English was one of my favourite subjects in school, essentially because it had no set boundaries. Like Science there were no specific diagrams and correct answers, like Maths there were no formulae to be understood and applied, like History it didn’t require memorising a whole lot of dates and people and like Hindi it didn’t have the risk of erring with matras.

Writing essays and letters was what I loved the most. True, some beaten up topics like ‘If I were..’ or ‘One day as a..’ made me cringe and roll my eyes in dismay but overall it was fun. It didn’t matter how many marks I got every time as long as I could let my creative writing take its course.

We had this compulsory question, ‘Read the passage and answer the questions’. When we started off in fifth grade I guess, it mostly comprised of easy passages with simple questions like who did this, who said this, give the adjectives or verbs, etc. As we grew up, the passages and answers became more complex and derivative.

A Jr has his first ever unseen ‘passage’ in his English exam this time and, impressively, the confident boy was much less harried than I was in my time. He insisted me to give him a test passage to determine how well he fares in it though, and I happily obliged.

To make it interesting for him I decided to pick up a page from his favourite Geronimo Stilton book ‘This Hotel is Haunted’ and posed faintly tricky questions, fully expecting him to throw a ‘Mamma, Teacher will not ask this’ tantrum. He didn’t. He answered all of them correctly and was mighty happy with himself for it. 🙂

So, he might draw a dancing girl looking like an egg balanced on a stick or puzzle his teacher with on oval-shaped sun, but the boy sure has his language knowledge and sense in place. His ‘articles’ written on MS Word (like his mother) might be all about him, his sister and his friends for now, but the fact that he likes to write is lot more gratifying. 🙂

Shouldn’t this be a proud day for a mother? 🙂 <3