Season for Summer Camps!

You notice a different kind of traffic on our neighbourhood roads nowadays.
A father ferrying his son armed with a badminton racquet.
A mother carting her daughter dressed in karate uniform.
A grandpa dropping off 10-year-old Shruti at a pottery camp in the suburbs.

With schools having closed for summer holidays, it is the season for summer camps.
A random count could put them at close to 200!
There are all kinds of camps in all our neighbourhoods. And these include the 'lets-make-a-quick-buck' types too.

The pedestrian ones are the camps which promise to train the young ones in arts and crafts, music and dance.
The boring ones, to me, are the camps which extend the classroom into the holidays - the sort who promise to increase memory power, or teach Vedic math or prepare you for the Plus Two exam!

There are are some interesting ones too. Theatreperson KK (Krishna Kumar) of Masquerade is going beyond a theatre camp; he plans to also prepare the children for a production which will go on stage weeks later.

With Chennai's neighbourhoods now better defined and spread out, creative people and those in the the activity business are well prepared to promote such camps well before the annual exams are over.

You rarely hear of children talking of going on holidays to their 'native places'. Holidays to the hills, or to Bangalore or to Delhi, or to the Far East - yes, that you will hear of.
But holidays to Alapuzha or Karaikudi or Udupi . . . you hear less of 'native' places.
Those are summer holiday times of another generation.

My own summer camp, which has become an annual feature, is on the basics of journalism. The idea is to expose senior school students to this profession, encourage them to improve their writing skills and take a closer look at newspapers, radio,TV and the Net.
Seven students are attending this camp at the 'Mylapore Times' office. And their reports are posted on a blog - www.mtjclass.blogspot.com.
We wanted the kids to also use tech-tools as part of their work. Friends Satya of New Horizon Media and Revathi who runs www.yocee.in are handling that part of the workshop.

When we wind up the camp we hope to explore a landmark. Perhaps do the round of the devastated Pallikarnai marshlands ( in the suburb in the south) and then retire for a nice lunch on the East Coast Road.

In between, I hope to hop across to my native place - Mangalore!