[Book Review] To Sir, With Love

One sinister backdrop: Prejudice.
One slum-ish neighbourhood.
One dark skinned teacher in a troubled school.
And one hope: the young minds.

How does one feel when a person who is qualified, trained and intelligent as an engineer (in a society where there was lot of demand for such qualifications), one does not get a job due to the color of his skin? How does one feel when you feel the hatred in a restaurant, in the bus, in a Taxi cab and on the road? How does one feel when infact this hatred is supposed to NOT EXIST as the british society is supposedly liberal?

This book is based on experiences of the author E. R. Braithwaite, a person of African origin in post-war London. He is well-educated and hopeful of getting a good job after being de-mobilised from RAF after WW-2. Instead he has to take up a teaching job in one of the poorer schools of the city. This school is for those children who have had a discipline problems in earlier schools. The children are as prejudiced as the their parents who live near-by.

The children are determined to mis-behave. It does not matter to them whether the teacher is a white or a black. But in case of the author, coming from the mindset of being treated badly, the indiscipline is even more difficult to handle. As the story progresses, the author not only manages to 'cure' the indiscipline, but also make the children a better human being. The children show an unexpected attitude towards unshackling the bonds of narrow thinking and also try to teach their parents a lesson or two.

There are also a couple of side-stories: Tension and dramatic politics between various teachers, romance between the author and one of the fellow teacher. But the author does not allow these side stories to derail the flow of the main theme.

Why is this story relevant to us? Today in india we face a similar situation. Officially and legally we dont have any caste-system in our society. But reservations for one and upper-caste egotism for another have been causes of strong under-current within the society. There are regular allegation of one party being victimised by the other which is the cause of social tension. The situation is not very much different than what is faced by the author, although in India all parties feel victimized.

This book gives hope to those in India who think that things will change with coming to next generations if enough is done. It is possible to wipe out the prejudices entrenched in the society if the children are given correct guidance.

I hope we have more and more teachers who think along the lines of the author. Amen.

Urbanization: First for solving it

Here is a sample of 3 cities in Maharashtra, India and state of infrastructure.

City	Population	Water	Load Shedding
Sangli	800 thousand	Once a day, enough	2 hours per day, scheduled
Malkapur	200 thousand	Once in 6 days, not enough	2 hours per day, scheduled and sometimes unscheduled
Pune	5 million	Twice a day, more than enough including wastage	Never

Counter Intuitive? May be. But true.