Sick capitalism

 Those who understand will not need a comment from me. On those who won't or can't, I won't waste words.

[If the above picture is not clear enough, you can see it here]

Abol Tabol

Dr. Sukanta Chaudhuri, Emeritus professor of English at Jadavpur University, recently wrote a most erudite yet entertaining article in memory of Sukumar Ray's immortal (and unique in Bengali) classic of nonsense poetry, Abol Tabol, in The Telegraph. Here is a link to the said article.

As Chaudhuri himself says, there aren't superlatives enough to describe Ray's magnum opus. Even Rabindranath himself could not quite match up to him in this one sphere at least. And Chaudhuri is absolutely best qualified to write an essay like this, because he made a magnificent translation of some of the most loved poems from Abol Tabol under the title of The Select Nonsense of Sukumar Ray, for which Satyajit Ray himself complimented him for having accomplished the apparently impossible. I consider myself privileged that I once collaborated with Sukantada on the Oxford series of translations of Tagore.

While Abol Tabol has enjoyed enormous popularity among the educated Bengali middle class for three continuous generations, it seems to me the dawn of the dark ages that most of today's children from the same sort of families can no longer recognise those poems, leave along being able to quote from them.

And do note and linger over the last paragraph of the essay. It bears thinking about.

Also, my fondness for Abol Tabol should be another proof that, in Russell's words, I should not be thought to be serious only when I am solemn. My grandfather was very fond of quoting from those poems, and as I grow old myself, I understand better why.

'We can see his bum!'

My daughter remarked snidely a while ago that these days there are so many idle, stupid and distracted people around, especially in the cities, that their favourite pastime has become 'get up in the morning, get offended at something someone somewhere has said or done, abuse him (usually in the name of 'majority sensibilities'), fall asleep again'.

I happened to come across the perfect example of this epidemic recently on - where else? - the internet. Ranveer Singh had done a photoshoot in the buff for some foreign magazine, and that had become viral in India. Some woman found it 'very vulgar', and called for his head. Mind you, I am not a great champion of the idea that 'everything goes in the name of free choice and free expression'. As I have said a thousand times in my class, one has a right to one's own sense of privacy, decency and decorum, which one must not sacrifice at the altar of public preferences if one wants to preserve some dignity in one's own eyes. Shah Rukh Khan might be comfortable posing in branded underwear because they pay him the earth for it: given the same choice, I won't think of doing it. But how stupid and coarse must one be to call for social ostracization of anybody whose tastes make him grimace? Just make your own opinion clear in your private circle and avoid keeping tabs on what such people are doing and saying, that's all that is needed!

Anyway, I am glad that the country has not filled up with uptight sourpusses yet. Some people can make fun of such things, and many others can see the fun and enjoy it too. Here's a meme that does exactly that, and I had more than one good laugh over it. More power to your elbow, Yashraj Mukhate!

 (afterthought: I wonder what the woman who condemned Ranveer would do or say if she knew about the sculptures on the walls of the temples at Khajuraho and Konarak?)

Airline capers

I read in this morning's paper that a large part of Indigo Airlines' cabin crew had taken sick leave en masse on Saturday the 2nd to appear for Tata-Air India's new recruitment drive. Reminded me of schoolchildren I know who play exactly the same trick here to cut classes when exams are coming...

Also, it made me smile to think that as a PSU, Air India had stopped creating jobs ages ago, but as soon as it has gone into private ownership and management, it has not only opened the doors again, but is apparently offering terms good enough to poach from the competition! Goes violently against the entrenched socialist dogma that private entrepreneurs are obsessively intent only on job pruning...

Smart, dumb, or just slaves?

Here is an editorial published in my newspaper on March 27: click on this link.

They are saying it might be a good idea to buy basic phones now.

Nishant should have a good laugh over this - he remarked 'smart phones are for dumb people' almost a decade ago!

The darkening menace!

 Saw this cartoon in my newspaper today.

After forty years at it, it's now so real it doesn't seem funny at all any more...

Influencers!

Thanks to the proliferation of social media, a new species of animal has attained notoriety of late: they are called 'influencers'. Apparently anybody can become one: you don't need any kind of serious knowledge, intelligence, social ideal or anything of the slightest importance to say, you don't even need to be an adult (think Malala Yousufzai, or Greta Thunberg) - all you need is dogged perseverance, carrying on spewing nonsense about nonsense ('how to paint your nails', 'how to fight off body shaming', 'which new phone to buy', 'what to do if your boyfriend cheats on you'...) until the number of visits and 'likes' on your Instagram or Youtube channel climbs into six or seven figures.

It bemuses me to think that once upon a time the label of 'influencer' could have been tagged only to earth-shaking titans like Jesus, or Chenghiz Khan, or Isaac Newton or Shakespeare.

The flip side: these days 'influencers' become famous then vanish into obscurity all within the span of one year or less, the vast majority of them. When you have too many influencers, nobody is significantly influenced by anything for any length of time!

New meme

I have been neglecting this poor blog alas, because the ambient situation is too grim to draw smiles easily. Still, the following meme might do that for some people. At least, I hope.

Thank you, Swarnava.

Even maths now!

'Everyone's opinions should be respected' may just have gone too far. It seems that even mathematics will gradually stop having rules now, because everything will be ruled by opinion. Such as these below:

How much more of this before the Dark Ages descend?

Thanks for the inputs, Swarnava.

Honest politician!

