Dyslexic
As a child he studied as hard as he could but Chemistry was something he found really hard to grasp. They wrote a test one day when he was in 7th standard. He knew he wouldn’t do well but he hoped to at least pass the test.
No such luck.
Ms. Indira (or Mindi as she was known by the students) handed out all the tests, and as per usual, saved him for last.
“Ah. Mr. Babu,” she said with her familiar smirk. “Guess what? You failed again. Am I surprised? No. Why? Because you’re an idiot. You should be at a special school because of your, uhhh, little remedial problem (Is he dyslexic!?!). You should not be here at this School. You are dropping the class average and making me look bad.”
She approached him and prodded his forehead with her stubby finger. “You irritate me.”
“Mr. Babu,” said Mindi. “Get to the front of the class and tell your classmates why you are such an idiot.”
“Yes, Ma’am,” he said.
He lowered his head and went to the front of the class.
He stood there, not knowing what to say.
“Well!” she said.
“I dunno,” he said, softly. Feeling totally humiliated.
“Typical,” came her reply. “You don’t know. Pah!”
“According to you, I’m an idiot,” he said, suddenly. “But my grandmother says I’m a genius. I wonder who I’m going to believe?”
Mindi, a rather large woman, grabbed him by the collar and propelled him out of the door. She took him down to Principal’s office where he was caned three times for insubordination and told not to show his face in his office again.
He dreamed last night that Mindi was tormenting him again. She’s been messing with his dreams for quite a long time.
He woke up that morning and decided that he’ve had enough of her. He has made a decision to retire Mindi as his tormentor. She is therefore released from duty forthwith.
It is over.
Done!
He will no longer be Mindi’s victim because, truth be told, he is not a victim. He just happened to be a little, dyslexic kid who messed with a science teacher’s beloved averages.
So long Mindi.
PS: Seen the movie, Tare zameen par recently. 
A Query
If you teach a toddler that pressing your nose makes you honk, eventually he’s going to wonder what sound you make if he jabs you in the eye.
Oh! Kids!!
There’s a school a block from my house and every morning my street is over-run with ten to twelve year olds.
They laugh as they walk to school, shout and call to each other. They run between groups, their bodies busting with energy and spirit. They’re lithe and young and free, and they radiate an almost blinding vitality — their whole lives strech before them, crowded with limitless possiblities, and their exuberance can be felt in the air.
One of these days, I’m going to hide in the bushes with a hose.
What do you want to do with your life?
I’ve got this friend and we’ve been e-mailing back and forth for seven or eight years now about what we want to be when we grow up. It’s become largely an academic question, because he’s now in his mid-thirties and I’m in my, ah, very mid-thirties and the course of our lives has been set — by the choices we’ve made while waiting for adulthood to show up, by the responsibilities created by those choices and by the people we’ve accreted into our lives during that time. It turns out adulthood doesn’t happen on your twenty-first birthday so much compile via sediment over the next decade or so.
Family, check. House, check. Car, check. Going abroad, check. You can get all that. So why do we keep asking the question?
Because it doesn’t feel completely answered: What do I want to do with my life?
That’s easy — or, rather, it’s easy to answer. I want to create something, build something, make something, with my hands and my brain and whatever tiny bit of passion I can muster. It doesn’t even matter what, really: cool things; fun things; interesting things; silly or stupid things. Things that make other people happy, or amused, or enraged, or some goddamned way other than what they were when they came in. Things that get a reaction, that have some sort of meaning, to me and to others. I want to exercise my creativity in ways that corporate and familial responsibilties don’t offer. I love my family and like my company, but they both need me to be solid and predictable and reliable. I want to be that, of course, but more, too. I want to do something.
And the doing turns out to be the hard part. Time, energy, motivation — they’re all necessary and all drained away by the work-a-day world, by all the other things that there are to take care of, the stuff we have to do because our families and our jobs depend on us getting them taken care of. I come home, ground down to a tiny little nub by work and the commute and everything else, and have dinner and talk to the kid and put him in bed and… I’m done. My brain curls up into a little ball and cries itself to sleep. Day after day after day.
But when all is said and done, that’s a pretty poor excuse, isn’t it? For all the hardship in the world, if the only thing standing between me and some sort of existential satisfaction is that there’s too much else to do, well, then, hmm.
