RELOOK AT MALORY TOWERS

I still remember the days when I was in 3rd or 4th I started reading the 'Malory Towers' by Enid Blyton. I would request my mother to buy me the next part of the series as soon as I finished the previous one. I was enthralled by the fact that there was an all girls school located right next to a sea, where they could play pranks on teachers, all of them had nearly perfect families and would enjoy midnight feasts. I thought that even though the characters had flaws, they were above them and were kind and 'sensible'; especially the protagonist, Darell. She was the teacher's pet, great at sports, very smart, and loved her family. She was almost always chosen as the Head of Form, which obviously made her a very lovable character. All the girls who were a part of this batch, have a close bond with each other even though there might be some spiteful moments between them, which is what I liked the most.

After an year or so, I almost finished the entire series, and decided to take a break from it for a while. Then I returned again to the books after a while and started re-reading some parts of the books I had, but my experience was different, let me tell you how. I noticed things in the books that were disturbing and had gone unnoticed before. 

1. Judgemental characters
The girls do not try to accept any new girls in the form (class) without judging any of them and even their parents at time. They accept girls only if they are like them or like sports. If a girl shows some self love or does things like wearing a bracelet, then she is called spoilt and snooty. If a girl starts crying of homesickness or cannot wake up early the next day they start saying mean things and call her a baby even though it's totally normal to be homesick.

2. Sterotypes
Enid Blyton has also placed her own prejudices against people from a particular nationality. For example, in the third book of the series, she introduces a new American girl called Zerelda. She is instantly disliked because she is supposedly "spoilt" with too many "airs and graces". They are constantly trying to change her to inculcate a "British sense of honour" and are bashing hate on her for her unusual accent. The "stuck-up" girls are always shown as rich and this creates an image in the readers' mind of rich people as stuck-up. 
In almost each book there is one girl (generally hated by everyone) who will "spill the beans" about someone doing the wrong thing after which she is bullied by all the girls in the form especially by the older girls. The bullying is even more intense if the beans are spilt about one of the older girls such as Darell. I am a girl who truly believes in raising her voice against something wrong and the thought of being targeted by an entire form of mean girls genuinely scares me.

I have enjoyed these books and I did learn of few things from the series too but some of these elements just evoke an unpleasant feeling in a reader which decreased the joy of re-reading them.
I have also ordered the new book that just came out (New Class at Malory Towers) especially because it has characters from diverse races including an Indian one which intrigued me. Hopefully I'll write a blog about that one too.

My reading for Summer'19

‘The Help’ by Kathryn Stockett- This book is about the seemingly impossible friendship between 2 Afro-American (consistently referred as ‘black’ in the book) maids and their white mistress’s daughter. The books stands out because of its intriguing plot. It takes a while for the story to kick off but that makes the book feel very natural. I also got to know about the lives of domestic help and how they were sometimes ill-treated by their masters and mistresses – something that I have only heard of.

‘The Da Vinci Code’ by Dan Brown- In this book, the protagonist (Robert Langdon) and a French cryptologist Sophie Neveu, have to solve the mystery of the murder of the curator of the Louvre (Jacques Sauniere). They also realize that they have to find and protect some very important historical documents. In order to do this, they need to crack the clues set up by the curator before someone else does. I would recommend this book because the author has made the clues intelligently by adding some historical context to it and you are forced to read what happens next. I also enjoyed exploring (thanks to Google) a lot more about ancient brotherhoods such as Illuminati or Priory of Sion. The book might be inappropriate for certain age groups because of mention of grown-up content.Also, there are a lot of French, Latin words in the story which can make it a complicated read. 

‘Educated’ by Tara Westover- This memoir was the most hard-hitting book I read in my vacations this year. It is the memoir of Tara Westover and her family who lead a survivalist lifestyle and don’t believe in the government. As a result of this, she cannot go to school, government hospitals (even if during serious health condition) and they are expected to follow strict religious rules. As she grows up, she realises that if she wants to obtain an education she will have to go away from home as her father and brother become even more radical. This book is about  Tara’s struggle to obtain a good education despite her family’s oppressive views. If not for anything, I will recommend this book for people to appreciate our good fortune. The author’s writing style made me feel as if I was right there, experiencing the story with her. It was very visual.

‘Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls’ by Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo- This is a book that contains stories of 100 girls/women who have challenged the thinking and mindset of the society around them and done something great in life. It is also the most funded original book in the history of crowd funding. They are a take on the original good night stories about a princess waiting for a prince to come and rescue her. The stories are written in a way that girls (or even boys) of all ages can enjoy them and get inspired. People might object to the fact that some of these stories are of pirates and conquerers, but these women too were rebellious and strong in their own ways. So I think its OK to have such stories included even if they may not create the best impression on young girls. I would recommend this book to young girls so that they get inspired to do something great in life and find a role model they can look up to.

