One word can make a world of difference

Sayan Datta's recent confession in a comment on my other blog that he now understands much better how much of a difference single words (and even inflexions on words) can make reminded me of a joke that I read in a book of humour:

The ship had docked at port, and on the first night spent on land after a long time, the first officer became so disgracefully drunk that he could not report for duty for the whole of the next day. The stern captain entered the following comment in the ship's log - 'Unfortunately the first mate was drunk all day'. On hearing about it, the said officer was aghast, and he pleaded strenuously with the captain to strike that comment off the record, since otherwise it could permanently mar his career. But the captain was unbending, insisting that it was a serious infringement of service rules, and besides, he had written nothing but the literal truth. Realising that it was a lost cause, the first officer went away to take revenge by writing his own entry in the log - 'Fortunately, the captain was sober all day.'

Only a game

My daughter found this game by chance on the net. I was aghast. Do take a tour. It is actually teaching children (most players, I guess, would be children and teenagers) that to run a big business organization profitably, just about everything goes. Politicians, workers, environmentalists, scientists, health regulators, consumers – they are all either interfering busybodies meant to be bought off with bribes, or slaves to be worked to the bone for as little as possible, or suckers to be parted from their money in the most ‘efficient’ (read profitable-) way possible: all other considerations, especially ethical ones, be damned.

I used to think that you had to get into business school, at least, to be drilled in this most pernicious doctrine, but now it seems that you cannot be too young!

desi diners

I happened to lunch at one of the new 'Food courts' run by Haldiram's in Kolkata the other day, and I am glad to report that they are doing good business. It seems it's childishly easy to give the likes of Macdonald's and KFC a run for their money by just cloning them, even with an all-vegetarian menu. And given the clean, quiet ambience and airconditioning, the Rs. 75 you have to shell out for a standard (and adequately filling-) thaali  is reasonable pricing indeed. May the tribe prosper. 

thumbs down again

I must say I am disappointed that the last post fetched not one comment in a whole week.

That's one reason I don't write about books and movies too often - I have found out the hard way that either people are uninterested, or they have nothing to say.

And this made me thank my lucky stars once again that I don't have to depend on writing for a living: even writing light-hearted stuff. The very thought makes my flesh creep... in this country, it's much safer to lance ulcers or patch up boilers in a power plant, or even count notes in a bank. You might go back to the post titled "Ten thousand visits" which I wrote back in May 2010.

Fun movie

Just watched a newly released offbeat satirical-comedy movie titled Phas gaya re Obama. The story-line can be found here. NRI businessman loses everything in the 2008 American economic meltdown, desperate to raise money quickly, comes home to sell off his ancestral haveli, has qualms of conscience about throwing out a lot of dependants, then kidnapped by a series of increasingly more menacing roughnecks who are all slavering over the imagined ransom he would fetch – ending up with a powerful state minister who is aspiring to be CM – and using his wits to get out of their clutches, while simultaneously getting them to pay over all the money he needs to save his house back in New Jersey, then taking the first flight back, presumably forever.

It’s no great shakes, but I liked the movie for a number of reasons. It does not depend on a star cast and big-yawn ‘item numbers’, it avoids sleaze almost entirely, it ruthlessly mocks the cow belt political class as well as the now-ancient Indian obsession with Umrica and big bucks (one young man has an epiphanic moment near the end), as well as the way we (including our so-called English teachers!) are mangling the English language beyond recognition in our mad bid to get smart, it uses wit of fairly good quality (by which I mean something better than slapstick) effectively, it portrays Neha Dhupia as someone who can sometimes rise to things better than being a modeling bimbo (here, a female Gabbar Singh), it manages to convey danger and fear without resorting to crude and bloody violence on-screen, it depicts low-level goons as rather sympathetic, or at least pitiable creatures (everybody is down at heel thanks to the recession, even kidnappers!), and it lets Rajat Kapoor play the finest role I’ve seen him in since Bheja Fry: a basically good man though he is a businessman, who, floundering in an alien and hostile environment, is nevertheless ready to fight tooth and nail with everything he’s got to save himself and his family when put into a nearly hopeless situation, but who never gets greedy, never seeks vengeance, and even discovers imaandaari among his tormentors, and pays back in the same coin. Also, the use of Barack Obama’s now-famous ‘Yes, we can’ speech as the background leitmotif is both clever and entertaining. No matter what the box-office figures might tell you, it’s worth watching.

Without comment

This is The Telegraph's Valentine's Day special for Durgapur.

What do my readers feel about it?

yeesh!

