Intelligent life

I found this cartoon in today's newspaper irresistible: A says to B 'My calculations prove the existence of intelligent life on the moon'. B says 'If that's true, how come they've never contacted us?' and A replies irritably 'I don't think you're paying attention'.

Grassroots wisdom... Copenhagen listening?

The other day I had gone shopping, and there was this young vegetable vendor yelling lustily at hesitant customers - dordaam korben na, ei bela ja paren kheye nin, 2012-te duniya shesh hoye jachchhe - (don't haggle, eat all you can while you can, the world is coming to an end in 2012)!

Good to see that people - especially those who have to live toughly - can make a joke out of such things.

Happy families

The young husband says over the phone he can't come home in time for tea; the workload is too heavy. The pretty wife says 'No problem, I'll have another companion today, fitter than you, more attractive...' The jealous husband, all work forgotten, comes rushing home, only to find that the wife is having tea with a particular brand of biscuits.

A gist of an advertisement feature I just saw on TV. I wonder about the tastes and I.Q.-levels of the target audience for which this sort of thing is designed. I'm sure they comprise 90 percent of our young educated population in their 20s and early 30s. Isn't India shining?

Walk while you talk

I was joking only a few months ago that perhaps people actually believe that because it is called a mobile phone, you cannot sit or stand still while talking on it. Now Idea mobile service has come to this town, and Abhishek Bachchan urges everybody in the ad. to walk while they talk. So now I'm sure...

I wonder what the Delhi Police is doing about this ad...

Wow!

I have been regularly posting on this blog for the entire course of the year, and I see this is the 43rd time I am writing here.

And yet so many people are firmly set in their opinion that I am a grumpy, grouchy old man who can neither laugh nor make people laugh...!

Funny notices

Someone sent me a list of funny notices that he had found somewhere. Among them, I found this one particularly ticklish:

Sign on a doctor's door says Specialist in women and other diseases.

Reminded me of Gerry Durrell's hilarious opus, My Family and other animals.

Now here's a gem indeed!

Ananta Bandopadhyay, the leader of the Coordination Committee of state-government employees in West Bengal, a CPI(M) outfit, has said (The Telegraph, 14th November, page 7) that his organisation had 'always wanted work culture in government offices.'

If it had not been for my doctor's stern warning, I would have laughed till I screamed...

Howlers from parents

I hope, when my pupils present and ex- read this, they will newly appreciate why Sir kept insisting so vehemently that it is important to get things like spelling, words and syntax right (and I can entirely believe this article a friend sent me, because I read this kind of stuff everyday in the homework I have to mark, even from supposedly ‘good’ students).

These are real notes written by parents in the Laredo, Texas & United I.S.D. Spellings have been left intact.

1. My son is under a doctor's care and should not take PE today. Please execute him.

2. Please exkuce lisa for being absent she was sick and I had her shot.

3. Dear school: please ecsc's john being absent on jan. 28, 29, 30, 31, 32 and also 33.

4. Please excuse gloria from jim today. She is administrating.

5. Please excuse roland from p.e. for a few days. Yesterday he fell out of a tree and misplaced his hip.

6. John has been absent because he had two teeth taken out of his face.

7. Carlos was absent yesterday because he was playing football. He was hurt in the growing part.

8. Megan could not come to school today because she has been bothered by very close veins.

9. Chris will not be in school cus he has an acre in his side.

10. Please excuse ray friday from school. He has very loose vowels.

11. Please excuse Lesli from being absent yesterday. She had diahre dyrea direathethe (shits).

12. Please excuse tommy for being absent yesterday. He had diarrhea, and his boots leak.

13. Irving was absent yesterday because he missed his bust.

14. Please excuse jimmy for being. It was his father's fault.

15. I kept Billie home because she had to go Christmas shopping because i don't know what size she wear.

16. Please excuse jennifer for missing school yesterday. We forgot to get the sunday paper off the porch, and when we found it monday. We thought it was sunday.

17. Sally won't be in school a week from friday. We have to attend her funeral.

18. My daughter was absent yesterday because she was tired. She spent a weekend with the marines.

19. Please excuse Jason for being absent yesterday. He had a cold and could not breed well.

20. Please excuse mary for being absent yesterday. She was in bed with gramps.

21. Gloria was absent yesterday as she was having a gangover.

22. Please excuse brenda. She has been sick and under the doctor.

23. Maryann was absent december 11-16, because she had a fever, sore throat, headache and upset stomach. Her sister was also sick; fever an sore throat, her brother had a low grade fever and ached all over. I wasn't the best either, sore throat and fever. There must be something going around, her father even got hot last night.

Now we know why parents are screaming for better education for our kids.

Riggers, teachers...

When the redoubtable (and irrepressible) T. N. Seshan was India's Chief Election Commissioner, he once publicly remarked that some rigging in our elections was always to be expected, since we Indians have rigging/cheating in our blood: after all, he said, our holiest book is called the Rig Veda!

Last night an old boy was lamenting that many college teachers, whether or not they can or want to do anything good for you, are free with threats about how much they can hurt your career if you manage to rub them the wrong way. Well, after all, I reflected aloud, that is only to be expected, wasn't it: look at how Dronacharya is regarded as a 'model' teacher by so many (the Government even gives an award in his name), and look at how he treated Ekalavya when that self-taught unfortunate dared to upstage his favourite pupil Arjuna, whose guardian paid Drona his salary! To put it in trademark Indlish, we are like that only...

Eyes

The saddest thing in the world, said Helen Keller, is not that some people don't have eyes, but that so many people have eyes but cannot see.

If she had been around, I'd only have asked her whether she didn't agree that there is so much nastiness and commonness in this world that those who can indeed see must start wishing, after a point, that they could stop seeing...

My love life, calculated

I saw a cartoon a while ago: husband and wife sitting in bed, scanning their mobile inboxes, and the husband saying 'Our marriage must be on the rocks... you haven't sent me an sms all day.'

