Cakes, Cricket innovation and the Songs of Roller Revolution…

I promised a report on the cakes and had no intention of disappointing…apologies it took a little longer than might have been expected. I've been contemplating what to give my energies to upon my return. At the moment the vision that is forming is combining the expertise gleaned from my previous working incarnations (co-operative member, restaurant management and youth worker) with the lessons of my current service to forge a café of sorts (possibly cyber) that serves simple, affordable food (I am a world renown expert at pancake making…pancakes are cheap to make, and are easy to veganise/be creative with etc) and also serves as a community hub, where disenfranchised youth can learn practical skills and regain their self-esteem, and where the focus can alight on educating about the transition towns movement, and the attendant causes that go hand in with it – climate change, recycling, oil dependency and emergent paradigms for community sustainability.

Anyone in the midlands who might be able to offer time/skills/capital to this vision is strongly encouraged to get in touch. I have a number of very capable team members lined up, and would very much welcome the expertise and support of anyone who might consider helping us to nurture what we consider to be a vital and worthwhile project.

Anyway…back to GMMCS blogging…The subject of today's blog of course highlights that I will be expounding about the cake making exploits, the cricket innovation and the 'songs of roller revolution' hint at what we've been up to so far since the After School Club began for real on Wednesday.

To begin with cakes…thankfully I was able to buy baking powder in the next village. This had been my only ingredient concern. I'd also managed to obtain an electric whisk/liquidizer and thus was planning, in addition to making cakes with the children, to show them how to make pancakes. The other bonus was that I'd been able to acquire an Indian version of cocoa. The intention I had therefore was to make a banana cake, an apple cake and a chocolate sponge. Saudagar had reminded me the day before that some of the children do not eat eggs. In India eggs and milk are considered by some to be 'liquid meat' (those holding such a view term themselves vegetarian, but they'd be termed vegan across the pond). I was ready for the 'no egg' aspect, and had obtained a recipe for 'no egg banana cake'. These best laid plans were rent asunder on the morning of new year's eve, when the children arrived (the majority of whom are Sikhs) and informed me that on Thursdays Sikhs did not eat eggs. Bummer. This meant a swift rethink and it was decided that we would make one cake with egg – the choc sponge – and would have the two fruit cakes as fully vegetarian.

The first task was to crush the sugar. As you can see in the photos (which will be uploaded as soon as possible) the set up looks like a scene out of Scarface – with my young charges all gathered round to bag up the fresh cut cocaine. I can assure you it is sugar. In the villages one can only purchase sugar in very large refined grains. This is no good for beating together with butter etc to form the basic cake mix, so we had to crush it finer before we could begin making the mix proper. As a steady stream of children arrived each were assigned jobs in addition to sugar crushing, such as chopping fruit, collecting firewood, making pancake batter and softening ghee (milk fat, which is a useful substitute for butter).

Once all the children had arrived, I took them through the basics of cake making and broke down the jobs that would be required. It was also one of the students birthday, and his sister (Navreen) had brought some pasta type stuff that is boiled into a sweet dish that ends up looking like congealed anaemic maggots, but tastes similar to rice pudding. This, in addition with biscuits brought by the children, and the cakes we were planning to bake, meant that lunch on this last day of the holidays would be a sweeter, more celebratory affair than that usual team-made aloo gobi of the preceding days.

Yours truly decided to make the two 'non egg' cakes first, by making a bulk load of mix and then adding the different fruits before the different tins were committed to the oven. The oven was pre-heated and clearly had sufficient temperature…and then some – the photos show just how roaring it got. I was pleasantly surprised as I lost the hairs on the back of my hand to an over audacious attempt to place the cakes in the oven before giving the flames a chance to die down.