I just heard that a very 'successful' and 'modern-minded' couple - husband a CA/MBA and senior executive in a large MNC, wife an engineer - arranged for a lavish Saraswati puja at home because their child, apparently, has been running from pillar to post to get a scholarship to some undergraduate course in the USA but has been unsuccessful so far. 

Just wanted my readers to know.

Humbugs

Wielding his pen dipped in vitriol and still going strong at 96, Khushwant Singh in today's newspaper remarks on the strange contradiction of a nation that boasts of Gandhi as its greatest icon and also takes great pride in showing off its military muscle in public pageants (as on Republic Day in New Delhi). He sums up by saying that 'India is not the land of Gandhi, it is the land of humbuggery'. 

Which reminded me of a schoolboy who recently told me his teachers had taken away the offer to let him speak before the assembly because he had demurred at needlessly buttering up an ex-principal by calling him a 'great' man ( though it is common knowledge that the teachers and the entire student body almost without exception privately despise the man in question, and in any case he has not left any significant achievement behind). 

Not only are we humbugs, we elders as teachers and parents insist that the children in our charge must grow into humbugs too! Otherwise, our 'glorious civilization' will be in danger...

What young India can teach us

I was dealing with a class which is about to go up to the seniormost year in school - class 12. We were studying F. Max Mueller's famous 150-year old essay What India can teach us (from which Jawaharlal Nehru quotes proudly in The Discovery of India). We had reached the point where he was waxing eloquent on India's rich mythology - whereupon I stopped and grinned at the boys and girls, saying, 'Of course, you know all about that, don't you? Any one of you could impress any westerner with gems from our rich storehouse of myths, surely, you, the smartest lot of today's Indians?... Let's see now,' and I picked on one girl at random and quizzed her 'What was Kacha's relationship with Devayani?' She looked blank, just as I had expected. 'Well, then, how were Bali and Sugriva related?' Again, she shook her head doubtfully, looking more flustered than before. No one came to her aid, though there were a few hushed mutterings. I tried one last time: 'What was the name of Lakshmana's wife?' The girl's face lit up with delight - she knew this one - and she declared, 'Sita, Sir!'

Home truth

There's a comic strip titled "Golmele Ginni" (Troublesome Housewife) in Anandabazar Patrika which often gives me stuff good for belly laughs. Recently there was one strip in which the little grandchild says 'Grandma, don't you want to go to the zoo?' Pat comes the reply: 'No, I don't like the idea of buying tickets to visit my relatives...'

I've got a double!

Imitation, they say, is the sincerest form of flattery. So - since so many people, students and teachers alike - pass off my writing as their own, I guess I should feel flattered. I have lately been told by some pupils of mine (and I checked) that someone has flattered me even more by opening a fake account in my name on Facebook, using the same photo as I use on my real profile. 

'How did you know it wasn't really me?' I asked them. 'Well, Sir, you don't send or grant friend requests to schoolgirls, do you?' they said charmingly. Clever, I must say...

A better way to travel

Travelling around swathes of West Bengal and the metropolis of Kolkata this time round (it was full holiday season too), it struck me with renewed force how utterly alike people are becoming everywhere – in this country at least. And it wouldn’t have bothered me so much if they had become alike in good manners and civic sense. But it is most evident to anyone who cares to notice that all the resemblance applies to undesirable traits: the same spitting and littering right and left, the same unconcern for traffic and parking rules (and eagerness to quarrel if anyone points out they are breaking rules), the same loud and coarse jokes, the same hogging (and it is hogging I mean – I have nothing against decent eating!), the same jostling and queue-jumping, the same disdain for other people’s convenience, the same vulgar display of new-gotten wealth, the same obsession with shopping malls everywhere (why go to places which are of historical/cultural significance, then, if all you want to do is shop and eat?). I don’t go abroad, but I am alarmed to hear that the streets of Singapore and Dubai are crowded with Indians exactly of the sort I have described, and road signs in Switzerland are being written in Hindi, and there are streets in London and New York which sound and smell like any town in India, and imagining what kind of crowds I might have to rub shoulders with in such places, I say a quiet ‘God forbid’ inside my mind.

I used to love travelling, and have travelled far and wide for a long time. Of late, however, I notice I am becoming less inclined to travel for pleasure. Travel-related books and video CDs, meanwhile, have become widely and cheaply available – you can visit any place from Antarctica to Greece to the Ajanta caves to Shantiniketan from the comfort and safety of home, avoiding all the expense, worry, risk and annoyance of having to rub shoulders with vast hordes of unpleasant people. Even watching Durga puja or Christmas celebrations around the town is done best on TV. Maybe, in the years to come, that is the way I will travel for choice!

