What a Child Thinks

This is not an expert's comment on child psychology neither is this a theory to judge all the children in this world. This is necessarily a collection of the different cute hypothesis and theories, that a child might have about the world around him. I have heard most of these from children whom I have interacted with as an adult and also when I myself was a child.

I will start off with a few of my own concepts about this world. The first thing that comes to my mind is my idea of the planet earth. Somehow I had this understanding that the Earth was a giant ball with all of us living on its surface - pretty good huh?? But the real twist in the tale is that the giant ball is placed at the top of a multistoreyed building!!! Now that is called imagination.

I also remember what I used to think about Birbal, a tribal man who used to live near our house in the tea garden. In our thick Bengali accent we used to call him Bir-BALL as in soccer "ball". I had never known the man by face and had only heard the name. I used to think that he must be a soccerball covered in a red hanky. I have got no idea why I had such an impression. When the man died and the funeral procession was going past our house, I had run to the verandah to have a glimpse of the man who was Bir-BALL. I was really hoping to see a soccerball covered in a red hanky. However, I do not remember how it had felt when I could find no ball in the procession.

Another winner is my idea of a school. When I was a kid, I remember my parents discussing that I am growing up and I need to be sent to a good school. Now the scholarly kid that I was, I thought that a school is a place where people go riding on a bicycle, wearing only a lungi (a clothing used in some parts of India where a long piece of cloth is used to cover the lower half of the body by winding it around the waist) with no cloth to cover the upper half. And when you reach the school, you gather your things and start to plough the field so that seeds can be sown - my way of becoming an engineer!!!

Enough of me. Now I will talk about a kid named Raja whom I sometimes used to teach science when he was a third grader. One day he opened his science book and said, "Explain 'The Universe'". He had this chapter called "The Universe" which dealt with the workings of this Universe - the Sun, the Earth, the Moon and so on. I had to go to my wit's end to make him understand that the Sun is actually much bigger than it looks like and that the Earth revolves around it. When he finally understood that the Sun is in fact a fireball millions of miles away and that man has gone to space in rockets, he asked, "If someone carries a bucketful of water in a rocket, goes very near to the Sun and splashes the Sun with the water from the bucket, then will the fire be put off?" Now who would answer that?

His next question was a very philosophical one that even Aristotle would be very pleased to hear! He asked, "You say that man has walked on the surface of the moon! Now tell me, if someone moves too close to the Moon's edge and accidentally falls off where would he go?" Then I had to explain to him that the Moon is like a giant pingpong ball.

There are even more of such unanimously accepted and acclaimed ideas which I shall try to document at some other time. I hope you all educated people will take some time out of your busy schedule and let us all know if any of you have thought or heard of any such enlightening ideas!!!