The hunch I had that I might have added too much ghee to the mix was proved true. I also put too much banana cake into a tin that was of the wrong shape (to tall and thin, thus not giving the mix a chance to get cooked throughout). These facts, coupled with the frustrating fact that I probably didn't get my point across sufficiently that I wanted the fire to be kept low, but steadily hot, meant that the cakes were burnt by hot flashes of the fire and then not cooked enough when the flames were allowed to die down too far. The result was a disaster for the banana cake, which ended up a ghee-oily, sludgy mess on the inside, and a cinder block on the outside. The apple cake fared much better I'm glad to say, and was absolutely delicious once some slight outer charring had been removed. Thankfully the children ignored the banana cake and instead tucked into the apple cake, which those who were not sikh/veggie, devoured using the pancakes we'd cooked as chapattis, into which they scooped the wonderfully sweet and moist appley delight.

To briefly retrace a couple of steps on the days chronological timeline…once the banana and apple cake were cooking in the oven, I showed a small group how to create a traditional egg based sponge cake, in this instance a chocolate sponge. The rest of the children were given over to bowling practice and to tending the fire – both of which they did with varying degrees of success and dedication, thinking I'm sure of the future moment when they'd be able to enjoy the sweet fruits of their labours. Indian cocoa/ choc powder is not as rich as its English counterpart, and we'd added about three times as much to the mix as would be required usually before deciding we'd best play it safe and see how it turned out. Again the oven's human-thermostat was a little inaccurate and the cake was soundly blackened on the inside – much to the childrens' amusement as I walked past to place it to cool in shade. Had I any comprehension of Hindi/Punjabi sarcasm and mockery, I'm certain my ears would have been burning a great deal more than they already were. My ego would probably also have lost its temper…so I guess this proves the adage that ignorance can be bliss. By who knows what grace, the cake inside the outer blackness turned out to be delicious, but for a small area in the middle which was too squidgy to be safely judged as cooked. The end result then of the chocolate cake was that after some exterior plastic surgery and an internal act of concentric liposuction, we were left with a donut shaped slab of sponge that turned out to be perfectly moist and tasty when I fed it to Saudagar and family that evening and to a few of the children once school restarted the following day.

The rest of the day was taken up with the playing of the three games I'd promised the children once we'd completed our cake making exploits. We began with volley ball, where the children continue to amaze me with the progress they are making, then cricket, where the children and I (thanks to my deliberately idiosyncratic umpiring, which has the benefit of teaching the children to accept the umpire is always right and to understand that sometimes in life and cricket you receive an unfair decision which must be put behind you as soon as possible) seem to manufacture a game each day that reaches a genuine fever pitch of excitement, with the match invariably being won or tied on the last ball of the day. Finally we played a game of 'winner stays on' 5-a-side football and all children returned home happy and suitably fatigued, having burnt of lunch's cake induced sugar rush in the appropriate manner. All that was left was a cleaning and washing up job that Hercules would surely have baulked at and chosen the dung encrusted stables a thousand times over. Without trying to imply I am greater than Hercules, I set to it with a contented gusto. The methodical and repetitious nature of the task allowed me an almost meditative peace in which to reflect on the events and lessons of the previous days. Chief among the small fragments of wisdom, which seemed to distil as I scrubbed and scraped was that the children responded fine to my words, but it was to my actions that the response was noticeably stronger. It is something have learnt from my time in restaurant management, where an ability to inspire your team to follow direction can be the very difference between a successful evening's service, which stays long in the customers' memory and one which is a disaster and is remembered by the customers for all the wrong reasons. Though the manager, I always made it a point to make clear to my staff by my example that I would not ask them to do anything I was unwilling to do myself. The idea I guess is that if one is prepared to get one's hands dirty, the very act creates a level playing field of activity from which a bond of trust begins to grow between captain and team members/manager and staff, especially if one can demonstrate that the necessity of undertaking whatever annoyingly menial task needs be done is that it will be of benefit to all, not just to the individual.

