Going Places with Sophie

Sophie as imagined by Copilot Designer

Going Places is a short story by A R Barton prescribed for grade 12 students of a Central Education Board in India (CBSE). Sophie, the young protagonist, is just completing her school and will soon be working in a biscuit factory near her home as most girls of her socioeconomic class usually do. Sophie doesn’t want that future, though. She has big dreams. She wants to open a boutique, or become an actress, or be a fashion designer. She is in love with Danny Casey, the national football champion, and believes that he reciprocates the love. She believes that her fantasies about her meeting Danny in the arcade are real.

Her father who is very practical and realistic has only contempt for Sophie’s fantasies. “One of these days you’re going to talk yourself into a load of trouble,” he warns his dreamer-daughter. The father is a traditional patriarch who works hard to get the family moving from day to day. He can be rough and blunt. He doesn’t know anything about the art of subtlety. At any rate, he won’t sugarcoat a bit when it comes to Sophie’s fantasies. But he is not a bad person, not at all. On the contrary, he embodies the ethos of the working class – hard work, earning an honest living, and being content with his lot in life. His life is defined by his labour and the limitations of his socioeconomic class.

Sophie, on the other hand, is an escapist of sorts. She doesn’t want her father’s working-class ethos and environs. She yearns for the glitter of a glamorous world where thousands of people will be rising with thunderous applause to welcome her.

I made all this clear enough as best as I could in my grade 12 classes where more than 170 students listen to me every day in five sections. Now the terminal exam is over and my students’ answer sheets are giving me both shocks and giggles.

The question I asked from this story was about Sophie’s aspirations and their constraints. Most students wrote good or at least satisfactory answers. But, to my surprise, an interpretation that I had never imagined appeared in a significant number of answers. These students blamed Sophie’s father for being “rude,” “arrogant,” “insensitive,” “domineering,” and so on. And some of them approved of Sophie’s fantasies!

This does bother me. I see quite many of my students taking life too easy. They don’t seem concerned about anything at all; neither about their future nor about what’s happening in the world around. They want to have fun wherever they are. Fun, for them, is kidding around and nothing more. Life seems to be a dream for them. A fantasy.  

If I tell them this, they will snigger at me. They think I have become outdated, a walking anachronism. They don’t know that my thinking is far more revolutionary than theirs because they have never tried to gauge me, let alone understand me even superficially. Do they try to understand anyone at all, even themselves?

Let me offer my counsel to Sophie. My students are free to take it or leave it.

·      Dream big, but ground your dreams in reality. Dreams are the seeds of possibilities. But they can only flourish when planted in the soil of reality.

·      Develop practical skills. Dreams are wings. The fuel for flying comes from your skills.

·      Value what you have. That room where your father sits eating shepherd’s pie in one corner, with mother doing the dishes in another, and dirty linen piled up in yet another, has its own value if you care to discover it. In fact, you may have to begin your flight right from there.

·      Don’t fear hard work. Nothing worth having comes easily. Hard work is the ultimate secret of success, in spite of all the motivational talks you might have heard about smart work and other pep pills.

·      Build confidence in yourself. You should be your own light, Sophie. Don’t stand in the shadow of someone like Danny Casey or Geoff. Trust your instincts and work towards what you want with confidence. Success will be yours.