Under-privileged kids make merry at a screening of Hum Tum at South Point. Picture by Atanu Pal. (Above) A script-writing workshop at British Council

it’s a wednesday morning, and 60 students are packed into a room that’s not large enough to hold them. They huddle in groups, pen and paper in hand, scribbling rapidly and having heated conversations. There’s a buzz of activity in the air.

‘Teacher’ Rajorshi Chakraborti shouts for silence and announces that it’s lunchtime, so everyone can take a break and regroup in half an hour. Shouts of “two more minutes” and “there’s still five minutes left” greets the astonished adult.

It’s a scene that’s typical of a classroom, except when the bell goes, the youngsters refuse to budge, and after hurriedly grabbing their food packets, rush back to work. But then, this is no ordinary class. The 60 students are from 30 different city schools, and they’re here to learn about scriptwriting.

The two-day workshop organised by the British Council is a prelude to the annual one-act play competition — this year there’s a little help for those who come up with the concept. The theme is Calcutta and although the story and dialogue are up to the individual, the workshop is meant to give a nudge in the right direction.

There’s no missing the electric excitement in the air. It has nothing to do with the fact that the youngsters have two days off from school — with permission, if you please. Textbook learning can be put on pause as most of the teenagers are veterans at juggling several activities together.

Like 17-year-old Fatima Waha, who was part of the student group in the TTIS-Seagull Pakistan mission visiting Karachi in January this year. She, along with a friend, was nominated to come up with scripts for the one-act play competition, and is taking her job very seriously. The workshop definitely provides an edge, asserts the Class XII student.

“I never had this opportunity when I was in school and I really wanted to learn creative writing,” says Richa Wahi, with a sigh. She’s one of the two instructors conducting the workshop. The ex-La Martiniere student had to go all the way to Cardiff University, Wales, to fulfil her wish. Back in Calcutta, she’s armed and ready to provide the training to others.

Richa sums up the sentiments of a generation whose idea of school holidays was going out to play in the neighbourhood lanes and bylanes, or sitting at home for adda with friends.

That has changed, and how.

Beyond books

Now, there is a choice of things to do around town involving a plethora of activities and packed with plenty of action. Whiling away the vacations is passé, earn or learn is the mantra of GeNext.

Toddlers or teens, indoors or outdoors, academic or extracurricular, cultural or creative, mental or physical, expensive or easy on the pocket — all one has to do is look around, for diversity is the name of the holiday game. The list is long and exhaustive, with experts and professionals as lodestars.

Try this for size — Birla Industrial and Technological Museum (BITM) had five workshops this summer, in geography and basic astronomy, physics, chemistry, life science and robotics, which drew around 250 children. The life science camp attracted around 50 kids in two batches of two hours each. There was a combination of textbook experiments, research and field trips.

“We wanted to give them an all-round experience, so we let them experiment with things they see and read about in books, like photosynthesis, and took them on trips to learn about ecological balance by studying insects, birds and plants,” explains a BITM official. “The children usually enjoy the mix of activities, to help bring the subject to life,” she adds.

Participants at the astronomy and geography workshop had 12 projects that included building a sun dial, moon dial, star dial, rain gauge and hydrometer. The robotics students designed and built three models, including an arm and a human prototype, using Lego Mindstorms, micro controllers and graphical user interface-based computer animation software.

And for once, the pro-active spirit of tomorrow’s citizens has little to do with parent-prodding. What often prompts the positive attitude and burst of energy is the “opportunity to bond” with their peers, something Pranjal Bhargava learnt to his delight. “There is no question of being shy. It was great interacting and sharing ideas with so many different people. When I write a play alone, it’s my own product. But in this case, there are others to improve on my ideas with better suggestions,” observes the Birla High school student at the British Council workshop.

Class XII student Sangeet Shirodkar participated in a 15-day ‘space’ theatre workshop for school and college students at Birla Academy, by stage personality Parnab Mukherjee, to learn all about body movements, voice modulation, scriptwriting and translation of text into movement. “We got to explore the text and our minds. Every day, we had to pretend we were blind, which helped us to understand the script better. So, we altered Shakespeare’s King Lear, renamed it Almost King Lear, played with the text and added narration about our own lives and problems and the rut the education system is in,” adds Sangeet. The 15 youngsters, including him, slogged for three to four hours a day, and up to 10 hours for the last three days, “just for the off-the-beaten-track experience”.

The road less travelled was also the way forward at the Eastern Zonal Cultural Centre in Salt Lake, which had organised a series of summer workshops for schoolchildren in the area. If a national scholar of puppetry headed the doll-making course, where the participants learnt to make traditional puppets using scrap materials like sponge, wool, bottles and newspapers, craftsmen from West Bengal and Orissa taught their young charges to make terracotta sculptures, and artisans passed on some fine points of folk-painting. The results are all on exhibition at Bharatiyam.

But it’s not all about fun and games either, and there are plenty of young guns with a keen sense of socially responsibility and forums with definite agendas. Just check out the numerous active Interact clubs in the city. Rahul Mohta, president of South Point school’s Interact club, finishes his term in July. To end with a bang, he wanted to do something big. So, a bunch of Interactors from different schools raised enough money for a free screening of Hum Tum for 150 children from NGOs. The under-privileged kids were also given food, drinks and stationery items, to make it “really memorable”.

Collective conscience? But of course. Work as play? But seriously. What else would one expect from a generation that has learnt to live far beyond books and made pushing the limit a habit.