Funny notices

Someone sent me a list of funny notices that he had found somewhere. Among them, I found this one particularly ticklish:

Sign on a doctor's door says Specialist in women and other diseases.

Reminded me of Gerry Durrell's hilarious opus, My Family and other animals.

Now here's a gem indeed!

Ananta Bandopadhyay, the leader of the Coordination Committee of state-government employees in West Bengal, a CPI(M) outfit, has said (The Telegraph, 14th November, page 7) that his organisation had 'always wanted work culture in government offices.'

If it had not been for my doctor's stern warning, I would have laughed till I screamed...

Howlers from parents

I hope, when my pupils present and ex- read this, they will newly appreciate why Sir kept insisting so vehemently that it is important to get things like spelling, words and syntax right (and I can entirely believe this article a friend sent me, because I read this kind of stuff everyday in the homework I have to mark, even from supposedly ‘good’ students).

These are real notes written by parents in the Laredo, Texas & United I.S.D. Spellings have been left intact.

1. My son is under a doctor's care and should not take PE today. Please execute him.

2. Please exkuce lisa for being absent she was sick and I had her shot.

3. Dear school: please ecsc's john being absent on jan. 28, 29, 30, 31, 32 and also 33.

4. Please excuse gloria from jim today. She is administrating.

5. Please excuse roland from p.e. for a few days. Yesterday he fell out of a tree and misplaced his hip.

6. John has been absent because he had two teeth taken out of his face.

7. Carlos was absent yesterday because he was playing football. He was hurt in the growing part.

8. Megan could not come to school today because she has been bothered by very close veins.

9. Chris will not be in school cus he has an acre in his side.

10. Please excuse ray friday from school. He has very loose vowels.

11. Please excuse Lesli from being absent yesterday. She had diahre dyrea direathethe (shits).

12. Please excuse tommy for being absent yesterday. He had diarrhea, and his boots leak.

13. Irving was absent yesterday because he missed his bust.

14. Please excuse jimmy for being. It was his father's fault.

15. I kept Billie home because she had to go Christmas shopping because i don't know what size she wear.

16. Please excuse jennifer for missing school yesterday. We forgot to get the sunday paper off the porch, and when we found it monday. We thought it was sunday.

17. Sally won't be in school a week from friday. We have to attend her funeral.

18. My daughter was absent yesterday because she was tired. She spent a weekend with the marines.

19. Please excuse Jason for being absent yesterday. He had a cold and could not breed well.

20. Please excuse mary for being absent yesterday. She was in bed with gramps.

21. Gloria was absent yesterday as she was having a gangover.

22. Please excuse brenda. She has been sick and under the doctor.

23. Maryann was absent december 11-16, because she had a fever, sore throat, headache and upset stomach. Her sister was also sick; fever an sore throat, her brother had a low grade fever and ached all over. I wasn't the best either, sore throat and fever. There must be something going around, her father even got hot last night.

Now we know why parents are screaming for better education for our kids.

Riggers, teachers...

When the redoubtable (and irrepressible) T. N. Seshan was India's Chief Election Commissioner, he once publicly remarked that some rigging in our elections was always to be expected, since we Indians have rigging/cheating in our blood: after all, he said, our holiest book is called the Rig Veda!

Last night an old boy was lamenting that many college teachers, whether or not they can or want to do anything good for you, are free with threats about how much they can hurt your career if you manage to rub them the wrong way. Well, after all, I reflected aloud, that is only to be expected, wasn't it: look at how Dronacharya is regarded as a 'model' teacher by so many (the Government even gives an award in his name), and look at how he treated Ekalavya when that self-taught unfortunate dared to upstage his favourite pupil Arjuna, whose guardian paid Drona his salary! To put it in trademark Indlish, we are like that only...

Eyes

The saddest thing in the world, said Helen Keller, is not that some people don't have eyes, but that so many people have eyes but cannot see.

If she had been around, I'd only have asked her whether she didn't agree that there is so much nastiness and commonness in this world that those who can indeed see must start wishing, after a point, that they could stop seeing...

