Suvro's world of wanton whimsy

Want to get rich quick? Avoid college

2012-02-16T15:27:00.002+05:30

The British businessman Simon Dolan has written in this month’s issue of Reader’s Digest that if you want to make good money, going for ‘higher education’ would probably be a costly waste of time. Doctors and lawyers need college degrees; those who want to make it big in business don’t – certainly not fancy management degrees which cost the earth and teach you little about how to make money in the real world. Dolan’s words should count: he’s worth a hundred million pounds himself, and has drawn attention to other hugely successful college dropouts like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and Richard Branson.

We in India could draw up a goodly list ourselves, I guess, with Dhirubhai Ambani right there at the top. So these are my views exactly. You want to make real money (and don’t tell me doctors and engineers make serious money!), trust on native intelligence, hard work, willingness to take big risks and learn from experience – and get into business as soon as you leave high school. If you are even moderately lucky, all your doctor and engineer friends will be envying you by the time you are 35, and maybe asking you to give them jobs.

If, on the other hand, you belong to the (vanishingly small-) tribe of people who value learning for its own sake, because next to doing good to your fellow man it is the grandest pursuit, don’t let thoughts of how much money you are going to make deter you from studying whatever you really love, whether it is history or physics or some fine art. Go for it.

And God have mercy on your doctor and engineer friends, who will miss out on both counts in the end, neither making much money nor finding out how much fun life can offer to the bold and fancy-free...

masterji, my kid's getting married, please come!

2012-02-08T22:12:00.000+05:30

Why do the parents of ex-students who have never once contacted me for years after they left my classes come over to invite me to their children's weddings, and actually expect me to honour the invitation? Can anybody tell me? I should so like to know.

Cat out of the bag

2012-01-30T09:28:00.008+05:30

The cartoon on the business page of my newspaper today shows some executives of the sales division of a large company saying to one another: 'We don't need smarter products, we just need dumber customers.'

So now it's official. That is how we keep our economies growing and civilization progressing. Gold plated WCs, personality enhancing pills, phones with 66,000 apps, banks which offer 'relationships', $10,000 pens which give you a special status in the eyes of other morons like you, coaching classes that will make Edisons, Curies and Fords out of every idiot kid, anything will do.

Just so long as the customer is dumb enough.

A future for 'stillness'?

2012-01-20T21:54:00.001+05:30

“Around the same time I noticed that those who part with $2,285 a night to stay in a cliff-top room at the Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur pay partly for the privilege of not having a TV in their rooms; the future of travel, I’m reliably told, lies in ‘black-hole resorts’ which charge high prices precisely because you can’t get online in their rooms…”

I read the above lines in a recent and very timely article written by the expatriate writer of Indian origin, Pico Iyer, and sent over to me by an ex-student yesterday. Some other people are apparently also looking at the future, and thinking along the same lines as I do: heartening news. Do let me know what the article meant to you.

'relationships'

2012-01-13T21:31:00.002+05:30

I found this wonderful reading because I have suffered at the hands of this strange breed of creatures (I won't call them humans-) who are titled 'relationship managers' in smart banks nowadays. I hope my readers will be forewarned. 'Relationships' mustn't be cheapened. The word is sacred...

Rising star

2012-01-06T22:15:00.000+05:30

There's a 13-year old moron who has scribbled on the cover of his homework book "I'm a hot guy with a cool attitude". From what I have found out about him, he's neither very intelligent nor very studious, and pathetically lacking in the GK and worldly wisdom that I should consider appropriate for his age. He thinks, for instance, that you need to be 'brilliant' to get through the West Bengal Joint Entrance examination, and that they teach engineering at the 'prestigious' Presidency College in Kolkata.

If I know something of the career trajectories of creatures like this, he will be working at Rs. 20-30,000 a month for TCS or Infosys in ten years' time, or if he's very lucky he'll have a slightly better job at a public sector enterprise such as NTPC or SAIL or SBI, and his mother would preen about how well-'established' her son is, and look for a bride whose dad would be willing to cough up at least Rs. 50 lakhs as dahej.

Any comments?

Looking back and ahead

2011-12-31T20:26:00.001+05:30

It's 20:25 hours of the last day of 2011. I have just returned after a holiday trip, about which I have written on the other blog. Mother Nature is up to her strange antics again: I left the town much colder than it is now, so that I went away wearing warm woolens, and now I am back and typing in shirtsleeves! In Kolkata people were actually sweating...the weather bureau has been talking about a low pressure belt which has built up over the Bay of Bengal, preventing the usual western cyclonic winds from doing their thing at this time of the year. I do hope that the cold will come back: I was hoping for at least a month more of really chilly weather.

2011 hasn't been a big deal for me, for good or for bad, but the world has been rocked by all sorts of revolutions and quasi-revolutions and pseudo-revolutions: Osama and Gaddafi killed, Mubarak deposed, Berlusconi removed, Putin and Manmohan Singh tottering, Cameron gibbering and Obama dithering, the likes of Anna Hazare sharing 15-minute-celebrity status with Lady Gaga and Steve Jobs, Dev Anand gone at last but Fidel Castro and Khushwant Singh have cocked a snook at the Great Reaper one more time, and some really far-out freaks almost eagerly looking forward to the end of it all sometime in late 2012. With all that in mind, I shall now go take a walk, then come back home to watch loonies hyperventilating as they gear up to usher in yet another new year. All the best, everybody.

It's December again

2011-12-16T11:58:00.001+05:30

Winter began last evening, with a sudden chill in the air. As usual, the weather had become comfortable since the start of November, but the sun was still unpleasantly warm in the afternoons, and I had been going around in shirtsleeves all through the month. Last night the kids began to shiver even in a classroom with all the doors and windows shut, and the woolens had to come out pretty abruptly. I hope, since the season has begun late, it will last at least until mid-February. It is for this very brief spell that I live every year. It coincides with the lightest workload for me, so I have a lot of time to soak in the delicious charm, God be thanked. Despite the cold water and the shivers if you go riding a two-wheeler at dawn or late in the evening, I will never see eye to eye with those who dislike winter in a country like ours. I only wish there was some rain to wash away all the dust in the air and on the leaves, and I am waiting for the sky to turn azure. I can never have enough of azure skies. And the mountains are calling me again...

Street maze

2011-12-07T12:43:00.001+05:30

The municipal authorities in this town are driven by strange fads. Once upon a time, while naming streets in my neighbourhood, they took it into their heads to immortalize the pantheon of Russian and American astronauts. So we got a rash of streets with utterly alien names like Grissom and Chaffe and Merbold and Svetlana and Tereshkova (some of those people might have had a little difficulty in identifying themselves from the spellings!). Then someone said "Let's do something different now - let's name all the next lot of streets according to the classical Indian raagas." At once there came up signs saying Bilawal and Iman Kalyan and Malkosh and Jayjayanti and Meghmallar Path...

Of late, they have gone back to naming new roads after famous people from recent Indian history, freedom fighters and writers prominently among them. Somehow, though, someone in authority wasn't confident that the names by themselves would ring any bells with the public - we being notorious for our indifference to matters historical - so they have put tags before the names: Biplabi (revolutionary-) Rashbehari Basu Sarani (street) and Sahityik Leela Mazumdar Sarani.

And they have been so prolific with the naming exercise that personnel from other government departments are having difficulty finding their way about. I don't know about postmen, but this morning I saw some policemen asking for directions...

Enlightened schoolboys, exasperated teachers

2011-11-23T20:44:00.000+05:30

One of my more educated young readers sent me this link today. It's about how ever brighter our kids are becoming at school, in this era of total freedom and Facebook. I found it a fine piece of black humour. Do let me know how it struck you.

Biggest fool of all

2011-11-16T10:41:00.002+05:30

The emperor Akbar once made a huge advance payment to a horse trader from distant Persia for bringing him a large number of the finest horses he could find. The man took the money and vanished, never to be heard of again. Sometime later, the badshah asked Birbal to draw up a list of the biggest fools in the kingdom. Birbal dutifully complied, but left the top two places unfilled. When Akbar asked him why, he first sought protection from royal ire, then said he would like to put the emperor's name at the number two position, because he trusted complete strangers from faraway places with large amounts of money. Though rattled, Akbar could not help laughing in agreement. Then he asked the obvious question. Birbal replied, 'Jahanpanah, I should like to put myself in the top slot, because I have chosen to serve someone like you!'

I sometimes draw up such a mental list myself, me holding the top slot for choosing to spend a lifetime trying to teach my jahanpanah, the public...

Too serious to be funny?

