India Ink: At M.A. Ideal School, Teenage Teachers, Hopeful Parents

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Kuni Takahashi for The New York TimesStudents in a classroom at M.A. Ideal School, a private school run by Mohammed Anwar, in Hyderabad.

Second-grade teacher Shaziya Begum paced through the classroom, read a story to her students and managed to hold the attention of the 7-year-olds long enough to ward off anarchy.

But at 17, Ms. Begum could be in school herself.

She, and many others like her, is one of the reasons scores of poor parents scrimp to send their children to private schools that cost about $3 a month in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, although the government offers free schools that include perks such as a free lunch, textbooks and even uniforms.

The method of teaching in these private schools is much the same as elsewhere in India, where rote learning dominates. But the teachers, though younger and far less educated than their government school colleagues, are far more accountable in educating the children.

Most importantly — they show up.

About a quarter of the teachers at India’s government-run primary schools don’t usually show up for work, a World Bank study found, and of those who do show, only half are actually teaching while they are there.

In the mostly-Muslim neighborhood where Ms. Begum teaches, at the M.A. Ideal School, parents, who are often day laborers and rickshaw drivers, praise the school’s convenient location, the teachers’ commitment in educating their children, and the low school fee.

Kuni Takahashi for The New York TimesWasim Akhtar with her son Mohammed Ahmed Khan, 7, outside the M.A. Ideal School.

I squeezed myself onto the last bench of a second-grade class, behind a metal desk narrower than my reporter’s notepad, to understand better what these private schools have to offer. M.A. Ideal School, started in 1987 with less than three dozen kids, now has some 2,000 students and 55 teachers. The blackboard was chalked up with English phrases such as, “Can I help you?”

During the class, Ms. Begum paced up and down and read sentences which the students chirped back.

“Clean clothes” (repeat) “make us” (repeat) “look smart” (repeat)

It was a mantra most of the children, or at least their parents, took seriously as they sported neat navy and white uniforms. The girls, who sat on one side of the classroom, and accounted for half the class’s two dozen students, had their hair neatly partitioned into two braided buns knotted immaculately with white ribbon.

Ms. Begum read the students the tale of the tortoise and hare, and had them repeat after her. Then followed another story about a fair.

“What is the meaning of a fair?” the teacher, dressed in salwar kameez – traditional Indian wear – and a blue cotton coat, asked her class.

“Mela,” the kids chorused.

“Do you all know what that means?” she asked.

“Yes!”

“Everyone clap for yourselves.”

Enthusiastic applause ensued.

“Now put your fingers on the first line,” instructed Ms. Begum, pointing to some copy in a textbook. The students dutifully traced the lines in their books with their fingers as she read and explained what the words meant, often translating the meaning into Hindi for their comprehension. The exercise was broken when the bell rang and a cry of victory erupted in the classroom.

The teacher flashed the kids an exasperated smile and helped them line up to leave the classroom. Ms. Begum, who joined the school in the summer of 2009, told me she enjoys teaching, but dreams of becoming an accountant one day. She, like other young teachers at private schools, often start working while in high school to make ends meet.

Priyanka Thakur, 17, who teaches Telugu, the state’s local language, to the same class, only finished the 10th grade before she became a teacher. In order to prepare for her classes, she studies the course material at home before getting into school. Despite her young age, kids snap to attention when she walks through the classroom, licks her fingertip, flips a page, and dictates to them. This, often when there’s no electricity, and the dismal tube light needs to be fiddled with at periodic intervals to start working.

Before students head home, they have to jot down their homework assignments in a diary, which teachers sign, so that parents know what their children need to finish before coming into class the next day. (Some who don’t do their homework sneakily finish it in the classroom — during a different class.)

Outside the school, most kids trickle down the narrow lanes to make their way to their nearby homes. The younger children are picked up by their parents. One such parent, Wasim Akhtar, who’s come for her 7-year-old son, Mohammed Ahmed Khan, said she sends her child to a private school because teachers actually turn up.

“We have to think about our kids’ future. We have to send them to a good school,” said Ms. Akhtar. “Here, they look after the kids.”

Ms. Akhtar, whose husband earns about $90 a month doing odd jobs at the local market, said she’ll cut spending elsewhere to keep them in school. “We’ll reduce our household expenses but we won’t skimp on their education.”