My love life, calculated

I saw a cartoon a while ago: husband and wife sitting in bed, scanning their mobile inboxes, and the husband saying 'Our marriage must be on the rocks... you haven't sent me an sms all day.'

Today my mobile service provider sent me one of those promotional short messages they routinely send out to millions of subscribers: for three rupees a minute, I can call up someone designated 'Love Calculator', and s/he will quiz me and let me know whether my wife loves me or not.

I cannot stop marvelling at the speed with which technology is bringing around all-round cultural progress...

Nobel? ha ha ha ha ha...

Barack Obama has been given the Nobel Peace Prize.

I neither can nor need to add to the humour here.

Just by the way: Gandhi wasn't good enough for the Nobel Committee. Enough said!

Plus ça change…

This news item in today’s paper says that a lot of people in Indonesia are blaming the earthquake – and other recent calamities – on their President because numerologists and other experts claim that he has an ‘unlucky’ name (or, for variety, an unlucky date of birth)! Other experts have strongly refuted the claim, insisting that the President’s stars are in fact ‘lucky’ for the country.

There is a saying in French: plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose (the more it changes, the more it remains the same). I sometimes watch how fervently our mothers tie all sorts of charms and amulets around various parts of their children’s bodies so that they may "do well in science" and get into the IITs or medical schools. Their children, if they at all notice the contradiction, find nothing embarrassing about it; indeed, some of them, having grown up memorizing science textbooks to get their master’s or doctoral degrees, get very angry when I laugh at their ‘scientific’ pretensions.

One has to pinch oneself sometimes to believe that one is living in 2009, not 1209.

Challenged

I sometimes startle myself with my prescience.

A while ago, when Taarey Zameen Par was the superhit and talking point of the hour, I happened to remark in class that a time was coming when every pupil who was simply too lazy and absent-minded to spell correctly would claim that s/he was a victim of dyslexia, and so deserving of leniency rather than stern reprimands. To that extent, Aamir Khan had done all language teachers a great disservice. In any case, dyslexia is far more uncommon than sheer cussedness (I shall maintain to my dying day that spelling correctly is the first and indispensable sign of literacy – someone who misspells ten common words per written page cannot be called educated, even if he has a PhD to his name. And nothing – besides bad handwriting – so instantly identifies laziness and sloppiness as deep-rooted character traits as poor spelling does).

Well, it came true very recently. When I ruefully asked a pupil how she could possibly spell so many words wrongly, she gave me a bright smile and said ‘Sir, dyslexia!’

Gift from an old boy

Here are a few rib-ticklers that an old boy, Archishman Sarkar, recently sent me.

"Don't I look good in tails?"
"Why not? Your ancestors did."

"You're a liar," said Muscles.
"Yeah?" grumbled the thin man. "Say that again and I'll bust your jaw."
"Consider it said."
"Consider your jaw busted."

"What sort of woman is your wife?"
"She's an angel, that's what she is."
"You're lucky. Mine's still alive."

Two old girl friends met on the street after not seeing each other for several years.
"Belle, my darling," shrieked one. "It's so good to see you. Tell me dear, do you and your husband have those terrible arguments anymore?"
"No", said Belle.
"What made you stop?"
"He died," said Belle.

Patient at a lunatic asylum: "We like you better than the last doctor."
New Doctor (flattered): "And how's that?"
Patient: "You seem more like one of us".

"But doctor," said the worried patient, "are you sure I'll pull through? I've heard cases where the doctor has made a wrong diagnosis, and treated someone for pneumonia who has afterwards died of typhoid fever."
"Nonsense," spluttered the doctor, "When I treat a patient for pneumonia, he dies of pneumonia."


Absentminded professor (leaving church): Who's the absent-minded one now? You left your umbrella back there and I not only remembered mine but brought along yours, too!"
Wife (gazing blankly at him): But neither of us brought one to the church!

Thanks, Archishman.

General knowledge, again...

