The Inside Truth

Shoaib Hashmi's column in this week's Friday magazine:


If there is a solid, red-blooded schoolkid in the household, call him and ask, and listen carefully, and you will learn that the proper pronunciation of the word is Honework - with an "N". Just as the word for the stuff ladies use is Nake-up: and the name of the pretty girl in the story is Sumbrella! Kids are clever, and their versions roll off the tongue much more smoothly and conveniently.

What one didn't know is that some of them grow up without even bothering to check. The other day, a young mother of schoolchildren was cribbing about their Holiday Honework! I slyly asked what the purpose was, and she said, They want the parents to kill themselves honing the children's skills in the holidays! Aha! She was clever too, just hadn't bothered to check.

Schoolkids are very much the talk of the town now, with the summer holidays looming. For one thing, 7 year olds, it seems, have to study 12 or more subjects! That means lugging a dozen books and twice as many notebooks to school each day in a bag the size of a jumbo. Then come holidays, they get homework.

I do not remember doing any work in the long vacation in my childhood. Summer was for goofing off and lounging around. These days, it seems, teachers, to impress the administration, require each pupil to produce a Principia Mathematica in ten weeks. It took Newton longer!

What is more, most of it consists of parents buying a specially prepared Holiday Workbook, and the child simply copying all of it into special notebooks - also sold by the school. I thought economics would raise its ugly head somewhere along the way.

Then I met a grandmother who remembered the old days. Aitchison College was a school set up to educate the children of the princely houses, and four of them lived within shouting distance of the place. The son of the Maharaja of Patiala rode to school on a shiny black steed. The scion of the ruling house of Chamba rode an elephant; and the princeling of Nabha came in a palki (palanquin) !

And the prince of Bhawalpur State took the cake! He came in a camel cart, escorted by lancers, because he wore a jewelled turban. Properly, and reverently, at the school gate he would exchange it for the plain blue turban of school, and the jewelled one, on a silver platter, would be locked in the cart and driven back to the house! Hmm? Much nicer than lugging your own hulking schoolbag, no?