Very early in the morning, 3 AM to be precise, Daivik got seriously interested in err... alphabets. Apparently he was just dreaming about "alphabets" and his eagerness to share the dream happened to be, well, timeless. With hard-to-curtail enthusiasm dancing on the sleep-defying eyes, he announced, "appa, I was dreaming about this alphabet". And using his finger as pencil, he started tracing the contours of the alphabet on an imaginary sheet of paper in front of him. Even as he was 'drawing' the alphabet, he remembered another one. Furiously he rubbed out the previous one from the 'paper' and redrew the new one, only to erase it and draw another one. After a few moments, his movements started resembling a sword fight, or more realistically, a 3AM attempt to evade a recalcitrant fly. Evidently he was having difficulties in getting the alphabet right. I'm not sure if it was the frustration of not remembering the correct alphabet from the dream or the lack of a commensurate skill in portraying it correctly, or the tussle with an instinct that was screaming get-back-to-sleep-now, the enthusiasm slowly gave way to a whimper and hands still raised mid air and pointing at the 'paper', he drifted back to sleep. Most amazingly, when he got up in the morning-morning, he remembered the dream again, and started writing on his 'paper' right away !
I was taken back to another time, maybe 3 years ago. Daivik was making the fascinating discovery that the sounds he was learning to make, consciously, distinctively and reproducibly, actually carried meaning. They were not randomly generated noise but indeed denote something. He was mentally cataloging these sounds and associating them with objects. It was a charmingly transparent process that was absolutely mesmerizing to watch : every now and then a new word will grab his attention, he will become concentration-focus personified as we point out to the object the word denotes. Usually he will repeat the word once or twice and look at or feel the object. That's it. A sound becomes a word and suddenly acquires a meaning, the transformation is complete. Now, as words gets more abstract, the process becomes more complicated. One fine day, night rather, 3AM (again!), he sat bolt upright and started reciting all the 'words' he knew at that point.
Perhaps the same mental processes are in operation again, as he is perched on the cusp of another exciting discovery. Just as sounds becomes words and gets an identity, shapes are becoming alphabets that fill up the books !
I wonder about the 3AM connection, though :)
I was taken back to another time, maybe 3 years ago. Daivik was making the fascinating discovery that the sounds he was learning to make, consciously, distinctively and reproducibly, actually carried meaning. They were not randomly generated noise but indeed denote something. He was mentally cataloging these sounds and associating them with objects. It was a charmingly transparent process that was absolutely mesmerizing to watch : every now and then a new word will grab his attention, he will become concentration-focus personified as we point out to the object the word denotes. Usually he will repeat the word once or twice and look at or feel the object. That's it. A sound becomes a word and suddenly acquires a meaning, the transformation is complete. Now, as words gets more abstract, the process becomes more complicated. One fine day, night rather, 3AM (again!), he sat bolt upright and started reciting all the 'words' he knew at that point.
Perhaps the same mental processes are in operation again, as he is perched on the cusp of another exciting discovery. Just as sounds becomes words and gets an identity, shapes are becoming alphabets that fill up the books !
I wonder about the 3AM connection, though :)
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