Kids, angst and aliens

It was the kind of event that was insignificant enough to be forgotten yet memorable enough to merit an account here. Over six months ago, this is what transpired on a musty morning in London in February.

I was attending a Discovery leadership workshop being run out of Richmond, a delicately serene and picturesque suburb of West London that people like Angelina Jolie and Mick Jagger call home. It’d been three days, and we were cruising from one thin spiral book to another with some delightful chocolate chip cookies for company in the evenings. While a tad pedantic, as these things turn out to be, there was that odd spark of inspiration and camaraderie between the group, that made this workshop worthwhile. The days were long but it wasn’t hard work by any stretch of imagination.

It wasn’t until late evening on the third day, that we were tasked with something that truly felt challenging. Mark, our trainer clapped his hands to get our attention.

‘Tomorrow’ , he said somewhat gravely, ‘you will visit a school and deliver a half day experiential leadership programme for a group of a hundred and twenty odd students on the meaning and purpose of leadership. These kids will be 14–15 year olds and will learn about leadership from you. We have arranged for a teacher from the school to speak with you in half an hour from now for any questions you might have.’

To say that we were stupefied with the task at hand is putting it rather mildly. The school we were told would have kids from less privileged backgrounds and possibly some differently-abled children as well. This was a real task in the real world, unlike the boardroom group exercises we had indulged ourselves in thus far.

On a personal note, dealing with kids had never been my strongest suit and it had begun to bite at me that the next morning, I was slated to spend more than three hours with a bunch of early teens. That’s more than any amount of time, I had ever spent in the company of kids.

Our team, after working at a frenetic, chaotic pace through the night decided on a set of ten simple but engaging games and exercises to deliver this experiential leadership programme for the students. I was to lead one such game called ‘Guess the Leader’.

Readers might recall this familiar game from Inglorious Basterds. The game would be played in a group and one of the students — let’s call him/her the ‘central student’ — would be given a leader’s name by the group. This name would not be told to the ‘central student’ but instead, this leader’s name would be stuck on the forehead of the ‘central student’ on a post-it note.

The main aim of the game was for the ‘central student’ to ask twenty questions that the others would answer with a simple Yes or a No. By accumulating those answers, the ‘central student’ would then attempt guessing the name of the leader.

The idea here was that this would be an engaging way to get the kids to think about and discuss qualities of their favourite leaders after the game was over. There were nine other similar games that our team had conceptualised for these students, each with a takeaway lesson around leadership.

I wasn’t particularly looking forward to the next morning but it started off reasonably well. At the school, we were given a large room with a high ceiling and a projector. We organised the requisite chairs, tables and other materials in time before the students walked in.

When they did march in, in straight files, the first couple of things that stood out for me about these students was an abundance of pimples and their obvious disinterest in dealing with us and who could blame them. Oli Barton, a tech leader from the England office, and someone I got along with quite well during the workshop, kicked it all off with an introduction. I remember looking at that wall clock after Oli’s presentation. We still had over two and a half hours to go.

Twenty minutes into the exercises though, I was pleasantly surprised at how well our team had managed to seep in more than a semblance of structure with this group. The groups we had divided the students in moved from one game/exercise to another synchronously and a couple of our designated timekeepers, kept us on our toes. The cacophony of planning from the previous evening had now given way to a perfectly oiled machine that was working without a squeak.

Since there were only twenty of us, we’d divided ourselves into ten pairs. My partner for the game, Mathieu a forty-year old marketing leader from France was effortless with the kids. He was cracking jokes, making the kids laugh, and even helping the ‘central student’ with questions that could crack the answer. Mathieu himself a father to two daughters knew a thing or two about keeping the kids’ interest and attention focussed on the game. I, on the other hand, was a tad nervous. To me, this was a task that needed to be done and done well and gotten over with. I was simply going through the motions to get to the end of it.

Around 12 noon, Mathieu and I had one last group for us to play the game with. We’d alternated being the game facilitator and I had just played the game with the previous group so for this last group, it was Mathieu’s turn. It was time for me to take it easy.

This was a group of another ten odd students and among them, I could see that there were two Indian girls. I knew they were Indian because one of them, the seemingly elder and confident girl was trying to explain to the other shorter and younger girl on how the game was to be played in Hindi.

The shorter girl, who sported one of those twin ponytails, was one of the most subdued kids I had ever seen in my life. She listened in to the elder girl but without any real interest to do anything. As usual, Mathieu set up the game nicely with his French-dipped English and a couple of girls in the group got giggly just listening to him. Mathieu selected one of the native English students and put a post-it on his forehead. It read Barack Obama.

The selected student started asking. ‘Am I male?’. The game was underway.