2011-11-09T11:56:00.000+05:30

It is said about Antony in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra that "he was disposed to mirth, but on the sudden/ A Roman thought had struck him". I too have just been struck by a 'Roman thought'. Perhaps it is because my image is too deeply set as a solemn sort of person that too few of my readers visit this blog, and even if they do, feel uneasy about commenting on it?

If that were true, it would be sad indeed. I daresay a lot of people cannot accept the whimsical side of my character, and either haven't noticed or haven't bothered to reflect upon what I intended when I put up that quote from Bertrand Russell as a fixture on the right hand sidebar...

to see oursels as ithers see us...

2011-11-01T09:30:00.000+05:30

A 15-year old drew the above cartoon at my behest in class. Do let me know how you liked it, everybody!

Those who are mystified by the title, look this up.

old 'naya' paise

2011-10-23T12:55:00.002+05:30

The above is a photograph of a one ‘naya paisa’ coin dating back almost to the year of my birth.

I recently came across a few old one- and two- and five- and ten-paise coins in my collection. When I was a child they were in wide circulation. Indeed, there were still lots of things that were available for five and ten paise: toffees and phuchka (three or four for ten paise), to name just two. With creeping but relentless inflation for more than half a century, such coins have long fallen out of use, of course (I read somewhere that a rupee today would be worth just four or five paise in 1950 in terms of purchasing power): you hardly see anything worth just a single rupee any more, and very soon, even one- and two rupee coins are going to become collectors’ items too, while one hundred rupee coins will come into vogue, as well as Rs.5- and 10,000 notes.

My grandfather used to tell me about new imported bicycles that cost Rs. 30, and my father bought a new motorbike in 1967 for about Rs. 1500. Sounds like a fairytale to the 50% of Indians who are below 25 years of age, I am sure. In 1977, the father of a friend of mine, a director of a large manufacturing firm, drew a salary of Rs. 8,000 a month, and he was considered rich.

Very soon our currency is going to go the way of the Italian lira and the Japanese yen, and we’d have millions of millionaires.

Those interested in coins might look up this website…

Jiyo, SRK!

2011-10-15T21:17:00.000+05:30

Heard on UTV Bindass channel at 9:13 p.m. on Saturday, October 15, in the course of Preity Zinta interviewing Shah Rukh Khan: 'King' Khan not only admits that he had played a monkey during Ramlila many years ago, but that 'main toh abhi bhi bandar ke jaise acting karta hoon' (I still act like a monkey).

Well, you've got to hand it to him for honesty!

iCon gone!

2011-10-07T12:17:00.005+05:30

Steve Jobs is dead. And this is the type who are mourning him most loudly.

Until the next poster boy comes along... that goes without saying. Then it would be 'Steve who?'

Who wants to bet they'd still be talking about him a year down the line? Five years? Ten?

Joy maa Durga

2011-10-02T12:24:00.001+05:30

Durga pujo has arrived again. An excuse for millions to gorge, splurge, dress up, preen, make noise, run around like beheaded hens, quarrel furiously with all and sundry in the course of having fun - and, most importantly, shirk work more or less for a whole month.

Yay.........!

Ugly Indian, part two

2011-09-28T09:34:00.000+05:30

Pot-bellied policemen in Delhi have been warned: get back in shape either by dancing bhangra or going to the gym, or face penalties. And in my town a lot of shopkeepers are telling me that they can't give out the wafer thin plastic 'carry bags' (what a silly name!) any more, now that the municipal authorities have seriously cracked down on this particular form of customer addiction...

At least some people in this country are bothering about some of the worst aspects of our culture. I'll keep my eyes on the news, because another aspect of the same culture is that most of our many enthusiasms are notoriously short-lived! Remember the 'anti-corruption' circus?

Fancy tag

2011-09-21T20:43:00.000+05:30

One expression that has come into widespread use over the last decade or a little more is ‘life partner’. The Oxford online dictionary, I found, defines it as ‘a person with whom one is in a long-term monogamous relationship’.

Funny, isn’t it, that the older term spouse has been quite forgotten? Also, as far as India is concerned, I cannot get rid of the suspicion that the term is a direct translation of the expression jeevan saathi, for the popularization of which all credit must go to cable TV and the matchmaking industry.

Funnier still is the fact that the term has caught on precisely in an age when no one can be sure any more whether a marriage will last out a single full year. Old-fashioned as I am, I should have thought no one who has not celebrated his or her silver jubilee, at least, with the same spouse can earn the right to call that spouse a ‘life-’ partner!

Ugly Indian

2011-09-15T20:31:00.001+05:30

As I wrote in the blogpost titled Atithi devo bhavo exactly a year ago, I was thrilled to bits to see Aamir Khan in a public awareness campaign on TV, exhorting fellow Indians to mind their public manners a little. I wonder how much it has affected our behaviour: haven't seen much signs of improvement myself. Today, an old boy called Sunup Varghese Kurien sent me a link to this website. I am very glad indeed to see that some people feel the way I do, and are doing things to change things for the better, even if it is ever so little. I have immediately asked Sunup to let me know if and how I can help. Meanwhile, some of my readers can write in, if only to tell me that they too feel like us, and very strongly, and would like to pitch in whichever way they can.

Purpose of life?

2011-09-11T21:22:00.000+05:30

Do go through this little essay, and let me know – did you find it gross, or sad, or funny, or just stupid? I couldn't make up my mind.

Just right

2011-09-06T11:58:00.000+05:30

I often read and remark on T-shirt legends. One moronic (or uber-wise: take your pick) tag read 'I was born intelligent; education ruined me'.

But I was pleased to see that somebody has got it just right on a pupil's T-shirt this time round: 'I was born intelligent, but twitter ruined me'.

Doctors' bane

2011-08-30T12:34:00.001+05:30

I had a very minor surgical operation on my leg under local anesthesia at a neighbourhood nursing home yesterday. I strode into the OT and chatted with the doctor while he operated (the nurse had solicitously offered to blindfold me - good heavens!), and all the while he assured me I could resume my daily routine directly the procedure was over, including normal diet, walking, using the scooter and so on. Well, I swung my legs off the table as soon as he gave the word, and was striding briskly out of the OT when he yelled after me, with obvious alarm in his voice, 'Slow down, slow down, don't hurry like that, you're acting as though nothing has happened...!' I obeyed, of course, but I was puzzled: hadn't he just been saying that I could start doing everything 'normally' as soon as he was done?

Reminded me of a more serious operation I had four years ago. On that occasion I was back on my feet within 24 hours, and insisted on leaving the hospital and getting back to work on day three, in spite of being advised 'complete rest' for at least seven days, and the doctor had grumbled about 'the patient (being) too impatient'...

Culture shocks preferable?

2011-08-21T12:31:00.000+05:30

Someone asked what 'culture shock' meant, and I illustrated with the example of the governor of a certain northeast Indian state, himself hailing from the northwest, a passionate dog lover, who presented the chief minister with a little poodle. Sometime later he asked the CM whether he was happy with the present, and that dignitary replied, 'Oh yes, certainly. It was delicious'. This, with a smacking of the lips...

When people are very different in their tastes and manners, such experiences of culture shock are bound to happen every now and then. In one country giving a girl a red rose is a compliment; elsewhere it's a deadly insult. But, I was wondering, isn't that better than creating a world which is so homogeneous that you won't know whether you are in Sao Paolo, New York, Mumbai or Shanghai? Twenty-odd years ago, I had a feeling while going round a certain Wal-Mart outlet in a small American town that if someone were suddenly knocked unconscious and whisked away to another Wal-Mart outlet a thousand miles away, s/he would never notice any difference. Now Indian cities are beginning to give me the same feeling.

We are the music makers...

2011-08-13T13:04:00.003+05:30

I read a remarkable line today in, of all places, a book of grammar. "Let a man be free to write the ballads, and I don't care who makes the laws". I wonder who said that. And even more so, whether it makes any kind of sense to my readers, though it took my breath away...

Looking for a new name

2011-08-05T13:01:00.001+05:30

Mamata Banerjee's new government says it wants the name of this state to be changed. I cannot help seeing their argument: 'West' Bengal is silly and out-of-date, since East Bengal has become Bangladesh long ago. They also say that since the name starts with W, our state figures at the bottom of all lists when the central government considers the needs of the various states, which puts us at a quite avoidable disadvantage.

So I fell to musing about what alternative tag we might put on. Bangla, Bongo, Bongo Pradesh, Bengal 2? Or, harking back to history, Bangal, maybe, or even Gour? Do my readers have some suggestions?

