Smart kids

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

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

The things we value

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

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

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'?

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'...

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!

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

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

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

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

Guess?

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

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

I don't think I need to say anything.

Thanks for voting

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.

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Whodunnit

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

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

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!

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

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.