The priceless curiosity of childhood

I've been meaning to share this very proud mommy moment. While we were holidaying in Sri Lanka in October, our van stopped at a petrol station in a one-horse town in the island country's central province. When the driver got back into the van, my older son Kabir asked him: "Is petroleum a major industry in Sri Lanka?"

I wondered if I'd heard right. I had. The driver, a wonderfully patient man called Sarath, said Sri Lanka didn't produce petroleum. So Kabir asked where it came from. Saudi Arabia and Malaysia, he was told. So how did it get here? Through pipelines and marine tankers. And how did it get to the individual gas stations? It's offloaded at the ports and then transported by tanker trucks.

The conversation then turned to sources of energy and Kabir asked if Sri Lanka had any hydroelectric power plants. He wanted to know where the dams were. This entire exchange was spontaneous and not once was he prompted by either my husband or me. Sitting in the back seat, we couldn't believe our nine-year-old was making such serious conversation. We were so proud. And we realised just how much the sometimes punishing school curriculum in India had impacted him. This time, in a good way. Geography lessons had definitely further fuelled his natural curiosity.

Geography seems to be the hot favourite for Kabir and his six-year-old brother Raghav at the moment. Their pet game these days is something called Atlas where you have to name a place using the last letter of the place the previous player names. This takes care of many a long car ride, which is quite commonplace in the cities of Thane and Mumbai whose roads are choked to bursting point. As a consequence, the boys have learnt the names of so many distant places, including Argentina, Nicaragua, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Norway, Yorkshire, Zimbabwe etc. etc.

Their mission, every time they play it, is to land the other players with the letter A. The names of the majority of places end with 'A', so after a point you do get stuck. Raghav needs help after the first few rounds, but in the process he picks up a lot of new names.

Last weekend we were driving to a wedding in Mumbai. We had to cover a distance of just about 30 kilometres but it took us two-and-a-half hours! The streets were completely clogged with traffic that day. Thanks to Atlas, the drive that could have been a nightmare from my restless kids turned out to be quite pleasant. Adding to their delight was the fact that their grandfather, my father-in-law, was with us. And they did their darndest to land Dadu with an 'A' each time. There were hysterical fits of laughter each time Dadu got an 'A' and protested vehemently!

A couple of weeks ago when I found the kids were getting frustrated while playing Atlas because they were running out of names too soon, I told them to sit with an atlas each and use the index to find new names every time they got stuck. That really paid off. They learnt so many new names! And they're really keen to try that again as soon as their school examinations finish in the second week of December.

A child's curiosity and capacity to absorb information are just astounding. Of course I've had to answer the usual questions about how do babies come out of their mummies' tummies. So we've had conversations about the uterus, the birth canal and contractions. The subject of conception hasn't come up yet, but I expect it to any day now.

And you learn from your kids too. Every now and then Kabir or Raghav comes up with a nugget of information that I didn't know, especially about the habits of animals. And they get so smug when that happens! This is what I most enjoy about parenting - the give and take of knowledge.