A month ago, I worked with a school for children with learning disorders. I was teaching them to dance the Bhangra, it was for a show they were putting up for parents. I loved the kids and working with them, but I felt I was doing more damage than good by making them learn to move in a particular way. Some of the children really had a difficult time learning the dance. I was having to ignore their individual abilities in the interest of a performance. When I had a problem with some of them not trying, I had to use the performance as an excuse – The show’ll be cancelled if you don’t try harder! It felt horrible to do that, I was eroding any learning that was taking place.

As the sessions drew to a close and the performance loomed large on our heads, the pressure to remember, the need to do well, the need for praise – all of this reached a point of frenzy. I couldn’t wait for it to be over and I felt really rotten.

In a meeting with a teacher from the school a week later, I voiced (rather vehemently) my apprehensions about pushing kids to perform. Especially them, because they were all carrying scars from being in mainstream schools that had made them out to be ‘losers’, told them they were dumb, had thrown them out because they didn’t do well, because they wouldn’t figure in the ’success’ of those schools. To my questions, the teacher said simply that being on stage gave the kids a sense of confidence, a feeling of achievement when they saw how appreciative their parents were. If they didn’t do that, they would be like the other schools, who would never put these kids on stage.

I want so much to find a meeting point that is something more – filled with a lot more care, perhaps.

But, thinking back to my high school days, I remember I had been classified as a ’slow learner’ when I got to tenth standard. And all slow learners had to attend extra classes. It had been purely based on my scores in the previous annual exam. I had cried for a few days. My already non-existent self esteem had taken a plunge to sub-zero levels, I felt like a misfit in class, I withdrew even more into silence and for a few months wanted to desperately prove myself to ‘them’.

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As part of research for the next project I have spent a whole week or more reading a translation of a novel by Vibhavari Shirurkar called The Victim. I spend most late evenings reading a gut wrenching description of a young Dalit boy’s life in a settlement for the people called Criminal Tribes in British India. I know as I read it that not much has changed for many Dalits since then. I want so much to be able to create something out of it.

And, in the meanwhile, the whole of last week I have been meeting dancers to rehearse a performance that we will show at a popular pub in town. Behind a glass, in designer clothes and speaking text in English.

These worlds co-exist. It just kills me to know in such graphic detail that they do.