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.

To the few who said they don't enjoy this blog at all, I am sorry that my tastes don't match yours. Please don't visit again!

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.

Google instead of brains?

A young and with-it person was complaining about why it is necessary to memorise so many things in order to become educated - all sorts of things from multiplication tables to dates in history to names of so many body parts to rivers and mountains and oceans and what not: 'After all, if there's anything you want to know you can always google it, can't you?'

I didn't see any point in arguing, so I agreed that he was probably right. So in the kind of future he has in mind, I said, doctors and lawyers and other people who used to be called 'knowledge workers' would simply google everything whenever people came to them for advice and help. And teachers, too: already I can see that teachers (at least in schools and colleges) are not really expected to know anything. And I am sure, I said, that people would gladly pay them hefty fees for using google to tell them what they needed to know.

The boy at least had enough intelligence to look abashed. But how much longer, I wonder?

Politically incorrect!

·        Brats need the cane, not fancy therapists (but of course, monsters shouldn’t masquerade as teachers, either).

·        Women can’t have their cake and eat it too. (On those terms, few would want to be 'liberated').

·        The world owes no human a living (so out of work ‘intellectuals’ shouldn’t whine).

·        There are too many scientists around these days. They add much more to confusion than to illumination. They’d have been better employed as taxi-drivers.

·        The problem with education today is that too many lazy people want to make a good living out of it, and too many unwilling people have been pushed up to high school and college, when they should have been sent out to make their own living.

·        Don’t waste your time and money on a book or movie or game until the hype has quite died away.

·        Old wisdom: a team of doctors can be deadlier than a team of hired assassins.

·        Things are badly out of kilter when criminals get more social attention and sympathy than their victims.

·        Then  again, there are too many ‘victims’ around these days: constructing their victimhood is a large-scale industry. Nobody has to be good just because it’s a woman, or a Hindu, or Black, or very young or very old or whatever.

·        We cannot all simultaneously claim to be good people and lament that corruption is taking the country to the dogs.

·        If you have too many friends, there’s probably a big emptiness inside you.

·        The more the jargon, the less the content – that’s an ironclad rule.

·        When a journo or lawyer offers lessons in morality, run. Give me politicians any time.

·        There are four kinds of people in this world: those who have nothing to eat, those who are too busy to eat, those who live lifelong as parasites, and those who have stepped off the treadmill.

·        It’s a good sign if dogs and children like you (but beware – they liked Hitler, too!).

Suhel Seth

was my contemporary (a year or two senior, I think) at Jadavpur University. Even in those days he had a wacky and often naughty sense of humour, as he widely publicised in the hand-written magazine titled Jabberwocky that he edited. Since then he has gone places, and done a lot of things in his time.

I am writing this post just to say I love his page called 'Survival Strategies' that is published every Sunday in the magazine titled 'Graphiti' that comes with The Telegraph. Maybe it's because I have a subliminal wish to be wickedly in-your-face like that myself, if only I had not lived in a 19th-century village, where they all expect teachers to be boring and goody-goody stuffed shirts, never doing anything other than churning notes and collecting fees, for fear of 'what they will say'....! Take a look at the page yourself to see what I am talking about. (You can even follow his page on Facebook. Just type 'Survival strategies Suhel Seth' in the search box).

God willing, I'll do something of the sort myself, when I am old enough, and no longer have to give a damn.

Breathtaking put-downs

I just read Shilpi's blogpost, and the last put-down was superb: the man says to the woman 'I didn't give up my seat for you because you are a lady, ma'am, I did it because I am a gentleman'!

Such magnificent put-downs are necessary to put the rude and the uncouth back in their proper place, and even to make nice people think and re-examine their attitudes towards a lot of things. It reminds me of the prince accosting one John Tower, and quite gratuitously insulting him in public with the remark: 'Hello, Tower. I hear you are the worst blackguard in Liverpool?'. Tower bows to the ground and says, 'I hope your Highness has not come to take my reputation away!' 

