voices around the world

I often reflect upon the ways the world has changed since the time our grandparents were young. Thanks to cheap telephone and internet connections, people are now talking across the globe in real time all the time. A lot of people have to do it for a living: think BPO and call-centre operatives. But it's not an unmixed blessing. If you know about international time differences, and how people's body clocks and schedules differ, I mean. So when I am chatting with someone across continents and oceans, I must factor in the reality that I might be sleepy after a hard day, whereas s/he might still be groggy, having just woken up with a hangover, or wisps of a bad dream still not wholly cleared away, or just facing the prospect of another long working day ahead. Besides, one might be in a depressed mood while the other is feeling all chirpy and garrulous. Makes for a difficult situation, really, with chances of unfortunate misunderstandings galore... I leave it to your imagination, unless you have been a victim already, in which case you know, and you have my sympathies. I at least can afford to talk only to people who, I can more or less trust, like me and seriously want to talk to me. God's mercy on those who have to do it with uninterested and often irate strangers, day in and day out, to earn their living... 

Grace

'Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive', wrote the poet, describing the initial euphoria generated by the French Revolution, 'but to be young was very heaven'.

Well, to feel that kind of occasional exultation, you don't need to wake up at dawn, you don't need revolutions, nor to be among large crowds, nor even to be young. All you need is God's grace. And the luckiest among us are those who are showered with such grace now and then.

about an out of the ordinary mule

Read this most unusual article. I found it enchanting and deeply reassuring to know that even in this day and age, some people are wise and observant enough to think and feel like this. Do let me know about your reactions.

find the boss

Subhadip Dutta sent the following cartoon to me. Comment unnecessary.

St. Xavier's Durgapur at fifty

Take a good look at the St. Xavier's Durgapur website. I provide the link here without comment. 

India 2013

I relished this tongue in cheek essay by Suhel Seth in The Telegraph of January 06. I think it captures the prevailing mood of urban, well-off, in-your-face India perfectly.

My friend Suhel, however, betrays his all-too-Indian failing of hypocrisy by signing off with the line ‘Suhel is poor’. No man who lives in metro India, is associated with the ad industry at a fairly high level, speaks English like his mother tongue, is at home on the internet and often appears on television is ‘poor’. That is a pose in rather poor taste, besides being hackneyed. Reminds me of a certain billionaire from the south who has always claimed to be ‘middle class’. Well, I am middle class myself, and I know and admit the difference. I am not poor: I guess I am better off than at least 90 per cent of the population. And I count my blessings every day.

'technical' stuff

…and talking about technology and ‘technical’ people, it always gets my goat to hear people restricting those terms, out of a combination of total ignorance and foolish vanity, to engineers. A carpenter, a potter, a chef or a shawl weaver is quite as much a technical person as any engineer is – the fact that he might not have gone to engineering school, and that his work may not in the current milieu command so good an income and ‘status’ as an engineer’s has everything to do with the way society chooses to value different things, and nothing at all to do with the level and intricacy of the skill involved (I have said before that Salman Khan does nothing at all, in the eyes of any sensible man, that makes him intrinsically worth 5000 times more than a computer code writer and 50,000 times a commando guarding our borders: it merely shows that we are an uncivilized society). Indeed, in more civilized countries even drivers and domestic help command such salaries that only millionaires can afford them, leave alone low-level techies.

Also, ‘technique’ is limited to machinery only by the very stupid. As any language teacher knows, prosody is a highly technical skill. There is very sophisticated technique involved in music and dance (leaving aside the chimp varieties, that is). To grasp the technique of painting or writing might take a lifetime: as the hugely successful novelist John le Carré famously said in his seventies, ‘I think I am beginning to understand how to write’ (Matter of fact: in all my thirty odd years of teaching, I have dealt with literally thousands who were good at math and physics, and I can count on my fingers how many of them could ever write even a decent letter).

So let my readers in future use these words more circumspectly.

Evaluation

The latest (January 17) issue of Desh magazine carries a short story by Seema Ray titled Mulyayan (evaluation). It hit me somewhere very deep, for reasons which will become apparent when you read the summary given below.

