Ugly Indian

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?

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

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

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?

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...

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

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

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

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...

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

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!

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...

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

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

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?

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?

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

...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!

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 US 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"!

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...