A Town Called Boring

Once upon a time in India, there was a town called Boring. It was by the side of Dull Lake. The residents of Boring never smiled. They did not know how to -- grownups, and even the children, never, ever smiled. All the children ever did was go to school and after school ended for the day, they would return home, do their homework and prepare for class tests.

If ever the children met each other in the evenings, they did not play. They avoided each other's eyes and tried to fool friends by pretending they had not studied much. They also lied to each other about which chapters were important and which were not for the coming test. All they wanted was marks, marks and more marks.

They did not know how to smile, they did not know how to joke and they did not know how to giggle and laugh. Life was really dull and boring.

One day, the town had a visitor: an old grandma with silvery hair and a smile that stretched from ear to ear. Her smile reached up to her eyes. She had come to visit her granddaughter, Ekta, for the first time.

At the end of her first day in the town, she understood that something was wrong - terribly, terribly wrong. When she smiled and nodded, no one smiled back at her, not even Ekta, her own granddaughter! When Grandma smiled and said she had made Ekta's favourite 'gajar ka halwa' for her, what did Ekta do? She just said: "The history teacher cut three marks in one answer. God knows how many marks she has cut over the years. By now she must have a treasure chest full of marks. I wonder what she will do with them? Maybe I should steal her trunk some day, then the marks will be mine." She did not eat the 'gajar ka halwa'.

Grandma was amazed. How could anyone talk at such length about marks and tests and nothing else? But she heard this nonsense day after day and not only from Ekta, but from all her friends as well. And -- if that wasn't bad enough -- from all the parents too!

These parents were always pushing their children to get more marks. Just as people in other places go to temples to pray, the parents went religiously to a shop called The Marks Bazaar, which kept a range of pens with which one could write secret messages. The parents would buy these pens for their children, who would then scribble answers on their thighs, ankles and elbows. It was called preparation for exams.

What the parents did not know was that the shopkeeper secretly stocked infra-red detectors that could make out any secret message on any surface. The children ended up getting caught, and their parents were forced to return to The Marks Bazaar to buy better 'secret messengers', as they were called.

When Grandma saw all this she decided that she must teach the children of Boring to stop thinking about school work and marks and to start playing and laughing and smiling. That was the only way to save the town. It was time to use her secret weapon!

Nobody knew it, but Grandma was a friend of the Goddess of Laughter. Her name was Hasyaa. And, it was Goddess Hasyaa's habit to take a human form from time to time and tell jokes to humans. She knew more jokes than there were stars in the sky. Good jokes, funny jokes, that made people laugh and feel warm towards each other.