A professor of physics in contemporary Kolkata who was also a successful private tutor is now retired, a widower who lives alone, with only a devoted old maidservant for company. He is financially comfortable, but even his grown up children live far away. He rediscovers an old pupil, Arpan, who had never been a ‘bright student’ in the conventional sense – couldn’t ‘crack’ the joint entrance test to become a doctor or engineer (the teacher had once urged Arpan’s father not to ‘waste money’ on the boy, since he was patently not good enough) – and has now opened a mobile phone shop in the neighbourhood, but is doing well, albeit on a small scale. Arpan turns out to be very respectful and useful in many different little ways, so that mashtarmoshai gradually begins to look forward to his company and rely on his help, even to the extent of being driven by him to the wedding of another ex-student. Arpan resents but quietly bears with his teacher’s constant boasting about how many ‘successful’ students he has produced, in terms of how well they are doing in their respective careers, in India and abroad. It is only after Arpan saves his life following a cardiac arrest by rushing him to hospital and taking care of many other incidental needfuls, at some cost to himself and without having any obligation whatever to do so while most of his ‘brilliant’ old boys and girls cry off with the excuse of being busy and far away – even the daughter flies in well after the crisis is over – that he has a change of heart. As he tells Arpan, he’s going to start tutoring again, but this time he will take especial care of the weak and slow learners.

I am ashamed to say that my generation of teachers and parents and the one immediately preceding it – I know hundreds of them personally and closely – is directly responsible for creating a whole generation of ‘successful’ monsters, and like this mashtarmoshai we find out to our great chagrin how deep and deadly our failure is only when we are finally lonely and helpless. We needed to make far more Arpans than all those doctors and engineers without souls and consciences that we have managed to produce instead. I haven’t, of course, been able to change things much; I am very small fry – but as everybody who knows me and my life’s work will aver, it has been my personal jihad lifelong that I shall not be one more parent and teacher of that sort. Indeed, I have been hated, feared, abused, ridiculed and as far as possible isolated by folks of these two generations precisely because I have lived and preached against the established zeitgeist. I shall not have to learn this particular lesson so late in life. And maybe it is because I refuse to boast about anything concerning my old boys and girls except the sort of human beings they have become that so many stay away, knowing that they will never be able to get one good word about themselves from this Sir’s mouth, no matter what their JEE rank was, what position they work in and where, and what size their paycheques are… we need real men, said Vivekananda, everything else will take care of itself. No no, we decided instead, we only need legions of technicians. Let us see how much longer this country needs to realize who was the fool.

Wrapped up kids

It was a very chilly afternoon today, so a lot of my kids were handed out rugs and shawls to cuddle into while they worked at their assignments. They candidly and happily admitted that at no other tutor's could they expect to be pampered like this. I sigh, and wish that some of them would grow up to retain good memories, and do me the kindness of telling me about them. 

Since this is a whimsy blog, no harm in daydreaming. I often wish I'd get a comment every morning, from some old boy or girl telling me about something s/he remembers with warm affection and thankfulness. It would certainly make me a much happier man...

Parasites? Naw, mustn't call people names

It never ceases to amaze me how so many people in this world live - and comfortably too - but don't do any kind of work that is remotely valuable from society's point of view. It's not just criminals and bureaucrats in sinecures and schoolteachers and old folks on pensions... but even middle aged men like me living on the rents of houses that their dads built for them, and PhD and post-doc scholars pretending to add to the world's knowledge and actually doing much less work in a month than a coolie or rickshawpuller does in a day, or tycoons who have inherited their dads' business and play golf or party most of the time, leaving all the nitty-gritty of running the business to their paid engineer/MBA minions, and ministers without portfolios, and government clerks... the list could go on and on. I really wish some economists should write learned papers on people who ride piggy-back on society throughout their lives...

Only for cows

My hundreds of boys and girls never cease to amaze me. I was threatening them with dire consequences if they didn't study hard enough, saying I'd seek their parents' permission to keep them in my house and entirely under my supervision for a month or two, and send them back vastly improved. And I said I'd look after everything, from diet to potty habits to exercise to following strict work routines. When they expressed curiosity about the diet, I mentioned that among other things, they would have to eat a lot of fresh green vegetables. To which someone muttered 'amra goru naa ki' (are we cows or what)?

What does that say about their parents' ideas regarding matters of nutrition? Remember, too, that all these parents are highly educated...

