Swami & Decision-Making

Although I could hypothesize about better plans of action Swami could have taken to deal with his predicaments, I can't blame him for being anything other than human. (He's a kid, too. They get away with more stuff.) Human fallibility follows us from birth to death. Our decisions shake us, break us, and make us. That doesn't mean they are always easy or that we arrive at them after a certain amount of meditation.

His motivations to both skip school (to play cricket) and run away (to avoid cricket) have to do with his inability to cope with structure vs. chaos. From the opening page of the book, we can see that Swami values the structure that school provides - academically and socially. There is a schedule of classes that recurs daily, there are teachers that are your authority figures, and it is expected that he has a mood of "work and discipline."

He complains about these things like they are dreadful, but as a child, I think he appreciates the familiarity of the situation. (And what child doesn't complain about school?) When he describes his friends, he describes them in terms of their classroom demeanor and intellectual capabilities. School gives him a place in which to define himself and others. He skips school because he thinks the doctor is vouching for him, therefore upholding the hierarchy of society and the structure of school. During the incident with the headmaster, he suddenly feels like this place of structure has become so chaotic. He has already been dismissed from the other school, and in his mind, I think he wishes he hadn't been so gullible, but he doesn't see any way out of it, so he panics and runs. On page 116, when he is grappling with his decision, Narayan beings each sentence with "He..." and this repetition creates anxiety that overwhelms the reader simultaneously. This repetition is also seen on page 128, when Swami is in the forest as well.

Eh, the articulation of that thought was not 100%, but I think you get what I mean. What does this say about his maturation? Well, I think it says that he has a lot of growing up to do, but dealing with the mental and emotional consequences of your own decision making is a skill that comes with time and experience. I mean, we are all much older than Swami is, and I guarantee that we still grapple with our decision-making...age is just a number, after all.