'I always do!'

It is said of Lord Chesterfield (of the letters fame) that he was ready with brilliant put-downs for people who were rash enough to try verbal jousts with him. Once he was walking along a narrow footpath, daintily avoiding the muddy street, when he saw an old adversary coming towards him in the opposite direction. He waited patiently for the other to make way for him, but the latter only snarled ‘I never accommodate a scoundrel’. With a bow and a smile, the peer replied ‘But I always do!’ and stepped into the puddle.

I have always had a weakness for smart ripostes, and this is one I cannot stop admiring. How polished, how spontaneous, and how utterly devastating can a man be! How much more civilized than what most of today’s youngsters would or could do, brought up with the manners of the mastodons they see on TV wrestling shows! And imagine how long the victim must have smarted with helpless rage under the rebuke…

Giggling girls

All teachers have idiosyncrasies which pupils love to note, mimic and remember long after all their teaching has been forgotten. I have my own share of them. Frowning when the girls, as is their wont, were giggling away to glory among themselves in class, I asked ‘Who laughs over nothing at all?’ and they replied on cue, without a shade of embarrassment, ‘Madmen and chimpanzees!’ as they had heard me observe a hundred times. I recalled a teacher in their school, long retired, who used to say ‘These girls can fall off their benches tittering if they see a leaf fall…’

And the thought struck me that when you see women – who were girls ten or twenty years ago – on the roads, they almost invariably wear grim and forbidding expressions, as if they are disgusted with the world, and cannot think of anything that could make them smile, leave alone laugh. The contrast is so sharp that I wonder many more people don’t notice and comment on it. Why does it happen? I have a little theory of my own. Since overdoing anything is the surest way to grow sick of it, maybe the grimness of adult life comes in reaction to all the hysterical, mindless giggling through teenage? Maybe we should laugh a little less when we  are young so that we can go on laughing now and then all through life?

beware the praise of the multitude

I remember an incident from the life of Sir Winston Churchill. He was leaving a packed hall after receiving thunderous applause for a rousing speech, and a hurrying reporter asked 'Sir, doesn't it make you feel good to see that so many people come to hear you and clap for you?' 'Of course it does', shot back the great man, 'but then I remind myself that the crowd would have been three times as large if I were going to be hanged'. That's mankind for you.

Whenever I sense the danger of becoming swollen-headed to see how many people are crowding into my house and how frantic they are to get their children admitted to my tuition and how lavish they are with their praise and their purses, I remember those immortal words from a master spirit, and I am sober again... I recommend Browning's poem The Patriot  very strongly to my readers. I can't do better myself than repose all my faith in the stirring last lines: 'tis God shall repay/ I'm safer so.

Admission-time bloopers

I am in the middle of the annual admission season, and every year all sorts of weird things happen during this time, some annoying, some surprising, some plain hilarious. I wish I could have recorded all the funny ones on video and uploaded them on YouTube: I'm sure it would have become a runaway hit. People would be amazed and abashed: 'Is that what we look and sound like in public?' Folks have started crying when I told them I couldn't take in any more kids; others have insisted that I should just take in their child and then shut the doors, and yet others gone away with the firm impression that I am a very arrogant person, refusing to understand why I keep the numbers within manageable limits...

In their distracted hurry, folks do and say strange things. One has carried away the notebook which I gave him to write down the details of his child - name, address, phone number and stuff - another has left his own slippers behind and walked away in another's. Some have, after going faithfully through the entire admission process and even paying the fees, asked 'Sir, what do you teach?' I could go on and on.

One of the common misunderstandings was repeated this week. Since people were flooding in to get admitted to the class 9 batches, I had assumed (through a foolish oversight: I should have known better) that this boy, too, had come for the same reason. After he had been admitted, I was beginning to tell his parents the rules (I don't even trust them to read and understand the contents of the printed notices I give them, so I repeat verbally), the mother suddenly blurted out 'But he's in class 10 now!' Neither parents nor son had bothered to tell me, maybe because I, being clairvoyant, was simply supposed to know by looking at his face. I immediately corrected the error, of course, but imagine how lost and confused the poor kid must have felt if he had turned up and found that he was attending a class full of his juniors!