Unforgettable ‘gutiya’ and the ghost-hunting in the hostel

It was when I finished my exam and was struggling to forget the tough time I had with my teaching methods paper, I was wondering how many of my teachers taught me according to the book. Then only I realized that despite the theories preached by behaviour psychologists and the thousand and one techniques supposed to be taught at the Colleges of Education, only a natural teacher can perform the miracle he or she is expected perform.
Unfortunately the faces of most of the teachers who were in my lower school are not clear in my schoolbook-memory except that of Lalitha Madam who taught Sinhala. She was not only my grade four class teacher but the reason I started writing; she was my first inspiration.
My Grade Five teacher was a different story. There was no question about her teaching, but sometimes she took to canes and rulers to curb the students. She used to have ‘punishing sprees,’ where she would get half of the class lined up at her table, waiting with our palms outstretched to received the ‘gutiya.’ Perhaps it was the pressure to see her students getting through the scholarship hurdle made her strict and seemed somewhat distant from the students.
Grade six and seven are two years I had my best of teachers who taught not only books but also things that are important to keep my head upright in society. Teenage-years may call be called the difficult years, but for my friends and I, they were the unforgettable years of school life, which laid the foundation to lasting friendships. The teachers we had in those classes knew exactly what they were doing and whom they are dealing with. As a result, most of us found good confidantes in them and the psychological and physical changes we were undergoing were no mysteries to us.
So, when the girls of my age were busy thinking about the boys they had seen in the roadside we had better things to do like investigating into a major hostel ghost story that haunted the minds of the entire seventh-grades. Even though the outcome didn’t make us ace investigators, the updates of the ghosts topped the gossip charts of the girls, beating the good looks of Shahid Afridi and the cute faces of Westlife dudes. Even though it sounds stupid to me now, as a twelve-year-old, with a brain wrecked by curiosity, ghost hunting wasn’t something to which I could say ‘No thanks.’ But there was one person behind us to save our backs-that was my science teacher- Anuradha Madam. She never burst our bubble by saying it was nothing, but lured us into brainstorming conversations about afterlife and scientific facts about spirits. So, by the time we found out there was no ghost of a white lady who got murdered in the colonial-time building- we took it in a good spirit.
The school also had two teachers who were very much like the personifications of horror. The couple was known as ‘T-56s’ among the teachers and the students. Their speciality was that they would hide behind a door or in an empty schoolroom, catch you unawares and punish you for something you did not do. I was lucky enough never to bump into any of their missile zones during my tenure.
When I left to Visakha, the relationship with the teachers there were not the same, but it was surely one of the first things which made me feel at home there. On a very personal note, I owe every one of my teachers because I have never stepped into a tuition class in my life.

Dinner at Thaththa’s courtroom

Falling into frequent arguments with Amma and Thaththa is the last thing I would like to do when I’m at home. Getting into a verbal fight with Amma over trivial matters, like Nangi does, is not really my ‘pol-pani’ pancake.
But, when the chance arrives, arguing with Thaththa is like being a courtroom or a public forum. Our topics range from politicos and their mock miracles to smart works of his so-called bright students. Unlike in the fights with Amma, I could leave the dinner table with the same spirit after such a hot-talk. This, perhaps, is one thing which lured me to join the press at a very early age, when my friends hardly knew what they were doing with their lives.
Thaththa is not what you call a petting-type, but he is always there for Nangi and me whenever Amma tries to release her work pressure on the two of us. He gives us a lot of freedom to walk around and see the world, trusting that we would not let him down. When I was showing signs of being a left-hander like him, it was Thaththa who taught me to hold the pencil correctly. He would buy me ten or twelve erasers with lovely bright colours and tempting aromas whenever I scored well in a monthly test. He happily gave the nagging job to Amma but was all eyes and ears about how I was proceeding.
Being a teacher, he was very particular about my math-score in term tests; the only thing I can remember him being hyper-sensitive about. During my math lessons with him, he would box my ears a couple of times in seeing me not getting the simple sums right.
Being a student of his is not as lovingly as being his eldest child, for he burdened me with tedious loads of homework with cutting deadlines.
With my 9-A’s when Amma and all the others were pushing me into A/L lab section, it was Thaththa who stood by me and said, “Let Loku decides for herself.”
Thaththa trusts in my judgement in many things, from picking up the right-tie for him to choosing electrical appliances for home. This makes me a proud daughter.
Amma is the biggest fan of the things I write, for she openly talks about them and shows my scrapbook to everyone who visits us, which can be embarrassing at times. Thaththa, on the other hand, only gives me suggestions to write but never goes to the extent of appreciating or commenting on the things which go on the paper with my byline.
So, I was taken by surprise when I went to school to pick up Malli, a handful of teachers of Thaththa’s staff, rounded me and said, “We enjoy reading your poetry and articles, Thaththa never forgets to bring the paper to the staffroom.” I could only say, “That’s him” in reply.
Daughters loving their fathers more than they love their mothers has been there ever since the phenomenon of parenthood came into existence. Whatever the reasons the high-profiled psychologists give, daughters tend to love their fathers because they are more liberal-minded and mild-hearted when it comes to daughters. This is the main reason why in most cases, a girl wishes to get married to a boy who has the same qualities of her father, and I am no exception.
I know for a fact that Amma’s favouritism is all directed at Malli, the devil and the angel, who can do no wrong in her eyes. And, Thaththa, of course, prefers Nangi to me, as she took to following his foot-steps by choosing Maths stream for her A/Ls. But, that doesn’t lessen the weight of the reality that I can love them both and take anyone’s side when I feel like it. In return, they can do the same with me.
After reading this, I won’t be surprised to hear Amma saying in one of her complaining tones, “This is not the first time, Thaththa, dûla teamed up against me,” when Thaththa is enjoying the praises of his staffers with the paper in his hand!