And then there was M.K. Gandhi after he had become famous as the Mahatma, who was always good for innocent-sounding but wicked ripostes. When asked what he thought about western civilization, he simply said 'It would be a good idea'. It takes my breath away...

Indlish

Remember me? I am Professor Seth.

Once I taught you geography. Now

I am retired, though my health is good.

My wife died some years back.

By god's grace, all my children

Are well settled in life.

One is sales manager

One is bank manager

Both have cars.

Other also doing well, though not so well.

Every family must have black sheep.

Sarala and Tarala are married,

Their husbands are very nice boys.

You won't believe, but I have eleven grandchildren.

How many issues you have? Three?

That is good. These are days of family planning.

I am not against. We have to change with times.

Whole world is changing. In India also.

We are keeping up. Our progress is progressing.

Old values are going, new values are coming.

Everything is happening with leaps and bounds.

I am going out rarely, now and then

Only, this is price of old age.

But my health is OK, usual aches and pains.

No diabetes, no blood pressure, no heart attack.

This is because of sound habits in youth.

How is your health keeping?

Nicely? I am happy for that.

This year I am sixty nine

And hope to score century.

You were so thin, like stick

Now you are man of weight and consequence.

That is good joke.

If you are coming again this side by chance

Visit please my humble residence also.

I am living just on opposite house's backside.

The Professor, by Nissim Ezekiel

To think that this was written almost half a century ago! (You might also try The Patriot by the same poet). How might the poet have felt if he had lived and observed the 'English-educated' crowd in today's India, where most English teachers themselves don't have the faintest inkling any more about the wretchedness of this pidgin that passes for English (as I should know)?

Horrifying thought: given our numbers, our determination to mangle the language, and the speed with which we are spreading all over the planet, this might be imposed as the International Standard fifty years from now!

Quiz to the readers: how many odd things could you find in the poet's mimicry of Indian English (remembering that language is always a vehicle of culture)?

Treasure forgotten

(photo from wikipedia)

Quiz: Where in Calcutta can you find a private zoo, 25-foot tall Belgian glass mirrors, chandeliers weighing many tons, original paintings by the likes of Rubens and Reynolds, priceless porcelain vases from China's Ming dynasty, giant stuffed heads of moose, and breathtakingly beautiful statues of Greek gods rubbing shoulders with those of eastern deities ... all presided over by a giant statue of young Queen Victoria carved out of a single block of wood? 

Answer: the Marble Palace, built by the fabulously wealthy (and cultured, unlike his early 21st century counterparts!) 19th century Bengali tycoon 'Rajah' Rajendra Mullick. It's just off Chittaranjan Avenue, a few steps after you have passed the Jorasanko Thakurbaari. It's so obscure that even a local rickshawpuller hadn't heard the name (nor had several elderly and young members of the smart set whom I asked at the city's biggest shopping mall, South City. I visited both places the same day in a bid to show my daughter what the city is like today...) Doesn't even the fact that the collection at the palace would be worth several hundred million dollars stir the interest of the most well-heeled of Calcuttans? How much farther will this social dumbing-down go?

Oh Calcutta!

Hard to love people like this

... and the picture itself should tell you why I can't sympathize with their plight!

It makes me sad that one of the most in-your-face signs that this country is 'developing' is that it is rapidly filling up with folks like this. Makes a nice juxtaposition with millions of emaciated and permanently hungry people, it does.

(nobody I know: just got the photo off the net while researching obesity on google images)

Making people read

Someone who is a bibliophile herself recently asked with a note of despair in her voice how she could persuade people to try out some books. I had hardly any advice for her, except to recall something I had read in Reader's Digest long ago:

A librarian who had the same problem (subscribers only went for the latest pulp fiction and refused to look at classics of literature or serious non-fiction) hit upon the idea of labelling one particular shelf 'For high-IQ readers only', and putting all her favourite titles on it. Books started flying off that shelf. 

Now whether the borrowers actually read the books they took home is, of course, another matter altogether!

Ten thousand visits!