In the dark

2011-07-27T12:36:00.001+05:30

The mid-eighties – precisely the time when I was going to college and university – were the worst time to live in Calcutta, for eight-to ten hour power cuts daily were considered normal. It is a miracle I didn’t go blind, doing so much reading by candle light. They have left some permanent nightmares: one thing I most definitely would never consider romantic is a candle-light dinner…

Of late the monopolistic state-run power utility from which we are compelled to buy electricity here in Durgapur is apparently going through one of the worst phases in its chequered history: I hear it is on the brink of collapse. As a result, frequent power cuts, from minutes to hours long, have become a part of the daily routine, and no respite is likely very soon. My generator has become a heavy duty necessity, not only because my classes depend on the lights and fans going, but also because I cannot bear to have those nightmares come back.

Almost every evening my house is the only one which is a blaze of lights when the rest of the street is plunged in darkness. Most of my neighbours, well-off as they are, prefer to mope for hours together in the sweltering, stifling darkness. You can at most see a single oil lamp or ‘emergency’ lamp gleaming fitfully here and there. Strange are the ways of men.

I still remember

2011-07-18T12:47:00.001+05:30

Increasingly frequently, my pupils write "I still remember..." when they are narrating something that happened only a few months, or at most a year or two ago. When I use the same expression, I refer to things that happened decades ago.

In the same vein, the newspapers gush about married couples in filmdom, "still" in love three months after getting married...

Does this say something about changing memory maps humanity-wide, or what? What does "a long time ago" mean to most people these days?

Interesting map...

2011-07-08T14:06:00.000+05:30

If Uttar Pradesh were to declare independence, it would be the fifth most populous country in the world. Yet, when you look at the state's per capita income, it ranks nearly at the bottom of the pile on any kind of international list.

Here is the kind of comparisons that I like to draw in my classes to make my pupils aware of the reality of things. Play around with it and let me know about your reactions.

Brainwashing

2011-07-01T12:31:00.000+05:30

An elderly neighbour came over to ask me to fill in an application form to get an extra mobile connection with his landline. A simple chore, and of course I obliged.

What I reflected upon later was the incongruity between the fact that this gentleman, too scared to fill in an application form on his own, can give the most fiery and learned political lectures in public - I heard him going full blast during election time recently. What a miracle of indoctrination, to be sure. Like today's candidates for engineering entrance examinations, he can obviously perform very well without understanding, or bothering to understand, a word of what he is saying!

Hurrah for technology!

2011-06-22T21:17:00.000+05:30

This is something, alas, which only my Bengali readers can really enjoy:

I recently read the Google people boasting in their blog that they have been upgrading their super-dooper technology to allow facilities for translation, and Bengali was one of the latest languages which they had taken on board. Seeing that they had sent out an open invitation to try it out, I did, to amuse myself - and I was not disappointed. On typing in 'You are a fool', they instantly translated it into aapni akta gordobh, and when I tried to exercise their 'brains' a little harder by letting them try 'To be, or not to be, that is the question', the gem they served up was theke, hobe ba na hobe, je proshno.

Don't believe me? Try it out yourself at translate.google.com

Thus spake Baba Ranchhordas...

2011-06-14T12:26:00.001+05:30

Indians hate corruption.

Especially when they are neither doing it themselves nor benefiting from it.

And even more than corruption, they hate fellow Indians who point out the various forms of corruption they are indulging in.

Penny pinchers

2011-06-08T11:58:00.000+05:30

My daughter told me this one, and I couldn't resist the temptation to put it up:

What is the definition of a miser? ... Someone who, when his house is on fire, gives a missed call to the fire brigade.

Virtual reality

2011-06-04T11:19:00.000+05:30

I was travelling by bus along National Highway 2, and the young man beside me, after fiddling some time with his ‘smart’ phone, drew out a Lenovo notebook computer from his bag and started playing a game of cricket. I am sure all my computer-geek old boys and friends would assure me that such a game is a marvel of computer programming, but after watching closely for about fifteen minutes, I discovered just what I had expected: the ‘game’, such as it were, could be only called either insipid or asinine by anyone with a halfway developed mind. If I cannot play cricket (of the real variety), I’d much rather listen to music, read a book, or simply go to sleep (or meditate: my mind is rich enough to provide me with a whole treasury of games for which one needs no machine).

In any case, when the young man looked up for a bit, I asked him why he was so absorbed in the game, and he claimed to be a great fan of cricket. I quizzed him about legendary greats like Ranjit Singh-ji and W.G. Grace, and about the likes of Neville Cardus, and predictably enough, he had never heard of them. Nor indeed did he seem to know much about great Indian cricketers who had played more than twenty five years ago. Biggest surprise of all: he had never himself played the game – the real game – in his life.

I wonder whether the thought that flashed across my mind was, or was not, really incongruous – I was reminded of the great animal expert, conservationist and maverick zoo keeper Gerald Durrell once remarking that the world has grown full of young people who believe that milk grows in plastic bottles on the front doorstep every morning…

Kid stuff?

2011-05-27T20:28:00.000+05:30

I was probably in college when I first became aware that the usually whimsical, often hilarious and apparently innocuous nursery rhymes that all children (at least in educated families) are fed with actually have convoluted, unexpected and frequently very dark histories – certainly not what in this hyper-sensitive, politically correct age we would regard as appropriate stuff for children. What surprises await the person who first explores the stories behind Jack and Jill, Humpty Dumpty, Mary Mary, quite contrary and Ring a ring o’ roses! For starters, the curious might look up this website.

Strange, indeed, that children absorb the fun without having their psyches permanently warped by such red-hot material (and lucky for literature that most mothers never find out!). Obviously kids are made of much sterner stuff than we normally credit them with…

Hello, Sir?

2011-05-24T12:12:00.001+05:30

It happens time and time again that old boys (or girls) ring up, hear my daughter's (or wife's) voice, and say 'Hello Sir, this is X here...'.

And many of these people are sharp and bright young folk, going by their school reports. It makes me wonder about what the IQ levels and reflex speeds of their progeny are likely to be...

Overheard

2011-05-16T08:41:00.002+05:30

...now that the dadus have retired, and we have a dada as well as a didi to look up to, no one can stop Bengal from forging full-steam ahead!

Geronimo!

2011-05-06T09:58:00.001+05:30

The more alert and aware people of diverse social groups become of their rights, privileges and dignity, the more difficult it becomes to stay politically correct all the time. It has become well-nigh impossible to make public jokes about racial and gender stereotypes. You have to call the head of a university department a ‘chair’ these days, because both chairman and chairwoman are insulting to one or other group of sensitive people, and chairperson never really caught on. Now I hear that some native American Indians are up in arms demanding an apology from

government authorities for using ‘Geronimo’ as a codename for Osama bin Laden during the military operation that killed the latter recently (see, for instance, this link). The way things are going, commanders planning super-secret military operations are going to spend more time worrying about appropriate codenames than about the details of the operations!

"Kalyug"!

2011-04-26T13:50:00.002+05:30

I had a bit of a fight at a bank this morning.

I won't go into the gory details, but briefly it was as follows (you must remember that as a rule I stand tamely in queues and never open my mouth more than I have to). They took a cash deposit at one counter and sent me off to another to update the passbook (which they usually don't do). There I was told to go to yet another counter, because I didn't have one of the new computer-compatible passbooks (they talked as if it was my fault they had not given me such a passbook earlier). The third man first sent me back to the second, then told me to wait, then got me one of the new passbooks which was printed so faintly that nobody could read the stuff, and I found to my horror that they had got some of the details wrong. When I pointed this out, they told me to come back later - in the afternoon or next morning. At this point I began to grow hot under the collar, and demanded that they update the old book at least, and then we could see about coming back later for the new one. When they began to raise more objections, I became loud and scathing. Then the (third-) man complained that he was being 'harassed' because this was kalyug. At which point I really blew my top, agreeing with him that it was kalyug indeed, because in satyayug the bank would have happily made mistakes and the customers would have happily suffered for it.

The yelling worked, and someone else ran up to do the needful. But I came away with a bad taste in the mouth. I also wondered how much I would enjoy this thirty years later, when I am a doddering old man, and the people manning the counter are my children's age...

This blog and Anna Hazare

2011-04-18T11:53:00.001+05:30

It took fifteen months for the visit counter to reach the 10,000 mark, and less than a year for it to jump to 20,000. A heartening thing to see, because it means I have not been labouring entirely in vain (as I have said before, it's hard work to keep two blogs running simultaneously, especially if one of them is dedicated to whimsy and plain fun. Somebody warned that I may not be able to keep at it for long, but lo! it's been more than two years without a break already. But it helps to see an ever-increasing visit count). I shall look forward to seeing how quickly the follower count goes up to 100 and the 30,000-visits milestone is passed.

