As I have mentioned earlier in this column, a few of us like-minded people in Santiniketan have taken it on ourselves to spread awareness about dementia. Of late, we realised that it was important to sensitise the young on the issue as part of our awareness-building drive. So, we decided to talk to students of Patha Bhavan — the school that Rabindranath Tagore started that later grew into the university that is known today as Visva Bharati.
We sent off a letter to the school principal to get permission to hold an awareness session and were happy to receive a prompt reply saying the school would send children from class eight to 12 to attend it. Since Patha Bhavan is primarily a residential school, the session was scheduled at 6.30 p m. I must admit that the thought of talking to schoolchildren on a topic that is quite morbid and eating into their evening playtime made me a trifle apprehensive.
Moreover, Patha Bhavan has been in the news for the wrong reasons. The case of a hostel warden making a student lick her urine to cure her of bed-wetting made national news. Locally, the school has been criticised for its falling standards and inadequate supervision of its boarders. All this and more was at the back of my mind as I walked towards the students’ hostel on the day of the talk.
As a few of us from the dementia awareness unit reached the hostel, we saw boys and girls approaching the venue in orderly lines. The hall where we were scheduled to hold the talk was large with a stage at one end. I was struck by how quite the place was despite it filling up with so many children (all in their uniform sari and pyjama and kurta). Soon, the children settled down on the floor, the boys on one side and the girls on the other and I took the mike.
As I started to speak, making sure that I was choosing the right words in Bangla and keeping the level of the talk simple enough for school children to grasp a difficult issue like dementia, I couldn’t help but notice the attention I was getting. There was no fidgeting, no talking, no restlessness, even among the boys; just rapt attention. “These kids sure are scared of their teachers,” I thought to myself, being sceptical of their unwavering attention.
After I finished the talk and opened the floor for discussion, I saw many hands go up eagerly to ask questions. One by one, children started to come up to the stage to ask their questions, and I was completely taken aback. They had not just been sitting there and pretending to listen! They were actually asking questions that made it clear that many of them had noticed some behavioural changes in their elders at home and were curious to know whether these could have anything to do with dementia.
Of course, there were also concerns about whether dementia could affect the young because many of them found it difficult to remember what they learn in classrooms! But not a single child showed impertinence, and none made fun of the issue — very different from the city kids I meet. As I walked back from the programme with the garland that the kids had made for welcoming us in my hand, I thought that for all the things that were going wrong in Tagore’s legacy, there were still at least somethings going right.