The children were furnished with two such examples throughout the course of the hoiday activites period, the first being when we were finishing off the oven and needed to mix up some 'mud cement' to bind the brick infrastructure together. At first I let the children do this, both because as we all know kids love a good excuse to get dirty and enjoy themselves and because having never actually done it myself (I'd only observed the act of building with mud cement and bricks previously) I was unsure whether there was some little secret or other concerning the quality of the mix, its consistency etc that I was missing. On the first day of cementing/mudding the children were happy to beaver away contentedly, glad to have the opportunity to indulge in a different kind of play. However, a couple of days later when we needed to touch up the outer sealing and create a flat mud surface for the oven shelf, they were more reluctant to get involved. Having by this time worked out that there was nothing to it but mixing together mud and water to the desired consistency, I got to work happily – secretly overjoyed at such a chance to be indulging my inner child's desire to play in the mud. Once the children saw me on my hands and knees, forearm deep in mud the consistency of very over-ripe brie, they crowded round and rolled up their sleeves. The significance of this did not really hit home until my washing-up reflective moment a few days later, which also came a few hours after the second incident which was to help secure the importance of this lesson for me.

After each day's lunch preparation, there would always be left a pile of peelings and other vegetal waste, which I would ask to be cleared up before we began the afternoon's activity. The common practice was to tip such waste over the boundary wall, where it would eventually provide a small iota of natural compost to the field on the other side of the wall. Having already eschewed polystyrene platelets (small bowl shaped plates) at lunchtime, in favour of the more biodegradable option of newspaper, you can imagine I was none too pleased when I looked from my bedroom window on the morning of the final day of the holiday sessions to see all the previous days' peelings dotting the fields in an assortment of plastic bags. Those who have read my early blogs will be aware of the curse the plastic bag has become in India (and of course the world, but at least in some countries we are waking up to its menace). In India, the penny has simply not yet dropped among the masses. For the vast majority there is simply no neuron/synapse linking 'litter' with 'personal responsibility'. As a result, the entire land of Mother India is treated as a suitable place to throw one's rubbish. Any and every form of superfluous packaging is simply left on the floor for someone else to deal with, and since nobody has been given the job of dealing with it, or even seems to have arrived at the perception that it is necessary to deal with it, much of India looks like a rubbish tip.

To return to my narrative thread before my ranting gets the better of me…knowing that we would not have time to do all the washing up and still fit in the games I'd promised we'd play I asked only that the children hop over the wall and gather up the plastic bags they had thrown over before we began our games programme. They seemed genuinely affronted by my request, no doubt founded on their belief that they had done nothing wrong in disposing of the waste in such a way. In response to their wounded 'why sir?' I replied that plastic lasts for stays in the environment and remains harmful for a long time, while newspaper disintegrates after a week at most. They accepted my reasoning and a few scaled the wall. When I returned to check how they'd done about five minutes later, I was angered to see at least four of the six or so bags still remaining in the field among the new wheat crop that was attempting to assert its nascent growth. I asked why they'd not done as I asked and they replied 'sir the mud is wet'. At this yours truly lost his temper and the 'F' word definitely nearly slipped out. I stormed over the wall and marched straight into the middle of the field to retrieve the furthest bag. At this point the last thing on my mind was setting an example, in fact I was certain that I would be on the receiving end of similar muttered jibes such as had accompanied the appearance of the blackened chocolate cake. My sole focus was on cleaning up such unnecessary littering to which my actions had indirectly contributed. The mud was up to my ankles as I turned to the children and loudly remonstrated that 'this' – indicating my mud caked shoes – 'washes off…this' – pointing to the plastic in my hand – 'lasts for centuries', whereupon I turned round and continued to gather up the litter. I felt like a single drop of water futilely trying to make clear a beaker full of black ink. My spirits were lifted when almost immediately I turned round to see that a number of children had hauled themselves swiftly over the wall and were collecting litter like dervishes. Three minutes later the field was back in its pristine state, with the exception of some of the peelings that were left to compost. As we clambered back over the wall I asked the children, 'that wasn't so difficult was it? You see how quickly things get done if we work together?'