Boris Johnson has said he can no longer afford his accustomed lifestyle on a prime minister’s salary, claimed that he used to earn much more as a newspaper columnist, and declared that he is going to resign after cleaning up the Brexit mess.

I had known since the days of Yes Prime Minister that the British pay their high political officials in a miserly way (as compared to France or the USA or Singapore, and even India, where though the salaries are laughable, the expense accounts are virtually limitless), but there are two things that I find noteworthy here: I did know that famous TV anchors earned huge pay packets, but not that even newspaper columnists earned on a lavish scale, and secondly, that Johnson used to be one of those high fliers before he came into politics. What on earth possessed him to make the shift?

Also, would any politico in India ever dare to be halfway as brazenly candid?

Birthday wishes nowadays

What a weird world we live in that the largest number of 'Happy birthday' messages come from insurance- and investment companies!

(P)oops!

Hey hey, I'll burst unless I tell you this one right now... I paused in the middle of episode 2 of a new series called 'Connected' on Netflix, just to let you know that, believe it or not, in a world that has become chock-full of every type of 'expert' you can imagine, there are now also - hold your breath - even experts on very ancient poop.

Cross my heart. I kid you not.  

Journalists in the time of pandemic

Haven't found much to laugh over these last few months, but this one made me guffaw.

One more, while I am at it:

How much damage this virus will do depends on two things

1. How dense the population is,

2. How dense the population is.

Get it?

Cleansing ritual

Twice now within the last fortnight I have seen shopkeepers taking currency notes and dipping them in Dettol solution, supposedly to get rid of any coronavirus that might be sticking to them. One was a mangshowallah, the other a mishtiwallah...

My mother reminded me of my great grandparents on my father's side. My great grandpa pursued a legal career in a district court, and apparently earned a pretty penny. Great grandma was a devout Hindu housewife, with many and very fixed ideas about things that were clean and unclean. So though she had no objection to her husband bringing home pots of money every evening, there was a rigid protocol about how the money and the moneymaker must be cleansed before being allowed to enter her house. While the husband was sent off to take a bath in gangajal and change into a fresh set of clothes which were never worn outdoors, the lady sat on the porch, painstakingly cleaning every guinea (they paid lawyers in coins a hundred years ago) in sacred gobarjal with her own hands before they were in her judgment fit for her use. If she were to come back today, wouldn't she say

নতুনটা আর কী দেখালি ?

Excuses change, but people's weirdness apparently does not. At least coins were less subject to damage through manhandling than notes are!

Laughter in the time of the coronavirus

I haven't been feeling humorous for some time now, but the coronavirus-induced panic worldwide has brought new occasions for (black-) humour. Two cartoons are reproduced below.

Thanks, Pupu and Swarnava.

And here's something that would have been uproarious if it hadn't been so horribly tragic: lots of people have gone blind or even died in Iran after drinking industrial alcohol (methanol) in the false hope spread by rumours that it can kill the virus. As the doctor says in the report, '(people) are even less aware of the fact that there are other dangers around.' Stupidity combined with panic, to name the deadliest one.

Good for laughs

Laugh One:

25% of the women in this country are on medication for mental illness. That's scary. It means 75% are running around untreated!

Laugh Two:

"And God promised men that good and obedient wives would be found in all corners of the earth".

Then He made the earth round and He laughed and laughed and laughed.

Thanks for those, Lavona. And thank God we have grown to be old enough to enjoy them without thinking about whether we are men or women, and whether or not we should therefore be offended!

Apology

I have been neglecting this poor blog for a long time. My bad, as they say who cannot speak English. Actually I haven't been feeling funny lately. And Bengal's annual madness is coming again: never fails to give me the heebie-jeebies. Thank God I'll be far away.

A thought: it would be nice if my readers were to send me links to things that have caught their eye lately, things that deserve a good laugh over. I can then at least draw attention to them on this blog: that would be a good way to keep it alive.

Terrific hailstorm again!

I wrote a post here in April 2013 titled Nature's violent beauty which a lot of people have read. Well, the day before yesterday there was a terrific thunderstorm all over the district (it's April again!), and though there wasn't much of a hail shower in Durgapur, some nearby places looked as if there had been heavy snowfall. Click here for a photograph (from my newspaper dated April 22).

'Hi, Rahul'?

Rahul Gandhi asked a gaggle of college girls to address him as 'Rahul' rather than 'Sir'. 

I have no quarrel with his personal preferences - maybe, as one commentator has suggested, pushing 50, he enjoys teenagers dealing with him more like a peer than an uncleji - and democracy is all very well, but is that how an aspiring prime minister should behave? Does it not take away much of the gravitas which has always been considered essential to the position? Should a president or PM aim at being a passing celebrity with overgrown children like a cricketer or pop star?

Even in the US, where they are very informal about most things, they habitually say 'Mr. President' or 'Sir' when addressing the Chief Executive. Are we trying to become more Yankee than the Yankees?

I am a mere small-town private tutor. But thank God no current or ex-pupil, or their parents, unless they are much older and close to the family, would dream of addressing me as 'Suvro'!

A certain winning slogan for Didi

My daughter and I were discussing the madness of vegetarians/vegans (my suggestion is just send them to Siberia and let them find out how many days they can survive), when it occurred to me that Mamata Banerjee needs only a one-line brahmastra to annihilate the BJP in this state at least during the coming Lok Sabha polls. She should just tell all Bengalis that if the BJP came to power it would try its damnedest to prevent them from feasting on fish and meat... if the alarm spread, I doubt whether any BJP candidate would get more than one vote: his or her own.