I just saw a daffodil!

For a long time, on my way to school from where I'm staying, I passed a little house- which had beautiful flowers growing around it- dahlias, and another little yellow flower that seemed familiar, but one I didn't know the name of.

While walking by the house today, I saw a man weeding (or atleast I think that's what he was doing-I'm not an expert at gardening!) the flowerbed. I thought I'd be polite- after all I HAD loved the flowers, so I told him they were lovely flowers. We got talking in a desultory sort of way- he asked me where I was from, and so on, until I asked him the names of the yellow flowers.

The little yellow flowers, he informed me, were daffodils!

Now, this doesn't really seem such a big deal, you might say. After all, daffodils are common flowers, especially in California(and in India too, a search online tells me that the white Nargis flowers are actually narcissi, another variety of daffodils). No, what was suddenly brought home to me was the fact that I could recite 'I wander'd lonely as a cloud' verbatim*, a poem that is unarguably the most famous ode to these flowers, and yet had never seen a daffodil before! I'd studied the poem twice, once in Class 5 (When it was in the little syllabus booklet in school) and again in Class 8, when the CBSE had finally decided we could understand such poetry.

When I looked back, I realised that much of the poetry I was taught in school was written by British authors. In fact, most of our school-texts were taken out of solely British anthologies, and the odd exceptions (n class XII) dealt with eco-tourism(!), a visit to Leh(!!), The awakening of women in India (Ugh!), and Gandhiji as a schoolmaster (!!!!). Scarcely the sort of stuff that would make one jump with joy.

It's strange, because Indian authors, writing in English, have written so much scintillating stuff. And this is not confined only to what one read in textbooks, as a child too, all I remember reading was Enid Blyton, the Bobbsey Twins, and a little later, the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew.

This was supposed to be one of those profound posts, except that I think it lost steam somewhere. With that, I leave you.

*And had also come up with a rather risque parody of, one night