Today my mobile service provider sent me one of those promotional short messages they routinely send out to millions of subscribers: for three rupees a minute, I can call up someone designated 'Love Calculator', and s/he will quiz me and let me know whether my wife loves me or not.

I cannot stop marvelling at the speed with which technology is bringing around all-round cultural progress...

Nobel? ha ha ha ha ha...

Barack Obama has been given the Nobel Peace Prize.

I neither can nor need to add to the humour here.

Just by the way: Gandhi wasn't good enough for the Nobel Committee. Enough said!

Plus ça change…

This news item in today’s paper says that a lot of people in Indonesia are blaming the earthquake – and other recent calamities – on their President because numerologists and other experts claim that he has an ‘unlucky’ name (or, for variety, an unlucky date of birth)! Other experts have strongly refuted the claim, insisting that the President’s stars are in fact ‘lucky’ for the country.

There is a saying in French: plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose (the more it changes, the more it remains the same). I sometimes watch how fervently our mothers tie all sorts of charms and amulets around various parts of their children’s bodies so that they may "do well in science" and get into the IITs or medical schools. Their children, if they at all notice the contradiction, find nothing embarrassing about it; indeed, some of them, having grown up memorizing science textbooks to get their master’s or doctoral degrees, get very angry when I laugh at their ‘scientific’ pretensions.

One has to pinch oneself sometimes to believe that one is living in 2009, not 1209.

Challenged

I sometimes startle myself with my prescience.

A while ago, when Taarey Zameen Par was the superhit and talking point of the hour, I happened to remark in class that a time was coming when every pupil who was simply too lazy and absent-minded to spell correctly would claim that s/he was a victim of dyslexia, and so deserving of leniency rather than stern reprimands. To that extent, Aamir Khan had done all language teachers a great disservice. In any case, dyslexia is far more uncommon than sheer cussedness (I shall maintain to my dying day that spelling correctly is the first and indispensable sign of literacy – someone who misspells ten common words per written page cannot be called educated, even if he has a PhD to his name. And nothing – besides bad handwriting – so instantly identifies laziness and sloppiness as deep-rooted character traits as poor spelling does).

Well, it came true very recently. When I ruefully asked a pupil how she could possibly spell so many words wrongly, she gave me a bright smile and said ‘Sir, dyslexia!’

Gift from an old boy

Here are a few rib-ticklers that an old boy, Archishman Sarkar, recently sent me.

"Don't I look good in tails?"
"Why not? Your ancestors did."

"You're a liar," said Muscles.
"Yeah?" grumbled the thin man. "Say that again and I'll bust your jaw."
"Consider it said."
"Consider your jaw busted."

"What sort of woman is your wife?"
"She's an angel, that's what she is."
"You're lucky. Mine's still alive."

Two old girl friends met on the street after not seeing each other for several years.
"Belle, my darling," shrieked one. "It's so good to see you. Tell me dear, do you and your husband have those terrible arguments anymore?"
"No", said Belle.
"What made you stop?"
"He died," said Belle.

Patient at a lunatic asylum: "We like you better than the last doctor."
New Doctor (flattered): "And how's that?"
Patient: "You seem more like one of us".

"But doctor," said the worried patient, "are you sure I'll pull through? I've heard cases where the doctor has made a wrong diagnosis, and treated someone for pneumonia who has afterwards died of typhoid fever."
"Nonsense," spluttered the doctor, "When I treat a patient for pneumonia, he dies of pneumonia."


Absentminded professor (leaving church): Who's the absent-minded one now? You left your umbrella back there and I not only remembered mine but brought along yours, too!"
Wife (gazing blankly at him): But neither of us brought one to the church!

Thanks, Archishman.

General knowledge, again...

Anandabazar Patrika reported a few days ago that in one of the so called upmarket schools in Delhi, a lot of pupils had written, in response to a GK test question, that model/actress Lisa Ray was the daughter of Satyajit Ray, and a lot of them had been marked right by the teacher concerned. When the scandal blew up, not only were the pupils blase about it ('How are we supposed to know?') but so were the authorities, on the pretext that the answer was not immediately available to the teacher in her textbook. We are still not supposed to ask what sort of clowns have become teachers these days; and obviously such cretins not only do not carry anything called knowledge inside their heads, but have either never heard of encyclopedias and/or google, or couldn't be bothered to check.

In my childhood, we heard of such things as caricatures - the Bengali comedian Robi Ghosh, playing the part of a 'smart' young man (as 'smart' was understood in the 1970s) glibly telling his father, as proof of being educated, that Indira Gandhi was Mahatma Gandhi's daughter. In three decades, India has progressed so much that now it's not a caricature any more, but everyday reality. 'Clever' young quizzards have said on TV that Pather Panchali was written by Satyajit Ray, and sung songs of Nazrul when asked to sing Tagore. And such things, please note, happen in highly expensive fancy schools which tomtom in the advertisements how they are giving 'world-class education' (makes you wonder what 'world-class' means these days, doesn't it?). The likes of Prof. Amartya Sen, living in faraway ivory towers, have long been lamenting the poor quality of education being given in scantily-endowed government schools all across India. When will they turn to look at the Augean stables that our best private schools have become?

In 1991 I heard this joke: What do you call a New York politician who can spell 'cat'?... You call him talented. These days millions of such talented creatures are having no trouble becoming teachers (and also doctors, engineers, scientists, lawyers, mind you). Close to home, I personally know 'bright' students who wrote or said 'I drawed a picture' and 'He teached me' and couldn't score more than 20% in an impromptu quiz and couldn't write a sensible essay when they were 16 going on to become scholars and teachers, and I keep warning every batch, 'remember, a fool, when he grows old, only becomes an old fool'! I know lots of teachers with first-class degrees who would be lost in class without the notebooks they dictate (borrowed) notes from. If this country is not in a pretty mess, what is it in?

Post-modern enlightenment

‘Do you believe in God, and religion, and the afterlife, and things like that?’ someone asked the pretty young girl-about-town.