    
     'Becoming’ by Michelle Obama- This book is the autobiography of Michelle Obama who was the First Lady of the US for 8 years. It talks about her journey from a simple family of Chicago to being First Lady and wanting to create an impact in the world. Firstly, I would recommend this book because of her writing style. To say the least, it is an extremely well-written book. Events transition so smoothly that it felt like watching a movie. I could empathise with Michelle and her struggles. I found her story so inspiring and full of strength that she is now my role model just by reading the book. Though I am neither an American nor a minority, I got so engrossed with her life-story that reading the book became highly engaging (I literally finished the book in two days)

Thank you for reading. 

Studying History is = Seeing things from multiple perspectives

    We all know the famous story of ‘The Three Little pigs’. In short, it goes like this:

    The three pigs build three houses. The first house was built by straw, the second by sticks and the third one by bricks. The first and the second house was blown away by a big bad wolf and those two pigs run away to the third house made by bricks. End of it, they are saved because the wolf could not blow away the third house. 

    Until now, this is the story we have heard as told by pigs. And here is the story from the wolf’s point of view which I’m sure you have never heard of:

Once there was a wolf (he was neither big nor bad). He was baking a cake for his granny’s birthday. He ran out of sugar so he went to borrow some sugar. First he went to the first pig’s house built by straws. While the pig was getting sugar the wolf sneezed and the house was blown away. Since only the pig was left (without a house), the wolf thought that the pig has no reason to live and there is no harm in eating him. So he ate the pig. The same thing happened with the second pig as well. End of it, the police arrested him even though the wolf had no intention of eating the pigs, he had visited their homes only to borrow some sugar.

   

    This was an exercise we did in our humanities class. We had to see how these two stories were different. The aim was to learn that  historical books or texts can have different information depending on the perspective of the informer or the sources For example: The information about a revered king such as Shivaji in our history textbook will be about praising him as a great king. But if Mughals or Shahs were to write the same book, they would consider Shivaji to be a menace. 

      The same could be true for a soldier and a terrorist. It could be the same person but what you name him/her will depend on where you are viewing that person from. 

My First ever : Overnight adventure camp

Dear Family Members,

I have decided to write about 'my first ever' experiences in this blog. Whenever I experience something new and exciting for the first time, I will attempt to write about it on this blog. Here is the first one in that series. 

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One day, in the school assembly our Principal Ma’m announced the 3-night adventure camp is organized by Pugmarks to Pavankhind. We were also told the itinerary for 4 days, listening to which I was highly excited to go. There was only one problem – Permission by parents. Whole day this thought stayed on my mind. I slowly started feeling confident that my parents might permit me to go because it would be a different experience for me.

As soon as I reached home, I asked Aai. She sounded slightly tentative about me going and she had many reasons for that such as upcoming Arunachal Pradesh Trip and lack of adequate information provided by school about picnic. After a lot of pleading, discussion, tear-shedding, Aai-Papa finally agreed to send me over. The school provided required information, contact details of the teachers were provided plus the biggest reason in my favour was the watch with a GPS tracker. I bought new clothes for the camp which added to my excitement. We started packing a few days prior to the camp. I was very careful about packing all the necessary things including medicines and toiletries.

Finally, the day came (Tuesday, 25^th October). We left for my school early on the morning. And after all the formalities, we boarded the bus. When the bus left the school, I was having mixed emotions – excitement about the next four days plus worry about not being with my parents. We played games in the bus, chatted with each other and stopped for breakfast on the way. We had delicious vadaa-paav and I also bought Maaza with the money I was carrying. We continued our journey further. The day was pretty hot. We traveled on the highway but we did not pay much attention outside. They played a horror movie in the bus. They drew the curtain and made it dark to give us all a feel of the movie.  I have never seen a horror movie so I thought let me try it. But as it progressed, it really became a boring movie.

After a long long travel of 7 hours which was tiresome at the end, we finally reached our resort – The Jungle Resort - which was in a village called Amba. It was a very beautiful resort. It had hammocks, climbing nets and there was dormitories too. We checked in our rooms (I was living with my classmates Sanika, Gauri and Kartika) We freshened up and went for lunch. The food on all the occasions was delicious. After lunch, we played around in the resort. In the evening we went to a Nature Interpretation Center where they had given information about different animals living in the village and in the surrounding forest. After that we went to a temple located in the jungle. We saw monkeys and also experienced peace to be in such quite surroundings. We were told about ‘Audumbar Tree’ . The botanical name of this tree is Ficas and that day I learnt that there is a pretty high chance that there be a water source below Audumbar Tree. The best part about this tour was travel on an open double decker Jeep. After this, we returned to our resort, had Chinese for dinner and went to sleep.

