The Chalkboard

By Jyothi Seshan

When does a cock-tale become a mock-tale? When you don't mix the ingredients right!

Hind Grammar School (HGS) is a reputed high-profile school for children of the expatriate Indian community. It practices the policy of segregation of students and boasts of separate facilities for boys and girls within the same spacious campus. The administrators of the school are more interested in the income the school brings than creating ideal conditions for children to develop holistically. A lot of emphasis is laid on discipline and the school endeavors to keep the boys and girls strictly apart. However, interstices occur and the boys and girls find enough chinks to mingle. This bottled up environment results in an unbelievable tragedy involving a rather bold and outspoken girl called Henna. Her friend, Deep, is her teacher's son and a bond develops between them. Aaron, the third figure in this triangle, is also a staff child and has romantic interest in Henna, but she refuses to encourage him. Enraged by her attitude and rejection, he becomes aggressive.

Deep's mother, Mahima is Henna's class teacher. The school sends her to Dubai to attend a workshop, organized by the Central Board of Education, India. The Board wants to bring about a paradigm shift in the teaching of English and had sent a number of high-profile teachers of English to be trained in the UK and act as a resource force in India and abroad to train teachers in the new methodology. New textbooks with tailor-made lessons for the purpose, was going to be released in the next academic year. Mahima finds herself caught in the crossfire between her conviction that classes in English should be interactive and the conventional attitude of the authorities that classes should be teacher-centered and there should be no noise in the class. The contradiction between the old lecture method preferred by the school and the new student-friendly approach as suggested by the board puts Mahima in a dilemma.

In the midst of this, unfolds the human drama of Henna, Deep and Aaron.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B09PM89BCZ
• ISBN13: 9798794974270
• Release Date: January 2022
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 252 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 9.0"