‘Nah...,’ said she, ‘who believes in all that rubbish in this scientific age?’

‘Well, what do you believe in, then?’

‘Why, lots of things! I believe in Macburgers, and my credit card, and my hair dye, and Britney Spears, and Wal-Mart and Nokia…’

‘And suppose these things fail you sometimes?’

‘Well, there’s always my boyfriend who tells me I’m looking good even on a bad hair day, and daddy’s credit card to fall back on, and Apple to do wonders in the mobile phone industry if Nokia falters! Then there's a new multiplex coming up in the neighbourhood. Who needs more?’

Read this one before?

I was given the following article years ago, but it is, I think, still completely relevant, and some of it is wickedly funny. Some of my readers are sure to have read it already, but I’d like others to laugh over it too. I am sorry that I haven’t been able to trace the author.

IF MICROSOFT MADE CARS

For all of us who feel only the deepest love and affection for the way
computers have enhanced our lives, read on.

At COMDEX recently, Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry
with the auto industry and stated, "If GM had kept up with the technology
like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25.00 cars that got
1,000 miles to the gallon."

In response to Bill's comments, General Motors issued a press release
stating: If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be
driving cars with the following characteristics:

1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day.

2. Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a
new car.

3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would
have to pull over to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut
off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue.
For some reason you would simply accept this.

4. Occasionally, executing a manoeuvre such as a left turn would cause your
car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to
reinstall the engine.

5. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable,
five times as fast and twice as easy to drive, but would run on only five
percent of the roads.

6. The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be
replaced by a single "This Car Has Performed An Illegal Operation" warning
light.

7. The airbag system would ask "Are you sure?" before deploying.

8. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and
refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned
the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.

9. Every time a new car was introduced, car buyers would have to learn how
to drive all over again, because none of the controls would operate in the
same manner as the old car.

10. Oh yeah, and last but not least . . . you'd have to press the "Start"
button to turn the engine off!

Humorists in short supply

It may be I'm getting short-sighted, but I have been having this strong feeling that the world is becoming, despite all its vaunted progress, a 'rum sort of place', as P.G. Wodehouse might have said. I don't expect a Jerome K. Jerome or a Sukumar Ray to be born every other day, but given the fact that so many different kinds of 'talents' are jostling with one another on the world's stage, from fabulous tennis stars to awesome software developers and fund-managers and cocktail-mixers, where are the people who can make us laugh (if you leave out the determinedly pedestrian sort, like Mr. Bean or our home-grown Mir)?

Lovely!

Almost a decade ago a pretty young thing walked into my drawing room for admission to my tuition, and said, 'Good evening, Sir, I'm Lovely'. Feeling mischievous, I replied, 'How nice! and what's your name?' which struck her speechless for a moment (and who knows, she might have been a mite affronted, too). Of late I have been hearing of a 'Lovely University' somewhere up Punjab way, and I am told it is not short of students...

Aesop's raven and 'science' today

There was this editorial in yesterday’s newspaper about how we ought to reflect upon the recent scientific ‘discovery’ that apparently Aesop knew what he was talking about when he wrote, almost 2,500 years ago, the fable about the crow filling a pitcher with pebbles until the water came up to such a level that it could drink.

Whoever wrote that editorial was not only a sensible person with a good sense of humour but also somebody who knew what the state of ‘science’ is these days, and how seriously we ought to take everything that scientific research claims to ‘discover’.

Much of what science is actually re-discovering is what used to be called plain common sense derived from long and well-digested, well-remembered experience – the kind of wisdom that old men and grandmothers used to pass on to their young, before they came to be derided as ‘old-fashioned’ and ‘out of touch’ by people who were sadly deluded by ‘the latest’, which is most definitely not always the best. It would be a nice idea if we could grow less snooty about our ‘knowledge’ and more open to the wisdom of the ages. As I have said in my other blog before, being informed or even being knowledgeable is not the same as being wise, and what this world lacks today, even more than wise men, is respect and attention to wise men. It is not a sign of progress that one needs a PhD today to say things that any granny who had never studied beyond high school knew even three generations ago, nor should a doctor or accountant or lawyer or engineer give himself airs about being wise just because he has mastered some saleable skill or the other (skills which often benefit the man who sells it far more than his customer!). So long as one has not digested and internalized a book like say the Panchatantra, one is at best a fool with a few degrees to his name, and this world is being dragged by the scruff of its neck towards disaster by such learned fools. Those interested may read the scathing remarks made about ‘experts/specialists’ in John le Carre’s The Russia House by a man who was a specialist himself, an atomic scientist: ‘...when this world is destroyed, it will be destroyed by the superior ignorance of its specialists’ is what he said if I remember correctly.

More and more of the same old crap...

Who needs twitter? As if sms text messaging with mobiles wasn't bad enough? Or is it that the whole world has gone crazy, and will lap up any 'cool new app' just for the heck of it? Is there one human being on this planet, who, despite having a laptop and/or a good mobile phone, and constant messaging and email facility at hand, still 'cannot do' without something as utterly witless and non-new as twitter?

Laugh for the day

A good friend sometimes sends me hilarious stuff for posting on this blog. Here’s another installment.

These howlers are supposedly from a book called 'Disorder in the American Courts' and are things people actually said in court, word for word, taken down and now published by court reporters who had to suffer the torment of staying calm while these exchanges were actually taking place.

ATTORNEY: Can you describe the individual?
WITNESS: He was about medium height and had a beard.
ATTORNEY: Was this a male or a female?
WITNESS: Unless the circus was in town I'm going with male.

ATTORNEY: Doctor, how many of your autopsies have you performed on dead people?
WITNESS: All of them. The live ones put up too much of a fight.

ATTORNEY: How was your first marriage terminated?
WITNESS: By death.
ATTORNEY: And by whose death was it terminated?
WITNESS: Take a guess.

