BUDDHA BAR: June, 2009

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June 17

SEVEN POUNDS

Have any of you ever thought of giving your life away for others? Do we have that courage in us, otherwise? Or do situations of deep regret draw forth that strength? Situations where, through one mistake we take the lives of many others? What can be our biggest punishment? The life we lead thereafter, our heavy conscience or the death we embrace? Can the damage be undone? Can the dead be reborn?

I found answers to all these questions in a deeply touching movie, called the Seven Pounds! A best from Will Smith, whose I AM LEGEND was my previous favourite! If you have seen the movie, do share your thoughts with me! For those who havent, leaving this to mere questions! Find your answers in the film!

June 15

Scope and Sequence... continued

This is more an effort to clarify myself to a kind friend who, much to the shock of conservative educators, boldy spoke against learning being structured from the external to the inside! Well, with regards to life's experiences, I would totally agree with her! And that is why I feel glad that my scope and sequence is for me to discover and shape and mould through my own needs and experiences, my own desires and aspirations, my own mistakes and faults and my own strengths and acts of goodness! It is shaped by me like a pot in the hands of a potter, sometimes it breaks, and sometimes a wonderful piece is born!

With regards to learning in school, a similar situation would be ideal! Tagore, to some degree experimented with the thought process and hence, the classrooms were under the trees, the content earthy and yet internationally minded! Similarly Krishnamurti often left his disciples in a lurch as he told them to find their own path and own way! Having taught in a school like the Sahyadri School, where each teacher had the complete freedom to etch out the curriculum the way they envisioned it and to deliver it in his own style, I have also seen the negatives of such a system, especially for children, who often are caught between the pressures of a board and its exam against a deeper understanding of learning! A more balanced approach is needed and coming back to the PYP SnS document, it achieves exactly that. It has more leg space to stretch out your mind and give birth to your wings, and hidden layers that can help you grow a banyan tree of ideas and activities! The possibilties are endless and especially unfettered in its continuum format! Sadly, as educators, we often feel limited when given wide boundaries, and for the benefit of the dewinged, we have fleshed it out in more concrete terms, in greater black and white! An exercise that has both been inward and outward.So here I take the opportunity to invite you to explore it further, my friend!

SCOPE AND SEQUENCE ... Entry for June 14

Scope and sequence! What thoughts do these words arouse in your mind? Does it make any sense? To me and many of my colleagues, it is the master bible of a word! Yes, in layman's term it merely means a curriculum or a syllabus. Being a teacher of the Primary Years Programme, we like to use words that sound different and most often refreshingly mean different! Scope and Sequence is one such term! It is a document that articulates learning objectives and the depth at which they need to be covered in different stages. The thus resulting gradation contributes to the sequence, which can be age wise, class wise or level wise!

The IB PYP has reorganised their own curriculums for Literacy (ok...it simply means, English!), Numeracy (you guessed it right, Maths), Science and Social Studies. The reorganisation for Literacy has been the most radical and at the same time helpful. It is now a more clearly articulated document, with real practical examples of what they mean and no longer a set of age wise esoteric and hence, often misinterpretable learning objectives! They have done away with the age wise categorisation and made it into a phase wise continuum. So a child in any grade could be learning language at any of the phases! It would become too technical to go into the details of how it compares to a regular syllabus and maybe boring for you to read and comment! In a nutshell, however, the process has been tediously reflective and at the same time it has explicitly clarified my/ourown understanding of acceptable learning outcomes for Language learning.

Interestingly, the the reason why I mentioned the Scope and Sequence (document) was for a more profound cause. Imagine, if somewhere we could find a Scope and Sequence document for our lives! What would it be like? What would be those learning outcomes? How often would we need to learn about the concept of kindness begets kindness, as that would be a concept we would need revisiting all our lives! So the scope would remain the same but the sequence would be self repetitive! Contrastingly, managing money, would have to start from the very basics of managing resources from a young age, to managing pocket money in the teenages, followed by managing small incomes in youth and later larger incomes in adulthood. The scope would also vary for this sequence. For e.g.

Pocket money - managing pocket money, budgeting weekly expenses, profit and loss, discounts

Larger Incomes - debt management, credit management, savings for tax reduction and maybe tax evasion and hiding black money for some nefarious others!?

Well, if we look at our Vedas, the four stages or ashramas of our life were broadly the sequence we followed. Shakespeare called the sequence the seven ages of man! Buddha was progressive and identified the ten worlds which are interwoven through three different realms. Phew! That would be a really complex scope and sequence document to write! I truly believe that our scope and sequence document for our lives exists somewhere and most often the purpose of life is to discover it and if possible rewrite it....much like the review we have been doing! Whether the fact, that we dont have access to our personal scope and sequence, is fortunate or unfortunate depends solely on the way you look at it!

June 13

Writing again!

