What young India can teach us

I was dealing with a class which is about to go up to the seniormost year in school - class 12. We were studying F. Max Mueller's famous 150-year old essay What India can teach us (from which Jawaharlal Nehru quotes proudly in The Discovery of India). We had reached the point where he was waxing eloquent on India's rich mythology - whereupon I stopped and grinned at the boys and girls, saying, 'Of course, you know all about that, don't you? Any one of you could impress any westerner with gems from our rich storehouse of myths, surely, you, the smartest lot of today's Indians?... Let's see now,' and I picked on one girl at random and quizzed her 'What was Kacha's relationship with Devayani?' She looked blank, just as I had expected. 'Well, then, how were Bali and Sugriva related?' Again, she shook her head doubtfully, looking more flustered than before. No one came to her aid, though there were a few hushed mutterings. I tried one last time: 'What was the name of Lakshmana's wife?' The girl's face lit up with delight - she knew this one - and she declared, 'Sita, Sir!'

Home truth

There's a comic strip titled "Golmele Ginni" (Troublesome Housewife) in Anandabazar Patrika which often gives me stuff good for belly laughs. Recently there was one strip in which the little grandchild says 'Grandma, don't you want to go to the zoo?' Pat comes the reply: 'No, I don't like the idea of buying tickets to visit my relatives...'

I've got a double!

Imitation, they say, is the sincerest form of flattery. So - since so many people, students and teachers alike - pass off my writing as their own, I guess I should feel flattered. I have lately been told by some pupils of mine (and I checked) that someone has flattered me even more by opening a fake account in my name on Facebook, using the same photo as I use on my real profile. 

'How did you know it wasn't really me?' I asked them. 'Well, Sir, you don't send or grant friend requests to schoolgirls, do you?' they said charmingly. Clever, I must say...

A better way to travel

Travelling around swathes of West Bengal and the metropolis of Kolkata this time round (it was full holiday season too), it struck me with renewed force how utterly alike people are becoming everywhere – in this country at least. And it wouldn’t have bothered me so much if they had become alike in good manners and civic sense. But it is most evident to anyone who cares to notice that all the resemblance applies to undesirable traits: the same spitting and littering right and left, the same unconcern for traffic and parking rules (and eagerness to quarrel if anyone points out they are breaking rules), the same loud and coarse jokes, the same hogging (and it is hogging I mean – I have nothing against decent eating!), the same jostling and queue-jumping, the same disdain for other people’s convenience, the same vulgar display of new-gotten wealth, the same obsession with shopping malls everywhere (why go to places which are of historical/cultural significance, then, if all you want to do is shop and eat?). I don’t go abroad, but I am alarmed to hear that the streets of Singapore and Dubai are crowded with Indians exactly of the sort I have described, and road signs in Switzerland are being written in Hindi, and there are streets in London and New York which sound and smell like any town in India, and imagining what kind of crowds I might have to rub shoulders with in such places, I say a quiet ‘God forbid’ inside my mind.

I used to love travelling, and have travelled far and wide for a long time. Of late, however, I notice I am becoming less inclined to travel for pleasure. Travel-related books and video CDs, meanwhile, have become widely and cheaply available – you can visit any place from Antarctica to Greece to the Ajanta caves to Shantiniketan from the comfort and safety of home, avoiding all the expense, worry, risk and annoyance of having to rub shoulders with vast hordes of unpleasant people. Even watching Durga puja or Christmas celebrations around the town is done best on TV. Maybe, in the years to come, that is the way I will travel for choice!

P.S., Jan. 10: I found this absolutely hilarious little essay on the net, and though the author is a foreigner, my sympathies lie entirely with him.