One small step for you...

(This is written as a letter to my daughter on her starting school)
 
Dear Mishoo,

Time flies…really really quickly. I feel like it was yesterday when I was a school-going boy, getting up super early in the morning to get ready, trying to avoid eating breakfast (but always failing to escape your Dadi’s watchful eye), cycling / moped-ing my way to school, meeting with friends, and then going through books, homework, quizzes, etc. All of that – the morning rush, the sounds, the smells, the school assembly hustle-bustle – it is all so fresh in my memory. But I realize that those memories are decades old now. And you, the next generation, are getting ready to build those experiences yourself! I am super excited about you starting this fascinating journey of going to school. You have already impressed me with how you handled yourself in the first few weeks. Now, as you get ready to resume your school after your first summer break, I wanted to share some thoughts on this exciting beginning and what lies ahead. So here is “Dad’s list of Top 6 takeaways from School”:

• Friends

You might be surprised that I am starting this list with something that is not related to education in the traditional sense – namely – making friends. But great friendships will probably be one of the biggest gifts from going to school (and later, college). You will spend a large chunk of your conscious hours in school. In school you will interact with people your own age and get to know their personalities and their likes/dislikes. You will start identifying who you click with. You will start appreciating different behaviors in people. You will start creating a social circle of yourself. You will create a group to share your time with. Right now, that might take the shape of playing ball or taking turns at swings. Very soon, it will be about playing pretend games. And then, as you grow older, it will involve sharing your inside jokes, your crushes, your day-to-day struggles, your role models, your aspirations, your fears, etc. If you happen to be like me in the friendship angle, you will always be found in the company of your close friends, never alone. And hopefully, we will be proud of these close friends of yours (scratch that – this is not a hope, it is an order – you better make sure that we approve of your friends!)

As I look back at some of my most valued relationships, a ton of those have come from friendships that got nurtured at school. You know most of these people:

  (The IITB Gang, My birthday celebration, Aug '98)

(You with Cleo; Dhruv and your Mumma are in the background, Hong Kong, '15) 

(Two generations of friendship, Hong Kong, '15)

("Piggi Maasi" and your Mom + Dad, Chicago, '13)

(With Polo and Maggu, Delhi, '14)

 (With Polo Chachu and Nishtha Chachi, Taj Mahal - Agra, '15)

And of course, if you are really really lucky like me, you might find your best friend in school as well:

(First time I saw your Mom dressed in a saree, IIT Bombay, '00)

(Friendship still going strong, '15)

• Asking Questions

Given your current rate of asking questions, I don’t think your curiosity needs any further nurturing :)

Jokes aside, I hope your school environment teaches you to ask questions. While usually there is a ton of focus on knowing the answers at school, I think a key learning is asking questions, without hesitating to do it. Curiosity will go a long way in shaping you. How? Why? What? Why not? Keep all those questions coming. Don’t hesitate in saying “I don’t understand”. Remember, if you don’t understand, there are probably a bunch more of your friends who feel the same way. Feel comfortable in saying “But I thought it’s the opposite” or “I don’t agree, and here’s why” or “I still don’t get it, can you explain to me separately” or “I don’t get it, but it looks like you do – can you please help me”. Once you get bitten by the bug of curiosity, there’s no letting go. And your life is pretty well set after that!

So, as much as I will kick myself for saying it, keep those questions coming. Just one request thought – first route those questions to your Mom :)

• Learning to Lose

In life, winning is important. And your Type-A personality Mumma will make sure you “better win every single time” ;) 

But there’s an even more important part of life. And that is losing. No matter how much I wish you never lose, it will happen a few times in your life. Some losses will be small ones, like being given runout in cricket when you thought you had actually made it . Others will be big ones, like not getting selected into the university program you dreamed about. While you may think that it is these big losses that decide the rest of your lives, it is actually your reaction to these losses that will really define you. Much of your future happiness will be a function of how well you learn to deal with losses & failures. The reason I bring up the topic of losing in this article is that many of your first brushes with failure will happen at school. Some day you may not do great in the playground. Another day you might struggle in a science quiz. And yet another day, you might feel robbed of your success because you ended up falling sick right during your exams. And day by day, how you react to these losses will start setting your psyche.