I shall reiterate that it would be nice to have more participation from my readers - by way of comments and contributions, besides visiting regularly and enlisting as followers.

One more thing I must note in passing is that maintaining this blog has brought home to me a) how many people are utterly humourless, and b) how widely tastes in humour differ.

And one last thing before I go: I shall insist till my dying day that not only is a sense of humour an essential requisite for civilization, but especially an ability to laugh at oneself - one's own sense of self-importance as balanced against the reality that one doesn't really matter in the vast cosmic scheme of things, even if one is a President or a tycoon or a pop icon. I wish more and more Indians, the man on the street as much as the movers and shakers, would learn to cultivate that virtue, which is the essence of true humility (as opposed to the ingrained habit of cringing before powerful people in the hope of currying favour and avoiding trouble). So here's my parting shot for now: I know, unlike Anna Hazare, that I am too ignorant and too insignificant a man to believe that I am always so right and good that I can and should impose my inflexible will upon this vast country without a qualm. I would run if anyone invited me to become the First Jan Lok Pal. Let me try to become a better man first. There's no shortage of people who are quite sure about their perfect moral virtue and absolute wisdom...

Weird expectations

2011-04-12T21:28:00.001+05:30

If people will keep talking arrant and malicious nonsense about me behind my back, I think I am within my rights to keep laughing at them here. If that makes some of my pupils angry because they know I am ridiculing their parents, I am afraid that can't be helped: they should have found themselves nicer parents.

One of the latest canards I have heard about myself doing the rounds of this one-horse town of late is that I supposedly keep sitting on my chair all the time (I don't, actually, as all my pupils blessed with eyes should know, but that is beside the point here), whereas such and such tutor puts in so much more effort, staying on his feet all the time he teaches - why can't I try to live up to his example?

I am reminded of something a friend of mine, a doctor, told me from his experience long ago: a woman had a septic ulcer on the left elbow, and as the doctor was about to give her an antibiotic injection she shrugged her arm away and walked out of the dispensary muttering angrily - 'He tries to give me an injection in the right hand when he can see the boil is on the left, and he calls himself a doctor!'

Start dancing!

2011-04-01T10:06:00.001+05:30

Wow: Google’s come up with a technological ‘paradigm-shift’ once again. Throw out your mouse and keyboard – outdated junk – and, after installing gmail motion and checking that your webcam is in position and switched on, just start throwing your arms and legs about in front of your PC, laptop, mobile or iPad. The computer will translate your gestures into commands for email – compose, reply, send, search, go to inbox, etc etc. (you can download their printable guide to check out how wide and varied a choice of gestures is already available).

Soon, thanks to Google’s now-hypnotic clout on what used to be called human minds, we shall see people monkey-dancing before their computers. And more and more, offices are going to resemble bharatnatyam or tai-chi classes. Vive la technologie!

One nasty thought: how am I going to actually compose anything like a long letter or one of these blogposts this way? And what about people with breathing problems and creaking joints?

P.S.: I won't be surprised if this is Google's idea of an April Fool joke. It's happened before. Last year they changed the company's name for a day...

Kya mazaak hai!

2011-03-26T13:14:00.001+05:30

Renowned scientist and the prime minister’s chief scientific advisor CNR Rao has lamented that today’s children are being forced to lose all interest in real education and becoming robots or circus-animals programmed to take examinations endlessly as a substitute for learning: see this news story.

As a telling sign of the times, the same paper carried, just below the above article, a half-page advertisement of one of those now-innumerable tutorials promising to fulfil every child’s ‘dream’ of becoming either a doctor or an engineer for a fat fee…

One word can make a world of difference

2011-03-21T10:56:00.000+05:30

Sayan Datta's recent confession in a comment on my other blog that he now understands much better how much of a difference single words (and even inflexions on words) can make reminded me of a joke that I read in a book of humour:

The ship had docked at port, and on the first night spent on land after a long time, the first officer became so disgracefully drunk that he could not report for duty for the whole of the next day. The stern captain entered the following comment in the ship's log - 'Unfortunately the first mate was drunk all day'. On hearing about it, the said officer was aghast, and he pleaded strenuously with the captain to strike that comment off the record, since otherwise it could permanently mar his career. But the captain was unbending, insisting that it was a serious infringement of service rules, and besides, he had written nothing but the literal truth. Realising that it was a lost cause, the first officer went away to take revenge by writing his own entry in the log - 'Fortunately, the captain was sober all day.'

Only a game

2011-03-11T20:42:00.000+05:30

My daughter found this game by chance on the net. I was aghast. Do take a tour. It is actually teaching children (most players, I guess, would be children and teenagers) that to run a big business organization profitably, just about everything goes. Politicians, workers, environmentalists, scientists, health regulators, consumers – they are all either interfering busybodies meant to be bought off with bribes, or slaves to be worked to the bone for as little as possible, or suckers to be parted from their money in the most ‘efficient’ (read profitable-) way possible: all other considerations, especially ethical ones, be damned.

I used to think that you had to get into business school, at least, to be drilled in this most pernicious doctrine, but now it seems that you cannot be too young!

desi diners

2011-03-04T22:07:00.000+05:30

I happened to lunch at one of the new 'Food courts' run by Haldiram's in Kolkata the other day, and I am glad to report that they are doing good business. It seems it's childishly easy to give the likes of Macdonald's and KFC a run for their money by just cloning them, even with an all-vegetarian menu. And given the clean, quiet ambience and airconditioning, the Rs. 75 you have to shell out for a standard (and adequately filling-) thaali is reasonable pricing indeed. May the tribe prosper.

thumbs down again

2011-02-26T19:14:00.001+05:30

I must say I am disappointed that the last post fetched not one comment in a whole week.

That's one reason I don't write about books and movies too often - I have found out the hard way that either people are uninterested, or they have nothing to say.

And this made me thank my lucky stars once again that I don't have to depend on writing for a living: even writing light-hearted stuff. The very thought makes my flesh creep... in this country, it's much safer to lance ulcers or patch up boilers in a power plant, or even count notes in a bank. You might go back to the post titled "Ten thousand visits" which I wrote back in May 2010.

Fun movie

2011-02-19T10:00:00.003+05:30

Just watched a newly released offbeat satirical-comedy movie titled Phas gaya re Obama. The story-line can be found here. NRI businessman loses everything in the 2008 American economic meltdown, desperate to raise money quickly, comes home to sell off his ancestral haveli, has qualms of conscience about throwing out a lot of dependants, then kidnapped by a series of increasingly more menacing roughnecks who are all slavering over the imagined ransom he would fetch – ending up with a powerful state minister who is aspiring to be CM – and using his wits to get out of their clutches, while simultaneously getting them to pay over all the money he needs to save his house back in New Jersey, then taking the first flight back, presumably forever.

It’s no great shakes, but I liked the movie for a number of reasons. It does not depend on a star cast and big-yawn ‘item numbers’, it avoids sleaze almost entirely, it ruthlessly mocks the cow belt political class as well as the now-ancient Indian obsession with Umrica and big bucks (one young man has an epiphanic moment near the end), as well as the way we (including our so-called English teachers!) are mangling the English language beyond recognition in our mad bid to get smart, it uses wit of fairly good quality (by which I mean something better than slapstick) effectively, it portrays Neha Dhupia as someone who can sometimes rise to things better than being a modeling bimbo (here, a female Gabbar Singh), it manages to convey danger and fear without resorting to crude and bloody violence on-screen, it depicts low-level goons as rather sympathetic, or at least pitiable creatures (everybody is down at heel thanks to the recession, even kidnappers!), and it lets Rajat Kapoor play the finest role I’ve seen him in since Bheja Fry: a basically good man though he is a businessman, who, floundering in an alien and hostile environment, is nevertheless ready to fight tooth and nail with everything he’s got to save himself and his family when put into a nearly hopeless situation, but who never gets greedy, never seeks vengeance, and even discovers imaandaari among his tormentors, and pays back in the same coin. Also, the use of Barack Obama’s now-famous ‘Yes, we can’ speech as the background leitmotif is both clever and entertaining. No matter what the box-office figures might tell you, it’s worth watching.

Without comment

2011-02-14T10:08:00.001+05:30

This is The Telegraph's Valentine's Day special for Durgapur.

What do my readers feel about it?

yeesh!

