Biking around at 77!

My dear old boy Arnab Chakraborty sent me this link, surmising - quite rightly - that I'd be interested.

I take my hat off to this sprightly old/young man, going strong at 77 still. Brought back to mind the Canadian surgeon I heard about once, just about the same age, who earned millions over eleven months a year, and went off holidaying in January without fail to work/enjoy himself as a ski-instructor (and skiing is one of the most physically challenging sports, too...)

Do the white (and maybe also black-) men just have something in them that we don't? I already feel so old sometimes, though I still exercise, and many people assure me I don't look my age. Suppose I survive up to 77, would I have the strength, pluck and enthusiasm to carry on like Simon Gandolfi? I sincerely hope so. No point living too long otherwise.

Service with a smile

I had an interesting experience last night. Ever since I quit journalism, I have steered clear of politicians, but of course every now and then you have to rub shoulders with them... and so I turned up at my (newly-elected) local councillor's office with a request for a certain piece of paper that only some elected public official can issue. Nothing very important, and certainly not a 'special favour' of the sort that requires bending rules and things like that, but as everyone knows, in this country ordinary people without 'connections' are apt to be harassed and fleeced by the netas and babus for no fault of their own. So it was a very pleasant surprise to have my work done in a jiffy, and that too in a very courteous manner - for once, it didn't sound like a hollow joke when the man behind the desk said 'We're here to serve you'. If this is the way they are ensuring that I will vote for them next time round, why, I wish them godspeed. They didn't even charge a penny (it would have been perfectly okay to ask for fifty rupees, or at least ten, if only to cover establishment, stationery and such other costs). I came home reflecting on how little our vast, creaky, unwieldy and free public services are appreciated, while we rave starry-eyed about private hospitals and schools and hotels and malls which charge us the earth for every little thing right and left.  There is much that is wrong with our country, not least in areas that most of us never care to think about...

Fun in the dark

We went through what the media is touting as the 'world's worst power outage' ever over the last two days (mercifully in the locality where I live, there was one power cut that lasted six hours in the daytime and another hour and a half in the evening; bearable enough by Indian standards, since the taps didn't run dry). The event has already spawned a number of good jokes; the one I liked best being that it happened because Rajnikanth was charging his mobile phone...

'Journalistic ethics'!

I had promised in my last post to give a glimpse into the world of journalism, as I have seen it. I could cite a lot of hilarious (or disgraceful) incidents from my own direct experience, but for now let two incidents suffice, things that happened within the last decade in my own town.

Several years ago, some outgoing girls had gathered in their school (very well known hereabouts) to bid farewell to one another. Girls being girls, they had to do something ‘exciting’, so many of them had brought over their old shirts and told one another to write parting messages on them with indelible ink. Naturally they were ‘expressing themselves’ by screaming their heads off, until it attracted the attention of the irate headmistress, who confiscated many of these offending shirts and sent the whole class out of the campus, telling them to go directly home. Next day some of the papers carried the news that a lot of schoolgirls had been stripped by the authorities and sent home déshabillée!

Then there was this fracas among parents and staff in the school where I had once worked, a few years ago. There was some angry talk, a lot of abuse was bandied about freely, and one or two staffers were pushed around… nothing much really. Many of these boys came to my tuition, and I heard the details from them. What is relevant here is that they had heard some journos prodding them to spill the beans about what was going on in the school, with the following words… tora kichhu bolbi, na amrai baniye baniye likhe debo (are you going to talk, or shall we make it all up ourselves)?

From long personal experience (my family has been in close touch with the media world for more than thirty years now) I know that this is the norm rather than the exception (remember the posto I mentioned in the last post?) So much for lofty ethical standards.  This is the reason that what you get if you google 'News of the World scandal' comes as no surprise, at least to the likes of me. No profession more deserves to be told ‘physician, heal thyself’…I think it was Desmond Doig, a celebrity journo himself, who famously said about Mother Teresa that she never read newspapers, so she knew better than most just what was going on in the world!

[My strategy seems to be paying off. The last post has attracted 500-odd visits within a week. However, I am waiting for more comments here, and the members count topping the 100-mark]

P.S.: If you are a complete stranger and are commenting here for the first time, start with a short self-introduction, specifically mentioning your age. I expect the same good manners on the internet as in the outside world: courtesy is a must, especially if you are someone far junior. That's orthodox Indian tradition, and I am a very orthodox person in these matters. If I am old enough to be your father or teacher, you will use language that is appropriate for your own father or most respected teacher. Otherwise, stay away...

What happened in Guwahati?