“They can do a lot if they study,” said Ms. Akhtar, as she ruffled the hair of her son, who was standing next to her. “If they don’t, they’ll end up with a job like my husband’s.”

Ms. Akhtar is not the only parent who carefully balances her household income to be able to send her kids to a private school.

Kuni Takahashi for The New York TimesMohammed Haneef with his son, Nadeem, 8, at M.A. Ideal School.

Mohammed Haneef, 38, sends his 8-year-old son Nadeem to another branch of the same private school that’s located closer to him. Mr. Haneef has three other children: an 11-year-old son and 9-year-old daughter who go to a government school nearby, and a 13-year-old daughter who goes to a local madrasa. Right now, Nadeem is Mr. Haneef’s only child attending a private school — but he won’t be for long.

“After two or three years, when he gets smart, I’ll remove him and put him in the government school,” said Mr. Haneef. His other kids had all attended private school for about four years before he shifted them to the government schools.

“I couldn’t afford it any longer as they grew older,” said Mr. Haneef, whose income fluctuates as a daily wage construction worker and amounts to about $60 to $80 per month.

He said his kids in the government schools aren’t taught much. “The teachers don’t control them. They just let them go.”

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Opinionator | Borderlines: Fighting over Parsley

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Borderlines explores the global map, one line at a time.

On July 11, 2002, six Moroccan gendarmes occupied Isla de Perejil [1], or Parsley Island, an uninhabited, Spanish-administered rock of about 37 acres, just 220 yards off the Moroccan coast. If the standoff had lasted longer than a few days, and if blood had actually been spilled, we might now know it as the Parsley War. But on July 18, they were overwhelmed and forcibly ejected by Equipo 31, a crack team of Spanish special forces soldiers. No shots were fired.

And that was that. Morocco and Spain agreed to return to the status quo ante [2]: Spain’s claim to the island would remain disputed, but not actively challenged, by Morocco. The island itself would remain unoccupied by either side. Isla de Perejil’s non-occupation is now closely monitored by both the Moroccans and the Spanish (though it’s unclear whether the Moroccan goatherd who occasionally used to graze his flock on the island now has to show his passport).

Apart from that, the case seems closed. But in this part of the world, few things are merely what they seem [3]. Known to the ancients as the Pillars of Hercules, the strategically important gateway between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean is laced with mirroring versions of history — a commodity in no short supply here. Those versions of history have even left mirroring border phenomena on either side of the Strait of Gibraltar.

Perejil is one of seven Spanish territories on and off the Moroccan coast, once known collectively as “plazas de soberanía.” The two main ones are Ceuta and Melilla, two cities on the African mainland. Formerly called the “Major Plazas,” they are now each enjoying a separate, autonomous status within Spain. The remaining “Minor Plazas,” apart from Perejil, are all garrisoned with Spanish soldiers: the Islas Chafarinas, a three-island archipelago near the Algerian border; Alboran, a flat and empty fleck of land flanked by tiny Isla de las Nubes; and finally Pe?ón [4] de Alhucemas (which includes the two minuscule islets called Isla de Tierra and Isla de Mar) and Pe?ón de Vélez de la Gomera, both on Morocco’s central Mediterranean coast, not far from the city of El Hoceima. Morocco claims both autonomous cities and all of the plazas, except Alboran, 30 miles out to sea, the only bit of Spanish North Africa not hugging the Moroccan coastline.

Joe Burgess/The New York Times

Opposite Ceuta, across the STROG [5], is Gibraltar (“Gib” in British parlance), captured by the British in 1704 and granted to them “in perpetuity” by the Treaty of Utrecht, which ended the War of Spanish Succession in 1713. The Spanish have never accepted the loss of Gibraltar, besieging it on three occasions and most recently blockading it from 1969 to 1985.

It seems illogical, not to mention a bit petty, of the Spanish to demand the return of Gibraltar while they cling to their toeholds on the Moroccan side. But Spain’s position is cherry-picked from two opposing principles: Either occupying strategic bits of another country’s coast is an affront to its territorial integrity, in which case Spain can rightly claim Gibraltar but has to renounce its plazas and autonomous cities in North Africa, or Spain’s historic rights to those places can be maintained forever, in which case the same applies for British sovereignty over Gibraltar.