2011-02-12T21:24:00.001+05:30

I just heard that a very 'successful' and 'modern-minded' couple - husband a CA/MBA and senior executive in a large MNC, wife an engineer - arranged for a lavish Saraswati puja at home because their child, apparently, has been running from pillar to post to get a scholarship to some undergraduate course in the USA but has been unsuccessful so far.

Just wanted my readers to know.

Humbugs

2011-02-05T10:37:00.000+05:30

Wielding his pen dipped in vitriol and still going strong at 96, Khushwant Singh in today's newspaper remarks on the strange contradiction of a nation that boasts of Gandhi as its greatest icon and also takes great pride in showing off its military muscle in public pageants (as on Republic Day in New Delhi). He sums up by saying that 'India is not the land of Gandhi, it is the land of humbuggery'.

Which reminded me of a schoolboy who recently told me his teachers had taken away the offer to let him speak before the assembly because he had demurred at needlessly buttering up an ex-principal by calling him a 'great' man ( though it is common knowledge that the teachers and the entire student body almost without exception privately despise the man in question, and in any case he has not left any significant achievement behind).

Not only are we humbugs, we elders as teachers and parents insist that the children in our charge must grow into humbugs too! Otherwise, our 'glorious civilization' will be in danger...

What young India can teach us

2011-01-24T11:44:00.000+05:30

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

2011-01-14T10:42:00.000+05:30

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!

2011-01-08T19:55:00.001+05:30

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

2011-01-01T14:14:00.003+05:30

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.

OOPS!

2010-12-24T06:47:00.001+05:30

Talk about whimsicality!

While fiddling around with the comments list on my blogger control panel I accidentally deleted all the more recent comments there.

I am, of course, deeply dismayed. My deepest apologies to all who had written those comments. Please don't stop writing, and I promise not to be so silly ever again...

Taking a break

2010-12-22T21:00:00.003+05:30

I have written sixty times on this blog this year. Over that same time, the followership has risen a bit, and so has the number of visits. The figures are not bad, but I would have been happy to have more followers, more visits and more comments. I have this suspicion that not enough of the readers of my other blog visit this one frequently. I do, do hope that they would give it a try. As I have said before, it offers a different flavour, and you would get a more well-rounded mental picture of me if you read both. I have said that this is not merely a fun blog, but one dedicated to whimsy. That is a much broader, deeper idea: so I write about everything from noses to mobile mania to mangled English and pretty doctors and what have you, and I expect my readers not only to smile with me but muse along, too, and perchance to jerk awake and revise some of their long-fixed opinions now and then…

Anyway, I shall take a break for a while. Sixty times a year is quite a bit; many blog-writers I know cannot write more than two or three times, unless they are writing fatuous nonsense three times every day. Take time to explore older posts on this blog, and comment on some of them, as Rashmi has done recently. Good critical commentary and suggestions will of course be welcome, too. Some of you might discover, if you give it time, that it grows on you, even if I say it myself. Meanwhile, Merry Christmas.

No 'chat-ting'!

2010-12-09T11:27:00.001+05:30

My older ex-students often tell me they cannot access me by chat on gmail, or even look up my blogs, because, though they are stuck before computers all day long, most colleges and offices - out of sheer exasperation with how much employees tend to waste company time on the net if left to their own devices, I'm sure - have blocked out all sorts of facilities, including blogs and sites like Facebook and orkut.

This morning one old boy told me something that really takes the cake. Apparently the computers in his workplace are loaded with some sort of filtering program that blocks out anything that has the word (or wordlet) '-chat' in it. As a result, he said, he cannot even look me up by name on Google Search (I being a Chatterjee)! The same goes for Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay...

A great speech mangled

2010-12-02T09:27:00.003+05:30

In a cartoon titled 'Gaurav' in The Telegraph today, the smart young teenage hero is thrilled to see that The History Channel on TV has dubbed Dr. Martin Luther King jr's famous speech, not into Hindi but Indian English, so that the great man seems to be saying "I'm having a dream that one of the days, my baba-logs, you know, will not be judged by skin and all, yeah? But by their good character only..."

For the benefit of the mystified, the relevant line in the original speech was I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

The Devil's Dictionary

2010-11-24T21:07:00.000+05:30

I first came across Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's dictionary when I was in high school, and it has never ceased to enthrall with its wicked wit. Here, for instance, are three of Bierce's idiosyncratic definitions:

Beggar: One who has relied on the assistance of friends.

Cannon: An instrument used for the rectification of national boundaries.

Belladonna: In Italian, a beautiful lady; in English, a deadly poison. A striking example of the essential similarity of the two languages.

And if you think that Bierce was petty enough to be a misogynist, here's another:

Brute: see Husband.

Inglis as she is spoked...

2010-11-17T13:05:00.012+05:30

I was recently reading the blog of a (now very common type of) smart aleck who was lecturing the world about how English is such a wonderfully fluid and flexible language, how its real charm lies in the way users keep on modifying it 'creatively', and how those who insist on some standards are pitiable stick in the muds at best, and no better than racists or sexists at worst.

Now I have written about this tendency before – this inability to believe that there can be standards higher than one’s own, this innate inability to respect people who are better than oneself (which might persuade one to try and become slowly better at doing things; that’s the only way people can improve – whether it is at math or music or cooking or anything else), this pride in semi-literacy and justifying one’s incompetence at expressing oneself well with the argument that anything goes, after all, as long as one can somehow get one’s thoughts across (you can check previous posts here, such as Indlish, Job application goof-ups and many more). What does it matter if I write 'grass eats cow' instead of 'a cow eats grass', really (what does it matter if instead of eating off a clean plate I use one on which the cat has just relieved itself)?

The effect of this pernicious (and increasingly popular, naturally, in an age when anything that requires talent, mental discipline and sustained effort is anathema, an age when Mozart and Lady Gaga can be called musicians in the same breath) doctrine is that people expect to get away with anything at all. A student writing ‘Portia had a wonderful father who wanted to marry her even after his death’ expects so, the teacher who says ‘I have two daughters and both are girls’ does so, the restaurant manager who writes a sign saying ‘The water in this restaurant has been personally passed by the manager’ does so, the barman who warns in a notice that ‘Ladies are advised not to have children in the bar’ does so, the leave applicant at the office who writes ‘My wife is ill and I am the only husband at home’ does so, the tourist who exults over how cheap the ‘fooding’ is in the hotel he has found does so, the idiot who writes Jibananda Das when he means Jibanananda Das on his blog and does not notice the mistake in a whole year does so…I remember William Safire the famous American newspaper columnist sighing that there was a time when Americans could speak instead of snorting and grunting like cave-men and worse. And it is that breed of American (I know many who are better) who are spreading the virus of linguistic philistinism worldwide, among all those who identify the worst of everything American with ‘smartness’ and modernity (it's cool to wear shorts of the kind that keep half your backside open to public view...)

The fact that most ‘educated’ people these days are illiterate except when they are dealing with numbers, that most PhDs and MBAs would swoon if I gave them a comprehension exercise from P.G. Wodehouse, does not automatically give them a right to impose their illiteracy upon those who know better. And to those who claim that ‘everybody’ is doing it, my retort is that you don’t know everybody; try consorting with your betters rather than your peers. Finally, I am not stuck in the days of Shakespeare or John Ruskin: even among the best and most successful contemporary writers, grammar, spelling, syntax, idiom and careful choice of words are just as sacrosanct as ever – as you could check out with J.K. Rowling, Jeffrey Archer, Stephen King, John le Carre, John Grisham, or even Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Seth and Jhumpa Lahiri.

But that is, of course, only if you can do something as hard and ‘boring’ as reading books… I forget myself! Of course most educated people deal only with the likes of Chinamen selling umbrellas and electronic toys, and therefore need no more English than is required to compose blurbs on packaging cartons (ever read that kind of 'English'?)

And by the way, I direct the same sneer at all those Bengalis who cannot speak or write three successive whole sentences in chaste Bangla without lapsing into English or Hindi slang. In West Bengal, at least, that accounts for 998 ‘educated’ folks out of every thousand now. They say 'ami car-ta niye season flower shopping korte jachchhi', and are very proud of it. Anyways, they're absolutely awsum, lol! (OMG, wasn't that the coolest line I writed here, dude?)

Did I tell you about my new gizmo/junket?

