'technical' stuff

…and talking about technology and ‘technical’ people, it always gets my goat to hear people restricting those terms, out of a combination of total ignorance and foolish vanity, to engineers. A carpenter, a potter, a chef or a shawl weaver is quite as much a technical person as any engineer is – the fact that he might not have gone to engineering school, and that his work may not in the current milieu command so good an income and ‘status’ as an engineer’s has everything to do with the way society chooses to value different things, and nothing at all to do with the level and intricacy of the skill involved (I have said before that Salman Khan does nothing at all, in the eyes of any sensible man, that makes him intrinsically worth 5000 times more than a computer code writer and 50,000 times a commando guarding our borders: it merely shows that we are an uncivilized society). Indeed, in more civilized countries even drivers and domestic help command such salaries that only millionaires can afford them, leave alone low-level techies.

Also, ‘technique’ is limited to machinery only by the very stupid. As any language teacher knows, prosody is a highly technical skill. There is very sophisticated technique involved in music and dance (leaving aside the chimp varieties, that is). To grasp the technique of painting or writing might take a lifetime: as the hugely successful novelist John le Carré famously said in his seventies, ‘I think I am beginning to understand how to write’ (Matter of fact: in all my thirty odd years of teaching, I have dealt with literally thousands who were good at math and physics, and I can count on my fingers how many of them could ever write even a decent letter).

So let my readers in future use these words more circumspectly.

Evaluation

The latest (January 17) issue of Desh magazine carries a short story by Seema Ray titled Mulyayan (evaluation). It hit me somewhere very deep, for reasons which will become apparent when you read the summary given below.

A professor of physics in contemporary Kolkata who was also a successful private tutor is now retired, a widower who lives alone, with only a devoted old maidservant for company. He is financially comfortable, but even his grown up children live far away. He rediscovers an old pupil, Arpan, who had never been a ‘bright student’ in the conventional sense – couldn’t ‘crack’ the joint entrance test to become a doctor or engineer (the teacher had once urged Arpan’s father not to ‘waste money’ on the boy, since he was patently not good enough) – and has now opened a mobile phone shop in the neighbourhood, but is doing well, albeit on a small scale. Arpan turns out to be very respectful and useful in many different little ways, so that mashtarmoshai gradually begins to look forward to his company and rely on his help, even to the extent of being driven by him to the wedding of another ex-student. Arpan resents but quietly bears with his teacher’s constant boasting about how many ‘successful’ students he has produced, in terms of how well they are doing in their respective careers, in India and abroad. It is only after Arpan saves his life following a cardiac arrest by rushing him to hospital and taking care of many other incidental needfuls, at some cost to himself and without having any obligation whatever to do so while most of his ‘brilliant’ old boys and girls cry off with the excuse of being busy and far away – even the daughter flies in well after the crisis is over – that he has a change of heart. As he tells Arpan, he’s going to start tutoring again, but this time he will take especial care of the weak and slow learners.

I am ashamed to say that my generation of teachers and parents and the one immediately preceding it – I know hundreds of them personally and closely – is directly responsible for creating a whole generation of ‘successful’ monsters, and like this mashtarmoshai we find out to our great chagrin how deep and deadly our failure is only when we are finally lonely and helpless. We needed to make far more Arpans than all those doctors and engineers without souls and consciences that we have managed to produce instead. I haven’t, of course, been able to change things much; I am very small fry – but as everybody who knows me and my life’s work will aver, it has been my personal jihad lifelong that I shall not be one more parent and teacher of that sort. Indeed, I have been hated, feared, abused, ridiculed and as far as possible isolated by folks of these two generations precisely because I have lived and preached against the established zeitgeist. I shall not have to learn this particular lesson so late in life. And maybe it is because I refuse to boast about anything concerning my old boys and girls except the sort of human beings they have become that so many stay away, knowing that they will never be able to get one good word about themselves from this Sir’s mouth, no matter what their JEE rank was, what position they work in and where, and what size their paycheques are… we need real men, said Vivekananda, everything else will take care of itself. No no, we decided instead, we only need legions of technicians. Let us see how much longer this country needs to realize who was the fool.

Wrapped up kids

It was a very chilly afternoon today, so a lot of my kids were handed out rugs and shawls to cuddle into while they worked at their assignments. They candidly and happily admitted that at no other tutor's could they expect to be pampered like this. I sigh, and wish that some of them would grow up to retain good memories, and do me the kindness of telling me about them. 

Since this is a whimsy blog, no harm in daydreaming. I often wish I'd get a comment every morning, from some old boy or girl telling me about something s/he remembers with warm affection and thankfulness. It would certainly make me a much happier man...

Parasites? Naw, mustn't call people names

It never ceases to amaze me how so many people in this world live - and comfortably too - but don't do any kind of work that is remotely valuable from society's point of view. It's not just criminals and bureaucrats in sinecures and schoolteachers and old folks on pensions... but even middle aged men like me living on the rents of houses that their dads built for them, and PhD and post-doc scholars pretending to add to the world's knowledge and actually doing much less work in a month than a coolie or rickshawpuller does in a day, or tycoons who have inherited their dads' business and play golf or party most of the time, leaving all the nitty-gritty of running the business to their paid engineer/MBA minions, and ministers without portfolios, and government clerks... the list could go on and on. I really wish some economists should write learned papers on people who ride piggy-back on society throughout their lives...