Google instead of brains?

A young and with-it person was complaining about why it is necessary to memorise so many things in order to become educated - all sorts of things from multiplication tables to dates in history to names of so many body parts to rivers and mountains and oceans and what not: 'After all, if there's anything you want to know you can always google it, can't you?'

I didn't see any point in arguing, so I agreed that he was probably right. So in the kind of future he has in mind, I said, doctors and lawyers and other people who used to be called 'knowledge workers' would simply google everything whenever people came to them for advice and help. And teachers, too: already I can see that teachers (at least in schools and colleges) are not really expected to know anything. And I am sure, I said, that people would gladly pay them hefty fees for using google to tell them what they needed to know.

The boy at least had enough intelligence to look abashed. But how much longer, I wonder?

Politically incorrect!

·        Brats need the cane, not fancy therapists (but of course, monsters shouldn’t masquerade as teachers, either).

·        Women can’t have their cake and eat it too. (On those terms, few would want to be 'liberated').

·        The world owes no human a living (so out of work ‘intellectuals’ shouldn’t whine).

·        There are too many scientists around these days. They add much more to confusion than to illumination. They’d have been better employed as taxi-drivers.

·        The problem with education today is that too many lazy people want to make a good living out of it, and too many unwilling people have been pushed up to high school and college, when they should have been sent out to make their own living.

·        Don’t waste your time and money on a book or movie or game until the hype has quite died away.

·        Old wisdom: a team of doctors can be deadlier than a team of hired assassins.

·        Things are badly out of kilter when criminals get more social attention and sympathy than their victims.

·        Then  again, there are too many ‘victims’ around these days: constructing their victimhood is a large-scale industry. Nobody has to be good just because it’s a woman, or a Hindu, or Black, or very young or very old or whatever.

·        We cannot all simultaneously claim to be good people and lament that corruption is taking the country to the dogs.

·        If you have too many friends, there’s probably a big emptiness inside you.

·        The more the jargon, the less the content – that’s an ironclad rule.

·        When a journo or lawyer offers lessons in morality, run. Give me politicians any time.

·        There are four kinds of people in this world: those who have nothing to eat, those who are too busy to eat, those who live lifelong as parasites, and those who have stepped off the treadmill.

·        It’s a good sign if dogs and children like you (but beware – they liked Hitler, too!).

Suhel Seth

was my contemporary (a year or two senior, I think) at Jadavpur University. Even in those days he had a wacky and often naughty sense of humour, as he widely publicised in the hand-written magazine titled Jabberwocky that he edited. Since then he has gone places, and done a lot of things in his time.

I am writing this post just to say I love his page called 'Survival Strategies' that is published every Sunday in the magazine titled 'Graphiti' that comes with The Telegraph. Maybe it's because I have a subliminal wish to be wickedly in-your-face like that myself, if only I had not lived in a 19th-century village, where they all expect teachers to be boring and goody-goody stuffed shirts, never doing anything other than churning notes and collecting fees, for fear of 'what they will say'....! Take a look at the page yourself to see what I am talking about. (You can even follow his page on Facebook. Just type 'Survival strategies Suhel Seth' in the search box).

God willing, I'll do something of the sort myself, when I am old enough, and no longer have to give a damn.

Breathtaking put-downs

I just read Shilpi's blogpost, and the last put-down was superb: the man says to the woman 'I didn't give up my seat for you because you are a lady, ma'am, I did it because I am a gentleman'!

Such magnificent put-downs are necessary to put the rude and the uncouth back in their proper place, and even to make nice people think and re-examine their attitudes towards a lot of things. It reminds me of the prince accosting one John Tower, and quite gratuitously insulting him in public with the remark: 'Hello, Tower. I hear you are the worst blackguard in Liverpool?'. Tower bows to the ground and says, 'I hope your Highness has not come to take my reputation away!' 

And then there was M.K. Gandhi after he had become famous as the Mahatma, who was always good for innocent-sounding but wicked ripostes. When asked what he thought about western civilization, he simply said 'It would be a good idea'. It takes my breath away...

Indlish

Remember me? I am Professor Seth.

Once I taught you geography. Now

I am retired, though my health is good.

My wife died some years back.

By god's grace, all my children

Are well settled in life.

One is sales manager

One is bank manager

Both have cars.

Other also doing well, though not so well.

Every family must have black sheep.

Sarala and Tarala are married,

Their husbands are very nice boys.

You won't believe, but I have eleven grandchildren.

How many issues you have? Three?

That is good. These are days of family planning.

I am not against. We have to change with times.

Whole world is changing. In India also.

We are keeping up. Our progress is progressing.

Old values are going, new values are coming.

Everything is happening with leaps and bounds.

I am going out rarely, now and then

Only, this is price of old age.

But my health is OK, usual aches and pains.

No diabetes, no blood pressure, no heart attack.

This is because of sound habits in youth.

How is your health keeping?

Nicely? I am happy for that.

This year I am sixty nine

And hope to score century.

You were so thin, like stick

Now you are man of weight and consequence.

That is good joke.

If you are coming again this side by chance

Visit please my humble residence also.

I am living just on opposite house's backside.

The Professor, by Nissim Ezekiel

To think that this was written almost half a century ago! (You might also try The Patriot by the same poet). How might the poet have felt if he had lived and observed the 'English-educated' crowd in today's India, where most English teachers themselves don't have the faintest inkling any more about the wretchedness of this pidgin that passes for English (as I should know)?

Horrifying thought: given our numbers, our determination to mangle the language, and the speed with which we are spreading all over the planet, this might be imposed as the International Standard fifty years from now!

Quiz to the readers: how many odd things could you find in the poet's mimicry of Indian English (remembering that language is always a vehicle of culture)?