For the next 20 minutes, until classes actually started, we were part of an exciting impromptu class. Even the girls admitted to having their own heroes, although they became strangely silent when I asked them how many actually played cricket. A few of them chimed up to say that they never had a chance to play the game - either because the boys would not let them, or because they had to help with housework when they got home from school. But the final round of conversation was perhaps the most the most arresting. The old verandah that runs horizontally across the building is paved with large grey Shahabad flagstones - and the cement that joins stone to stone provides a kind of a line of demarcation.
Peace is better.
The answers came fast and furious - we did not need Amartya Sen or any other learned scholar to tell us.