Don’t discount grandma’s intelligence

Grandmothers come armed with a vast range of skills to tackle all sorts of issues. 
| Photo Credit: Getty Images

Every day, we are being bombarded with the latest from the world of artificial intelligence. While all the buzz is around AI, let us not forget the age-old GI, or grandma’s intelligence.

Grandmothers come armed with a vast range of skills to tackle all sorts of issues. They are super-intelligent when it comes to dealing with fidgety grandchildren of all ages.

When school started teaching the writing of letters, grandma would make her granddaughter practise writing with a slate pencil on the terrace floor with some interesting and quirky singing and dancing with “hop, skip and jump” added with a traditional floor game. She knew it was difficult to hold attention for long with a book.

Children are fussy eaters and during lunch and dinner time she would come up with unheard-of tales from folklore, mythology, yesteryear village tales, tales behind many practices we adopt and keep them guessing as to what would happen next as the tale progressed. The food which would otherwise take ages to eat, even the much-maligned greens, would disappear soon because of the engrossing nature of the tales.

When our house was raided by ants, grandma would drop a few peanuts in the nearby area. She knew that ants would arrive lured by the smell of peanuts and her keen eyes would spot the tiny hole it was coming from and she would plug it.

When my eyes would be puffy on waking up, she would insist on a head bath with a dab of gingelly oil to reduce the body heat which was causing the puffiness.

When I am down with a tummy problem, indigestion and the like, she would say ‘Langanam Parama Aushadham’ from her repertoire of experience, which in Sanskrit, translates to fasting is good for the body. In other words, she would advice having warm water, watery, salted buttermilk and starve a bit to allow the stomach to settle down.

While handing over several pieces of material to our tailor to stitch, her sharpness of intellect would come to the fore. She would write down the instructions in a piece of paper and hand-stitch the paper to the cloth material so that the tailor would not forget and find it easy to follow her wishes while stitching.

When plastic bags were the craze, she put away all cloth bags deep inside a cupboard knowing that it would come back in use one day and now the slogan heard often is Less Plastic.

While we are all watching the onward march of AI, the next generation should realise GI has its relevance even today.

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