ATTORNEY: Are you qualified to give a urine sample?
WITNESS: Are you qualified to ask that question?

ATTORNEY: Do you recall the time that you examined the body?
WITNESS: The autopsy started around 8:30 p.m.
ATTORNEY: And Mr. Denton was dead at the time?
WITNESS: If not, he was by the time I finished.

ATTORNEY: This myasthenia gravis, does it affect your memory at all?
WITNESS: Yes.
ATTORNEY: And in what ways does it affect your memory?
WITNESS: I forget.
ATTORNEY: You forget? Can you give us an example of something you forgot?

ATTORNEY: Now doctor, isn't it true that when a person dies in his sleep, he doesn't know about it until the next morning?
WITNESS: Did you actually pass the bar exam?

ATTORNEY: The youngest son, the twenty-year-old, how old is he?
WITNESS: He's twenty, much like your IQ.

ATTORNEY: Were you present when your picture was taken?
WITNESS: Are you shitting me?

ATTORNEY: She had three children, right?
WITNESS: Yes.
ATTORNEY: How many were boys?
WITNESS: None.
ATTORNEY: Were there any girls?
W ITNESS : Your Honor, I think I need a different attorney.

ATTORNEY: ALL your responses MUST be oral, OK? What school did you go to?
WITNESS: Oral.

ATTORNEY: Doctor, before you performed the autopsy, did you check for a pulse?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: Did you check for blood pressure?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: Did you check for breathing?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: So, then it is possible that the patient was alive when you began the autopsy?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: How can you be so sure, Doctor?
WITNESS: Because his brain was sitting on my desk in a jar.
ATTORNEY: I see, but could the patient have still been alive, nevertheless?
WITNESS: Yes, it is possible that he could have been alive and practising law.

P.S.: If someone like Khushwant Singh is happy to take inputs from friends who write in, I shouldn’t be embarrassed. Do send me things you have really enjoyed, readers, if you want me to publish them on my blog.

Books, anyone?

The teacher was expounding on the myriad benefits of reading, and trying to get his class of very young children interested. ‘Every one of you has books at home, don't you? Try naming some...’

Every child named a few, only little Johnny at the back of the class kept mum. ‘Hello, Johnny, what about you? Don't you have any books at home? Of course you do... try hard to remember,’ encouraged the teacher.

Little Johnny’s brow puckered with furious concentration. A few seconds passed, then his face lit up. ‘Yes, there’s one,’ he cried, ‘the telephone directory!’

At a more ‘high-class’ level, the affluent housewife goes shopping for her husband’s birthday gift. After-shave, cuff-links, sunglasses, ties, whatever the shopkeeper tries to tempt her with, ‘He’s got one of those,’ comes the dissatisfied reply. On the verge of giving up, the man suggests ‘Why don’t you give him a book, then?’ Pat comes the reply, ‘Oh, but he’s got one of those too!’

I used to think that these were wicked exaggerations, but then I read about a woman coming out of the cinema after watching Tagore’s Chokher Baali, and commenting to her friend, ‘Did you know that the book version is already available?’ And I meet such people all the time these days… the same people who are very proud of being ‘highly educated’, and who have hardly ever read anything in their lives except textbooks and crambooks. How easy it has become to be educated these days. Used to be a time, not too long ago, when no man dared to give himself such airs before three or four decades of concentrated reading…!

Brilliant!

I just heard that the honourable minister for health in our government of West Bengal has been boasting that our government hospitals routinely accommodate three patients to a bed, besides dozens lying on the floor, so great is the demand for their services - which, according to the minister, only goes to show how wonderful the state health service must be.

I suppose it takes a minister in India to be that blase and shameless. I put this in the humour blog because if I don't laugh, it can only make me cry!

General knowledge

A young unemployed man, terribly frightened of violence and bloodshed, is forced by his father to apply for a typist's job with the army. The recruiting officer hands him a sheet of paper and asks him to show what he can do. He sits down at the table in one corner of the tent with a typewriter on it, and deliberately types as slowly and messily as he can, so that he might be rejected out of hand. To his dismay, the officer takes one look at his handiwork and barks 'You're hired'. Flabbergasted, the lad asks 'But why ... how...?' In reply, the officer says, 'Son, I've been looking at applicants for three hours now, and you are the first one who knows what a typewriter looks like! That's good enough.'

Then there were the two country bumpkins who had been invited to dinner by the lord of the manor, known for his cultured tastes. They try to be on guard, lest they should make a gaffe. Everything goes smoothly until after dinner, when they settle down with coffee and cigars. 'Tell me, my good men, how do you like Shakespeare?' asks the squire, by way of making conversation. 'Not after dinner, sir,' blurts out Jake, and gets kicked sharply in the shin by Tom for his pains. He clams up for the time being, but asks on the way home, 'Why did you kick me so hard?' 'You fool,' roars Tom, 'you nearly spoilt everything with that stupid remark. You think Shakespeare is a kind of cheese, don't you? - Well, as a matter of fact, it's a kind of wine!'

I often tell these jokes in class. Always in context, of course, only when my pupils give me the right cues with strokes of sheer brilliance. The occasions are all too frequent these days, despite the fact that many of them routinely score very high marks in school examinations...

A funny poet

Ogden Nash cheers me up whenever I visit him. Here's a sampling of his poetry for those who do not know him already: click here. Tell me how you liked them.

Is all 'fun' funny?

Several young pupils had written letters for homework, describing a supposedly ‘funny’ incident at school. I was dismayed to read, in letter after letter, how they had hugely ‘enjoyed’ themselves and laughed uproariously at some classmate who had got accidentally hurt (such as by falling down the stairs), or at some teacher who had been inadvertently embarrassed. Is that the sort of thing that should cause us to laugh, instead of commiserating and trying to help out the person in distress? In the same vein, college seniors claim to be having fun ‘ragging’ juniors in the most humiliating and cruel manner. I have seen mobs having fun lynching helpless innocents, beating them to bloody pulp, burning them alive. And I can hear echoes of the jackboots at Auschwitz… is it only when we ourselves become victims of such fun that we remember ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you’?

Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple used to say that human nature is the same everywhere, in all its pettiness, crookedness and viciousness – that is why, despite never having left her little, remote, ‘uneventful’ village all her life, she could so easily see through the motives of sophisticated criminals and unravel plots that baffled the best city-smart brains. I have been a small-town teacher for the biggest part of my life, and I can see how right she was. Also, since I deal with young people, I keep worrying, being constantly troubled by the adage ‘Morning shows the day’. The Nazi killers were schoolchildren once. So also all vicious thugs everywhere else...

Sane weirdos

It is sometimes awfully difficult to deal with madmen, they can sound so rational and self-possessed and plausible - upto a point!

A man rattles the knocker at the door of the warden of the lunatic asylum at dead of night. The poor warden, rudely awakened, peers out of his window and looks down: ‘What is it, my man?’

The fellow cringes and replies, ‘Please Sir, I am so sorry to disturb you, but my folks threw me out of the house, and told me to find shelter here if I could’.

‘Why, what on earth have you done to upset them?’ asks the warden.

‘Please Sir, I haven’t done anything. I only keep telling them I like socks.’

‘You like socks?’ asks the warden, puzzled. ‘What’s wrong with liking socks? I like socks too!’

‘You do, Sir, really?’ the man beams with pleasure. ‘and do you like them with tomato sauce?’

Gender bender

I keep wondering from time to time how much more weird common English usage is going to get. In connection with politically correct gender-sensitivity, they started saying chairwoman instead of chairman when women became increasingly more visible in high places. Then they decided it would be more convenient (or egalitarian) to write ‘-person’ instead of ‘man’ and ‘woman’, so we stopped hearing of chairmen and chairwomen, and grew familiar with just plain chairpersons.

Then somebody somewhere may have started wondering what to do about postman and milkman, and even hu-man… would it be okay to write that we are all huperson beings? By and by someone came up with the really brilliant idea to drop the suffix altogether. So these days we hear that Dr. So and so is the Chair of the department of economics or physics in such and such university. Fancy that it should be considered a great step forward to reduce a person to a thing! The chair sits on a chair, I suppose, but which is which? I’m sure a Martian newly introduced to the charms of the English language would tie him- (it?) self up into knots puzzling over it.

And yet we still hear that Congresswoman Ms. X has just given a fiery speech. How long before she is referred to as just plain Congress?

You can't call anybody a moron these days

[A friend sent me the following delicious piece which I want to share with my readers (especially those who enjoyed the post titled ‘The death of Common Sense’). You can do a google search on Stella Awards yourself; I do not vouch for the authenticity of the contents here. Some of them do strain one’s credulity, although God knows I have encountered enough morons in my own life, and I know that silica gel sachets that come with things like cameras carry the warning tag ‘Do not eat’!]

It's time once again to review the winners of the Annual "StellaAwards." The Stella Awards are named after 81 year-old Stella Liebeck, who spilled hot coffee on herself and successfully sued McDonald's (in NM). That case inspired the Stella awards for the most frivolous, ridiculous, successful lawsuits in the United States. Here are this year's winners:

5th Place (tie): Kathleen Robertson of Austin, Texas, was awarded$80,000 by a jury of her peers after breaking her ankle tripping over a toddler who was running inside a furniture store. The owners of the store were understandably surprised at the verdict, considering the misbehaving little toddler was Ms. Robertson's son.

5th Place (tie): 9-year-old Carl Truman of Los Angeles won $74,000 and medical expenses when his neighbor ran over his hand with a Honda Accord. Mr. Truman apparently didn't notice there was someone at the wheel of the car when he was trying to steal his neighbor's hubcaps.

5th Place (tie): Terrence Dickson of Bristol, Pennsylvania, was leaving a house he had just finished robbing by way of the garage. He was not able to get the garage door to go up since the automatic dooropener was malfunctioning. He couldn't re-enter the house because the door connecting the house and garage locked when he pulled it shut.The family was on vacation, and Mr. Dickson found himself locked in the garage for eight days. He subsisted on a case of Pepsi he found, and a large bag of dry dog food. He sued the homeowner's insurance, claiming the situation caused him undue mental anguish. The jury agreed to the tune of $500,000.

4th Place: Jerry Williams of Little Rock, Arkansas, was awarded $14,500 and medical expenses after being bitten on the buttocks by his next door neighbor's beagle. The beagle was on a chain in its owner's fenced yard. The award was less than sought because the jury felt the dog might have been just a little provoked at the time by Mr. Williams who had climbed over the fence into the yard and was shooting it repeatedly with a pellet gun.

3rd Place: A Philadelphia restaurant was ordered to pay Amber Carsonof Lancaster, Pennsylvania $113,500 after she slipped on a soft drink and broke her coccyx (tailbone). The beverage was on the floor because Ms. Carson had thrown it at her boyfriend 30 seconds earlier during an argument.

2nd Place: Kara Walton of Claymont, Delaware, successfully sued the owner of a night club in a neighboring city when she fell from the bathroom window to the floor and knocked out her two front teeth. This occurred while Ms.Walton was trying to sneak through the window in the ladies room to avoid paying the $3.50 cover charge. She was awarded $12,000 and dental expenses.

1st Place: This year's runaway winner was Mrs. Merv Grazinski of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Mrs. Grazinski purchased a brand new 32-foot Winnebago motor home. On her first trip home, (from an OU football game), having driven onto the freeway, she set the cruise control at 70 mph and calmly left the driver's seat to go into the back & make herself a sandwich. Not surprisingly, the RV left the freeway, crashed and overturned. Mrs.Grazinski sued Winnebago for not advising her in the owner's manual that she couldn't actually do this. The jury awarded her $1,750,000 plus a new motor home. The company changed their manuals on the basis of this suit, just in case there were any other complete morons around.