2010-11-08T10:57:00.000+05:30

My good young friend Sumitha had once written to me via email about why she hates so-called social networking sites: most people, she said, merely put up all kinds of pictures and drop all kinds of names just to draw attention desperately to themselves: look, I have been there, done that, I hobnob with so many big noises, and so forth. It disgusts me too, and I have seen the same tendency on people’s blogs, and even in emails they send to me: they are not in the least interested in other people, they only want to talk about themselves and their piddling ‘achievements’ and acquisitions. We were brought up in an ambience where we were told only crass and ‘uneducated’ people do that sort of thing: now it’s spread like an epidemic. It isn’t civilized to talk about such things; it’s best not to mention them at all unless absolutely necessary in the context. It only tells others you suffer from great insecurity combined with a bloated ego, and if you are ‘admired’ for that, it’s only by people who are just as crass and silly as you are (Ooh, she’s got a chauffeur/ a new laptop/ a new hairdo!).

Of course there are people about whose travels and houses and cars and wines I love to hear – but that’s not only because they are close friends but I know that showing off is the last thing on their minds; all they want is to share with me the kind of stories I like to hear. Alas, their numbers are pitifully small.

And then there are people who are so dull that it never occurs to them that their vaunting may sound offensive and stupid: when it is pointed out to them, they privately take offence, and sometimes get back to you with lame apologies – ‘That’s not what I meant…’ Why on earth don’t people reflect a bit about how others might react to what they say before saying it?

Fast life

2010-11-03T11:13:00.001+05:30

I normally pay all my bills within a few days of receiving them, but last month, through an oversight, the phone bill was forgotten till almost the last moment. The 29th of the month is apparently the last date for paying this sort of bill without a fine. The payment office is virtually next door, so I dropped in twice, on the mornings of both the 28th and 29th, and came away scared by the long queues - it would have entailed standing for an hour at least.

This morning I went again, and there was nobody else, so it took me less than a minute to get the job done. The price - a fine of ten rupees.

There are so many hundreds of people around who can both afford to and are quite comfortable with standing in long queues for hours on end so that they might not have to pay ten rupees extra. These people are all more than well-off, it goes without saying - the ruling party calls this a rich man's neighbourhood! - and they all sing in chorus at the appropriate places about how terribly busy they are, what a fast life this has become...

Creativity zindabad!

2010-10-26T21:28:00.000+05:30

In a very recent ad, a bank promises to come to your house in case you have such a bad stomach upset that you can hardly leave the loo for more than a few minutes at a time (I suppose it goes without saying that if you are in really bad shape, the man from the bank wouldn't mind dealing with you right there in the loo).

I'm sure that when young people these days talk about advertising being a creative art form, this is the sort of thing they have in mind...

(If you are interested, you can see that particular ad any weeknight on Kaun Banega Crorepati, courtesy Sony Channel).

Smart kids

2010-10-23T12:03:00.001+05:30

I asked a fourteen-year old in class whether he had done his homework, and if not, why not. His reply, almost in one breath, was 'I remembered, Sir... I forgot, Sir!'

Talk about coherence and articulateness.

Holding my breath

2010-10-19T12:17:00.003+05:30

There's hardly 360 days left for Durga pujo. Yippee...!

The things we value

2010-10-10T12:23:00.001+05:30

I borrowed a hammer from a very elderly neighbour, and he was almost frantic that I might forget to return it before going away on a three-day trip (rest assured he never uses the hammer himself; he calls in a mechanic, who always comes with the full bag of tools).

I had also borrowed a certain book from him that I had seen on his shelf, and returned it recently - almost a whole year after. Believe it or not, he had entirely forgotten about it.

Going, going, gone

2010-10-04T11:21:00.001+05:30

For the last two months and more, the local media, both print and electronic, have been screaming their heads off telling us night and day just how many days are left for the pujo bedlam to begin.

It has just occurred to me that the long wait is almost over. In a fortnight from today, there will be blessed relief again...

Agony uncle

2010-09-27T10:18:00.000+05:30

I quote from the regular pullout section titled aami in Bartaman newspaper, Saturday 25^th September 2010 edition, p.2. It is the veteran journalist-turned personal counsellor Ranjan Bandopadhyay giving advice to a young married woman.

The lady writes (and I translate): My husband is a glutton. When I went around with him in the days before our marriage, he came across as smart and stylish, and a good conversationalist too. Within a few months of marriage, I discovered that the real person is very different. He has rustic habits of eating and sleeping. He snores, and eats like anything. He is not even clean in his person. Sad to say, my mother-in-law supports him in all his bad habits. Believe it or not, such a crude man still manages to earn a large pay-packet. That’s all he understands, in fact: money. But money alone cannot make for happiness, can it? How can I adjust with a man like that all my life?

The counsellor replies: Had you lived together before marriage, you would have at least found out in time that he snores in his sleep. I think you are rather foolish. That same uncouth person seemed smart, stylish and good to talk to before marriage? And now he has turned out to be dirty, unmannerly and crude? Your mind and eye are both given to illusion: what looks like a butterfly to you from afar becomes a bat when it comes close. Anyway, your husband has one positive quality at least – he makes good money. I don’t think there’s a dearth of love (prem) in this world; money can buy it for you. Use your husband’s money cleverly; your way is clear. You might soon emerge as a high-flying socialite. Poets, philosophers and artists will queue up at your door as friends, lovers and sycophants to drive away your loneliness.’

'I'm good'?

2010-09-20T21:18:00.001+05:30

As is my wont, I have been wondering about which way the English language is going. Just about every moron thinks 'anyways' is a vast improvement on 'anyway', and the moment they go to college they are taught that in order to sound cool and with it you have to write 'I'll revert to you' instead of 'I'll reply to you', or even 'I'll get back to you' (if only they knew what a dictionary was, and could summon up the energy to check what 'revert' really means!). And that it's OK and cool to sign off with just 'Best' (best what? Will their fingers drop off if they write 'With best wishes'? ... mine haven't yet).

Recently I felt like throwing up when someone said in an email 'I hope you're doing good'. For the love of God, doing good is supposed to mean doing something of some use to others, as in giving alms; if I am feeling fine, I ought to say 'I'm fine/doing well' or 'I'm alright' or 'I'm okay', even, and only an arrogant boor will declare to the world 'I'm good'!

'aajkaal competition-er joog'...

2010-09-12T17:13:00.000+05:30

I keep hearing parents and children mourning/gushing about all the 'competition' around us these days, in every sphere of life. I guess they are right: except in the sphere of serious learning, there seems to be competition everywhere - to shop more, to flaunt more, to shout more, to abuse more, to pollute more, and what have you. On a TV channel called Sangeet Bangla today, they have just announced a competition about who can narrate the best story about prem kora (having a love affair, but the flavour of the Bangla cannot be quite captured in English) this pujo season. God bless them all!

Atithi devo bhavo!

2010-09-08T21:52:00.001+05:30

I am thrilled to bits by the latest public interest advertisement by Aamir Khan on TV, where he reminds us that though we are exulting over how quickly we are becoming a major player as a nation on the world's stage, we had better change some of our not-so-edifying habits fast if we want to improve our global image, culturally speaking: habits like spitting right and left in public, littering everywhere, and training our little boys to do their soo-soo just about wherever their mummies please. A short while ago, Aamir was exhorting us not to be rude to foreign tourists, or try compulsively to cheat them at every turn. Tellingly, these ads underscore the fact that most certainly it is not just poor and illiterate Indians who indulge in such uncouth and unsocial behaviour.

Kudos to Aamir. I hope many more people will listen to him than to me. I hate to live with the knowledge that I live in a country with some of the worst public manners in the world, despite pretending that most of us are bhadralok...

New age teachers

2010-09-03T19:04:00.002+05:30

In our day, teachers used to tell us to study hard all through the term, so that we could ease up on the day before the examinations were due to begin: that, they said, was the key to doing well. Not that all of us (or even most of us) listened, but that is how we were advised.

Times have changed, and so have teachers, except, I suppose, for a few stick-in-the-muds like me. Recently the Principal of a leading school advised the school assembly to start studying as 'the exams were approaching'. The said exams were supposed to begin the next day.

Just one day's harvest

2010-08-27T11:22:00.002+05:30

Glancing through just two newspapers this morning, I found

· Pantene advertising a ‘mystery’ shampoo,

· Rock band U2 has been fined by civic authorities in Spain for rehearsing ‘too loudly’,

· One man has killed his wife for giving birth to a girl,

· Another has killed his daughter for having too many boyfriends,

· Some judges have been caught cheating in a law examination they were taking,

· A greedy and stupid college-goer who had bought 12 mobile phone SIM cards one after another when they were going cheap is now in trouble because the service provider had allotted 103 more numbers to her without her knowledge.

Aren’t people absolutely wonderful?

Try this

2010-08-20T20:44:00.000+05:30

Zinsser is a scholarly author, but here he writes in a lighter vein.

Guess?

