Magadi days

On a cool billowy Friday morning, the Tamalas, our ten year-olds, found themselves in the midst of goats and sheep and vans and people, dodging mud puddles at the Weekly Animal Bazaar.

This was the final trip as part of their Magadi History Project. The earlier trips had been to successively larger settlements, starting with Varadenhalli, where CFL is located and then to Motaganahalli, a village of a thousand homes, ten minutes by road. The visits had given the children a chance to look and listen and to gain a sense of lives around us. Back at school, they recounted their time. They talked aloud about what they had seen and learned. They classified their observations into groups such as homes, water, animals, work. They asked questions about each group, they compared aspects of the two villages. They asked themselves about change in this area in the last fifty years. They wrote down their descriptions, comparisons and theories.

The Magadi Trip was dramatic. It was Friday Market Day. The streets were full. Vegetable sellers sitting on the roadside, goat muzzles on the pavement, chickens and ducks packed into a tight coop. Potsellers, flower sellers. And the Friday Goat Market, on the vast premises of Kempegowda’s Fort grounds. After being in this busy midst, we spent a quiet half an hour at the peaceful Someshwara temple. We have been here over the years, and this time, it was heartening to see that it is now under the care of the Karnataka Archaeology Department.

The children came away both with very graphic observations and descriptions as well as with questions. Here is a sampling:

You don’t have to grow lots of vegetables to sell them. You can set up a small vegetable stall on a plastic sheet and sell what you have.

How can you tell how deep a step well is? Oh, you can just look at it and follow the slope of the steps all the way down.

Why do people sell goats? And what do people do with the goats they buy? They need the money. But people who buy goats also need the money. They can sell the goats again, they can sell the milk. They can wait for more baby goats and sell those.

The artists who carved the sculptures at the Someshwara temple were both very skilled and very patient.

Apart from being in the midst of goats and flowers and earthen pots, the children saw that even a very small farmer, who may grow vegetables behind her house, can set up a small shop on the pavement. They found out, to their surprise, that the vegetables we eat and school come from these very Magadi angadis, big and small.

~ Diba

It seems so very trite to state that we humans approach our world with moral stances. Obviously, these stances, or rather nuggets of attitudes, moral tastes, make up the very core of our being. Philosophers have argued over the ages that they constitute the essence of what it means to be human. Yet our moral anchors are also deeply problematic. When my sense of what is right clashes with yours, in any realm, conflict ensues. Moral anchors can be interpreted as what may bind us together within communities, but also, and to a greater extent, what divides us as nations, religions, castes and ultimately as individuals.

Read about this and more, in our latest newsletter, Issue 20!

The middle schoolers from Varadenahalli school and CFL were happy participants in a banana fibre workshop. Friends from Sirsi:  Vidya, Nirmala and Premila, conducted the workshop. In Sirsi, they are part of an organization, Chetana, which works with children and young adults with special needs. Six adults at Chetana have taught around thirty young people the art of making stationery and boxes with waste paper and banana fibre.

Together, they spend the day in song, movement and craft. We were all impressed by the precision and neatness of the work and the finish. Our younger ones insisted on attending assembly, the next day, with their lovely banana boxes by their sides.

~ Diba

Here is a flip book made by our seven to nine year-olds as part of a Library Project.

There are innumerable ways of opening this book. Each page may have three authors and three illustrators.  You can actually compose your own page!

Here are some of the one-sentence accounts you may find:

Kaki the happy white and brown monkey
laughed so loud that she fell off the tree branch on
grey wonder rock.

Large eyed Lata, the slow slender loris
Laughed so loud that she fell off the tree branch
In the pond filled with mosquito larvae and frogs.

Tilley the cucumber-eating goat
Walks around
In the lush green gardens around the
Junior School at C.F.L.
In Varadenahalli.

Come find a story sentence in Fantastic Funny Flip Friends, now on the Library Projects shelf in our Library!

Diba