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New
Books for Old
SAQI
RAHMAN
Time was when a normal-sized
family meant six children as in ours with the odd grandparent,
or uncle or widowed aunt thrown in. My friend Daliah had
no sister, only three brothers, so hers was considered a
very small family while one of our neighbours who had eighteen
children was considered to be a man with a large household.
After producing nine children his first wife died and he
got married again so that there would be a woman in the
house looking after the nine. But she too produced another
nine, gave up early trying to distinguish between her children
and the step-children and lived happily in her own room
ignoring the lot of them. We in the neighbourhood also could
not make out who belonged to the first lot and who the second
but all of us were friendly with one or the other of them.
There is a lot of choice among eighteen, you could always
find someone you liked.
Anyhow, on the subject of books. After the final exams,
we would come home with report cards and booklists. My father
would cut us down to size if we boasted of our high marks
saying that if ten donkeys ran a race, one donkey would
be first. All the older brothers and sisters would haul
out the books they had outgrown along with their old jumpers
and clothes. We would be kitted out with the books that
had belonged to the brother or sister just above us by a
year, we would cross our their names, write out ours and
with old calendar paper put a new cover on the books. If
the previous owner was a particularly rowdy type and had
occasionally played football with them or if the book had
more than its fair share of previous owners, then the book
was sent for 'binding' and it came back tightly bound, with
a new stiff cover. We would then be given old sweaters outgrown
by older siblings or even cousins and our shoes now finally
a perfect fit after six months of wearing a half size too
big were given new half soles by a cobbler who sat on the
ground below the outside veranda and expertly wetted the
leather and cut around it to fit the worn out underside
of our shoes. We had to show the stumps of our old pencils
and that the last pages of our exercise books were also
covered with writing before being allowed to buy new.
Whatever happened to those good old days?
Okay, forget the sweaters, the pencils, the exercise books,
and the shoes. So everybody now has one or two children
and need not economise on the above. But what about books?
Why can't the children use perfectly valid old books? Grammar
rules don't change every year, the capital of Australia
stays the same, the equator is where it always was (in the
mind) and two plus two is four. Why are book publishers
allowed to put in a few more spelling mistakes, add one
and a half paragraph somewhere and take out a sentence somewhere
else, change a few of the questions at the end of the chapters
and call the book New Edition?
This is particularly true of Bangla Board books every year.
One poem more, two pieces of prose changed (usually for
even more boring ones), some more sentences added to a certain
chapter and it's New Edition. Some of the Science and Mathematics
books printed in India are also doing this year in and year
out.
This year, at this school I know (to put forward an authentic
example), the Science book of Class V did not have New Edition
printed beside it on the book list so the children came
back with the shopkeepers having sold them whichever edition
they wanted to get rid of. The differences in the contents
of the two editions are nothing to write home about. More
descriptive lines, more questions in one, more pictures,
more experiments in the other, enough ammunition for the
children to create a huge chaos in the classroom every single
science period.
The teacher at first decided to send the students with the
New Edition back to the shops to change for the old (not
a very scientific decision but why not if the old edition
is better). But the shops would not change the books. The
children had written their names on them, some of the pages
were already torn, and the shops had run out of the New
Edition. The teacher thought of changing the old for the
New, but anticipating similar problems, she gave up. Now
she is keeping both, and bringing out whichever edition
suits her whim; she dictates the missing bits and ignores
the extra bits or vice versa, depending on her mood that
morning.
Some psychologists (those paid by the bookshops and publishers)
say, not getting new books in a new class can leave indelible
scars in the child's mind. Chances are good that this deprived
child will grow up to be a malfunctioning adult and will
need to see a therapist. This theory had better not be true.
All my friends and I were third or fourth or fifth on the
lists of our parents' immediate descendents and we are neither
malfunctioning nor seeing therapists. Although some our
children may disagree and feel we are solid therapy cases.
The opposite theory is probably more true, those who grow
up to be malfunctioning (in some cases nonfunctioning) are
the ones who get too many new stuff, without having to produce
old every-page-written-on exercise copies and stumps of
used-up pencils as evidence of academic requirements.
Leaving aside the tussle between the two theories for the
moment, the question is what can one do to stop this annual
con game of changing old books for new for no earthly reason
except for making bookshops owners and publishers richer
and parents of school-going children poorer? Sadly, just
as there is no answer to questions such as, when will they
stop filling up Gulshan Lake and when will the banks stop
lending money to defaulters and when will the politician
develop a sense of shame about Bangladesh being top on the
Corrupt Countries of the World list -- there is no answer
to why can't children re-use perfectly valid old text books.
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