Invaders spice-attacked

My line-up of exams had turned me out to an insensitive creature, that until a little while ago I didn’t realize how our Poor Aunty Manel had felt when I was turning a deaf-ear at her continuous mumblings about the recipe for ‘Kurakkan Kenda’ which she never got.
Pasting a mental sticky note at a reachable corner of my mind, I started to think of my mother’s territory, which has been guarded by a number of regiments and battalions of vessels and some countless number of kitchen utensils.
Since food was not on top of my lists, kitchen was not my most favourite haunting place in the house. But it always has a mystic sense of fascination which often draws me there when Amma prepares her ‘thuna paha’ and other spices at home. It is not the food, but the colour and different shades of spices that make me put down my book and run to the kitchen.
Cooking with Amma always keeps me on toes. She doesn’t like anyone messing up with her jars of spices. She wants them to go back to the shelves immediately after spoonfuls of them being put into the curry. This is something I never could follow. I always wanted to have me surrounded by these talking jars even though Amma kept on insisting that first they should go back and then I could flirt with the curry. One day, by the time I finished parking them in their original places, the hearth had cooked a curry on its own! So much for cooking with the Queen, I felt like the knave who stole the tarts.
But, this does not stop me from breaking into the kitchen especially when she needs a brave knight to scrape her coconutty-fellows every night.
I love the feel of cute cutlet balls on my palm, but I hate the smell of sardine that survives all the scrubbings afterwards. It is a treat to see them dancing in the pool of hot oil. Once they are out from the pan, the sight of Malli and Thaththa devouring them when they are still in their fiery state, fill my tummy. Amma made a great fuss about my becoming a plant-eater, but now she praises me outright for eating every part of the plant she cooks without letting out a word.
But mostly, it is my chocolate cake that lures people to fall in love with me. I have always prided myself of not celebrating a single birthday without serving my friends with a piece of Daw-special messy chocolate cake. As some one I overheard uttering, “I prepare the world’s best fried chicken,” I don’t want to crown myself as the maker of the world’s tastiest chocolate cake. But I have seen Nangi living a couple of days on my cake and my cake alone! So, I guess there’s certainly some tummy-filling charm in it.
Apart from the culinary work, kitchen is the place where Amma and I have our conspirations on how to surprise Thaththa on his Birthday or what to buy for Malli when he is appointed a prefect in the primary section.
It’s surprising why Nangi can never cope up with the smell of frying chillies or I guess it is her wrong timing when she is suddenly thrown out of the place with a heavy cough on every rare occasion she volunteers to help Amma. We made a good laugh of it the other day saying that even the kitchen hates her.
After all, it would be a good idea to work on self-activating spice launchers in view of vicious foreign invasions, specially at a time like this when we expect so many!