I have begun writing again, forced by the leisurely paced life I temporarily have (as long as the holidays last) and the bunch of words that have been prodding like a mid term embryo kicking against the grey cells to take birth in my writing! As a result, I have begun writing again!

9:14 AM | Add a comment | Permalink | Blog it | Hobbies

June 12

Observing oneself with ease

Yesterday's thinking aloud was a reflective effort. Today, I feel more free to articulate the same realisations in simple verse, as I tenderly slept close to my two darlings, swam with them joyously, and then played on the field, one with the grass, birds, trees and the breeze!

ACTIVE PASSIVE

The Sun seems to move in its own cycle,

energetic, active and illuminating

the world it sustains!

Not once waiting for anybody else,

ruthless in its glare.

Supportive in its bright stare.

At the end of the day,

the moon rises, aglow with serenity.

at ease with itself.

Calm, relaxed and soothing rays

sedate the tired, tempt the lunar and

romance the lovers.

8:40 PM | Add a comment | Permalink | Blog it | LIVING

June 11

Breathing free

When we were born unfettered, why do we have to live in chains? Chains of work, chains of social responsibilities and chains of human emotions and relationships. Were we actually ever born free? When I stare out of my balcony door at the all encompassing nature around, I wonder, whether those sunbirds, vivdly inky blue, flitting from one bottlebrush to another, sucking on nectar, are actually free? Or are they too, tied to their own cycle of birth and death? Are they aware? DO they reflect? Or is it the painful burden of the human mind, that we cannot stop from analysing and observing what we see, trying to make connections amongst what we see and with ourselves?

However, this is not to answer all those questions but to proclaim to the world that I am at last breathing free! Free from chains that I had choked myself with over the last 6 months...a time of tremendous turmoil, self questioning and trying to understand not only what life has planned for me, but also whether life has at all planned anything for me???!! Of course, it has, but it has its own time and pace. So in January, my wife and I were busy getting ready to shift to a new school in Hyderabad, with promised goodies to steal us away from our existing job. However, just when we were getting ready to finalise the packers and movers, an inexplicable change of heart on their side, made on baseless arguments provoked us to get totally shaken! In the midst of recession and the Satyam fiasco, on one hand we had two jobs and in the next instant we had neither. Hence, just like a firm yet loving mother, when our current boss took us back gladly, we realised that life did have plans for us! What they were, we had no clue. Anyways, you can imagine the turmoil we went through being totally shaken from our roots, that we had so endearingly grown into the Buddha soil of the Aravalis over the last four and a half years (by the way, the longest we have stuck to one job) and which we were spurning due to the illdoings of a few common mortals. I had lost my otherwise broad vision of my speck of life in the vast eternity of the the Holy Trinity. Doubt and fear were waiting to pounce on me, as I lamented the loss of an opportunity, an escape I was seeking that I had been in denial about! None the less, more hurt and angst came when I was rejected in a training course for a third time. What could the message have been? A month or two of reflection later, I realised that it wasn't the passion or the heart that I lacked but it was the same heart and passion which made the acceptance an even greater challenge. Because I did not approach it from technical superficiality, I had to prove myself all the more. This was THE test through which I had to pass, to prove no longer to myself but to the Universe that in the face of all these persecutions, slander and injustice, my faith in life's plans would remain unshaken! Patience and perseverance became my new weapons, once again! Amidst all this, new responsibilities, that not only satisfied my innate managerial acumen, but also my intellectual needs, got me busy and extremely preoccupied. Tied to deadlines, against the stake of public attention...I had a lot to prove and otherwise be burnt against the same stake that was so trustingly placed as support behind my back! Thankfully, I was able to tie all loose ends, settle back into the school climate, accept the injustice in my environment with Buddhist kalm, and focus myself on fulfilling my responsibilities, with the spirit of oneness of mentor and disciple. I was finally able to untie myself!

This week, I can feel myself relaxed and at ease with the nature around me, as the rains washed away the grime and dust of the last 6 months, letting new grass emerge and new buds bloom! This was only a teaser I know, but I do hope that like the eternity of seasons, I too will be able to soak in the freshness of monsoons as an intrinsic value, an inner oasis, an introspective escape from reality, where once in a while I can take a dip and rinse myself clean of the tar and soot of the daily vagaries of life. A life riddled with human insecurities and negativities, by the bullets of verbal and physical violence. Thankfully, the nature around me acts like a healing balm, a mud pack that cleanses every pore of my being and rejuvenates, every cell of my body, with the verve of the sunbirds, the dash of bright of the sun, the colours of the flowers and the moistness of the squally showers! As of now, I am breathing free! Content in the quiet process called life, undercurrents of which are strengthening the seeds within me to manifest...at the right season, when the rains drench the fertile soil of my existence! It is truly a delightful feeling!