Reach out to care

With families separated across the global village and time zones, perhaps the elderly with their wealth of wisdom can reach out and lend a guiding hand to the young in their vicinity, whether family or not. A thoughtful essay by Abraham Kuruvilla.

Lending a helping hand

Sixth standard in Mumbai seemed like a walk in the park but for those thorny fractions. Adjusting to a change of system and syllabus in the middle of the academic year was very unsettling. All because of his bureaucrat father?s untimely transfer!

Tuitions could bridge the fractional gap created by the missed term. Private tutors were available closer to school in Bandra. Their timings were inconvenient for 10-year-old Anand with his home in Vile Parle. Anand?s fear of fractions and ratios was worrying the father but not the son. Cricket in the evenings was more important than a few marks lost. What was all the fuss about, was he not amongst the top three! Yet, his father worried, why the otherwise clever brat could not get the hang of it despite his efforts to make him understand.

The summer hols of ?58 saw the family in Kerala. Grandma searched for a retired math teacher. Help came in the form of a younger relative; once a Montessori teacher. She insinuated into Anand?s playful frames of reference with broomsticks, matchsticks and raw mulberries. An hour a day, over 20 days did the trick. Ungainly numbers paired with sticks and stones bridged the fractional divide. At the end of it, all she accepted was a token gift. As for Anand, he never looked back, as far as PCM was concerned.

?Why should I spend my hols with Grandpa?? Every odd year they vacationed at a resort in India or abroad and now at 14, Anita was being asked to spend a month in hot, steamy Vizag. She wondered why. She relented when her father explained that Grandpa, a retired professor of Physics, was committed to banishing the ghosts of the subject from her head. He was doing so, for free, for children in his neighborhood. She wanted to be an IITian and without its modulus she knew she?d see stars even if she cracked JEE. The story goes that in the process Anita and her Grandpa got inseparably close. She spent about a week a year with him for the next 15 years, till he passed away. Not to forget; Anita sailed through IIT and then into the prestigious TIFR.

The global village, with vexing time zones, 24/7 service levels, IPR, gadget geeks, time-share, mobile banking and the social media, has perhaps lost track of such niceties of life; niceties as old as time.

To begin with such gestures were perhaps confined to the immediate family circle when parents or close family members uncovered latent talent in the young. They helped one become aware of one?s abilities. A discovery of oneself in more senses than one! Mentor son of Anchialus of Troy took it to another level and gave it a name. ?Mentoring?; a transaction from the heart that shares knowledge and imparts wisdom for the pure love of it!

Socrates mentored Plato over decades; did he charge him for it? Aristotle mentored Alexander perhaps not entirely for free. Isaac Barrow mentored his namesake Newton perhaps for an apple in return. Gurus tutored shishyas in gurukulums of yore, for 10 to 12 years, all for some heartfelt acknowledgment. Gandhiji mentored Nehru surely not for anything more than a Namaste. Nehru in turn mentored Kidwai, what was the motive one may ask! And from his cell he also mentored Priyadarshini and that was between father and daughter.

Didn?t the legendary Jordan mentor Kwame Brown? Achrekar coached Tendulkar but could Marc Anderson be counted as Zuckerberg?s business mentor? The list with different flavors goes on and on. A mentor, coach or guide, whatever the name, draws out the latent genius from the ward provided the vibes to share originate in the heart and not the head! It?s given free with no strings attached but for the strings that knit two hearts and minds together over time.

Our global village is increasingly being infested with beehives, anthills, pigeon holes and poultry farms of human settlements, with no queen bees, queen ants or mother hens to hold communities together. They come from far and wide, de facto aliens, perhaps homesick in their pigeon holes, unaware of neighbors till kindred droppings spoil their morning walks. Fathers in Shanghai, New Jersey, Melbourne or Montevideo with mothers and children in Gurgaon, Pune, Chennai or Bangalore or vice versa with spouses changing places! Many in their twenties, that formative age, according to Sharon Doloz Parks1, when the hand of a mentor could shape their future! Such are the nuclear families that have just traversed the Large Hadron Collider of world trade; searching for their own God particle.

Where are the loving, now retired, parents and grandparents? Perhaps in their own ivory towers or resigned to some up-market geriatric pasture. Don?t they have roles to play other than during the baby sitting season? How they miss their grandchildren in their growing years! How they miss that baby talk, that elixir of screeches, squeaks and pranks that could keep them young. ? Arguably the best insurance against Parkinson and his cousin Alzheimer! Is Skypeing the answer across incompatible time zones?

There is so much to share without escaping to Skype! Their heirs will inherit their depreciating assets but who is to inherit the love in their hearts and the ripe wisdom in their minds? The Jonathan2 in them wants to soar and teach the chicks the nuances of the glide. But where are the chicks?

Some families have just returned to base after a hiatus abroad. Who is to help them find their bearing in the heap ahead? Not their parents for they are longing for them in another city. Friends and relatives are no different from them, chasing their own tails. Cultivated anonymity and acquired loneliness are part of their accompanied baggage. And then, untouched by them, there are their chicks who like our once little Anand miss a guiding hand in trying to come to grips with a different system and what now looks like an alien culture? There are some like our Anita with a dialect that?s less understood.

The answers are not far to find. The high density urban spaces of today are replete with neurons waiting to be fired. Teenagers looking for a gentle guide and the younger ones looking for a tip to place the decimal point! Young adults in the rat race wanting to learn, from an older caring voice, how to handle failure and success with equanimity! When to duck and when to hook! Pearls of wisdom that no business school can impart with conviction! All from the heart3 with no strings attached. Mentoring is the current fashion in the business world but not yet in civil society at large and definitely not in clustered urban living spaces where the unspoken need is high. Barkis4 could be willing but how is Peggotty to know?

At the other end, with kith and kin far away, are the grandmas, grandaunts and grandpas with time on their hands and wisdom in their hearts to balance the equation. Wise are they to know what ails the younger ones and what could make them feel at home. Perhaps too proud to even suggest that they would expect caring gestures, not condescending crutches, in return! In a world of apparent strangers they hesitate to make the first move other than return a wry greeting in the park or at that noisy mall.

Who is to reach out, that?s the question. Society would charge grandpas and grandmas to make the first move. Notwithstanding forums that encourage such communion, is collective social awakening nearing a critical mass? Perhaps it is, for then our Anands and Anitas could discover their Grandmas and Grandpas next door. Fusion is perhaps close at hand to circle the square5 and prove Kipling6 wrong.

1. Sharon Doloz Parks: Social researcher and author of the book ?The Critical Years?

2. Jonathan the self actualized Seagull from the book Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach

3. See Blogspot ?To Give or not to Give? at http://mumblingskeptic.blogspot.in/2011/11/streaming-mind-9-to-give-or-not-to-give.html

4. Barkis & Peggotty; silent admirers from Charles Dickens? David Copperfield

5. Square: A nerd

6. Rudyard Kipling with reference to his famous lines ?The East is east and the West is west and never the twain shall meet.

About the author: Abraham Kuruvilla describes himself as a management consultant, technocrat educationalist and a low-key activist. He is also a former electronics and telecom engineer. He lives in Bangalore and blogs at http://mumblingskeptic.blogspot.in/