Meanwhile, I noticed that the short girl in ponytails had her eyes rooted to the ground. It wasn’t so much in defiance but in submission to the ineffectiveness of everything that was happening around her. Mathieu noticed it too and we had one of those non-verbal exchanges where we gestured to each other to let her play the next round. Barack Obama was a slam dunk for the ‘central student’ and he finished well before time. Mathieu, now in an effort to involve the short girl invited her to play the last round. Once again, she stayed rooted to her spot. When Mathieu bent over slightly to ask her again, he got her answer. She was speechless still, but she’d swayed her head from side to side in reply.

‘So shy and introverted, like most Indians,’ I mused to myself.

Mathieu now made another smart move. He asked the other elder Indian girl to come forward. She did. Mathieu thought that by involving her friend who was explaining the game to her, the shorter girl would get engaged in the game. But it didn’t work and she continued to look downcast.

I didn’t like that image of her being surrounded by nine other kids all of whom were playing a game and this solitary, innocent-looking girl, being so inert to those talking, laughing and playing this game around her. Sensing that she might be open to speaking in Hindi, I asked Mathieu if I can try playing this game one on one with her. Mathieu knowing that he wasn’t able to get the best out of her, instantly agreed.

So here I was with this kid, who had barely uttered a word in the past ten mins, sitting in a chair across from me, a person who is the least qualified to deal with kids of any kind. I am sure we both felt like aliens to each other.

‘Where are you from?’ I asked in Hindi.

For the first time in all this while, she looked up, absorbing that friendly pinch of Hindi in this alien world.

‘Bangladesh,’ she replied.

Not the best start I thought though. I had wrongly presumed she was from India.

‘Do you know this game?’ I continued in Hindi.

‘Nope’, she said but this time she rocked her legs back and forth. Her height was short enough for her to do this freely perched on this chair.

Thank God, we are moving somewhere I thought.

‘Are you comfortable in Hindi? Is that what you speak at home?’

Affirmative.

She also told me that it was her first day in a school in England as her family had only recently moved from Dhaka and that she didn’t understand a word of English.

I worried for her. How will she get by in this school? Do her parents speak English? I asked. They didn’t. I empathised.

There was a reason.

When I was 16, I had moved from Ghaziabad to a small town in Kerala and somehow got by without knowing Malayalam for five straight years, thanks to English. For those early years, I had this gnawing frustration of not having been able to understand people rattling off in perfect Malayalam around me. That sense of alienation, that not knowing a language can cause, I was familiar with.

I didn’t want to tell this girl how tough it was likely to be from here on. Instead, I falsely comforted her saying it will be okay, that she will find enough Asians to talk with in Hindi (true) and that people in Richmond were very nice and helpful (I had no clue if they were). Mathieu asked me with a thumbs up sign if all was okay. I said it was. He reminded me that we were over time and that we got to wrap it up in five minutes.

‘Shall we play this game now? Why don’t you give me a name and I’ll try guessing it. Think of any leader or person who you admire.’ I handed her a that ubiquitous yellow post it with a pen.

‘I don’t know anyone here.’

The pen and the yellow piece of paper I gave her stayed there motionless.

‘It doesn’t have to be from anyone here. Give me a name from someone in Bangladesh. I’ll try.’

‘You know people from Bangladesh?’

Sheikh Hasina, Taslima Nasreen and a bunch of Bangladeshi cricketers came to mind.

‘Well, I know of your old Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina,’ I said.

That warmed her up a bit for the first time. She straightened her pen and sat straight. Those demure ponytails too perked up a bit.

She started writing a name and in the first display of a competitive streak, that I very much welcomed, hid that name from me as she was writing it. She then pasted that post-it on my forehead. I was kind of sure she wouldn’t have put Taslima Nasreen but fifteen minutes ago, I was also sure she was from India.

I thought of the many other cricketers I know. Athar Ali Khan, my favorite Bangladeshi batsman. What a sight for sore eyes, he was. Mushfiqur Rahim. Would she know him? Mashrafe Murtaza? What if it’s not a cricketer? What about Mohammed Yunus? With these names running in my head, I ventured out in the wild wild east.

‘Am I male?’ I asked her.

‘Yes,’ she nodded.

I went for the most famous Bangladeshi cricketer I knew.

‘ Is it Shakib Al-Hasan?’

It was a genuine, factual attempt on my part to guess that name. I hadn’t said any joke but she chuckled in a way, I thought was beyond her these past fifteen minutes I was trying to know her.

It slowly grew into a laugh that reverberated across this massive hall. Mathieu was stunned with this sudden outburst, and so were some of the other nearby team leaders.

Meanwhile, she cupped her hands to her mouth in delight before managing to utter, ‘Aapko kaise pata’ (How did you know?)

I didn’t have an answer then.

I don’t have an answer today.