Bookworm: Modern term for ardent booklover

If anyone happens to see me in the morning, taking my usual bus ride to work, there are two possible conclusions he or she might jump into. If someone who knows of my peculiar habits sees me lost in a world of my own with a book or a Reader’s Digest in my hand, when heaps of passengers are overflowing from both the entrances of the bus, the reaction would be, “Oh! that’s typical her.” But, to a stranger’s eye, my eye-locking with a book at that time of the day would be an act of a ‘super nerd’ or ‘creepy bookworm.’ Whatever the titles I am honoured with, my flirtation with books knows no bottom.
It is rather surprising how reading had crept into my busy school-day schedule which was tied up with sports practices, music, literary association work and of course studies. I guess, once you get so used to do something, it ceases to be a habit and becomes an addiction. Such was my love for reading.
Amidst my editorial bee-work, when Aunty Manel demanded a piece on ‘Reading habits of my generation’ I knew it was not going to be as easy as reading Jeffrey Archer. She may be true when she said there was a love-lost between my generation and books. When Thaththa said the only few young avid readers who are existing in the world today are either journalists or undergraduates, I nodded at his words. But, the fact that most of them raiding bookstores and library shelves out of sheer necessity than out of their love for books escaped his notice.
Do the folks in my generation read at all? I think they do. It is not fair by them if you expect them to read ‘Complete Works of Shakespeare’ when they are caught up with the rat-race to find jobs or move higher in their studies. They may run their eyes through the front-page headlines of a newspaper, maybe a little bit of sports and fashion; that is their portion of reading for the day.
The mushrooming blogs in the cyber space also do some work in keeping their reading habits away from the extinction lists; but the question as to how good the material these blogs provide is a point worth pursuing. Unlike in printed material such as books, magazines etc., most of these blogs carry raw-writing. So, the regular readers of these blogs (mostly the techno-loving youth) cannot help themselves from catching up wrong language expressions and bad grammar. The common complaint heard from newspaper offices about the scarcity of good writers shows the acuteness of the matter. Leave alone breeding writers, most of the CVs and bio-datas get rejected in the job process because they contain grammar or vocabulary errors.
Interestingly, a boy who turns out to be an extensive reader gets teased by his peers more than a girl who is found out to be a bookworm by her friends. This maybe another reason why my generation tries to pretend that books don’t exist. Apparently, the e-books that are quietly getting into the Sri Lankan scene are a relief to those who love to read but no time to hold a book in hand.
Like table manners, values and health habits, reading too should be planted from home and nurtured at school. Parents can monitor what their children read, but never pull off a book from a child’s hand and try to give the wrong message that you are against reading. As for me, my grandmother read me out stories from so many books and I was so enchanted by them that I knew every story by heart even before I learnt to read.
That is how I got into trouble! Today, anything which comes between me and my book gets the ‘trouble’ label straight.
After all, there’s nothing like curling up in my bed at the end of the day, hugging ‘The Road from the Elephant Pass’ for the sixteenth time and falling in love with Captain Wasantha over and over again.

Ad hoc ad clips

Apart from a few rain-clouds that had crowded the far edges of the sky, the day was pretty sunny. So, I was not the only one taken by surprise when it started thundering in the middle of the hot afternoon. Malli, who is still learning to get used to the habit of having regular baths, was humming his usual Mission Impossible theme under the shower when the first thud of thundering was heard. Poor boy, who got petrified, jumped out of the bathroom, clutching the cake of soap in his hand; dripping soapy water. Amma, after finishing her Saturday-morning cooking and washing was getting ready to have her nap. The sight of his son almost turned into a ‘mer-boy’ would have been a joke to her if she hadn’t notice that Malli was actually wetting the bedroom floor. Knowing what was coming up from Amma and in a vain attempt to cover up the shameful act, Malli put up an angelic face and asked, “Amma, What is this new soap?” His condition and tone was uncommonly funny that Amma instead of boxing his ears started laughing. Witnessing the spectacle from behind my bedroom curtain, I decided that the scene would be an ideal one to relaunch a soap that is already in the market!

So, when Aunty Manel asked me to write how I see the issues Samitha Akki has spoken out loud in her last week’s column, I was more than happy to scribble on something that is within my comfort-zone.

If we are seeing an excessive number of nude or semi-nude female models in TV commercials, the reason for that is the advertisers and the brand teams not giving much thought to conceptualisation. The product which they are trying to promote could have been advertised in a different way, placing it in a far better light than next to some waxy pair of legs. After seeing a certain soda ad, continuously played on TV during a cricket match season, I tried to figure out why they used a ‘faceless’ female model, wearing a red coloured dress with above-the-knee-slit to advertise a fizzy drink. How come it didn’t turn out to be an ad on a hair-removal cream?

It is a fact that the businesspersons do not select nudity as their first option. But, as someone who had been in the ad making business for sometime, I have seen clients go for exposing when the other concepts we offer are out of their budget.

If you are someone who had tough times with clients who rejected your most creative concepts because they thought that they might not understood by the people, there you go, I am not talking gibberish.

But the agencies and the clients are making a genuine effort to look for other ways now. Local TV channels do not have stripping-clips like in Indian or any other foreign TV channels. They are quietly realizing that the times when the woman was used for cheap commercial gains are coming to an end.

But the left-alone trend is creeping into the music videos. This is why Thaththa banned Malli and Nangi to watch the Sinhala Chart Shows going on TV. He doesn’t want the local versions of Bay Watch stealing into my poor siblings’ minds. Making a music video eats up both money and time. Unlike those days, every guy who can shower-sing thinks that he is a super star and starts like acting one. So, a woman who’s willing to go on air is easy to find to squash into his first video clip. Unfortunately, the so-called fame-seekers do not realize that a video full of skinny girls in bikinis does not make a lasting impression on the viewer.

As Samitha Akki said, nudity is an art, and it has to be used likewise. Overkill of nudity does not raise sales, but rather backfires. So, if you are planning to advertise your next fruit drink with semi nude girls, you might as well give a ‘sili sili bag’ free for the lenient consumer who might have had the urge to throw up seeing the ad and yet bought your stuff out of sheer sympathy.