'cool' morons

Thanks, Subhadip.

Earth-shaking news

...Facebook is going to introduce a 'dislike' button.

The world will never be the same again!!!

English children being taught English

I just learnt that my younger sister - the history prof settled in the UK - takes free remedial classes for British high-school graduates who cannot write three lines of their mother tongue sensibly and grammatically. Reminded me of the fact that so many of my daughter's pen-pals from English-speaking countries have complimented her for writing far better English than they do! This is ulto-puraan with a vengeance. It all comes from forty years of 'experimental/progressive' ideas about how education should be 'comprehensive and enabling and enjoyable', combined with language acquired through social networking via computer. Even two decades ago they were saying in 'Yes Minister' that teenagers could be sent compulsorily into the military, so that they might receive a 'comprehensive education' that could make up for their 'comprehensive education'! Now the results are there for all to see.

The tragedy is that, as with so many other things, we have been blindly copying the west in this too, trying to make education continuously easier and more 'fun'. God help us. 

Indians sporting 'great' names

I had known for a long time that there was a political leader down south called Stalin. It appears that one Hitler Chowdhury is a rising politician in north Bengal now.

I wonder about the ancestors who chose the names...

Yes, men are frequently better

I had gone to a diagnostic centre this morning for a routine check-up. All three attendants and technicians were women in the 25-35 age bracket, and only the doctor was a (grandfatherly sort of) man. Something the girls said while doing me over made my day. They were murmuring among themselves as they worked, and one said, 'The last three were males, now it's going to be a female'. Another replied 'female gulo niyei joto jwalaton. dhong o korbe dosh goon beshi, bojhateo shomoy lagbe onek' (It's these females who bug me. They will fuss much more and take much longer to follow instructions: I have used her exact words in Bengali). The other two, far from protesting, merely sniggered.

These are real working women, you see, and they can call a spade a spade from long and irritating experience: no generalized anti-male nonsense with them. God bless, and may their tribe increase!

Without comment again

Thank you, Rudro.

'time-pass' and true love

Just watched a 2014 Walt Disney animation movie called Maleficent. Bad title. In any case, though it's not what I'd call a great movie, I liked it, not only because it is an interesting re-telling of the Sleeping Beauty legend, but because it underscores pretty strongly something I have believed and said for a long time: that 'romantic' love is for kids. They say in the movie that nothing like true love exists, and then show that it does, but it is far more likely to come from parents - or, even more likely, parent figures, biological parents often being no more than brutes and bores - than the boy or girl in class you had a crush on. Good to think that it was my daughter who told me to watch the movie.

There are, of course, lots of people who cannot recognize or value true love when it is served to them on a platter - but why waste time on them? They cannot do anything more worthwhile than 'time-pass'...

Facebook 'discovery'

A 'scientific study' recently conducted in the US has 'discovered' that people who are insecure in their relationships are more actively engaged on Facebook - frequently posting on walls, commenting, updating their status or 'liking' something - in hopes of getting attention. (The Hindu, Kolkata edition, Feb. 16, p.5)

They could have simply asked me.

Dawn of the golden age in Delhi!

Ha ha ha... a certain fruit-people party has swept the polls in our capital city. So, within six months, for sure, there will be free water round the clock from every tap, no government babu will think twice about clearing files in a twinkling without asking for a palm-greaser, no student will cheat in an examination, the streets and garbage vats will always be spanking clean, traffic accidents will dwindle to zero, young drunken studs will prostrate themselves at midnight before near-naked girls having fun and call them 'mother', every daddy will report for work at 8:50 a.m., every mummy will be lecturing her friends about the importance of honesty and integrity...

Our squeaky-clean, Gandhi-worshipping middle class, long oppressed by dirty politicians and sleazy clerks and wicked wheeler-dealers (who are not people like us, don't be silly), has at last found its true spokesman and saviour.

Let the fun begin.

P.S., Feb. 11: This morning, Anna Hazare has set the ball rolling by announcing 'Arvind knows how to run a government. He is a graduate of IIT Kharagpur' (The Hindu, Kolkata edition, Feb. 11, p. 9). 

Full circle

Two years ago, at admission time, when I am literally swamped with frantic parents and work like a machine, hardly looking up from my papers as I go through the formalities, one woman, who had sat down in front of me with her daughter beside her said, ‘Suvroda, whom are you calling apni (vous in French)? Look up – it’s me, X, from the 1992 batch!’ The wheel had turned, and an old girl had brought her daughter in her turn to me. Isn’t this what is called the fullness of time?

Indeed, so many old boys and girls, now raising families but living far away, tell me their one big regret is that their children are missing the Suvroda experience that they still savour nostalgically, over and over in their minds. And I often say it is my great sorrow that Durgapur has never provided jobs to reasonably educated and ambitious young people, so 95 per cent of them go away – else my classes would have been full of the children of older pupils by now.

This morning an old boy from the 1990 batch came over with wife in tow. She told me that she has heard so much about me and so often that she sometimes feels she has attended my classes in person, and both husband and wife were absolutely determined their son just had to have a taste of the same. I am not often at a loss for words, but the kind of pleasure that this sort of thing fills me with – especially when juxtaposed with all the inhumanity and injustice that I have also suffered at the hands of so many old boys and girls who once averred that I mattered to them – that it is beyond my power to express. Thank you, whoever up there decides that this man sometimes deserves a bit of happiness too, and a reaffirmation that he has not worked in vain all his life after all. 

Un-fair sex

'The idea that women are innately gentle is a fantasy, and a historically recent one. Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction, is depicted as wreathed in human skulls; the cruel entertainments of the Romans drew audiences as female as they were male; Boudicca led her British troops bloodily into battle.' - that's Naomi Wolf, the author, quoted in this month's Reader's Digest (Points to Ponder).

Many hundreds of my ex students, male and female, will hear an echo of me in this, of course: down to the very examples. I am, therefore, a misogynist, and Ms. Wolf a traitor to her sex.

Back!

This video recording showcasing the 'evolution' of Bollywood music caught my eye (and ear). Thanks, Pupu.