Parenting

Grandparents: People who think your kids are wonderful even though they are sure that you are not raising them right.

That is exactly what I hear from my parents. They want us to spare the rod and spoil the brats but once upon a time they never spared the rod in our case, even when my granpa pleaded.
Mira seems better - the swelling has diminished and she is as active, if not more, than ever.
Today I went out in search of the best school in our area - Padma Seshadri, which was once rated as the best school in India by Outlook magazine. The campus looks disappointingly cramped. Anyway admission to pre-KG is closed and getting into any other class is impossible there - either you join in pre or wait for some kid to leave for a vacancy to arise. And Ash will be too old at 4 yrs 3 months to join preKG next year.
It was lunchtime when I went there - the smell of lunchboxes was enough to bring back sick memories of school. I never really enjoyed school with all the caning and other vague punishments we had - not to talk of incompetent teachers. The kind who went by "Guides" to textbooks and gave you a big zero if you wrote something original... Made you stand outside classroom/atop benches if you failed to bring a text book. As for the books we carried to school, it rivalled a donkey's burden.
St. Mary's school, Mallassery
Classes I-V had been more fun as I went to an Anglo-Indian school in Mallasseri near Konni, where the "Miss" treated you less like a ward in need of disciplining. Even the "Big Miss", an old short-haired, bespectacled lady in a frock rarely whacked your knuckles with a scale. Though I think I was a recipient of a couple of those awards.
The only Malayali "Miss" we had there was an old lady in chatta and mundu who came to teach us Malayalam - and she carried a bamboo stick to the class to punish non-performers. She lived alone in a house in the hills beyond the school and the rubber plantation surrounding it. The only excitement in her life (other than tutoring us) was when her grandson visited her during holidays. She would come back and regale us with stories of his mischief.
When I joined the school in Class 1, it was run in a small green-colored building not far from the bus stop. Initially, my younger aunt dropped me there and I would cry myself hoarse begging her not to go. My best friend there was one Susan, who left the school a year later. Our friendship was legendary, I think, because even the teachers would tease us about how we kept calling each other 'Roshaa' and 'Susaa.'
A year later, the school shifted to a place up in the hills. For us, it meant a 5 km trek from the bus stop, the last leg of which was a steep climb. We never really felt exhausted by the walk as there were many a thing that grabbed our attention on the way - flowers, seeds, tamarind (the last inviting the wrath of the owner of the tree) and a deaf-and-dumb guy (the unwritten rule being that one should never laugh at a dumbo - else he will throw stones at you).
A couple of years after I left that primary school to join a big run-of-the-mill kind of school elsewhere, the Anglo-Indians from Quilon stopped coming to that school to teach. The school now functions like many other so-called English medium schools in Kerala - where even English is taught in Malayalam.