Even as I write, the visits-counter has turned over, and I have crossed the 10,000 visits milestone. It has taken me 15 months: much faster than it happened with the other blog. Gives me a good feeling, knowing how hard it is to keep at this sort of thing for weeks and months on end in the midst of a busy (and not too funny) work schedule, with very little help – as I observed in an earlier post. Add to that frequent niggling irritations, like anonymous mugs and complete strangers chipping in just to say they don’t like the contents of this blog (and without making the slightest effort to show me how to do better – as by writing and maintaining a blog of their own)!

Indians are not known for their humour. I keep telling my girls and boys that they exhaust all their sense of fun by giggling so much over inanities and trifles all through teenage that by the time they are adults, they are surly grumblers all, or else they laugh only over obscenities, or over others’ misfortunes. Sit in on any office conversation or party gossip or roadside adda of college dropouts. I may not have a very exalted sense of humour, but I pride myself that I have never needed to stoop to such baseness.

One thing that a lot of people don’t know is that appreciating humour requires a) high IQ, b) wide GK, and c) often also a much better grasp of language than most people can boast of. There’s nothing more painful than watching a joke fall flat simply because the audience has no clue as to what you are talking about. Reminds me of the Bengali adage that a fool always laughs three times over a joke: the first time because he sees others laughing, the second time because the humour strikes him at last, and the third time realizing that he had laughed the first time without understanding…

It is not easy to be whimsical, especially in troubled times. I have met very few people in flesh and blood who can do that. So I am compelled to fall back on quoting the wise-saws of the great and the good, such as when Sir Winston Churchill scathingly put down his garrulous opponent in Parliament by saying ‘The honourable member is modest, and he has much to be modest about’, and when President Lincoln, on hearing about the drinking problem of his brilliant general Ulysses Grant, said ‘Find out what he drinks, and I am going to send a barrel to each of my other generals’, and the incident in the comic book Asterix the Legionary, where the eponymous hero tells friend Obelix to swallow the disgusting-looking mash they serve in the army, saying ‘The worse the food, the stronger the army’, then spitting out a mouthful himself, and commenting with a grimace ‘I didn’t know the Roman army was that strong!’

A good wish to all my followers. Do send in a few words of encouragement now and then…

Criticism

To say something good about others needs character; any uncouth fool can call you names.

While I welcome comments on this blog, they should come from people who have something worthwhile to say, something good to share, some little nugget of wit or wisdom that I and all other readers could profit by; and, if nothing else, to say thanks. And so, before typing in a few lines, the comment-writer should pause to reflect whether s/he has anything at all worthwhile to say, or whether s/he is one more of the literally uncountable pathetic folks who are dying for a moment's attention. There are people who strip in public, and abuse, and walk drunkenly - even without being paid - only to draw others' eyes to themselves, even if it's only looks of contempt and disgust that come their way.

I am reminded of the joke: 'Sir', said the man to the Universe, 'I exist!' 'The fact', came the reply, 'has not given me much concern'... and the fact that the young man who shot US President Ronald Reagan later confessed he had done it merely to get on the front page of all the world's newspapers and thus impress his girlfriend. Most human beings only appear sane!

One of the abiding motifs of the recollections of old boys and girls is about how much they laughed in my class. So, after 29 years, I don't really need certificates. I write here only for the entertainment and edification of those who like what I say. Everybody else is welcome to stay away.

So please don't bother to waste your time just to tell me 'I don't think much of the contents', without even offering a reasoned explanation, and suggestions for better things. If it is entirely a matter of your subjective, and probably untutored judgment, keep it to yourself; I am not interested in how many complete strangers don't like me, especially when I can see how enormously tastes vary: the same joke that someone enjoys hugely falls flat on someone else (who knows but simply because it flew over the latter's head?)

And I was just reminded that some people have to be hit with a hammer on the head before they can recognize a joke.

A wonderful howler

I was thumbing through some old issues of the once famous Punch magazine when I came across this absolutely priceless late-Victorian cartoon: the young man is reclining against the trunk of a shady tree beside his lady love, and by way of making conversation he asks her 'Do you like Kipling?' to which she tartly replies 'I don't know, you naughty boy, I've never kippled'!