Naturally, Spain has an internally consistent way out of this conundrum: Ceuta and Melilla were Spanish cities long before present-day Morocco existed [6], so it can’t claim them. But Gibraltar was ripped from the bosom of the Spanish state and has been a British colony ever since — in fact, the last colony on European soil [7]. And what should happen to colonies? Right, they should be decolonized.

Another solution, examined first by the British in 1917 and then proposed independently by Spain’s King Alfonso in 1926, was an exchange between Spain and Britain, with Gibraltar reverting to Spain and Ceuta (and possibly also Melilla) becoming British. The swap would have been an interesting new chapter in the long association of Ceuta and Gibraltar. Both exclaves, barely 14 miles apart, poke into the strait, guarding this chokepoint of naval traffic between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. Seen from above, they look like the hinges of a door that can be opened and shut by whomever controls them. Seen from the sea, Gibraltar’s Rock and Ceuta’s Monte Hacho [8] could be mistaken for the northern and southern pillars of a gigantic gate.

Google Earth

In fact, both rocks are the actual Pillars of Hercules known to the ancients, named after the legendary hero because they marked the westernmost extent of his 12 Labors. To the Greeks and Romans, the Pillars of Hercules were the proverbial end of the world. Tradition has it that the inscription on them warned “Nec Plus Ultra,” or “Beyond this, there’s nothing.”

That changed when Columbus brought back news of lands beyond the ocean, and riches beyond compare. The personal badge of Emperor Charles V, who ruled Spain soon after the discovery of the Americas, showed both pillars interwoven with the slogan: “Plus Ultra” — “There is more out there,” the perfect motto for a nascent transatlantic empire. Charles’s badge is at the origin of Spain’s coat of arms (which still shows both pillars), and possibly also of the dollar sign [9] — the two vertical bars being abstract renderings of Gibraltar and Ceuta, and the curling motto reduced to the S-shape that connects them.

(Nec) Plus Ultra: the pillars as endpoint or gateway. Again, two competing versions of history. And Ceuta and Gibraltar are connected by yet another history with two wildly differing versions. Early in the Eighth Century, Julian [10], a count tasked with “holding Ceuta for Christendom,” switched sides, exhorting and aiding the Muslim invaders of North Africa to cross the strait to Spain. The Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula began when their general Tariq ibn Ziyad landed at Mons Calpe in 711, henceforth renamed Jebel Tariq — i.e. Gibraltar.

Legend has it that Julian wanted revenge for the honor of his daughter Florinda, ravished by Roderic, the last Visigoth king of Spain. Muslim sources later described her as innocence incarnate, while Christian scribes depicted her as a loose woman — respectively maximizing and minimizing Julian’s casus belli. In Spanish history, Julian is the ultimate traitor, opening up the country to seven centuries of Moorish rule. But in his 1970 novel “Count Julian,” the Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo takes the alleged traitor’s side, relishing in the destruction of Spain.

Examples of this mutability of allegiance persist across the strait. Spain’s claims to Gibraltar are supported by … Morocco — for surely, a return of Gib to Spain must mean a return of Ceuta to Morocco. Spain’s claims to Perejil are supported by Algeria, Morocco’s unfriendly neighbor, but not by Spain’s fellow European Union member France, Morocco’s former colonial overlord.

Perhaps Gibraltar is the northernmost part of Africa, for its Barbary Macaques are the only monkeys living in the wild in Europe [11]. And maybe Melilla is the southernmost city of Europe, because its Capilla de Santiago (St James’s Chapel) is the only gothic church in Africa.

All the while, the peculiar borders of these exclaves persist, and harden and soften according to circumstance. Spain and Britain’s co-membership of the European Union was instrumental in ending the blockade of Gibraltar, normalizing the border at La Linea — no longer a three-quarter mile strip of no man’s land garnished with barbed wire.

Read previous contributions to this series.

But the persistent disagreement between Spain and Morocco over the plazas, coupled with an increase in undocumented migration from Africa into Europe, has put Spain on the spot. For many thousands of poor Africans seeking a better life in Europe, Ceuta and Melilla are the entry points into the First World. The barbed-wire fence around both territories is hardly an impediment for those daring and hardy enough to trek across the Sahara.