Next morning when we woke up, it was chilling cold to our surprise. Even worse because I was not wearing my jacket (because I was feeling lazy to go back to room and get it). We were then divided into groups which had girls and boys both. Every group was given a wonderful names such as Terrific Tigers but our group was given the worst name – Lazy Lions. We became the laughing stock of the entire camp. Our poor group leader, Yukta motivated us and said that ‘we will prove everyone wrong for calling us lazy’. We then went for a Jungle Safari in which we walked through the jungle and some of the children spotted a giant squirrel. We also spotted the funnel web spider (the web had a hole, the spider would sit beneath the hole and would wait for its prey to come and then attack). Unfortunately we did not get to see a lot because it was day time and children were making too much noise. We then visited Pavankhind. We were told the story of Baji Prabhu, a Maratha commander in Shivaji’s army, who had given his life while saving Shivaji from Adilshah forces. Further we visited a waterfall which had sparkling clear water. We washed our feet and faces and felt cool and refreshed. We walked back and climbed the flight of stairs puffing and panting. We were served cool Kokam Sarbat and then it was time for lunch. On the way back we saw beautiful scenes, we reached a spot in the forest where we had lunch. We came back to the resort. It had been a long day so we just relaxed and played with our friends. In the night, we had a group activity of MAD movies in which we had to recreate a scene from the movie. The movie we got was Houseful 3 (everyone besides me had seen the movie). We had dinner post the activity, we were instructed about the next day and we then we called it a day.

The next day we woke up with excited state of mind because we had adventure sports. We started out day with warm-up exercises and spent our day playing around. After lunch , we were taken to adventure sports facility in the resort. We had commando net, parallel climbing , Burma bridge and shooting (air rifle) I think I performed pretty well except shooting. In the evening there was another group activity that day. The name was ‘Human Model’. We had to dress up a person using props. We chose statue of liberty and we created reasonably good human model. Also the extra challenge was that the audience will try to make the model laugh but the model should not laugh. Thankfully our model did not laugh. Next round, we had to become a helicopter as a team and everyone had to participate and other groups had to identify the model. I was made the propeller and our group coordination was the best. I learnt from Kartik bhaiyya that when we coordinate and cooperate, things become easier. Finally, they announced the results of adventure sports and to our surprise, our group stood first. We finally proved that we were not ‘lazy’ especially because this was adventure sports. Our joy knew no bounds. After this we went for a night safari. It was dark and we traveled by double decker jeep. We went to a place called Vagh-zara (Tiger – stream). At this place, once in a while tigers can be spotted while drinking water. They switched off the lights and stopped the jeep. I was so frightened that I was almost about to cry. Thankfully, we didn’t spot any tiger (because when you see a tiger, I don’t think it’s a pleasant sight). We returned to our resort. Just before sleeping Kartika told us a secret that one boy Atharva was going to scare Nidhi by becoming a ghost. Though Nidhi is my friend, I still hid the secret from her because it would have been fun to see her scared. After we slept, they knocked on the door and went away. But I did not notice any of this because I was fast asleep.

Next day was the sad day for us because the camp was ending. We came to know that besides scaring girls, boys had also thrown girls’ chappals here and there and also that one of the teacher was a part of the plan. We were tensed but soon everyone’s slippers were found. When we were looking for misplaced slippers, we saw a beautiful hornbill which was yellow and black coloured. As a punishment, all the boys participated in this trick were asked to serve us breakfast and eat only after everyone had finished.

Finally our return journey started but the highlight of the journey was when I fell asleep in the bus a boy named Aditya put toothpaste on my face. When I woke up, I suddenly found my face smeared with toothpaste. I quickly cleaned by a wet wipe though it constantly felt sticky. We had snacks at Joshi Vadewale (I made Aai jealous by telling her that ;). Finally when we reached our school, I was happy to meet my parents, but still sad that the camp was over. This was a very memorable experience.

A trip to The City of Angels

My journey began at Pune as soon as we sat in a taxi for going to Mumbai. I was highly excited to get on this journey (psst psst... even though it meant missing my school and final exam revision). As soon as I sat in the cab, I looked around trying to get the last view of our building which I was not going to see for next 15 days. 

We reached the Bombay airport 12 a.m. (It was also Aai-Papa's anniversary that day). My excitement about visit to an international airport kept me awake that day. When we entered the airport I was stunned. It was a fabulous site. We moved past security check and immigration and then we went to see around the airport and the art galleries. 

When we waiting for our flight, I could see our plane. It as Emirates Airbus - A 380. It looked very grand. Once we boarded, I saw a small TV screen which I found to be the best part about the flight. I thought that Raghav and Aaradhya would have loved this feature of the flight. 

After a 2 hour 50 minute flight, we reached Dubai airport. Sun had just risen, it was extremely bright and we got a view of Burj Khalifa. It was fascinating to see the largest structure of the world. Even though, Dubai airport is busy and everyone thinks it is 'posh', I still found Bombay airport better. Finally, it was time to board our flight for a 16 hour journey which would take us to our final destination.