So what does "losing well" mean? First of all, it doesn’t mean being nonchalant about failure. There are no two ways about it – losing sucks. It is also not in your DNA. If you are anything like your parents, you will find losing incredibly difficult to digest. Ask your Mumma about the time she didn’t get a gold medal in class because she had chicken pox and the school authorities won’t let her take the exam for fear of spreading the disease to others. She is still sore about not winning that medal! I vividly remember losing this city-wide quiz in fifth standard, partly because I was dumb enough not to identify a violin from a piano in the “music round” (I still kick myself for it!), and partly because where our arch rivals sat, they kept getting easy questions being passed by the other weaker teams. It has been more than twenty years now, but I still remember that loss. It still hurts. And to this day, I am very particular about where I sit in a meeting room :)

So what are good ways of losing? Start by understanding that losing sucks, and hence doing everything possible to avoid it. But if you do lose, losing well means being gracious to the winner, giving them the due respect, and learning from them. It means doing some self-analysis with a cool mind. What did you miss? What could you have done better? Knowing what you know now, how would you approach the situation differently? How will you make sure that you don't lose the next time? Beyond analysis, it means putting some of those ideas into practice. Don't just talk, get stuff done. Finally, it means knowing that hard work & preparation are necessary but not sufficient conditions to success. Sometimes there are things outside your control, and you can’t let failure get to your head. In such cases, losing well means not giving up. Remember Incy Wincy Spider? Or Shakira:

(you gotta) “Pick yourself up,

Dust yourself off,

And get back in the saddle”

(note to self: I need to play this song for you today – it’s a catchy one. You will enjoy listening and dancing to it)

• Books and Reading

 (You already seem to be interested in the newspaper)

 (Yeah, clearly very interested in newspapers)

While we have exposed you to books at home, it is at school where you will get to spend some real quality time with books. I hope you make the most of it. I hope you develop a love of reading. Books are a great way to learn, of course. They are also a great way to spend some free time. Books transport you to a different world at a moment’s notice. They make you go through different emotions. They will make you think. They will bring joy and happiness. They will also bring grief and tears. Some books will leave you at the edge of your seats. Some will make you understand key junctures in human history. All good books will leave you wanting for more.

Here’s a fun story – I vividly remember the first time I got exposed to a real-life library. It was in my sixth grade that my school opened a library. My first day there was one of the happiest days of my life. I realized that it had all kinds of books, and you could take whatever you wanted, read it, and come back for more! I felt like a kid in candy land - I just couldn’t believe my good fortune! I would read books all day long – during lunch break, sitting inside the “tempo” to/from school, after finishing my homework, after dinner, and even after lunch when your Dadu and Dadi wanted their boys to sleep (I would close my eyes, wait 20 minutes for everyone to fall asleep, then get up, move the window curtain just a bit to let some light in, read my book for about 1.5 hours, hide all evidence after that, and then go to sleep 15 minute before everyone was supposed to get up, and get up with them. No one ever came to know). There was one catch though – the library “period” in my school was once a week, which meant that the earliest anyone could exchange their book was one week after borrowing it. Since I would routinely finish my book much before the one week mark, I had to wait for the rest of the days, which was pretty agonizing. Soon I figured out a way around it. I identified a few classmates who didn’t care much about reading. Every week, during the library period, I would pick out one book for myself, and another 4-5 books for my other classmates that I was interested in reading. They would then get those books issued out in their names, and I would borrow the books from them and lap them up! (Yeah, I know, I was quite a nerd).

Fast forward twenty years, and that obsession for reading still remains. You can give me a good book and I will lose all sense of time. I hope you too develop this love of reading. Trust me, it will be a blast! I wait for the day when both of us can sit beside a pool or at a cafe, and spend hours reading our own books.

• Teachers (and later Mentors)

As you grow, you will find mentors and advisors along your way. But it is at school where you will find some of your first role models and guides. The foundation for such relationships will be set in school, when you interact with teachers. Some teachers will be ok, some will be good. And then there will be a few teachers that would be just phenomenal. These would be the ones who will go above and beyond, and will leave a lasting impression on you. You will learn a lot from them. You will go the extra mile for them. You will become a better person due to them. And you will always be indebted to them. Like I am, to some of these amazing people:

·         Joy Mam – my English teacher from grade 8^th – who encouraged me to write (If you hate going through these random pieces from me, you now know who to blame!)