[Nothing in this post should be construed to mean that I have the slightest sympathy for people who gang up to harass, abuse, hurt and humiliate the weak – by which I mean not only young girls but children, old people of both sexes, the disabled, the ill and even the lone man against the mob… we too easily forget that young girls are not the only victims of abuse! A lot of people of the type who are now up in arms in defence of this girl find it quite right and enjoyable to beat a petty thief to death or close if he is unlucky enough to get caught: I have seen this again and again with my own eyes]

The more I read up on the net (click here and here) about what happened that night in Guwahati, the more I smell something very, very fishy.

For one thing, the so-called video looks much less like a genuine molestation scene than a grotesque pantomime in slow motion: in this age of the uncouth and the absurd, courtesy kinky cinema and mindless ad flicks, surely most sane readers will agree that much weirder things can be ‘arranged’? This suspicion grows strong when one sees how quickly politicians have got into the mutual mudslinging act, how the police still haven’t picked up the main accused, and how the National Commission for Women seems at a loss about what to do (this evening I heard it has recommended that the government ‘rehabilitate’ the girl with a job. For god’s sake!)

Secondly, molesters rarely allow themselves and their dastardly act to be filmed for the record at length – unless the whole thing is premeditated for a purpose (Amitabh Bachchan has asked in his blog how a TV crew was so promptly on the spot). I have been on the news beat (real news, not covering models doing the catwalk or launching new brands of shampoo), and I know that the far commoner reaction is to take away the camera and beat up the man behind it.

Thirdly, ‘assaulted and molested for half an hour before she was rescued by some passers-by’? How could a girl be assaulted and molested in public for half an hour? And who were these ‘passers-by’ who then rescued her? Were they a bigger mob, or armed policemen, or a few braveheart do-gooders? What took them so long, and how did they persuade the ‘molesters’ to let the girl go?

Fourthly, some reports say the girl was a minor: so what was she doing in a pub? Why did they throw her out only when she couldn’t pay? It even seems she had been brawling drunkenly on the street with some of her friends, and it is some of these ‘friends’ who then turned on her (some are even saying that one of these friends was the reporter who told the cameraman to start shooting; the fellow has resigned from his job even before formal charges have been brought against him!). What kind of people did she choose as friends? Everybody is screaming about her rights and how they have been violated – what about some talk of responsibility? What kind of responsibility did this girl take for her own safety? What kind of parents let their 17-year old kid out for a night on the tiles? Why don’t people who want that kind of ‘fun’ – no matter whether they are young or old – calmly accept the fact that it goes with certain kinds of risks? Nobody accuses ‘society’ of neglect or abuse when a bungee-jumper dies because the rope broke!

And finally, all this talk about how journalists were involved, and what they should and shouldn’t have done fills me with deep disgust. Any honest reporter admits in private that ninety per cent of what they are accused of is true: they are only concerned with finding or actually creating sensation, because that alone sells, and that alone is what ultimately matters. In the newsroom we talked about posto – slang (in those days, I don’t know what it is now) for concocted or grossly embellished news, and how most of our pages were routinely filled with such stuff.  I shall narrate just two fairly recent incidents here, both in Durgapur. But let’s keep that for the next post… 

So what am I missing here? Those who have been following the unfolding story more closely, would they care to enlighten me? Catcalls, wolf-whistles, lewd remarks, surreptitious groping in buses, yes (disgusting as all that is), but girls are not as a rule suddenly molested on city streets by gangs, else all the hundreds of girls who have been coming alone to my classes for years would have stopped coming long ago. Why did this happen? And what really happened? 

Sayan and Rashmi's blog

My old boy Sayan and his wife Rashmi have started their own blog. 

I should like all my readers to visit them, become members, and write sensible and encouraging comments every now and then.

Also, though only 85 people have become members of this blog as yet, I know that far more people visit (the number of members on the other blog is now 275). So how about cheering me up by joining the members' list? It's not a crime. Go on, it takes only a minute...

Only Man is vile

The evil that men do lives after them,

The good is oft interr’d with their bones…

(Shakespeare, Julius Caesar)

There were these parents of an ex-student who had come over for a chat, and they happily and gratefully recalled the time they spent when their daughter was a pupil here. I do not like to boast, but it made me feel good to see how well they remembered all the ‘special’ favours that the girl and her friends had been treated to as a matter of course – things that were special only because they had neither expected nor got the same treatment at any other tutor’s: a large, well-lit and airy room to study in rather than a dingy garage, a clean toilet always available, filtered water to drink, medicines whenever someone felt ill, our own clothes for them to change into when they came in from the rain dripping wet, the meals upstairs when some child was hungry, the assurance that the kids were safe indoors with us when a parent couldn’t help being late in picking them up, the punctuality which made things hugely convenient for them and their parents alike, the stories they heard, the games they played, the movies they watched, the quizzes they enjoyed, the countless jokes they laughed over, the meticulous correction and commentary on homework, the habit of disciplined regular work well within deadlines, which, if picked up here, helped them to do better in all subjects, the books they borrowed to read, the new vistas opened up of so many things they had never even heard before, things which came in tremendously useful later in life, whether they were taking a vocabulary test or participating in a group discussion or an impromptu writing contest, even at university level or while entering working life…

