young people who eventually made me consider education in a totally different light. Among other things, this experience made me more aware of how education changes to meet the demands of an evolving economy and how society as a whole must evolve, to facilitate the necessary changes in education. Fresh out of college, when word processing was still a major career choice with statistics, due to increasing demand, I stepped into the computer training field. Some personal computers and computer terminals were still dedicated to producing word processing documents only. Dedicated Vydec terminals, outdated Wang equipment, and IBM Display writers sat in the corners of many offices gathering dust; it was difficult for some companies to throw such good computers away - maybe there would be another use for them some day. IBM PC Juniors had outlived their usefulness and were priced low so people who just needed a home computer for aesthetic purposes could pick them up. This was right before word processing became a part of every day technology, and word processing positions became information technology positions. At that time space was being commissioned in museums to store stenography books and stenography equipment for anyone who still insisted that there was a high and increasing demand for stenographers. Young people were being encouraged to choose skills and careers to meet the increasing demand for employment in office automation careers. I was on a business school team to develop an automated accounting training program to add to their existing schedule of classes. Once the curriculum was in place, I was assigned the job of piloting this computer training program with a carefully selected group of students who were part of a skills training program sponsored by a national non-profit group. I had no teaching experience, but I was armed with lots of knowledge and a determination to make a difference in the lives of these young people, not much younger than I at the time. They came in ready to learn; they were attentive and respectful. They went above and beyond assignment requirements when reports or presentations were assigned in the data processing theory segment of the course. They enthusiastically shared the additional information they found about the embryonic stages of voice processing or voice recognition technology as well as telephones which would allow the transmission of sound and pictures over digital phone lines vs. the analog technology of the day. These were my DE (or Data Entry/Accounting) students. During lunch breaks and breaks between classes, other trainers would express frustrations about the difficulties they were having in their classrooms – students who were disruptive and did not seem to be interested in learning. “How are we expected to make up for 12 years of missed opportunities in nine months with students who are not willing to give it their all?” This frustration generally came from professional pride as well as a genuine desire for students to succeed. The school had several programs: English as a second language (ESOL) for non-English speaking students, an electronics program, a receptionist/typing program (RT program), an automated accounting program (DE program), and a word processing specialists program (WP). It was students in the RT program who seemed to be creating so much angst. Many of the RT students were preparing to take the GED exam and receiving clerical training at the same time. A few had high school diplomas or a GED, but did not score high enough on the admissions exam to enroll in a DE or WP program. Once the automated accounting program and word processing curriculum proved to be a good investment for the school, a few hours of computer training were added to the RT program. So, I finally had a chance to experience the frustrations of the other trainers first hand. Believing that teaching success was automatic because I had a lot to offer and I was a dedicated, caring trainer, I approached the RT’s the same way I approached my DE students. The wake up call came quickly. There were some noticeable differences between the two groups, academic preparedness being the most obvious. This group was less attentive, a bit disruptive at times and some seemed disinterested in learning. A few students with a clearer sense of purpose had also enrolled with this group. I could not understand why a young adult who had voluntarily registered for 6 to 12 months of skills based training would not be totally enthusiastic about learning. They had not been brought in forcefully by a truant officer, or a parent dragging them in by the collar while they screamed for their favorite blankie or teddy bear they had signed up voluntarily. But, these were my RT students. At the end of their 6-month training that first DE group had a 98% retention rate and 100% job placement, which was very impressive considering the fact that the drop-out rate for many business school training programs averaged 50%. At the end of their 9-month training RT groups were more likely to have less than 50% retention. There were very few job placements from this RT group, and a few failed GED exams. Many were only qualified for the same jobs they had before entering a training program. Many left the program with one more thing under their belts: another disappointment, another missed opportunity. What if we could rewind to the beginning? The beginning when they were babies snuggled in pink and blue blankets in the hospital nursery at the height of readiness – ready to take on the world, babies born ready to learn. Let’s rewind to the beginning of every child’s life . . . What if every parent, realizing that education changes to meet the demands of an evolving economy, had the foresight to make the most of this early opportunity and read to their babies from birth? Not because their baby will begin reading at age one or two, but because babies enjoy the sound of their parent’s voice, babies love sound and color and cuddling. Babies would begin hearing the words and sounds that would later become a part of their vocabulary. What if all parents found ways to be involved in their child’s education in any useful manner that fit their working lifestyle? An active involvement that lets a child know that education is important and that their parents value education. What if all parents attended all school conferences, attended PTA meetings and school functions? What if all parents found ways to volunteer at school in any small way without overtaxing themselves? Teachers and administrators do not need the cookies, cupcakes, juice or paper goods brought in for elementary school holiday parties, but your child wants you, the parent, to represent him or her in some manner. What if all parents made sure homework got done and communicated with teachers? What if each school set and maintained high standards? What if high expectation were the norm in every classroom regardless of what a child looks like? What if good school leadership and clear vision were the minimum acceptable standards for each school, and teambuilding was routinely used to make the most of every teacher’s talents? What if we all came together as one phenomenal team of educators, joined in a collaborative effort to help children reach their highest potential; with parents as a child’s first teacher, establishing an early love for learning through reading and communicating to a child about the world around them, directing their curiosity in a manner that will help them to appreciate their academic environment later in life? What if teachers grabbed the ball around age five with parents standing on the sidelines coaching their child every step of the way? What if each child, having received the physical, spiritual, social and academic training necessary to meet the challenges of our new global economy finally realized that society will give to you what you give to it? What if missed opportunities happened less frequently? Mary Linen Annamraju has an MBA in Finance; she lives and works in the Metro Atlanta area. She was born and raised in Georgetown, South Carolina, received her education in New York. Her favorite things to do: read, tour America and other countries. Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in these columns are solely those of the writers and do not necessarily represent those of the editor/publisher. Archives:
All Material © Copyright Kavita Chhibber and respective authors.
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