 While I was a kid I always thought 24 hours was too less in a day and God was being very unfair in just giving us that much time a day. I had plenty of things to do, go to school, pretend to be listening to my teacher while I was always dreaming about the lunch break or the post school games, the cultural day for which I would miss plenty of classes on the pretext of practice, the NCC parades which devoured my entire math class on Mondays and plenty of days while I was away in camps. Not to forget the music classes, the practice sessions for group song competitions, the Annual Sports day, the cricket memorial volunteering. Over all school life was totally fun and at the end of the day I would hit the sack as a tired young boy.
In spite of so many opportunities to avoid regular class (I was not a great student with respect to marks and never even dreamt of being a studious boy) I was happy to have studied in a school where we had a natural forest fragment that was quite large. The CFTRI Campus in Mysore had plenty of unexplored woods that we as kids used as our hideouts.
How ever, I do regret having born some 25 years earlier when I see kids of today. I wonder how on earth do they study, speak such good English, know their Hollywood, bollywood, chemistry, math, science, physics, astronomy and most surprisingly their Natural History. Being a Wildlife Photographer, I have been indulging in meeting young boys and girls talking to them about Natural History, the amazing wildlife found in India, some issues we face, what we can do, how they can contribute etc In the recent years. Over the last two days, I met up with kids of the Head Start Montessori School, Koramangala. The head of the institute invited me to deliver a talk on Bird watching to kids of class 3 and 4 and follow it up with a bird watching session in Lalbagh.
 I carried my usual presentation and met the head of the school just before the talk. I was not only surprised but also happy to know that these kids were not the usual kind of kids I have been meeting. Though the talk was supposed to be a thirty minute interactive presentation, I took at least an hour and a half to go through my slides and I surely ran through the last two slides due to time constraints. The kids not only knew their natural history but some of them even educated me about their knowledge on birds like the American Bald Eagle, the Penguin etc.
For every bit of information I gave, I learn t one more from the little kids. A sweet girl assured me that she has instructed her mom not to throw tissue paper from the car as it is not a good thing to do. While we were walking on the edge of lalbagh lake, the kids who got to know how the plastic covers and water bottles ended up in the lake remarked “How bad and foolish” of someone to have littered in a place like lalbagh. It took me 16 years to understand what “Litter” is. But I am very happy and delighted that these kids are much better than what I was and they surely seem to have the potential to change their world.
 One girl asks me “Jay, why does always the male have to try too hard to attract the female bird?” I had no clue of what male and female means when I was in class 3. Vikram a smart boy who uses Wikipedia to find out about the birds he sees says “I think you should start NGOs to help save birds”. Rohan, the boss of the group of children knows everything from a Dodo’s extinction to the Peregrine Falcons, from K-gudi to Masai Mara. After having met the children of this school, I am confident that creating wildlife awareness amongst kids is not just a nice thing to do but also a very effective way of making them better citizens of the country. Even if they don’t do anything great to help save our wildlife, I am sure they won’t litter like their parents do. And I am sure they would know that a wild elephant is not the one their parents have been seeing in Circuses near home.
I want to wish these kids a very Happy Children’s day and urge everyone to try and educate their kids about natural history which I think is more important than learning how to solve algebra problems. If anyone of you knows places where such presentations can be made and it can be useful to children, do pass on the contact information. Contact me to know more about such initiatives so that we can help spread the word of awareness and conserve our beautiful planet.
Happy Children’s day.
_________________
Cheers,
Jayanth Sharma
jay@wildlifetimes.com
Last edited by Jayanth Sharma on Fri Nov 14, 2008 1:50 pm; edited 1 time in total
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