I don't know whether they felt guilty for me dirtying my shoes, or whether seeing that I was prepared to do what they were not without a second thought spurred them into action, but my semi-strop proved very effective in galvanising their collective effort. I'm sure the Indian society's reverence for those older than you probably played a part, but I also have an inkling that demonstrating so clearly that I considered myself no different from the children in what I was prepared to do has I think borne fruit in the form of trust and a desire to behave in a very positive way.

To illuminate this point we arrive at the first sessions of the after school club proper, which began on Wednesday 6^th January. The short break between the end of the holiday sessions and the start of the after school sessions proper was valuable and noteworthy for two main reasons. It gave me time to reflect on the triumphs and disasters, allowing me to keep these two impostors in mind when planning for the future. It also gave me time to reconcile (through my own contemplation and by seeking the advice of my family) one of the major doubts that had been plaguing me about my time here, which was that I would not be able to achieve anything significant in so short a space of time as 6 months. What would become of the After School Club once I headed back across the pond etc etc? Whilst it was easy to rationalise these doubts – especially drawing on the thread of generativity's importance – and talk them down, they still remained like a fire whose embers are softly glowing, but which might suddenly spring back to flaming life without warning. Thankfully in the space of about a day I had had a flash of understanding and my Ma and sisters were on hand to reinforce the nascent awareness that was germinating in me. Generativity was at the heart of the learning. I looked back to my time at school, and to the teachers who had really left their mark. I understood that they could have had no idea I would be remembering them and drawing on their example at this moment of my life's journey. They were simply doing what they could to the best of their ability. I realised similarly that if I could leave the children with some smiles and memories they would treasure and some skills they could continue to develop and enjoy, then hopefully I could prove a tree whose seeds would in time bear fruit and more seeds (or some other such metaphor. I was originally going to go for 'I could be the one match that burnt a thousand trees' but didn't feel quite such a destructive and climate threatening metaphor was quite in keeping with the events I was trying to describe. Perhaps 'the match to light an eternal fire' would be better, since we are nearing the time of Lhori festival, which is celebrated with fire and peanuts!).

As for continuing the work I begin once I am gone, my sister helped to put into words what I had been searching to grasp myself. She suggested always having as one aim the idea that the students should run the sessions as much as possible as time wore on. That I should imagine the forging of a chain, with myself as the blacksmith and first link, but I leave behind the tools for all future generations to add their unique links to an unbreakable and empowering chain.

Once these realisations distilled in my heart and mind, they truly imbued me with a fresh energy and vigour, from which I resolved to be open about my wish that those students who were older/more able in any given sport should help their team-mates, using the trust built up by my shoe-muddying litter picking rant to begin the chain building process. Such an idea is already firmly established in my classroom teaching, where the more able students of English help to convey and explain my teachings to those whose English is not yet strong enough for them to understand me independently, but it seems to have found its real raison d'etre in the After School Club sessions that are now entering their second week.

It has been bitterly, bitterly cold recently. Foggy and inclement in such a way that your hands and feet never get a chance to get warm before the evening falls and the temperature again plummets. For this reason the Principal and Saudagar tried to talk me out of coaching on the first day, but when I responded that as an eight year old I'd played rugby in the snow, and when they saw there were over twenty students waiting to take part in spite of the cold they abated their opposition. We focussed on cricket on the first day, running the Usain-Ronaldo-Randall drill (see previous blog if you have no idea what this is) through a couple of times to get the students warm, before turning to some bowling coaching. Given the fact that we were all very cold at the start of the session and I was keen to get us warm as quickly as possible, I'd yet to find a moment to explicitly mention my chain building ideas to the students. Once again, life offered a wonderful gift. Clearly building on the comradery and team ethic built during the holiday period, the older and more cricketing proficient students swiftly and completely unbidden by myself began to take aside the less able and still bent armed bowlers and offer coaching and advice. During the match that followed they continued to be helpful and attentive to the wider needs of their respective teams and the group as a whole, culminating in a hugely satisfying first day, where I felt the spark of potential generativity could be seen to be glowing bright. I made a point to speak to Shubam, Lovepreet and Harman the three main elders who had been so influential in setting a good example and thanked them for their attitude and effort. My father used to love the paradox of telling children 'don't be so childish', and this was brought to mind the next day when, of course, Shubam and Lovepreet managed to undo some of the good work by arsing around to the point where I had to ask them to go home early. Realising I was serious in my threat they were immediately apologetic and saw their error. I carried through on my threat, knowing it would serve as a pertinent reminder to all of the standards of teamwork expected, and that in the days to come Shubam and Lovepreet could doubtless be relied upon to demonstrate even greater sensitivity to the needs of group leadership – a hunch that has thankfully proven correct.