Anandabazar Patrika reported a few days ago that in one of the so called upmarket schools in Delhi, a lot of pupils had written, in response to a GK test question, that model/actress Lisa Ray was the daughter of Satyajit Ray, and a lot of them had been marked right by the teacher concerned. When the scandal blew up, not only were the pupils blase about it ('How are we supposed to know?') but so were the authorities, on the pretext that the answer was not immediately available to the teacher in her textbook. We are still not supposed to ask what sort of clowns have become teachers these days; and obviously such cretins not only do not carry anything called knowledge inside their heads, but have either never heard of encyclopedias and/or google, or couldn't be bothered to check.

In my childhood, we heard of such things as caricatures - the Bengali comedian Robi Ghosh, playing the part of a 'smart' young man (as 'smart' was understood in the 1970s) glibly telling his father, as proof of being educated, that Indira Gandhi was Mahatma Gandhi's daughter. In three decades, India has progressed so much that now it's not a caricature any more, but everyday reality. 'Clever' young quizzards have said on TV that Pather Panchali was written by Satyajit Ray, and sung songs of Nazrul when asked to sing Tagore. And such things, please note, happen in highly expensive fancy schools which tomtom in the advertisements how they are giving 'world-class education' (makes you wonder what 'world-class' means these days, doesn't it?). The likes of Prof. Amartya Sen, living in faraway ivory towers, have long been lamenting the poor quality of education being given in scantily-endowed government schools all across India. When will they turn to look at the Augean stables that our best private schools have become?

In 1991 I heard this joke: What do you call a New York politician who can spell 'cat'?... You call him talented. These days millions of such talented creatures are having no trouble becoming teachers (and also doctors, engineers, scientists, lawyers, mind you). Close to home, I personally know 'bright' students who wrote or said 'I drawed a picture' and 'He teached me' and couldn't score more than 20% in an impromptu quiz and couldn't write a sensible essay when they were 16 going on to become scholars and teachers, and I keep warning every batch, 'remember, a fool, when he grows old, only becomes an old fool'! I know lots of teachers with first-class degrees who would be lost in class without the notebooks they dictate (borrowed) notes from. If this country is not in a pretty mess, what is it in?

Post-modern enlightenment

‘Do you believe in God, and religion, and the afterlife, and things like that?’ someone asked the pretty young girl-about-town.

‘Nah...,’ said she, ‘who believes in all that rubbish in this scientific age?’

‘Well, what do you believe in, then?’

‘Why, lots of things! I believe in Macburgers, and my credit card, and my hair dye, and Britney Spears, and Wal-Mart and Nokia…’

‘And suppose these things fail you sometimes?’

‘Well, there’s always my boyfriend who tells me I’m looking good even on a bad hair day, and daddy’s credit card to fall back on, and Apple to do wonders in the mobile phone industry if Nokia falters! Then there's a new multiplex coming up in the neighbourhood. Who needs more?’

Read this one before?

I was given the following article years ago, but it is, I think, still completely relevant, and some of it is wickedly funny. Some of my readers are sure to have read it already, but I’d like others to laugh over it too. I am sorry that I haven’t been able to trace the author.

IF MICROSOFT MADE CARS

For all of us who feel only the deepest love and affection for the way
computers have enhanced our lives, read on.

At COMDEX recently, Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry
with the auto industry and stated, "If GM had kept up with the technology
like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25.00 cars that got
1,000 miles to the gallon."

In response to Bill's comments, General Motors issued a press release
stating: If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be
driving cars with the following characteristics:

1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day.

2. Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a
new car.

3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would
have to pull over to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut
off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue.
For some reason you would simply accept this.

4. Occasionally, executing a manoeuvre such as a left turn would cause your
car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to
reinstall the engine.

5. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable,
five times as fast and twice as easy to drive, but would run on only five
percent of the roads.

6. The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be
replaced by a single "This Car Has Performed An Illegal Operation" warning
light.

7. The airbag system would ask "Are you sure?" before deploying.

8. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and
refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned
the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.

