When Mazy feels very patriotic...

Namaskaar, this is Mazy, who can sing our national anthem quite well. But I don’t know why they never select me to sing on stage.

“That’s because you’re so loud, Mazy!” says my friend Mona. “The crows and cats in the school building get scared when you sing. And you get the words wrong all the time.”

Okay, so I get the words wrong  once in a way. That is because it is in a language I don’t speak. Rabindranath Tagore wrote the song in a mix of Sanskrit and Bengali, and I don’t know either language. You know, it is 100 years since ‘Jana Gana Mana’ was first sung in public. It was first sung at the Calcutta Session of the Indian National Congress on December 27, 1911 but was adapted as the National Anthem of India only later.

I love to sing the National Anthem. It makes me feel happy and proud to be Indian. I like national anthems. The part that I like best about watching international sports on television is the anthems of different countries. The Spanish one is my favourite, and I can hum it quite well.

But don’t ask Mona about it, I’m sure she’ll say I hum wrong!  The number of words in the Spanish anthem can be got by solving this sum: 360 plus 45, multiplied by zero, divided by 5. If I need one day to memorise 10 Spanish words, how many days will I require to learn the full anthem?

Out of the maze: Zero days! There are no words in the official anthem of Spain, called the ‘Marcha Real’, even though many Spaniards did try to make up lyrics!