Recession laughs

A friend sent me the following bits of humour generated by the ongoing recession. It is good to see that some people can still laugh over what is putting creases on so many foreheads. If I am unwittingly infringing on someone’s copyright, do tell me and I’ll take this post off the air:

Ali Baba and the forty thieves are now Ali Baba and thirty thieves. Ten were laid off!

Batman and Robin are now Batman and Pedro. Batman fired Robin and hired Pedro because Pedro was willing to work twice the hours at the same rate!

Iron man is now "air-pooling" with Superman to save fuel costs!

A director decided to award a prize of Rs.1000 for the best idea for saving the company money during the recession. It was won by a young executive who suggested reducing the prize money to Rs. 100.

Women are finally marrying for love....and not money!

The only "deposits" being made on a Ferrari are the ones made by birds flying over them.

Q: With the current market turmoil, what's the easiest way to make a small fortune? A: Start off with a large one.

Q: What's the difference between an investment banker and a large pizza?A: A large pizza can feed a family of four.

Q: Why have Dubai real estate agents stopped looking out of the window in the morning?A: Because otherwise they'd have nothing to do in the afternoon.

Q: What's the difference between an American and a Zimbabwean dollar?A: In a few weeks... nothing.

Q: What's the difference between a bond and a bond trader?A. A bond matures.

Q: Did you hear Goldman Sachs has a new cafeteria?A. It is called the Warren buffet.

The broker told him that he has been sleeping like a baby. "Really?' replied the customer. "Absolutely," said the broker,"I sleep for about an hour, wake up, and then cry for about an hour."

Recession Bumper Sticker: The recession is worse than a divorce. You lose half your fortune and still have your wife.

The Difference between Communism & Capitalism: In communism we nationalise the banks and then push them to bankruptcy. In capitalism we push the banks to bankruptcy and then nationalise them.

A priest, a rabbi, and a mortgage broker were all caught in a shipwreck. Sharks are soon circling around. The sharks eat the priest. The rabbi starts praying fervently, but to no avail, as the sharks eat him as well. The mortgage broker is really getting worried, as a shark is coming for him. But, instead, the shark puts him on its back, carries him to shore, and lets him off. The mortgage broker asks, "How come you didn't eat me too ?" And the shark replies, "Professional Courtesy!"

The laughter of the wise

Genuinely humorous people, you will notice, have the rare ability to laugh at themselves. The reason most people cannot do that is that they take themselves too seriously. That is a common affliction not only of saints and statesmen, but also, I have noticed, of government clerks and schoolteachers, newspaper editors and run-of-the-mill parents! If you instinctively believe (though you might never admit it) that the world revolves – or ought to revolve – around you, you cannot make fun of yourself now and then.

 

Birbal – the fabled courtier, not necessarily the character in history – was supposed to have been one who could pull his own leg sometimes. On one occasion he is supposed to have put Akbar at position number two on his list of the biggest fools in the kingdom (and he gave the emperor satisfactory reason for so doing, seeing that his head didn’t roll, but that is another story), and placed himself right on top of the list: because he was fool enough, he said, to make a career of humouring such a foolish overlord!

 

There have been honorable exceptions among saints, philosophers and statesmen, of course. Some of my greatest heroes are among them. Socrates, who had a shrew of a wife, sagely observed that a man who finds a good wife becomes a householder, a man who is not so lucky has to find solace in philosophy. Abraham Lincoln, when called ‘two-faced’ by a critic in Congress, pointed at his own face and remarked – ‘Look at this mug! If I had another face, would I use this one?’ When someone bowed low before Vivekananda and addressed him as god incarnate, he is supposed to have pointed to his midriff and said ‘You think God has a pot belly?’ And Mahatma Gandhi often had his audience in splits by lampooning himself. When someone asked him if he did not feel ashamed to present himself before the King-Emperor clad only in a short dhoti, he shot back ‘Why? The king was wearing enough for both of us!’

Good stuff!

Click here if you are keen on reading some really fun stuff regarding words and their wonder, a subject of which I am just as fond as this writer is.

My town is blazing and I am reeling in the heat and praying for rains. I don't dare to pray simultaneously for inspiration for some new blogpost here at this point: the gods might get angry at my importunations. So if you are visiting often in search of something new, do please bear with me for a while.

Dennis the loveable 'menace'

I have always been fond of comic strips, and Dennis the Menace has ranked consistently high on my list of favourites. The precocious child is not only always good for a laugh, but again and again a thousand times over he forces you to take a good hard look at yourself – through his own naughtiness and folly, he keeps telling you ‘You are just like me, only maybe too timid, too boneheaded or too lazy to express yourself the way I do!’ And he makes you think that the world might have been a much better place if more of us were as honest and frank and lively and loveable as he is.

One of my perennial favourites is when he asks his mom and finds out that his dad and she and he were born in places far away from one another – ‘Funny how we got together, isn’t it?’ And another where the long-suffering neighbour Mr. Wilson tells his wife ‘What frightens me, Mary, is the thought that that boy could grow up to be the President of the United States!’ And all those numerous occasions when he has given his parents and neighbours and ‘Ol’ Margaret’ and the parish priest and shop attendants red faces or left them gasping at his careless insouciance. As I saw in the strip in my newspaper this morning: A couple have come visiting, and he takes one look at the lady’s skirt and exclaims ‘Hey Dad! I thought you said she wears the pants in this family?’

If you cannot laugh with Dennis, you are a bore. If you dismiss him as merely a child, you are a very shallow person. And if you merely laugh and do not take a few moments off to ponder, well, God probably didn’t give you much of a brain…

The death of common sense

An old boy emailed me this delightful (and heartrending, if you read it the right way) article which I thought would be appropriate for this blog:

London Times Obituary of the late Mr. Common Sense - Sunday, 31st March 2008

Today we mourn the passing of a beloved old friend, Common Sense, who has been with us for many years. No one knows for sure how old he was, since his birth records were long ago lost in bureaucratic red tape. He will be remembered as having cultivated such valuable lessons as: "knowing when to come in out of the rain"; "why the early bird gets the worm"; "life isn't always fair"; and "maybe it was my fault".