We still have no roller!!!!!!!

So part of Friday's session last week was spent composing 'songs of roller revolution'.  These were protest chants made by the children whose subject was roughly 'give us our roller. We need it because…' the chorus/main slogan had to be in English,whilst the 4 line rhyming verse could be in Hindi, Punjabi or English as they wished. Again, Harman, Lovepreet and Shubam shone. Harman is an avid football devotee, Shubam an avid cricket devotee and Loverpreet is simply an excellent all round sportsman who wants to play any sport whenever he gets the chance. Bearing this fact in mind, I was concerned that they would naturally be less than enthusiastic about making up a song, especially one dedicated to a negligent mechanic and a missing roller. Again the teacher learned to have a little more faith in his wards, as all students, with Harman, Shubam and Lovepreet proving able steersmen in each group, took to the task with dedication and admirable creative imagination. We had a remix of the popular Punjabi song 'oye Lucky', a short play that showed the children's devastation at not having a roller, and two varieties of that immortal human rights protest chant…'What do we want? A roller! When do we want it? Now!'

After such a successful non-sporting moment in the After School Club's first week, we still had time to reinvent cricket before the parents/brothers arrived to collect their charges. You've heard of 20Twenty…welcome to 1One – where teams begin on 200 runs and lose five runs for every wicket they lose. Teams can be of as many players as you wish, and each player bowls one ball and faces one ball, meaning each have a fair crack of the whip and the game cannot be dominated by the better cricketers to the detriment and boredom of those less able. So remember…you heard it here first…1One…the new cricket revolution!

With the After School Club now a week or so old, there has been time for certain practices to develop into traditions and for certain trends to become clear. The first trend is that there is a core of cricket lovers who, if they had their way, would simply play cricket all the time. The challenge is to sufficiently indulge them, whilst also keeping happy those not so passionate about cricket. One helpful tradition that has developed has seen me draw once again on my own school days, and this time on the influence of my old latin teacher. Knowing that young boys are inherently competitive, he developed an ingenious way of ensuring we learnt our Latin vocab, whilst keeping the process fun. He would sit us in a line, and denote one end the top and one end the bottom. He would then fire vocab questions at us, and any one who failed to answer correctly would be relegated to the bottom. I've transposed this to the GMMCS ground, with latin vocab replaced by a ball. The children stand in a semi-circle and I hit catches to them from about 15ft away. Any dropped catch results often in a loud chorus of 'BOTTOM!' and the a trip to the bottom of the line. Any disputed catch, where the chance was very difficult, but probably should still have been caught will be decided by giving a steepling high catch to the person in question, and if they catch it, they've passed their trial by height. If the high catch is dropped, a trip to the bottom will follow. The children have failed to show their usual imaginative flair in coming up with a name for this new tradition – plumping for the fairly obvious 'TopBottom'- which we play at the end of each day's session.

Blessings and curses…

Having previously regarded with some vehemence the delay in the roller's delivery being something of a curse, inhibiting me to develop the cricket coaching quite as I'd have liked, I have now once again learnt that 'nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so' and that 'change is the only constant'. Were it not for the delay, I'd not have had the chance to see the children's response to a non-sporting activity in the form of the songs of roller revolution, nor could I have been so impressed by the creativity displayed.

