Summary
Highlights
The speaker satirizes the modern, gentle approach to child rearing, where children are compared to "flower buds" that should bloom at their own pace. She then contrasts this with her teachers' blunt honesty, who would precisely articulate a child's academic standing, even if it meant being ranked 56th out of 56. She jokingly advises parents to "force the petals to open" and claims, "Your child is a cauliflower."
The speaker proudly recounts her past as a "school champion" and "consistent class topper," highlighting the glamour associated with achieving top ranks back then. She jokingly implies that her past academic prowess would have earned her a spot on a show like 'Coffee with Karan' if it had existed then.
The speaker contrasts the current lenient grading system, where teachers avoid giving negative feedback, with the more direct and sometimes harsh feedback given by teachers in her era. She ridicules modern parental attempts to subtly question teachers about their child's abilities, contrasting it with parents from her generation who were more straightforward and expected honest evaluations. She humorously imagines parents debating whether to invest in an education fund or a flat, depending on their child's academic future.
The speaker criticizes the current trend where parents feel compelled to carefully choose every word and validate every emotion their child expresses. She illustrates this with a humorous scenario where a child's "black rainbow" painting, dismissed by a teacher, becomes a deeper issue for the parents, suggesting marital conflict is manifesting through the child's art, and concluding with a humorous suggestion for the parents to go for marriage counseling.
The speaker introduces Amma, a government school teacher, who is determined to learn fluent spoken English, not for coolness but to better teach her students. Amma struggles with English grammar, particularly complex tenses like the "future past continuous," which the speaker comically portrays as existing solely to confuse her mother. A specific anecdote highlights this struggle when Amma misunderstands the grammatically correct "She had had had an apple" as a printing mistake.
Amma purchases "Lingua Phone English," a set of 25 audio cassettes, but lacks a cassette player. Fortuitously, Apa owns a Sony Walkman, described as the "iPhone of its time," a prized possession he rarely shared. The speaker reminisces about the time when even their TV lacked a remote control, making the Walkman seem even more luxurious. She recounts long, 24-hour bus journeys to their native place (Kudla Mangaluru) where Apa would guard his Walkman, except when distracting movies featuring Shakti Kapoor came on, which would prompt Apa to offer the Walkman to his daughter.
Amma begins her English lessons every evening after work, diligently repeating sentences from the Walkman while cooking. The speaker humorously questions the uselessness of phrases Amma is learning, like "Peter, would you like to go on a picnic with us?" and suggests more practical, dramatic sentences she could use daily. The story culminates in a tragicomic accident where the headphone wire of the Walkman comes into contact with a hot tawa, destroying it and metaphorically ending Amma's English lessons. The family keeps the broken wire for seven years, a testament to the Indian middle-class aversion to throwing things away, and Amma's dream of becoming an air hostess (due to her English skills) remains unfulfilled.