Kallola

Emirates Parent Plus. March 2010. Smiling through nothing more than a snooze after an entire week of exasperating sleep deprivation, I looked at my son, smart in his crisp whites, chin-up and thrilled to be back in school after a long and well-deserved break. Having beat the rush hour, we reached school unexpectedly early that morning and with all room doors still shut and maintenance staff only just trickling in, there was not much else to do but wait. The virtually empty school building worsened the heaviness in my eyes as we sat there, just the two of us, my little boy leaning on my knee. It’s been a year since we officially started life in Bangalore and one question repeated itself through the fatigue weighing me down into the cold steps outside the classroom: “Is there anything I wouldn’t do for my child?” Again, I looked at his beaming face, now bobbing up and down along the row of floor tiles, when my eye caught the poster on the wall behind him. Boldly calligraphed was:

I never know what will bolt out of Space when my little boy is on the watch. Under his visor, this week, was a web page on Neil Armstrong. At school, having covered a short chapter on the astronaut, it so happened that my son’s first internet search on the man, coincidently, presented itself on July 20, exactly 40 years to the day Mr Armstrong first stepped on the surface of the moon. Small step. Beat 1. In the Language part of the same subject, the current topic of exploration is the Articles, a , an and the . We had completed an extensive worksheet and other exercises, by the end of which my son was quite a little master of their usage. This is what shocked me earlier. He repeatedly intoned: “The-is-used-with-a-par-ti-cu-lar-noun-or-with-the-name-of-some-thing-that-is-one-of-its-kind. The-is-called-the-de-fi-nite-arti-cle. The-in-de-fi-nite-arti-cle-is-used-be-fore-a-common-noun-that-is-sing-ular-in-num-ber. A-is-used-bef-ore-a-con-so-nant-and-an-is-used-be-fore-a-vowel-sound. They-a