P.S., Jan. 10: I found this absolutely hilarious little essay on the net, and though the author is a foreigner, my sympathies lie entirely with him.

OOPS!

Talk about whimsicality!

While fiddling around with the comments list on my blogger control panel I accidentally deleted all the more recent comments there.

I am, of course, deeply dismayed. My deepest apologies to all who had written those comments. Please don't stop writing, and I promise not to be so silly ever again...

Taking a break

I have written sixty times on this blog this year. Over that same time, the followership has risen a bit, and so has the number of visits. The figures are not bad, but I would have been happy to have more followers, more visits and more comments. I have this suspicion that not enough of the readers of my other blog visit this one frequently. I do, do hope that they would give it a try. As I have said before, it offers a different flavour, and you would get a more well-rounded mental picture of me if you read both. I have said that this is not merely a fun blog, but one dedicated to whimsy. That is a much broader, deeper idea: so I write about everything from noses to mobile mania to mangled English and pretty doctors and what have you, and I expect my readers not only to smile with me but muse along, too, and perchance to jerk awake and revise some of their long-fixed opinions now and then…

Anyway, I shall take a break for a while. Sixty times a year is quite a bit; many blog-writers I know cannot write more than two or three times, unless they are writing fatuous nonsense three times every day. Take time to explore older posts on this blog, and comment on some of them, as Rashmi has done recently. Good critical commentary and suggestions will of course be welcome, too. Some of you might discover, if you give it time, that it grows on you, even if I say it myself. Meanwhile, Merry Christmas.

No 'chat-ting'!

My older ex-students often tell me they cannot access me by chat on gmail, or even look up my blogs, because, though they are stuck before computers all day long, most colleges and offices - out of sheer exasperation with how much employees tend to waste company time on the net if left to their own devices, I'm sure - have blocked out all sorts of facilities, including blogs and sites like Facebook and orkut.

This morning one old boy told me something that really takes the cake. Apparently the computers in his workplace are loaded with some sort of filtering program that blocks out anything that has the word (or wordlet) '-chat' in it. As a result, he said, he cannot even look me up by name on Google Search (I being a Chatterjee)! The same goes for Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay...

A great speech mangled

In a cartoon titled 'Gaurav' in The Telegraph today, the smart young teenage hero is thrilled to see that The History Channel on TV has dubbed Dr. Martin Luther King jr's famous speech, not into Hindi but Indian English, so that the great man seems to be saying "I'm having a dream that one of the days, my baba-logs, you know, will not be judged by skin and all, yeah? But by their good character only..."

For the benefit of the mystified, the relevant line in the original speech was I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. 

The Devil's Dictionary

I first came across Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's dictionary when I was in high school, and it has never ceased to enthrall with its wicked wit. Here, for instance, are three of Bierce's idiosyncratic definitions:

Beggar: One who has relied on the assistance of friends.

Cannon: An instrument used for the rectification of national boundaries.

Belladonna: In Italian, a beautiful lady; in English, a deadly poison. A striking example of the essential similarity of the two languages.

And if you think that Bierce was petty enough to be a misogynist, here's another:

Brute: see Husband.

Inglis as she is spoked...

I was recently reading the blog of a (now very common type of) smart aleck who was lecturing the world about how English is such a wonderfully fluid and flexible language, how its real charm lies in the way users keep on modifying it 'creatively', and how those who insist on some standards are pitiable stick in the muds at best, and no better than racists or sexists at worst.

Now I have written about this tendency before – this inability to believe that there can be standards higher than one’s own, this innate inability to respect people who are better than oneself (which might persuade one to try and become slowly better at doing things; that’s the only way people can improve – whether it is at math or music or cooking or anything else), this pride in semi-literacy and justifying one’s incompetence at expressing oneself well with the argument that anything goes, after all, as long as one can somehow get one’s thoughts across (you can check previous posts here, such as Indlish, Job application goof-ups and many more). What does it matter if I write 'grass eats cow' instead of  'a cow eats grass', really (what does it matter if instead of eating off a clean plate I use one on which the cat has just relieved itself)?