2010-08-13T20:03:00.007+05:30

This very morning, somewhere in my little town, I saw a man's name on his post-box:

G.B. Shaw.

... and if you keep an eye on the papers, you will see a company which makes iron-work furniture calls itself Irony. There is also yet another business group which goes by the name of Weird Industries Limited. Check the link: I kid you not. If my memory serves me rightly, the chief minister of this state (supposedly an educated man) did not baulk at inaugurating one of their new projects a while ago.

Missing Jerome K. Jerome

2010-08-07T12:31:00.002+05:30

One important characteristic of the humorist is that he can see weird inconsistencies between what people say and what they do, and he chooses to laugh over them rather than to curse or cry. If he writes or talks about it, he does so in the hope that others will share his way of looking at things, and find things to laugh about too. He sees, for instance, that the more ‘educated’ people become, the more they cannot spell or write whole sentences grammatically (the number of my pupils who write catched and teached and seeked and ‘I didn’t knew’ after ten years in school is rising rapidly). And that people put on amulets with ‘powerful charms’ so that they can get into engineering college. That the fewer friends we have, the more desperate we become to add to our list of friends on Facebook. And the lazier people get, the more they complain (or exult!) about being busy. Or that wants multiply much faster than incomes, so the richer people get, the more unhappy they become.

The fact that humorists are in such short supply augurs ill for mankind. We are taking ourselves too seriously, and our skins are getting ever thinner, so maybe we dislike those who make fun of us. Besides, unlike our ancestors, maybe we are all so sure that we are perfect that we cannot bear to have anybody point out our faults to us (humorists have usually been keen on reform). So maybe closet comedians are lying low, since they don’t enjoy the prospect of being pilloried or burnt at the stake?

Why hasn’t another book like Three Men in a Boat been written in more than a hundred years?

Learn English, the Indian way

2010-08-01T11:34:00.001+05:30

I don't think I need to say anything.

Thanks for voting

2010-07-31T17:15:00.003+05:30

Time's up. Thanks to all of you for voting. Pity that the number wasn't larger, though.

Seventy five percent said they found the blog hugely entertaining: that makes me happy. The six who said they find it only mildly entertaining might write in to say what, in their opinion, would make it more enjoyable to them. Just please let me know your names, though: I don't set store by anonymous comments.

To the few who said they don't enjoy this blog at all, I am sorry that my tastes don't match yours. Please don't visit again!

Whodunnit

2010-07-21T11:05:00.000+05:30

In the aftermath of the recent train accident at Sainthia station, West Bengal, TV channels and newspapers, as is their wont, are inundating the public with all kinds of theories, more or less bizarre, about what could have gone wrong. Here is one of them.

Heaven knows what official inquiries will eventually reveal (if anything at all - such inquiries are much better known for covering up after a mess than otherwise), but for the present, I think, the moral of the story is that you shouldn't accept tea from strangers, especially in the middle of the night! Even more especially, if you happen to be driving a train. It's not good for you.

MLAs in helmets

2010-07-13T11:04:00.002+05:30

My newspaper says (The Telegraph, 13th July, p. 3) that some MLAs in the Karnataka Assembly have gone to attend meetings protected by helmets, claiming they are afraid of being manhandled by some of their colleagues in the ruling party.

Parliamentary politics has always seen some degree of rough and tumble: that is supposed to be inseparable from full freedom of expression. They banned the induction of arms of any kind inside the sacred precincts long ago so that some people's representatives didn't get carried away in their enthusiasm to make their point into murdering some of their peers. Now, it seems, even bare hands and legs have started posing sufficient menace: we might soon hear about MPs and MLAs arriving to serve the people in full body armour. Who says democracy isn't flourishing in India?

Never just right

2010-07-09T19:57:00.001+05:30

In this country, they keep telling you till long after you start sleeping alone that you are 'too young' for certain things - consorting with the opposite sex, for instance, or experimenting with drugs (even of the very mild sorts) - and then, before you know what, you are suddenly 'too old' for everything, except perhaps politics. Just when are we ever the right age?

This is the reason why, though I make fun of such people too, I feel a sneaking sympathy for both little boys who try very hard (by growing beards and jauntily perching cigarettes at the corners of their mouths) to look grown-up, and old geezers who dress up like young rakes in the desperate hope that they might look the 'right age' despite their swelling midriffs and their bald pates and their wheeziness. But honestly, is most of life supposed to be yearning to grow up and then lamenting that the 'right age' is past forever? How sad.

Odd choice!

2010-07-06T10:49:00.001+05:30

Why is it that these days both on the streets and in the newspapers and fashion magazines one only gets a choice between looking at over-dressed women who resemble misshapen mountains of lard and those who look like well-oiled lizards (size zero, my daughter says they are called, just skin stretched tight over bags of bones sticking out at all sorts of odd places) who have little to cover themselves with?

Has anybody else noticed?

The world of Don Camillo

2010-07-04T12:44:00.007+05:30

They make neither priests nor humorists the way they used to.

That was the thought that kept passing again and again through my mind as I was savouring a set of Don Camillo books that Shilpi had very kindly sent over all the way from the United States.

I shall not write much about either the irrepressible village priest Don Camillo (and his eternal friend-cum-bête noir Peppone) or about his creator, Giovanni Guareschi: a google search, I have checked, will yield enough to whet the curiosity of any real reader/connoisseur of humour, and then the books are waiting. All I want to say here is that I am grateful to an old boy for having reminded me of the books (which, thanks to yet another great Catholic priest – Father Pierre Yves Gilson – I have had the privilege to know, I enjoyed in full measure long ago, when I looked after the library in St. Xavier’s School, Durgapur. Another time, another place…)

Earthy, credible, wicked, whimsical, unfailingly imaginative, loveable, and yet also informed, thoughtful, large-hearted, moving and memorable. I rarely use so many adjectives at one go to describe anything, but they all fit in admirably in this case.

In one sense, the stories are period pieces now, as much as those of Dickens are. Yet – as all good books should be – their essential appeal is eternal. Nothing about these stories is more endearing than the little candid conversations that Don Camillo has with his mentor on the cross. I often reflect that certain writers – Tolstoy, Dickens, Ruskin, Chesterton, Eliot and Guareschi among them – have done far more for Christianity than any flesh and blood priest has ever done. A pity that the Vatican has not always done them justice.

Try this link if you like.

Google instead of brains?

2010-06-28T13:42:00.002+05:30

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!

2010-06-21T19:59:00.012+05:30

· 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

2010-06-15T13:13:00.006+05:30

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

2010-06-11T12:06:00.001+05:30

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

2010-06-03T21:06:00.006+05:30

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)?

Treasure forgotten

2010-05-30T11:24:00.003+05:30

(photo from wikipedia)

Quiz: Where in Calcutta can you find a private zoo, 25-foot tall Belgian glass mirrors, chandeliers weighing many tons, original paintings by the likes of Rubens and Reynolds, priceless porcelain vases from China's Ming dynasty, giant stuffed heads of moose, and breathtakingly beautiful statues of Greek gods rubbing shoulders with those of eastern deities ... all presided over by a giant statue of young Queen Victoria carved out of a single block of wood?

Answer: the Marble Palace, built by the fabulously wealthy (and cultured, unlike his early 21st century counterparts!) 19th century Bengali tycoon 'Rajah' Rajendra Mullick. It's just off Chittaranjan Avenue, a few steps after you have passed the Jorasanko Thakurbaari. It's so obscure that even a local rickshawpuller hadn't heard the name (nor had several elderly and young members of the smart set whom I asked at the city's biggest shopping mall, South City. I visited both places the same day in a bid to show my daughter what the city is like today...) Doesn't even the fact that the collection at the palace would be worth several hundred million dollars stir the interest of the most well-heeled of Calcuttans? How much farther will this social dumbing-down go?

Oh Calcutta!

Hard to love people like this

2010-05-21T13:15:00.003+05:30

... and the picture itself should tell you why I can't sympathize with their plight!

It makes me sad that one of the most in-your-face signs that this country is 'developing' is that it is rapidly filling up with folks like this. Makes a nice juxtaposition with millions of emaciated and permanently hungry people, it does.

(nobody I know: just got the photo off the net while researching obesity on google images)

Making people read

2010-05-16T17:09:00.000+05:30

Someone who is a bibliophile herself recently asked with a note of despair in her voice how she could persuade people to try out some books. I had hardly any advice for her, except to recall something I had read in Reader's Digest long ago:

A librarian who had the same problem (subscribers only went for the latest pulp fiction and refused to look at classics of literature or serious non-fiction) hit upon the idea of labelling one particular shelf 'For high-IQ readers only', and putting all her favourite titles on it. Books started flying off that shelf.