Some in Spain suspect the periodic surges of migrants into its two African cities are co-orchestrated by Morocco, to underscore their untenability as Spanish, and EU, exclaves in Africa. But ironically, the surges more likely result from the improved Spanish surveillance of the strait, which many migrants try to cross. Like the flow of a river, the phenomenon of mass migration simply seeks the most convenient channel for its course. Hence the poor, huddled masses of boat people reaching Italy’s southernmost island Lampedusa, and likewise the Canary Islands, Spain’s archipelago off Morocco’s Atlantic coast.

For them too, the Strait of Gibraltar no longer is the Nec Plus Ultra of their dreams.

Frank Jacobs is a London-based author and blogger. He writes about cartography, but only the interesting bits.

[1] The official Moroccan nomenclature is “Tura,” which in Berber means “uninhabited,” but also used is “Leila,” which probably is a loan from the Spanish “la isla” (“the island”).

[2] In full: status quo ante bellum, “the state of things before the war.” This principle of international law holds that territorial conquest in battle should be nullified after the end of hostilities. The opposite principle, used to justify territorial gains, is uti possidetis — in full, uti possidetis, ita possideatis, “as you possessed [it], you shall possess [it] from now on.”

[3] For starters, how about the intriguing similarities between the Parsley Incident and the Falklands War, fought two decades earlier? Both involve failed attempts by former European colonies to reclaim islands off their coast held by former European superpowers. Kennedy-Lincoln assassination similarity buffs, start your engines!

[4] Literally a crag (a steep rocky outcrop), the Spanish word pe?ón has also come to mean a Spanish military outpost at such a location. Apart from the two mentioned here, other examples include the Pe?ón de Argel (i.e. Algiers), occupied by Spain from 1510 to 1529.

[5] Naval speak for the Strait of Gibraltar.

[6] 1640 and 1497, respectively. Morocco became independent from France in early 1956. Spanish Morocco — a protectorate since 1912 , not to be confused with the plazas — was allowed to join French Morocco in independence a few months later.

[7] Gibraltar had the status of Crown Colony from 1830 to 1981; in 2002, it was re-classified as a British Overseas Territory. Gibraltar has its own elected government, and thus claims no longer to be a colony, but Spain resists attempts to remove it from the UN Special Committee on Decolonization’s list of Non-Self-Governing Territories (16 at present, of which 10 are under British jurisdiction).

[8] Elevations 1,400 and 670 feet respectively; another candidate for the southern pillar is the Jebel Musa (2,800 feet), just beyond Ceuta’s border with Morocco.

[9] The pillars were pictured on the reverse of the Spanish dollar, legal tender in the United States until 1857.

[10] He might also have been called Urbano, or Ulban. He may have been a Berber, a Visigoth or a Byzantine. Perhaps he was the local ruler of Ceuta, or merely its governor. [11] According to tradition, the extinction of the Gibraltar macaques would signal the end of British rule over the Rock. A similar legend requires the Tower of London to house six raven, lest the monarchy should fail.

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Letter From Europe: London's Fog of Olympic Ambivalence

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AppId is over the quota

Both visions of London’s Olympic destiny are true, if unprovable, depending on which cab driver, barroom pundit, holder of tickets for the 100 meters final or failed bidder for those same prized items is expounding on the issue.

If sporting spectaculars mirror the societies that stage them — the regimented opening ceremony of the 2008 Games in Beijing, for instance — then Britain’s first Olympics since 1948 suggests ambivalence: for every muscle-toned, would-be champion, London offers a counterview, a curmudgeon voice to confound the organizers’ attempts to create a myth of undiluted enthusiasm and public support.

The Games, said Sebastian Coe, an Olympic gold medalist and the head of the organizing committee, will be “the biggest thing this nation will have delivered in the living memory of the vast majority of the population” — bigger, thus, than the Falklands war or the Northern Ireland peace, a supporting role in the invasion of Iraq, a lingering commitment in Afghanistan, the boom-to-bust banking crisis, the X-Factor or sundry royal weddings, funerals and divorces.

Stretch the notion of living memory to encompass the witness that binds one generation’s memory to the next, and a few weeks of sporting bonanza will eclipse the D-Day landings or the dismantling of most of the British Empire.