I told them that the real wonder was not that I did all this, but that they remembered still, long after my immediate utility was exhausted, and had even bothered to come over to thank me for it. I am not ungrateful to Providence: certainly for years and years lots of ex-students and parents have spoken well of me; nothing else can explain why such big numbers come over unfailingly to enroll with me at the start of session after session, despite all my failings, all the outbursts of temper, all the scathing remarks, all the worst that the scandal-mongers have spread. What makes me wonder is that so few people thank me directly for what they have got from me (even over the phone or the internet), and also that there is a sizeable number of people who, after having enjoyed and benefitted from everything good that I did for them, have decided, once they found out that I had maybe one fault or two, that I was an entirely forgettable person, or not a nice man to know. And this is not peculiar to someone like me: titans all through history have faced the same weird treatment from the people. One fault or shortcoming discovered (you know, Gandhi had sexual urges for women other than his wife!!!), and all the great and good about them is instantly forgotten. Talk about selective memory. Which is why I tell everybody that to praise someone is infinitely harder than to abuse. Anybody can speak ill of you, however noble you might be, and however petty and despicable a character he might have himself. It is hard to live long and not become a misanthrope. I think it was in this frame of mind that the poet wrote of a beautiful natural landscape ‘where every prospect pleases/ and only Man is vile’!

A 'forgetful' nation

In this front-page news item in yesterday's newspaper, I read that 'forgetful' Indians have left behind Rs. 60 crores worth of hand luggage at various airports in the country over the last four years.

Although the reporter has blamed 'stress' and 'multi-tasking' and that sort of 'in' garbage, the psychologist he took the trouble to consult has hit the nail on the head: 'People all over the world forget things but we Indians more so, as we are (by breeding-) less organized'. 

I guess that that explains an awful lot of things about why this country is so messed up. From pupils 'forgetting' things that they have been told a hundred times over to people having accidents on the road because they 'forget' to give the right signals to doctors 'forgetting' to write detailed case histories before prescribing medicines... 

Powerless in Washington, D.C.

Read this. In the capital city of the world's most powerful nation, citizens are beginning to find out what misery means, misery of a sort that virtually all Indians are only too familiar with. 

What makes for 'excellence'?

The photograph below was taken in front of a lavatory in one of the most elite educational institutions in this country, one of our 'centres of excellence'. Comment unnecessary.

Pretended interests

Looking up this news item I have been quietly laughing for some time. Now that studying the 'arts' (as they are called in India) is beginning to pay good money - via advertising, journalism, law, management and suchlike - a lot of high scorers in the plus-two level examinations are making a beeline for them at the time of college admissions. One more open secret publicly revealed: in India it has always been about money and comparative ease of landing jobs, period. No question of personal interest in any subject/career. As I have been saying for donkey's years, if suddenly tomorrow millions of parents and their kids heard that studying history or painting was paying much more than engineering and far more jobs were available, the IITs would be emptied, and nobody will go around saying 'I too am deeply interested in science' any more...a lifetime of teaching has taught me very well how many are really interested in science, or any other academic subject for that matter.

Without comment

The above is a sample of what teachers are doing with the English language all over India.

My thanks to Saikat Chakraborty for sending me the picture.

'Loved ones far away'

P. G. Wodehouse once wrote that in order to be happy all a man needs is a Pekinese dog, a swimming pool at home, and loved ones far away. Can any cynic beat that? It bears reminding ourselves what Aristotle really said was that children and teenagers apart (merely because they cannot feed themselves, nothing more), man is not a ‘social’- but a political animal, who invariably bickers and fights and even kills whenever he is caught up in large groups, and has discovered politics as a safety valve to avoid constant and large scale killing of his fellow men, simply because he can’t put up with them for very long. Otherwise, he depends on circuses of one sort or another to keep him forgetful of his plight, whether they be weddings or shopping malls or cricket and football or casinos or drunken orgies…but those of course, serve only men who do not think.

Gems of howlers

This one again is for those who can relish humour in Bengali. A retired schoolmaster is reminiscing over the gems of howlers he had collected over a long career. click and zoom on the print...

Orangs and iPads

The right gadget has at last found the right kind of user: see this newspaper editorial.

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...