·         Jose Sir – my classteacher from fifth and sixth grade. He was my role model for hard work, dedication, and devotion. He spent countless hours before and after class to help me prepare for that quiz that I have mentioned above (another reason why I still hate losing the quiz – I felt that I let him down)

·         RK Sir – my physics teacher when I was preparing for college entrance exam. There was a point in time when I was struggling and had kind of given up. One day RK Sir was particularly disappointed with our entire class and gave a very emotional speech. He asked us how late had we studied the night before and how much had we slept. He then told us how late he had been up till, and how little had he slept, because he was busy preparing material for us. And boy, that embarrassing truth was the kick that I needed. I was ashamed. Something clicked somewhere. And things changed, quite a bit

·         Prof. H Davis – my professor of “Business Policy” at Chicago. I looked at him, and I saw someone who had really lived a fulfilling life. His course has had a profound impact on my life. It is fair to say that it was because of his class that I got reminded of the need to reinvest in the relationship with your Mom, and not take it (or any other relationship) for granted. Besides other things, he taught me to be paranoid (in a good way), and that has helped me prevent some really crazy situations in life

•       The single most important thing you will learn at School

If you were to ask me to name the most important thing that I learnt at school, it will be …

…are you ready

…still ready

….wait for it

…a bit more

delayed gratification. 

A lot of the content that you learn at school (especially secondary and higher education) will have limited impact on the rest of your adult life. Some examples of stuff that I studied which hasn’t been particularly useful – Why the battle of Panipat was fought…g = 9.8m/s^2…chemistry…electrical engineering…

What school will teach you and inculcate in you will be this concept of delayed gratification. Give up a small piece of fun today, do that many times over, and one day you will win boatloads of happiness & satisfaction back. You will have to demonstrate this every day, multiple times at school:

·         Give up spending 3 hours with Mumma and Papa, go to school, and it will help in the long run

·         Set aside the toys, do the exercise assigned to you now, and you might get a pat on the back

·         Ignore the video game, read the book, and you will have a better understanding of a beautiful piece of literature

·         …the list goes on…

This concept of delayed gratification has indeed been the topic of much research, the most powerful one being the famous marshmallow experiment by Walter Mischel in the ‘60s. 

In this experiment, 4 and 5 year old kids were asked to sit in a room by themselves. A marshmallow was placed in front of them, and they were given the deal that if they could sit in the room for 15 minutes without eating the marshmallow, they would get not one but two at the end of that time period. But if they ended up eating the marshmallow before that time, they wouldn’t get the extra one. 2/3rds of kids couldn’t wait and gobbled up the sweet, while the others did wait and get the extra prize.

Some 30 years later, researchers tracked down those kids (now adults) and found out that the ones who had waited ended up doing well at academics, had better SAT scores, were overall more competent, and even had better health. Since then, this study has been repeated many times and across many cultures, and the findings are quite consistent.

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/09/what-the-marshmallow-test-really-teaches-about-self-control/380673/

http://jamesclear.com/delayed-gratification

As you grow, you will see the concept of delayed gratification and the choices it offers come up quite often, even outside of academic environment:

·         Sleep for 20 more minutes or go for a quick run

·         Kill some more time on the net or get the next version of the spreadsheet out

·         Watch another episode of the sitcom or practice the guitar for another 30 minutes

·         Pack up early & go home or spend another 60 minutes trying to nail that landing that brings you closer to earning a pilot’s license

·         Chat a bit more with your friends or practice soccer

·         Check out another facebook post or spend 5 minutes catching up with your spouse

·         (For me right now) Take a nap for 20 minutes in this airline lounge in Singapore after a long flight or complete this blog that you may or may not read in quite a few years from now!

The list goes on…and it is logical to see why people who prefer delayed gratification to immediate rewards would have happier, successful, healthier, and more satisfying lives. And the training for all that starts now, at school.

With that background, I hope when the time comes, you don’t eat the marshmallow. At least not right away!

So there you go kiddo. That’s my list of the top six things to take away from school. Good luck for the next twenty years in school! Keep learning always.

(Ready for Day 1 of school, Apr '16)

(And this time in uniform, Day 2 of school, Apr '16)

Love,

Papa