But hype is part of the Olympic run-up, the boosterism discernible already in parts of the British media, cementing the new orthodoxy that holds support for the Games to be laudably British, and indifference to be a poor show, even unpatriotic.

“We’ve got all the stuff in place,” Lord Coe said, likening the Games to Halley’s Comet “which doesn’t come around that often” (every four years for the Games; 75 or so for the comet.) “But people will decide how they respond, and my judgment is that they’re responding in a massive way now.”

Massive, perhaps, in the sense described by Robert Hardman, a journalist and author, in The Daily Mail: “We have been treated like imbeciles by those who believe they have a divine right to squander other people’s money in the name of sport.” Or by the design critic Stephen Bayley, quoted in The Guardian on the subject of the opening ceremony, who suggested that “Sebastian Coe and his army of bureaucrats should be dressed in penitential costumes and chained together, then made to parade slowly around the stadium in muted lighting chanting ‘Mea culpa, mea culpa.”’

Great sporting galas, of course, always offer a contest between democracy and tyranny, between the crowds and competitors in the stadiums, bonded by the passion of the moment, and those less in thrall to balls kicked, javelins lofted, hurdles leaped, batons passed or shots put.

To test the point, try navigating parts of West London when 82,000 rugby union fans are spilling out of Twickenham Stadium; or try crossing the city by road when highways are closed for the annual London Marathon.

Now multiply those tribulations by many degrees and imagine a capital city in July and August committed to the Olympics to the exclusion of its normal crop of tourists, theatergoers or conventioneers.

The West End theater district, said the composer and impresario Andrew Lloyd Webber, is facing “a bloodbath of a summer” because theatergoers can neither find nor afford hotel rooms in a city filled with sports fans. “People who want to go to the theater or concerts are not the same sort of people who really want to go to sport,” he said.

But duality has accompanied the London Games from their beginnings.

For every announcement of stadiums built or rail links upgraded, there have been reports of cost overruns.

London secured the right to host the Games at a time of economic boom when the nation seemed afloat on surging credit. Now, the city is obliged to stage them after the bust of the global economic crisis when jobs are lost and times are hard.

“You can say: These are times of austerity, and therefore we should pare them down as much as possible,” said Jeremy Hunt, the British culture secretary. “Or, you can say: Because these are times of austerity, we need to do everything we possibly can to harness the opportunity of the Olympics.”

Britain has chosen the latter course. That is not really surprising: official enthusiasm has rarely seemed to wane or falter.

On July 6, 2005, when the International Olympic Committee awarded the 2012 event to London, Prime Minister Tony Blair declared, “It’s not often in this job that you punch the air and do a little dance and embrace the person next to you.”

Less than 24 hours later — by apparent coincidence — the hop-skip-and-jump fizzled when four homegrown suicide bombers killed 52 travelers next to them on the London transport network, confronting Britons with the unsettling notion that their land had spawned a nexus of Islamic terrorists bent on mayhem.

The authorities spent successive years confronting waves of conspiracies, including the foiled plot in 2006 to bomb at least seven airliners over the Atlantic.

That accomplishment by the security agencies, too, might have fallen within Mr. Coe’s pantheon of achievement delivered in Britain’s living memory.

And it might help explain why, for all the exuberant anticipation, Britain plans to commit 13,000 troops in addition to the police to shield crowds and competitors, not just, presumably, from the curmudgeons, but also from those of far more sinister intent.

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India Ink: Islamic Center, Hindu Priest's Home Targeted in New York

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Four sites in Jamaica, Queens, were firebombed Sunday night by an attacker who favored Starbucks Frappucino bottles filled with flammable liquid. The attacker, who has not been captured, targeted an Islamic center, a bodega owned by a Muslim man, the home of a Hindu priest which had a shrine in its window and the home of residents who said they were Christian.

The imam at the Islamic center said he had heard about the attack on the Hindu temple, and added, “Some people confuse Hindus and Muslims.” Read more ?

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India Ink: Hello, How Are You? Hello, How Are You?

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Private schools in India are often attractive to parents because they offer English language instruction.

English has long been considered a passport to white collar jobs in India. Here, kindergarten students at the M.A. Ideal School, Phadi Branch, which is located in a Hyderabad slum, are taught phrases and gestures in English to build basic conversational skills and confidence.