9. Every time a new car was introduced, car buyers would have to learn how
to drive all over again, because none of the controls would operate in the
same manner as the old car.

10. Oh yeah, and last but not least . . . you'd have to press the "Start"
button to turn the engine off!

Humorists in short supply

It may be I'm getting short-sighted, but I have been having this strong feeling that the world is becoming, despite all its vaunted progress, a 'rum sort of place', as P.G. Wodehouse might have said. I don't expect a Jerome K. Jerome or a Sukumar Ray to be born every other day, but given the fact that so many different kinds of 'talents' are jostling with one another on the world's stage, from fabulous tennis stars to awesome software developers and fund-managers and cocktail-mixers, where are the people who can make us laugh (if you leave out the determinedly pedestrian sort, like Mr. Bean or our home-grown Mir)?

Lovely!

Almost a decade ago a pretty young thing walked into my drawing room for admission to my tuition, and said, 'Good evening, Sir, I'm Lovely'. Feeling mischievous, I replied, 'How nice! and what's your name?' which struck her speechless for a moment (and who knows, she might have been a mite affronted, too). Of late I have been hearing of a 'Lovely University' somewhere up Punjab way, and I am told it is not short of students...

Aesop's raven and 'science' today

There was this editorial in yesterday’s newspaper about how we ought to reflect upon the recent scientific ‘discovery’ that apparently Aesop knew what he was talking about when he wrote, almost 2,500 years ago, the fable about the crow filling a pitcher with pebbles until the water came up to such a level that it could drink.

Whoever wrote that editorial was not only a sensible person with a good sense of humour but also somebody who knew what the state of ‘science’ is these days, and how seriously we ought to take everything that scientific research claims to ‘discover’.

Much of what science is actually re-discovering is what used to be called plain common sense derived from long and well-digested, well-remembered experience – the kind of wisdom that old men and grandmothers used to pass on to their young, before they came to be derided as ‘old-fashioned’ and ‘out of touch’ by people who were sadly deluded by ‘the latest’, which is most definitely not always the best. It would be a nice idea if we could grow less snooty about our ‘knowledge’ and more open to the wisdom of the ages. As I have said in my other blog before, being informed or even being knowledgeable is not the same as being wise, and what this world lacks today, even more than wise men, is respect and attention to wise men. It is not a sign of progress that one needs a PhD today to say things that any granny who had never studied beyond high school knew even three generations ago, nor should a doctor or accountant or lawyer or engineer give himself airs about being wise just because he has mastered some saleable skill or the other (skills which often benefit the man who sells it far more than his customer!). So long as one has not digested and internalized a book like say the Panchatantra, one is at best a fool with a few degrees to his name, and this world is being dragged by the scruff of its neck towards disaster by such learned fools. Those interested may read the scathing remarks made about ‘experts/specialists’ in John le Carre’s The Russia House by a man who was a specialist himself, an atomic scientist: ‘...when this world is destroyed, it will be destroyed by the superior ignorance of its specialists’ is what he said if I remember correctly.

More and more of the same old crap...

Who needs twitter? As if sms text messaging with mobiles wasn't bad enough? Or is it that the whole world has gone crazy, and will lap up any 'cool new app' just for the heck of it? Is there one human being on this planet, who, despite having a laptop and/or a good mobile phone, and constant messaging and email facility at hand, still 'cannot do' without something as utterly witless and non-new as twitter?

Laugh for the day

A good friend sometimes sends me hilarious stuff for posting on this blog. Here’s another installment.

These howlers are supposedly from a book called 'Disorder in the American Courts' and are things people actually said in court, word for word, taken down and now published by court reporters who had to suffer the torment of staying calm while these exchanges were actually taking place.

ATTORNEY: Can you describe the individual?
WITNESS: He was about medium height and had a beard.
ATTORNEY: Was this a male or a female?
WITNESS: Unless the circus was in town I'm going with male.