Now whether the borrowers actually read the books they took home is, of course, another matter altogether!

Ten thousand visits!

2010-05-12T12:55:00.001+05:30

Even as I write, the visits-counter has turned over, and I have crossed the 10,000 visits milestone. It has taken me 15 months: much faster than it happened with the other blog. Gives me a good feeling, knowing how hard it is to keep at this sort of thing for weeks and months on end in the midst of a busy (and not too funny) work schedule, with very little help – as I observed in an earlier post. Add to that frequent niggling irritations, like anonymous mugs and complete strangers chipping in just to say they don’t like the contents of this blog (and without making the slightest effort to show me how to do better – as by writing and maintaining a blog of their own)!

Indians are not known for their humour. I keep telling my girls and boys that they exhaust all their sense of fun by giggling so much over inanities and trifles all through teenage that by the time they are adults, they are surly grumblers all, or else they laugh only over obscenities, or over others’ misfortunes. Sit in on any office conversation or party gossip or roadside adda of college dropouts. I may not have a very exalted sense of humour, but I pride myself that I have never needed to stoop to such baseness.

One thing that a lot of people don’t know is that appreciating humour requires a) high IQ, b) wide GK, and c) often also a much better grasp of language than most people can boast of. There’s nothing more painful than watching a joke fall flat simply because the audience has no clue as to what you are talking about. Reminds me of the Bengali adage that a fool always laughs three times over a joke: the first time because he sees others laughing, the second time because the humour strikes him at last, and the third time realizing that he had laughed the first time without understanding…

It is not easy to be whimsical, especially in troubled times. I have met very few people in flesh and blood who can do that. So I am compelled to fall back on quoting the wise-saws of the great and the good, such as when Sir Winston Churchill scathingly put down his garrulous opponent in Parliament by saying ‘The honourable member is modest, and he has much to be modest about’, and when President Lincoln, on hearing about the drinking problem of his brilliant general Ulysses Grant, said ‘Find out what he drinks, and I am going to send a barrel to each of my other generals’, and the incident in the comic book Asterix the Legionary, where the eponymous hero tells friend Obelix to swallow the disgusting-looking mash they serve in the army, saying ‘The worse the food, the stronger the army’, then spitting out a mouthful himself, and commenting with a grimace ‘I didn’t know the Roman army was that strong!’

A good wish to all my followers. Do send in a few words of encouragement now and then…

Criticism

2010-05-08T19:57:00.007+05:30

To say something good about others needs character; any uncouth fool can call you names.

While I welcome comments on this blog, they should come from people who have something worthwhile to say, something good to share, some little nugget of wit or wisdom that I and all other readers could profit by; and, if nothing else, to say thanks. And so, before typing in a few lines, the comment-writer should pause to reflect whether s/he has anything at all worthwhile to say, or whether s/he is one more of the literally uncountable pathetic folks who are dying for a moment's attention. There are people who strip in public, and abuse, and walk drunkenly - even without being paid - only to draw others' eyes to themselves, even if it's only looks of contempt and disgust that come their way.

I am reminded of the joke: 'Sir', said the man to the Universe, 'I exist!' 'The fact', came the reply, 'has not given me much concern'... and the fact that the young man who shot US President Ronald Reagan later confessed he had done it merely to get on the front page of all the world's newspapers and thus impress his girlfriend. Most human beings only appear sane!

One of the abiding motifs of the recollections of old boys and girls is about how much they laughed in my class. So, after 29 years, I don't really need certificates. I write here only for the entertainment and edification of those who like what I say. Everybody else is welcome to stay away.

So please don't bother to waste your time just to tell me 'I don't think much of the contents', without even offering a reasoned explanation, and suggestions for better things. If it is entirely a matter of your subjective, and probably untutored judgment, keep it to yourself; I am not interested in how many complete strangers don't like me, especially when I can see how enormously tastes vary: the same joke that someone enjoys hugely falls flat on someone else (who knows but simply because it flew over the latter's head?)

And I was just reminded that some people have to be hit with a hammer on the head before they can recognize a joke.

A wonderful howler

2010-05-03T11:44:00.003+05:30

I was thumbing through some old issues of the once famous Punch magazine when I came across this absolutely priceless late-Victorian cartoon: the young man is reclining against the trunk of a shady tree beside his lady love, and by way of making conversation he asks her 'Do you like Kipling?' to which she tartly replies 'I don't know, you naughty boy, I've never kippled'!

Mad hatters

2010-04-28T09:46:00.004+05:30

The world is full of madmen, they say, and we are all mad in one sense or the other. Is that right, I wonder again and again... are all of us equally mad?

I just heard from an old boy that their overhead water tank was overflowing, and the housewife next door - a middle-aged mother - drew their attention by throwing a brick and breaking a window.

And my wife says she was shopping at a women's wear outlet in Calcutta where there was this fat middle-aged woman trying out all sorts of fancy clothes appropriate for skinny teenagers and loudly proclaiming to anybody who'd listen that she didn't care about the price tag, because her lockers were chock-full of black money.

And amidst this blistering heat I can see whole families gorging on phuchka (paani-puri) by the roadside at ten o' clock in the night...

Yikes!

2010-04-21T20:08:00.000+05:30

A father passing by his teenage daughter's bedroom was astonished to see the bed was nicely made and everything was neat and tidy. Then he saw an envelope propped up prominently on the centre of the pillow. It was addressed "Dad". With the worst premonition, he opened the envelope and read the letter with trembling hands:

Dear Dad,

It is with great regret and sorrow that I'm writing you, but I'm leaving home . I had to elope with my new boyfriend Randy because I wanted to avoid a scene with Mom and you. I've been finding real passion with Randy and he is so nice to me. I know when you meet him you'll like him too- even with all his piercing, tattoos, and motorcycle clothes. But it's not only the passion Dad, I'm pregnant and Randy said that he wants me to have the kid and that we can be very happy together. Even though Randy is much older than me (anyway, 42 isn't so old these days is it?), and has no money, really these things shouldn't stand in the way of our relationship , don't you agree?

Randy has a great CD collection; he already owns a trailer in the woods and has a stack of firewood for! the whole winter. It's true he has other girlfriends as well but I know he'll be faithful to me in his own way. He wants to have many more children with me and that's now one of my dreams too. Randy taught me that marijuana doesn't really hurt anyone and he'll be growing it for us and we'll trade it with our friends for all the cocaine and ecstasy we want. In the meantime, we'll pray that science will find a cure for AIDS so Randy can get better; he sure deserves it!!

Your loving daughter,

Rosie.

At the bottom of the page were the letters "PTO".

Hands still trembling, her father turned the sheet, and read:

PS: Dad, none of the above is true. I'm over at the neighbor's house. I just wanted to remind you that there are worse things in life than my report card that's in my desk centre drawer. Please sign it and call when it is safe for me to come home.

I love you

[Many thanks for the input to Subhadip Dutta]

A big loser

2010-04-19T11:41:00.004+05:30

An old boy told me about a classmate in the English department of one of the most 'prestigious' colleges in Calcutta, who had been told by her professor to read and report about Irving Stone's magnificent fictionalized biography of the great Italian renaissance artist Michelangelo, The Agony and the Ecstasy.

Her report was 'This Michelangelo was a big loser'.

Imagine the kind of wife, mother, teacher and citizen this creature is going to become...

A touching thank you

2010-04-16T12:43:00.003+05:30

Someone very recently wrote 'Thank you for this blog. Life's a bundle of worries and troubles, but it's good to know that every time I visit this site I can find something to smile over, and sometimes to laugh'.

My day is made. There's no better feeling than the knowledge that you have managed to make some people smile...

The richie rich

2010-04-10T20:54:00.005+05:30

Among the people who most fascinate me are those who have so much money that they don't have to work for a living. The reason I am fascinated is that it so often happens that instead of being lazy dullards living sybaritic, inconsequential lives, they turn out to be among the most creative people, contributing things of incalculable value to civilisation. The Roman philosopher emperor Marcus Aurelius was one such. So was Tolstoy (until he gave it all away), and Tagore, and Lord Kelvin the chemist, and Ludwig Wittgenstein (he too chose poverty). I could name dozens more. And so many of them keep working either because they are workaholics, or because they are addicted to the fame and money, or because they have found only work keeps them sane - look at Steve Jobs, and Sachin Tendulkar.

So what has Ms. J.K. Rowling been doing these three years since the last Harry Potter book was released? Can somebody find out and tell me?