Common Sense lived by simple, sound financial policies (don't spend more than you can earn) and reliable strategies (adults, not children, are in charge).

His health began to deteriorate rapidly when well-intentioned but overbearing regulations were set in place. Reports of a 6-year-old boy charged with sexual harassment for kissing a classmate; teens suspended from school for using mouthwash after lunch; and a teacher fired for reprimanding an unruly student, only worsened his condition.

Common Sense lost ground when parents attacked teachers for doing the job that they themselves had failed to do in disciplining their unruly children. It declined even further when schools were required to get parental consent to administer sun lotion or a band-aid to a student; but could not inform parents when a student became pregnant and wanted to have an abortion.

Common Sense lost the will to live as the Ten Commandments became contraband; churches became businesses; and criminals received better treatment than their victims. Common Sense took a beating when you couldn't defend yourself from a burglar in your own home and the burglar could sue you for assault.

Common Sense finally gave up the will to live after a woman failed to realize that a steaming cup of coffee was hot. She spilled a little in her lap, and was promptly awarded a huge settlement.
Common Sense was preceded in death by his parents, Truth and Trust; his wife, Discretion; his daughter, Responsibility; and his son, Reason.

He is survived by his 4 stepbrothers: I Know My Rights, I Want It Now, Someone Else Is To Blame, and I'm A Victim.

Not many attended his funeral because so few realized he was gone.

Admission time

The time of admissions to my tuitions is not merely hectic and strenuous for our whole family but a time when we can collect hilarious howlers observing the silly things people do and say. Right now I am in the process and it will take some time to wrap up still, but let me mention one or two things that might raise a laugh among my readers …

One of my old boys, now in college, was helping us out, holding back the crowd (everybody being terribly busy and clamouring to be served first!). Somebody asked him who he was and what he was doing, and, on being told, asked ‘Is Sir teaching ex-students too these days?’

My daughter (tall and solemn and businesslike and busy as she was) has lost count of how many ‘tiny tots’ two years her senior addressed her as dada or didi while she was telling them the rules and helping them to fill out their forms.

And (though this is not really funny) one mother came to declare that she had enrolled her son last year, and she lives right next door to X (one of my ex-students, who, she has found out somehow, remains a favourite) – so will she get a concession on the fees?

Five-line rib tickler

Humour is not the first (or even the usual) thing I look for in poetry, but one particular type of poem has always tickled my fancy. It’s called the limerick, supposedly taking its name after a little village in Ireland, a five-line doggerel with an aabba rhyming scheme, and it can deal with any subject under the sun, so long as it is at least vaguely funny (some can be wickedly so). Here’s a sample of hundreds that I have enjoyed:

A woman who isn’t too stunning
Competes in marathon running.
She really enjoys
Being chased by the boys:
Is she sporting, or just quite cunning?

If you share the same kind of taste, send in your favourite limerick. Only, not too very naughty ones, please – we have to keep in mind that a lot of teenagers with clucky parents read this blog, and my daughter does, too!

That thing in your ear...

The mobile (or cell phone, have it your way) has spread like wildfire all over this country since 2000. The newspapers inform me that India has now emerged as the second biggest cell phone-using country in the world, having recently surpassed the US (given the population it was, of course, only a matter of time, some will say!), and at the speed with which it is growing, it may soon overtake China. It generally sounds good when you hear your country is tops in something, but is this one a dubious distinction or what?

At first (only about ten years ago, actually, but for today’s young that’s prehistoric times…) cell phones were very expensive and pretty useless (you could hardly get a connection), so they were (predictably) flaunted as status symbols by that tiny class of people who have too much money and no idea of what they can do with it (and would die if you suggested charity, or even buying good books). Then connections improved dramatically and prices fell through the floor (the set that cost Rs. 25,000 in 1998 would go for Rs. 1,500 today and won’t find buyers, it’s so out-of-date), and it could hardly serve as a status symbol any longer, seeing that every maidservant and railway coolie and rickshawwallah had one – but it happened so fast that the hip and happening crowd couldn’t give up the habit of carrying around their phones in their hands fast enough (ever wondered why people need to carry their mobiles tightly clasped in their hands or hanging from their necks as though it were a lifeline or something? I have been using one for six years now, and it has never been a bother hiding in my trouser pocket!)… and of course, a few phone makers are doggedly trying to keep prices up by advertising their gizmos as must-haves by getting them endorsed by celebrities and bedecked with diamonds and scented with rare perfumes and what have you. But a wag has already suggested that pretty soon the real status symbol will be not carrying a cellphone for all to see (and folks like me will at last heave a sigh of relief)… ‘Look, I don’t do what the riffraff does’!

But what are so many people doing with so many mobiles? The advertisements seem to suggest that you can’t even express to your loved ones how much you love them any longer if you don’t call or message them: just sitting down beside them and telling them face to face or giving them a hug or a kiss has become so passé, so uncool! I can see boyfriend and girlfriend by the score sitting on roadside culverts, engrossed in punching keys on their separate mobiles. Scientists have observed that after a million years of practising the use of the index finger, which supposedly separated us from the apes like nothing else, we have been persuaded by the cell phone in two decades flat to make the thumb the most-used of fingers, and I have grown so visually used to people with mobiles stuck to their ears that I actually started on seeing a man passing by merely scratching his ear instead of talking (or listening) on a phone: surely such people should be put in museums?

Stories of people being so engrossed in phoning that they are run over by cars and trains no longer raise eyebrows, and watching a man taking instructions from his wife on the mobile about what to shop for at the vegetable market made me wonder how we and our fathers coped without these gadgets for so long. Soon, they say, you won’t be able to drive without the aid of your GPS-enabled mobile. Listening to people’s choice of ringtones gives away more about their personalities than they would ever care to admit: my girls snigger about what they hear when their teachers’ mobiles suddenly go off in class. Mobiles are already offering radio, camera, email, TV and canned music in addition to phone and messaging facilities: how much longer before they start wiggling appendages and giving you services of a more intimate sort, and people gladly give up jobs and spouses before they part with their mobiles?