ATTORNEY: Doctor, how many of your autopsies have you performed on dead people?
WITNESS: All of them. The live ones put up too much of a fight.

ATTORNEY: How was your first marriage terminated?
WITNESS: By death.
ATTORNEY: And by whose death was it terminated?
WITNESS: Take a guess.

ATTORNEY: Are you qualified to give a urine sample?
WITNESS: Are you qualified to ask that question?

ATTORNEY: Do you recall the time that you examined the body?
WITNESS: The autopsy started around 8:30 p.m.
ATTORNEY: And Mr. Denton was dead at the time?
WITNESS: If not, he was by the time I finished.

ATTORNEY: This myasthenia gravis, does it affect your memory at all?
WITNESS: Yes.
ATTORNEY: And in what ways does it affect your memory?
WITNESS: I forget.
ATTORNEY: You forget? Can you give us an example of something you forgot?

ATTORNEY: Now doctor, isn't it true that when a person dies in his sleep, he doesn't know about it until the next morning?
WITNESS: Did you actually pass the bar exam?

ATTORNEY: The youngest son, the twenty-year-old, how old is he?
WITNESS: He's twenty, much like your IQ.

ATTORNEY: Were you present when your picture was taken?
WITNESS: Are you shitting me?

ATTORNEY: She had three children, right?
WITNESS: Yes.
ATTORNEY: How many were boys?
WITNESS: None.
ATTORNEY: Were there any girls?
W ITNESS : Your Honor, I think I need a different attorney.

ATTORNEY: ALL your responses MUST be oral, OK? What school did you go to?
WITNESS: Oral.

ATTORNEY: Doctor, before you performed the autopsy, did you check for a pulse?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: Did you check for blood pressure?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: Did you check for breathing?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: So, then it is possible that the patient was alive when you began the autopsy?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: How can you be so sure, Doctor?
WITNESS: Because his brain was sitting on my desk in a jar.
ATTORNEY: I see, but could the patient have still been alive, nevertheless?
WITNESS: Yes, it is possible that he could have been alive and practising law.

P.S.: If someone like Khushwant Singh is happy to take inputs from friends who write in, I shouldn’t be embarrassed. Do send me things you have really enjoyed, readers, if you want me to publish them on my blog.

Books, anyone?

The teacher was expounding on the myriad benefits of reading, and trying to get his class of very young children interested. ‘Every one of you has books at home, don't you? Try naming some...’

Every child named a few, only little Johnny at the back of the class kept mum. ‘Hello, Johnny, what about you? Don't you have any books at home? Of course you do... try hard to remember,’ encouraged the teacher.

Little Johnny’s brow puckered with furious concentration. A few seconds passed, then his face lit up. ‘Yes, there’s one,’ he cried, ‘the telephone directory!’

At a more ‘high-class’ level, the affluent housewife goes shopping for her husband’s birthday gift. After-shave, cuff-links, sunglasses, ties, whatever the shopkeeper tries to tempt her with, ‘He’s got one of those,’ comes the dissatisfied reply. On the verge of giving up, the man suggests ‘Why don’t you give him a book, then?’ Pat comes the reply, ‘Oh, but he’s got one of those too!’

I used to think that these were wicked exaggerations, but then I read about a woman coming out of the cinema after watching Tagore’s Chokher Baali, and commenting to her friend, ‘Did you know that the book version is already available?’ And I meet such people all the time these days… the same people who are very proud of being ‘highly educated’, and who have hardly ever read anything in their lives except textbooks and crambooks. How easy it has become to be educated these days. Used to be a time, not too long ago, when no man dared to give himself such airs before three or four decades of concentrated reading…!

Brilliant!

I just heard that the honourable minister for health in our government of West Bengal has been boasting that our government hospitals routinely accommodate three patients to a bed, besides dozens lying on the floor, so great is the demand for their services - which, according to the minister, only goes to show how wonderful the state health service must be.

I suppose it takes a minister in India to be that blase and shameless. I put this in the humour blog because if I don't laugh, it can only make me cry!