The effect of this pernicious (and increasingly popular, naturally, in an age when anything that requires talent, mental discipline and sustained effort is anathema, an age when Mozart and Lady Gaga can be called musicians in the same breath) doctrine is that people expect to get away with anything at all. A student writing ‘Portia had a wonderful father who wanted to marry her even after his death’ expects so, the teacher who says ‘I have two daughters and both are girls’ does so, the restaurant manager who writes a sign saying ‘The water in this restaurant has been personally passed by the manager’ does so, the barman who warns in a notice that ‘Ladies are advised not to have children in the bar’ does so, the leave applicant at the office who writes ‘My wife is ill and I am the only husband at home’ does so, the tourist who exults over how cheap the ‘fooding’ is in the hotel he has found does so, the idiot who writes Jibananda Das when he means Jibanananda Das on his blog and does not notice the mistake in a whole year does so…I remember William Safire the famous American newspaper columnist sighing that there was a time when Americans could speak instead of snorting and grunting like cave-men and worse. And it is that breed of American (I know many who are better) who are spreading the virus of linguistic philistinism worldwide, among all those who identify the worst of everything American with ‘smartness’ and modernity (it's cool to wear shorts of the kind that keep half your backside open to public view...)

The fact that most ‘educated’ people these days are illiterate except when they are dealing with numbers, that most PhDs and MBAs would swoon if I gave them a comprehension exercise from P.G. Wodehouse, does not automatically give them a right to impose their illiteracy upon those who know better. And to those who claim that ‘everybody’ is doing it, my retort is that you don’t know everybody; try consorting with your betters rather than your peers. Finally, I am not  stuck in the days of Shakespeare or John Ruskin: even among the best and most successful  contemporary writers, grammar, spelling, syntax,  idiom and careful choice of words are just as sacrosanct as ever – as you could check out with J.K. Rowling, Jeffrey Archer, Stephen King, John le Carre, John Grisham, or even Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Seth and Jhumpa Lahiri.

But that is, of course, only if you can do something as hard and ‘boring’ as reading books… I forget myself! Of course most educated people deal only with the likes of Chinamen selling umbrellas and electronic toys, and therefore need no more English than is required to compose blurbs on packaging cartons (ever read that kind of 'English'?)

And by the way, I direct the same sneer at all those Bengalis who cannot speak or write three successive whole sentences in chaste Bangla without lapsing into English or Hindi slang. In West Bengal, at least, that accounts for 998 ‘educated’ folks out of every thousand now. They say 'ami car-ta niye season flower shopping korte jachchhi', and are very proud of it. Anyways, they're absolutely awsum, lol! (OMG, wasn't that the coolest line I writed here, dude?)

Did I tell you about my new gizmo/junket?

My good young friend Sumitha had once written to me via email about why she hates so-called social networking sites: most people, she said, merely put up all kinds of pictures and drop all kinds of names just to draw attention desperately to themselves: look, I have been there, done that, I hobnob with so many big noises, and so forth. It disgusts me too, and I have seen the same tendency on people’s blogs, and even in emails they send to me: they are not in the least interested in other people, they only want to talk about themselves and their piddling ‘achievements’ and acquisitions. We were brought up in an ambience where we were told only crass and ‘uneducated’ people do that sort of thing: now it’s spread like an epidemic. It isn’t civilized to talk about such things; it’s best not to mention them at all unless absolutely necessary in the context. It only tells others you suffer from great insecurity combined with a bloated ego, and if you are ‘admired’ for that, it’s only by people who are just as crass and silly as you are (Ooh, she’s got a chauffeur/ a new laptop/ a new hairdo!).

Of course there are people about whose travels and houses and cars and wines I love to hear – but that’s not only because they are close friends but I know that showing off is the last thing on their minds; all they want is to share with me the kind of stories I like to hear. Alas, their numbers are pitifully small.

And then there are people who are so dull that it never occurs to them that their vaunting may sound offensive and stupid: when it is pointed out to them, they privately take offence, and sometimes get back to you with lame apologies – ‘That’s not what I meant…’ Why on earth don’t people reflect a bit about how others might react to what they say before saying it?

Fast life

I normally pay all my bills within a few days of receiving them, but last month, through an oversight, the phone bill was forgotten till almost the last moment. The 29th of the month is apparently the last date for paying this sort of bill without a fine. The payment office is virtually next door, so I dropped in twice, on the mornings of both the 28th and 29th, and came away scared by the long queues - it would have entailed standing for an hour at least. 

This morning I went again, and there was nobody else, so it took me less than a minute to get the job done. The price - a fine of ten rupees.

There are so many hundreds of people around who can both afford to and are quite comfortable with standing in long queues for hours on end so that they might not have to pay ten rupees extra. These people are all more than well-off, it goes without saying - the ruling party calls this a rich man's neighbourhood! - and they all sing in chorus at the appropriate places about how terribly busy they are, what a fast life this has become...