The trouble with names

I have heard of legendary teachers who can match names and faces of old boys almost instantaneously, decades after they last met, and while I marvel at such tremendous feats of memory, I don’t really pity myself for not being able to do as well. For one thing, as I tell my current pupils in class, only the very good and the very naughty leave any strong impressions at all; the rest, unless they make an effort to keep in touch, are quickly forgotten. There’s a broom in my mind that does the sweeping out automatically, every season. Didn't somebody say you have to keep forgetting in order to keep learning?

For another, people don’t help matters by sending children with the same names to my classes again and again. I have long lost count of all the Subhadips, Sayans, Arnabs, Ayans, Joydeeps, Anirbans, Arghyas and Abhirups I have dealt with, and likewise with the Ankitas, Ananyas, Anweshas, Sushmitas, Shreyas, Sagarikas and Gargis. It helps if they have uncommon names, so I don’t easily forget the Jayastus and Jias and Brahmis and Diptokirtis, Dibyanjanas, Sponditas and Koussis – though some of these have been entirely forgettable or worse except for their names…

I wish they’d make a law that in every municipality, only one newborn child will be allowed to be named Ananya in any one year (to think it means ‘unique’, too!). At least, they could ring me up saying ‘Sir, I am Ananya of the 1991 batch’: that might help to ring a faint bell.

Budding genius

Here's the latest gem I picked up while marking an essay written by a 15-year old who is supposed to be 'good in science'... Stephen Hawkins is the world's greatest astrologer.

No comments...

Strange are the ways of abuse!

I often muse aloud in class about the oddities of language, especially when it comes to invective and abuse. When a Bengali is irritated with someone's obduracy, he says "kochupora khao", though there is nothing harmful or disgusting about that particular humble vegetable, especially if it is cooked well (by the way, google could not translate 'kochu' for me: will somebody help?) And shuorer bachchha (offspring of a pig) is supposed to be even harsher than son of a bitch, although most of us love piglets and dogs, or at least see nothing very hateful about them. Nobody considers son of a lion an insult, though (and the expression is little used anyway), and nobody calls another son of a squirrel or something like that. Does anybody have a theory about this?

Will India finally conquer English, then?

Oh, wow, the visit counter has crossed the 30,000 mark without my noticing it! That means a goodly number of people are reading this blog, too. It's  a pity that comments are few and far between. I guess most visitors just come to this page, get their daily laugh or grin or grimace, and then leave, without bothering to let me know what they felt about it. I wish some would share a few laughs now and then...

By the way, how do you carry on teaching English in a country where a college prof says something is called 'bizarre' because it makes a 'bizz-ing' noise, and a schoolteacher says 'I have two daughters and both are girls'? And only this afternoon I saw an astrologer advertizing 'gnyaan-tips' on TV. I kid you not.

Matrimonial howlers

Going through the matrimonial columns of the newspapers is one of our hilarious pastimes on Sunday afternoons. Apart from the fact that it tells us a great deal about how petty, greedy, foolish, habit-bound and generally cussed people actually are behind all their workaday pretensions, they are always good for a few belly laughs. Here’s a tiny selection of ads from today’s edition of Bartaman:

The girls usually always call themselves fair-skinned, pretty, ‘homely’ and ‘convent-educated’, of course  (no matter how dark, ugly, unpleasant and dumb they might actually be) and almost universally seek grooms who are dah/ih/sho. cha (daktar/engineer/sorkari chakurey), no matter whether they look like apes and behave even worse. But here are some that really take the cake. One prospective groom touts the fact that he is a teetotaler (seems to be his only virtue), declares that he hardly earns anything, and that he’s willing to marry anybody, just so long as his father in law puts him up permanently (a ghorjamai: he’s quite candid about it). Another who is 45 declares that he looks no older than 37, and touts his Rs. 26,000 a month clerkship in a government aided school as though that’s as good as being a millionaire playboy. Yet a third who by his own admission makes just about Rs. 3000 a month (I paid my driver more than that!) generously says that he will ‘accept’ any bride, so long as she is willing to keep him in her father’s house. A girl in her mid-30s who proudly announces she has studied upto class three is looking for an ‘established’ groom.

After we had stopped hiccupping with laughter, my wife, daughter and I thought it would be nice to write down some such ad for me, if I were to put myself on the marriage market again (did I tell you that a couple of years ago the rumour had gone around that I was divorced, and I had started receiving lucrative offers for a second marriage already?) Both of them insisted I'd be deluged with requests...

'I always do!'

It is said of Lord Chesterfield (of the letters fame) that he was ready with brilliant put-downs for people who were rash enough to try verbal jousts with him. Once he was walking along a narrow footpath, daintily avoiding the muddy street, when he saw an old adversary coming towards him in the opposite direction. He waited patiently for the other to make way for him, but the latter only snarled ‘I never accommodate a scoundrel’. With a bow and a smile, the peer replied ‘But I always do!’ and stepped into the puddle.