While we were right over the North Pole Desert in the middle east

Snow somewhere in north Europe

Once we boarded the flight, we saw many new things such as deserts, and as we passed through Greenland, we could see the snow. It was a completely new sight for me. Once we reached Canada, only 5 hours of our journey were left and after such a long journey 5 hours felt like 5 minutes. I remember stretching arms and saying, " Sirf 5 ghante bache hain." And when actually 5 minutes were left, I was so thrilled that I felt like taking a parachute and jumping out. When we finally landed (0 hours 0 minutes), I actually felt like pushing everyone and running outside. 

Even though I had visited US before, this time it was different because I was going to meet R and A. We stood in a looooooooong queue for immigration and after all other formalities finally we met Fufaji in the arrival lounge. As we went outside the airport, I didn't look around the car or talked to anyone because I was awed at the site of a new city and all the different kind of cars and their number plates. When we entered Chino, I was extremely impatient. I wanted to ask Fufaji how much longer, but it would have felt rude. 

We entered Eucalyptus Avenue and when we saw the board of Eagle Canyon, we slowly tip-toed onto the front patio and we rang the bell. When Booa opened the door, the blow of our sudden sight left her numb and she broke down (check out the video). I saw R and A and I went and hugged them. It was a completely different feeling because I was meeting them after a long time.

Chino Hills is a very green place. I found it different from the rest of the places in US I visited. It had a very warm climate which was one thing I also liked about LA. We saw snow-capped mountains at the distance. 

Some of my favourites from our site-seeing were:

1. Universal Studio – I saw some of my favourite characters at US such as minions. We also visited The Wizarding World of Harry Potter. There was a Hogwarts castle, Diagon Alley, There was a model of Hogwarts Express, Zonko’s joke Shop, Honeydukes.

We saw welcome dances of Beauxbatons and Durmstrang. They were selling magical drinks such as Butterbeer and Firewhiskey. I wanted to buy a wand but I did not get one because it was expensive. The Mummy ride (Revenge of the Mummy) - it was so spooky that I had to keep my eyes closed. It had special effects such as water splash and spider crawling. We saw Animal show and Special Effect show. We learnt how animals get trained for movies and some of the secrets for eg how movie makers create effects such cutting a body part or flying. 

2. Six Flags – This is an amusement park with some of the most thrilling rides I experienced. I had gone with Papa and Fufaji with an assumption that rides will be ordinary but I was wrong. I could see the rides from a mile away and I was shocked. But in the end, rides turned out to be a lot of fun. The ride named ‘Tatsu’ is worth mentioning. This is a Japanese word meaning Dragon. I could here people’s shrieks – I was not sure if that was out excitement or out of fear. 

3. Disneyland – This is a place I had been wanting to visit since I was a child. It turned out to be worth the time and effort. We saw the Disney castle and castle of Princess Sleeping Beauty. It was slightly scary because it was dark with videos of the movie playing inside. We saw the world-famous parade which left me awe-struck. While it displayed all my favourite Disney characters, the Frozen characters were missing which I found disappointing. We also saw a man who was using a broom and water to draw Disney characters on the floor.

4. Santa Monica Pier – It was a very large pier with an amusement park. There we had ice cream. There were a few eating joints, caricature artists and a huge cruise ship. It was a very beautiful and peaceful place. There was a photo booth in which I, Aai, Booa, R and A had to squeeze and click a picture. Every frame had someone’s face covered. It was very funny. 

5. Long Beach Aquarium – It had a variety of fishes – Jelly fish, star fish, Sharks. And we could also touch some of the fishes and birds. There were these colourful birds to whom we could feed nectar. We also saw a show in which they also showed how they train seals. Apart from capturing animals, they rescue them and treat them if they are unwell. 

The food in US was nothing special. I could only have pizza or French fries or lemonade. There was not a large variety. But one place I liked was ‘Soup Plantation’ because of its salad bar and its cold-drink machine where we made special (wink-wink) drink for Aai which tasted like tooth-paste.

I found children in US to be very cribby. I think they are spoilt children. Because all of them have phones and I saw them shouting and yelling at their parents if their parents decline their demands. In general, people were courteous to us even though we are non-Americans. They always wished us Good morning, Good Afternoon etc. 

Booa’s home is just like an Indian home. 

We also celebrated Raghav’s birthday in a place called ‘Pump it up’. As soon as they opened the place, I got to see the giant air castles. I had such amazing time there. That was the best birthday party I have attended in my entire life.  

Aaradhya had grown up a lot and she would run everywhere. Sometimes it became difficult for me to manage them and entertain them in the car backseat. But this is not a complaint because I really had a wonderful and memorable trip because of my dear Booa, Fufaji, Raghav and Aaradhya.