Pretty good doctor...

Medicine remains one of the few professions which I deeply respect. Females of the species, especially the contemporary young, urban, ‘educated’ kind, who think even hotel valets, airline stewardesses and call-centre operatives are professionals deserving of admiration, and believe that women unlike men ought to make money primarily to splurge on themselves, on the other hand, and working women who imagine they have a special right to make nuisances of themselves in public with their loud gossip on mobile phones and rudeness with fellow commuters or pedestrians, I regard with disdain.

At a major new private hospital in Kolkata which I happened to haunt morning and evening for a few days recently, I was pleased to find, therefore, a lot of smart young women – doctors as well as nurses – who knew their jobs well, and were doing them with the utmost sincerity, yet with ever smiling faces.

And I fell in love with a very pretty young thing whose smile was as bewitching as the seriousness with which she attended to her medical rounds. Very young, indeed – she could have been my pupil eight years ago! What stole my heart, though, was the fact that being very short (and unwilling, for some reason, to wear high heels…) she stood on tiptoe every time she wanted to peer through the glass into a patient’s room. I could have lifted her up in my arms, telling her I was daydreaming that I was doing it with my daughter in mind, but I resisted the temptation!

A good father?

To those who have been readers of my blog(s) for some time, here's a question. What kind of a father do you think I am? Is my daughter lucky or otherwise?

I am not really being facetious here. Unlike most parents I know, I did not convince myself the moment my daughter was born that I was the best thing that could have happened to her. And I have never stopped wondering...

Jeeves forgotten?

I should have thought that P.G. Wodehouse created a true immortal with his Jeeves character. People from the time of Jyoti Basu till yours truly have been afficionados. Now, despite the fact that more people are learning English (after a fashion) all over India than ever before, few people read the Bertie Wooster books - and one of the reasons, so many of my pupils tell me, is that they find the English so 'difficult' that all the humour goes clean over their heads. Well, it is true that Wodehouse's English is incredibly sophisticated, what with its wealth of allusions, puns, innuendos, idioms and idiosyncratic turns of phrase - but if so many 'English-educated' people who have gone to the best schools (and are very snooty about their learning) cannot read what we in our day laughed ourselves to tears over, what price their education?

Of noses and other profound things

It has been said that if Cleopatra's nose had been only slightly shorter, all history would have been different. In the Ramayana, we read of Lakshman cutting off Surpanakha's nose (as well as ears) for being too saucy, and that, as we all know, led to all hell breaking loose! And some people have been known to be extraordinarily sensitive about their extraordinarily long noses - the great (semi-legendary) French romantic and swordsman, Cyrano de Bergerac, challenged people to duels for insults to his nose (which he had often merely imagined) and composed poems extempore to the rhythm of his sword thrusts and parries even as he fought. There are endless jokes about Jews and their noses, and I have wondered whether having small/flat noses makes people feel bad or sad. Having a rather long hooter myself (and proud to know that in ancient Rome they called it 'patrician'), I often point to it to demonstrate what 'aquiline' means. Sharks have no visible noses, and dogs have rudimentary ones compared to us, yet they can smell far better. We weren't given such noses merely to be able to smell. Surely this is a matter that calls for profound thought?

Last post for the first day

'I have a billion,' sighed the tycoon, 'but I am seventy.'

'Why,' simpered the bimbo, 'you look twenty!'

Noticed the quote at bottom?

Now why is it there, do you wonder? I am not clinically insane - in the sense that I don't bite people or go dancing and singing in the buff or way-out things like that - and yet all my friends have known for a long time that lots of people call me mad, and not always very kindly either. Let me see: can you count the ways in which I have been said to be 'mad'? ... and do you think you can figure out why it might be a pleasure, too?

Witty about dying...

There was this king who, when his death was mentioned, exclaimed, 'Die? Why, Sir, that's the last thing I should do!' (I do, do hope people get the pun!)

Then there was the funny man who said 'I'm not afraid to die: I just don't want to be there when it happens.' And Sir Thomas More, who supposedly raised a finger, removed his flowing beard from the chopping block, put his head down, and told the executioner 'You can go ahead now; I didn't want my beard to be harmed; it has not offended the king.'

I wonder, too, if you have read about the monk who was always making his devotees laugh. When he was on his deathbed, he made his last request: that he should be cremated with his clothes on. When the pyre was lit, there was a great burst of firecrackers - he had apparently hidden a lot of them in his robes. Even at his funeral, he was making people laugh...

Apologia

That word above is an old-fashioned one, which most readers may not be familiar with. I am not apologizing for anything, just offering an explanation for why I should want to start another blog.

My other, original blog will continue and, I hope, thrive in the months and years to come. This one is not a separate project; I expect my old and faithful readers to visit it in tandem. But I also hope that this one will create a somewhat different image of me, and draw other kinds of readers…

If you ask why, my reasons are manifold:

· The older blog is getting cluttered with too many posts, and very few people have the time/patience to explore it for older posts,
· Despite my intentions (see this essay), it has started sounding rather too solemn, practical, worldly, and I would like readers to find out other facets of my character/interests too,
· To live a full and good life, one must attend to many things. As with money and work and sex and philosophy and music, pure fun and whimsy (of the cerebral kind, it goes without saying – I have no desire to attract your typical mall-hopper, pub-crawler, giggly teenager or party animal) should have some space for itself, and that is one of the themes I wish to attend to here, in the spirit of Carroll’s most famous ‘nonsense’ poem Jabberwocky

… well, there are other reasons, but let that be enough for now.

Oh, one more thing: I shall be delighted to have suggestions by way of comments here, too!

Love you…