Petunias from my garden

When I shifted to the new flats (some call it Mall View Apartments as we face the mall on the Nelson Mandela marg), I was little apprehensive about my garden.  It took me some time to establish it but we (my gardener and I) did it.  The balcony attached to the bedroom is long and east facing so I get the morning sun. My plants love it. 
We planted petunias, pansies, nasturtiums, dahlias, phlox and asters.  The petunias are the desi variety. They are available only in two colours- white and pale violet.  We also planted some of the hybrid varieties. Very showy and very colourful.
I was fascinated by the anther and the stigma.  There is a difference in the inner floral patttern between the desi variety and the hybrid variety.  Take a peek below.

Desi white petunia

Desi pale purple petunia

Hybrid petunia

By the way, there is a fantastic book by Alick Percy-Lancaster titled 'A sahib's manual for the mali'.  Alick Percy-Lancaster was the main person behind the splendid Sunder Nursery in Delhi and his manual is a delight to read.

Where are the boys?

I visited one of our projects yesterday. The project runs non-formal education centers in slums around Bhatti Mines area in Delhi. We have been supporting the project for long time even though I have reservations about the effectiveness of non-formal education centers. The good thing about the project is that all the children attend the government school in the morning and come to the center in the afternoon. At the center they are given further coaching/help with their classes. The effectiveness of the government school can be judged by the fact that most of the children have poor reading and writing skills.

The centers have children of all age group though attempts have been made to segregate them based on their ages.  What stuck me most was that in the age group of 6-8 years there was equal numbers of girls and boys.

However, the age group 11-14 consisted of girls. There were only 5-6 boys; the rest were girls. Where did the boys go? The project coordinator did not know. They had not tracked them or tried to figure out why they had dropped out.

The girls were eager to present skits. I watched two skits, written and acted by the girls themselves. One of the skit was termed "Lazy" and the other one was on child labour.  Both the skits were great! But what was amazing was the gender attitudes. In both the skits men were portrayes as good-for-nothing. In the skit "Lazy" the man was completely lazy, lolling/sleeping in the house, too apathetic to even prevent the robbers from looting his house.  In the skit on child labour, the man (husband/father) was a drunkard who sells off everything to feed his addiction.  In both the skits the woman (wife/daughter/school teacher) was portrayed as active and energetic who is capable of shouldering the responsibilities. The house is managed and run solely by the women. They are the breadearners and the managers and everything.

The portrayal was really surprising because the girls had written the skits in their own dialect.  So it was not as if they were being fed the notion. Rather, it is something that they have observed and noted and down.

So is the gender imbalance a reflection of the role models that these children observe in their community? The girls are eager to learn (they want to learn computers now) because they understand that the house will be run on their income.  Whereas the boys drop out because they see the men around them being completely worthless.