Day 14 : The Paper Presentation

I knew this girl when I was in Chennai. She worked in her parent’s tea shop near the neighborhood where I stayed. It was during the first weeks of my moving there so this establishment was the only one familiar to us and we used to frequent it each night post dinner - me for hot cup of masala tea, others to puff their post-supper cancer-sticks.

The store was run by a Telugu family. I hadn't heard the language a lot before coming to Chennai so had to use a mix of Tamil and body language to get them to understand what we wanted, they didn't speak much of Tamil either. But since this had become more of a routine for me, and I had ended up becoming their regular customer and was was beginning to get a hang of their language and these people itself.

The girl I mentioned earlier was in her early teens, fifteen I'd guess. But she looked and behaved like someone who was much older. She had the grace and confidence of someone who knew exactly what's on her mind and how to express it. And was never embarrassed that she didn't know the language she was trying to communicate it. I thought accomplishing all that was a big feat, as most of the southies I meant in my time here were really shy when it came to communicating. She was in some distance professional education I don't remember which. And by the looks of it, she was pretty serious about it.

One night out of the blue, her father came up to me while having tea. He looked like he wanted to speak to me, but was unsure of how. So he simply handed over a pamphlet to me he was carrying for me. There was "Paper Presentation" written in bold italics at the top. It was an advert for an inter-collegiate technical paper presentation competition in a local Chennai university. Apparently he thought his daughter wished to enroll in it. So I took it from him and went over to his daughter who as usual was seated at the cash counter.

She took once glance at pamphlet, and the look on her face said clearly how sad the sight of it made her. "I no go, no money for printout", her reply was barely a mumble.

Then I somehow asked her about the topic that she was thinking of presenting. It was about some sort of cleansing process that reprocesses domestic household waste water for agricultural use. She had already prepared clippings from her textbooks and some Xerox pages from library books. It was almost all done really, just needed to get it all put together on a document. It was a Friday anyway and it was only a little past 8 at night and I didn't have anything else going for me. So I thought, what the hell. Let's do this.

I got her to carry her pen-drive and materials to a nearby internet cafe. I asked her to sit with me and recite the whole paper. Within a couple of hours the whole thing was done. It was not more than 25 pages really. Not too much of a worry.

I got it printed, spiral-bound and gave it to her and sent her on her way saying I had some of my stuff to do online. A few minutes after she had left, I got up and went over to the counter, the guy just asked for Rs.213, which is less than what I'd spend on a McChicken burger. But somehow this felt a lot more satisfying.

She didn't win the presentation, yes. But she'd win one on her third try, which was just a couple of month later. She learnt fast.

Today, I added her on Facebook. We chatted for a little while. She has completed her course and is now working in a university in south Tamil Nadu as a research lab assistant. Her English has gotten much better. She even used a word that was new to me - abeyance. Normally that would make me kick myself. But today I sort of felt pretty proud of her. Good going, kid!