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!