This theme has now developed very interestingly, leading me to in fact see the lack of roller as something of a blessing, as it has enabled a means of providing the children with (I hope) some memories that will last them well into their adult years. When we were composing the songs of roller revolution, I told the children that if the mechanic had failed to deliver the roller by the start of next week, we would make our protest a reality and put the songs to practical use. With no roller materialising on Tuesday morning, and seeking to be good to my word, I gathered the children in a classroom once school had finished and explained the making of the banners and the purpose of a protest – namely that you were clear about why you were protesting and that your banners should communicate that message succinctly. The other aim is that your protest should be comprehensible to as great a number of people as possible. To this end, I divided the children into three groups to create banners in English, Punjabi and Hindi. These groups became English Team, Punjabi Team and Hindi Team, each under the leadership of one of the older children. Especially the Punjabi team did an superb job and created an excellent banner. But, having given the children only twenty minutes to create their banners, it must be said that all demonstrated brilliant teamwork. The children were still a little at a loss as to the purpose of the banners when I instructed them to each collect a carryable stool from the computer room and assemble on the ground, where I met them carrying my large pot and mixing spoon, which for the day's mission had been transformed into a drum.

The children were told that as we would be leaving the school grounds, they should remain in single file and stay on the verge of the road at all times. It was at this point that it dawned on them we would actually be using the banners we had just created. I had expected a strong unwillingness to do this – when I'd previously taken the children for a cup of afternoon tea one day, two or three of them had to be diligently persuaded to join us, afraid that their parents would see them, or that they would be laughed at. I was, however, pleasantly surprised by the children's response. There were a few gasps and cries of 'oh no sir' at the reality of what was to come. After brief reassurance though, we set off. As we walked the 300m or so to the Lehrian high street (this is a fairly loose description for ten or so shack shops lining a busy road) where the protest was to take place, I answered the children's questions about what we were doing and why…and why I was carrying a big cooking pot.  I also instructed them on the necessity of explaining what we were doing to anyone who asked.

After an initial drum accompanied march up the high street to generate interest and awareness, we doubled back on ourselves and arrayed ourselves in banner formation either side of the street. I felt worryingly militaristic shouting to the children 'Hindi and Punjabi team this side, English team that side'. We sat for about five minutes, during which time about forty or so people gathered to gawp and ask what was happening. The children began to feel uncomfortable, feeling that everyone was laughing at them. I reassured that their courage and originality would naturally make some feel uncomfortable, and that their only response would be laughter. Our point made, we picked up our stools and headed to the mechanic's workshop where we staged one final banner show and sit down, before asking how long the roller would take to be completed. We were told two or three days and so left stating that we expected him to deliver on this final promise, or the protest would be upped a level.

We returned to the school for a game of 1One cricket, after which I sat the students down for a quick debrief. I told them truly from the heart how deeply impressed I was with the dedication, creativity and teamwork they had shown throughout the day. I asked them how they felt about the day's activities, and seeing that a few were not sure how to feel – torn between embarrassment and disbelief, I told them that for a few days everyone would be talking about what we'd done, that this was the nature of village life, where any break from the norm was a topic for discussion. I explained how this played into our hands and helped us in achieving our aim of getting people to know of our frustration and disappointment over the roller. I said that this few days of gossip would excellently serve our purpose, after which it would be swiftly forgotten, and that in a few years, no one would remember it except the students themselves, who would always have something to share with each other and look back on with smiles, laughter and (I stressed) a deserved sense of achievement for what they'd accomplished.

This about brings us up to date with life at the school, save that Miss Nehra has left us to endure the formalities of traditional Indian marriage, which seems to include being a prisoner in your own house for a week leading up to the wedding. I have taken over the teaching of her English class, so in the coming blogs I will update you on the experiences of teaching at the coal face of curriculum demands and on what the future is likely to hold as the school and staff begin the run in to March's exams and start to look forward to the requirements of the new school year that begins after April.

Love to one and all.