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World Briefing | Middle East: Saudi Arabia: Help Wanted

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Competing histories across the Strait of Gibraltar contribute to its peculiar exclaves.

Medicare should demand evidence that a costly cancer treatment is more effective than cheaper options.

In Nigeria, designating Boko Haram as a foreign terrorist group will only inflame anti-Americanism among Muslims.

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Relatives of 9/11 Victims, Suspecting Hacking, Await Answers

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Some heard mysterious clicking sounds on their home and mobile phones. The fiancée of one man who died at the World Trade Center remembers listening to snippets of someone else’s conversation on her line. A husband of another victim recalls hearing somebody remotely accessing his home answering machine, which still held the final, reassuring message left by his wife shortly before the crash of Flight 93. Others say they are baffled as to how details about their loved ones appeared in British tabloids within days of the attacks.

Ten years later, their long-held suspicions aroused by The News of the World phone-hacking scandal in London, dozens of relatives of victims contacted the Justice Department. On Aug. 24, eight of them met with Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and asked him to determine whether their privacy had been violated. As a first step, they asked him to see whether Scotland Yard had a record of their names or phone numbers among the material seized from a private investigator who hacked cellphone messages for the tabloid.

Four months later, they are still waiting to hear back and are frustrated by the Justice Department’s silence.

“It’s not that hard to find out — it’s quite a simple thing, really, isn’t it?” said Patricia Bingley, a British citizen whose son, Kevin Dennis, a 43-year-old trader at Cantor Fitzgerald, worked on the 101st floor of the World Trade Center’s north tower.

Ms. Bingley said she was stunned to see, in the Sept. 18, 2001, issue of The Sun, a photograph of her son reading a bedtime story to his two sons, which she did not give to the paper. The story also contained details about her son that she said no one from her family had provided to The Sun. “It never made sense to me,” she said, adding that she suspects hacking or worse by the paper. “I’d like very much for the government to tell us whether this happened or not. Celebrities seem to have no trouble finding out.”

In July, as revelations about widespread phone hacking by the tabloid were spilling out, another British newspaper, The Daily Mirror, reported that a private investigator said that News of the World reporters had offered to pay him to retrieve phone records of Sept. 11 victims. After the report, which was not confirmed by other news organizations, the Justice Department opened an investigation. To date, no evidence has emerged publicly that Sept. 11 victims were hacking targets.

Jodi Westbrook Flowers, a lawyer at a South Carolina firm that represents more than 6,700 relatives of Sept. 11 victims, said she and her colleagues had scoured the British tabloids and found scores of details about the victims. Relatives were not certain how the tabloids found out so much so quickly after the attacks.

One of the relatives, whom she declined to identify, said that five days after Sept. 11, The Sun published the words from a voice mail message left on his cellphone by his son, who was aboard one of the planes that hit the World Trade Center. (British authorities are also investigating whether hacking occurred at The Sun, which, like The News of the World, is owned by News Corporation.)

In late September, Ms. Flowers, of the Motley Rice law firm, sent Mr. Holder phone numbers of two dozen relatives of victims and asked that Scotland Yard run them through the 12,000 pages of documents seized from the home of Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator responsible for most of the hacking by the now-shuttered News of the World. She said at least 100 of her clients, in both the United States and Britain, now want similar information.

On Nov. 3, Vida G. Bottom, chief of the Justice Department’s public corruption unit, wrote to the lawyers, saying, “The F.B.I. has undertaken a preliminary review to assess the veracity of those allegations.”

Ms. Flowers said she was disappointed by the vagueness of the response. “We asked a simple threshold question, and we basically received a nonanswer,” she said.

Ms. Flowers added, “If there was no hacking, it is wildly coincidental that so many people describe similar experiences.”

Even so, two Justice Department officials with knowledge of the inquiry said they did not expect much to come of the investigation. The officials, who declined to be identified because they were not authorized to discuss a continuing criminal inquiry, said the investigation remained open in case Scotland Yard discovered evidence confirming the suspicions of the Sept. 11 relatives. They both said they were doubtful such evidence would emerge.

Tracy Schmaler, a Justice Department spokeswoman, said only, “It’s an ongoing investigation.”

Charlie Savage contributed reporting.

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