I have always had a weakness for smart ripostes, and this is one I cannot stop admiring. How polished, how spontaneous, and how utterly devastating can a man be! How much more civilized than what most of today’s youngsters would or could do, brought up with the manners of the mastodons they see on TV wrestling shows! And imagine how long the victim must have smarted with helpless rage under the rebuke…

Giggling girls

All teachers have idiosyncrasies which pupils love to note, mimic and remember long after all their teaching has been forgotten. I have my own share of them. Frowning when the girls, as is their wont, were giggling away to glory among themselves in class, I asked ‘Who laughs over nothing at all?’ and they replied on cue, without a shade of embarrassment, ‘Madmen and chimpanzees!’ as they had heard me observe a hundred times. I recalled a teacher in their school, long retired, who used to say ‘These girls can fall off their benches tittering if they see a leaf fall…’

And the thought struck me that when you see women – who were girls ten or twenty years ago – on the roads, they almost invariably wear grim and forbidding expressions, as if they are disgusted with the world, and cannot think of anything that could make them smile, leave alone laugh. The contrast is so sharp that I wonder many more people don’t notice and comment on it. Why does it happen? I have a little theory of my own. Since overdoing anything is the surest way to grow sick of it, maybe the grimness of adult life comes in reaction to all the hysterical, mindless giggling through teenage? Maybe we should laugh a little less when we  are young so that we can go on laughing now and then all through life?

beware the praise of the multitude

I remember an incident from the life of Sir Winston Churchill. He was leaving a packed hall after receiving thunderous applause for a rousing speech, and a hurrying reporter asked 'Sir, doesn't it make you feel good to see that so many people come to hear you and clap for you?' 'Of course it does', shot back the great man, 'but then I remind myself that the crowd would have been three times as large if I were going to be hanged'. That's mankind for you.

Whenever I sense the danger of becoming swollen-headed to see how many people are crowding into my house and how frantic they are to get their children admitted to my tuition and how lavish they are with their praise and their purses, I remember those immortal words from a master spirit, and I am sober again... I recommend Browning's poem The Patriot  very strongly to my readers. I can't do better myself than repose all my faith in the stirring last lines: 'tis God shall repay/ I'm safer so.

Admission-time bloopers

I am in the middle of the annual admission season, and every year all sorts of weird things happen during this time, some annoying, some surprising, some plain hilarious. I wish I could have recorded all the funny ones on video and uploaded them on YouTube: I'm sure it would have become a runaway hit. People would be amazed and abashed: 'Is that what we look and sound like in public?' Folks have started crying when I told them I couldn't take in any more kids; others have insisted that I should just take in their child and then shut the doors, and yet others gone away with the firm impression that I am a very arrogant person, refusing to understand why I keep the numbers within manageable limits...

In their distracted hurry, folks do and say strange things. One has carried away the notebook which I gave him to write down the details of his child - name, address, phone number and stuff - another has left his own slippers behind and walked away in another's. Some have, after going faithfully through the entire admission process and even paying the fees, asked 'Sir, what do you teach?' I could go on and on.

One of the common misunderstandings was repeated this week. Since people were flooding in to get admitted to the class 9 batches, I had assumed (through a foolish oversight: I should have known better) that this boy, too, had come for the same reason. After he had been admitted, I was beginning to tell his parents the rules (I don't even trust them to read and understand the contents of the printed notices I give them, so I repeat verbally), the mother suddenly blurted out 'But he's in class 10 now!' Neither parents nor son had bothered to tell me, maybe because I, being clairvoyant, was simply supposed to know by looking at his face. I immediately corrected the error, of course, but imagine how lost and confused the poor kid must have felt if he had turned up and found that he was attending a class full of his juniors!

Bury two

A lawyer was accosted by his colleagues and asked to subscribe ten pounds (dollars?) to arranging the funeral of a fellow professional. He at once fished out some money from his pocket and exclaimed, 'Is it that cheap to bury a lawyer? Here's twenty pounds: go ahead and bury two!'

Some ascribe this mordant (and self-mocking) witticism to the great Irish legal luminary John Philpot Curran; others to someone equally likely, Abraham Lincoln himself. The only other famous (ex-) lawyer I know of who spoke about his professional brothers in the same vein was Mohandas Gandhi.

Knowing the teaching profession as I do, I daresay that in a similar situation, I'd probably come up with the same remark, despite knowing it won't be original...

The things that matter

I heard this doggerel in Bangla when I was still a boy, and like so many other things that seemed really interesting at first blush, it has stuck permanently in my memory.  Hari hey, dinobondhu, tumi amar babar bondhu/ hoy tumi dyakha dao, noy kichhu poysha dao,  the country poet says: “Lord, you are my dad’s old friend, y’know/ show yourself to me, or do give me some dough”.

Having lived and seen and thought a long time, I marvel at how this anonymous philosopher got his priorities just right, and with what sublime simplicity he has expressed them.

If you see God, you’ve got everything. Till then, it’s best to have some money.

It’s like the wag said about the American credo: In God we trust. With everyone else, we prefer cash…

Want to get rich quick? Avoid college

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!

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

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'?

“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'

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

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

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

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

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...