12.12.12, December 21st and all that

A news item in one of the several Sunday papers I read informed me on the 9^th that there’s an ongoing craze worldwide for doing something special on 12.12.12  (and most particularly at 12:12 hours on that ‘special’ day) – that is to say, tomorrow – eating at a fancy joint, buying a car or a house, or even having a baby! The simple reason being that such a triple-barrelled date is never going to come again anytime this century.

As though it makes the slightest difference to anything at all. The world is being swamped by people as bored as they are mindless, and dying all the time for some new sensation – anything at all would do, the stupider the better…

And of course, the faint possibility that, courtesy medieval Mayan astronomers, the world just might end on the 21^st is apparently lending the whole thrill a very special edge. Even the Australian prime minister has been publicly spoofing about it. Heaven help us.

Dumb rich kid

Read this story, then just look at the face in the photograph. 

What sort of people can 'admire' a creature like this simply because he was lucky enough to get rich for a while?

Minds like empty rooms

In his comment on my earlier post titled I am not alone in saying what I do, Nishant Kamath mentioned Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird (it makes me wince to think there are people in the world who don't know that and don't care), now 86, saying 'Now, 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books' (People like J. K. Rowling, Shilpi, Abhirup and I hope a few million others around the world will understand what she means, Nishant, the full import of it that is...)

Harper Lee only ever wrote one book in her whole life. It has been voted as the greatest novel of the 20th century. I shall not go into superlatives - they have been so incredibly cheapened that they don't really mean anything any more anyway - but I sometimes say that the world is divided between those who have read (and loved-) To Kill a Mockingbird and those who have not. It is good to have someone like that on one's side as one fights the forces of enveloping darkness. Minds like empty rooms. Let's not forget the phrase. Some day decades or centuries hence, when some people try to figure out just why men became slaves of machines and were forced into underground dungeons to live like blind worms (see the concluding pages of H. G. Wells' The Time Machine), they might discover that the rot started when people in the mass stopped reading books, and their minds became like empty rooms.

Investment bankers!

We've been joking about investment bankers in the other blog. You might also care to read an earlier post titled 'Monkeys in Armani suits' there. And here is another collection of investment banker jokes that many people are sure to enjoy.

I am not alone in saying what I do!

The following is a translation of the top editorial in today’s issue of Anandabazar Patrika, Bengal’s premier newspaper. The translation is mine. I am sorry I lost the link to the original; if someone can locate it, please send it over.

The worship of  the small

A seventeen-year old in Britain has just invented an ‘application’ which can break up any item of news into three short paragraphs. All the ‘flab’ would be trimmed off. Nick D’Aloisio is already being hailed as a computer wizard, tycoons are coming forward to help fund the happy commercial birth of his revolutionary brainwave. This invention satisfies a very common and evident desire of contemporary  society – learn it quick, say it in short, let me know at once. The custom of drastically summarizing all kinds of reading material has already become widespread. In the west, classical literature is being sought to be presented to today’s youth in highly abridged form: the Bible is being peddled in drastically culled summary, and Shakespeare in sms-text. People these days habitually type ‘lol’ in emails when they want to laugh out loud; nobody says I just saw Dilwale Dulhaniya ley jayenge, because DDLJ does the job.

We want that a movie should last no longer than an hour and a half; cricket matches should be concluded in twenty overs, and textual essays limit themselves to a single line if possible. As an explanation, it is said that people ‘have too little time’ these days. The pace of life has accelerated greatly; nobody can afford to give too much time to any one thing. Most people take this assertion for granted. But what does it mean? Are humans working much harder than before, is the national product increasing exponentially, are people giving far less attention to recreation than to clearing files? Or is it that people these days spend most of their time checking worthless email and text messages, playing endless games on their mobiles, visiting all kinds of useless sites (entirely unconnected with the work at hand) on the internet, wandering about shopping malls, or idly surfing channels on TV? Has mankind’s workload increased, or has a vast vista of trivial engagements opened up? In fact, the means of ‘entertainment’ have multiplied so explosively and the insane urge to enjoy them all at once has become so rabid that men cannot concentrate for long on anything any more. Lack of attention has always been a problem for many; today people have found a very powerful excuse for never cultivating the kind of self-discipline and reflective ability that is absolutely essential in order to learn or do something really well. He was always eager to finish Tagore’s huge novel, but so much ‘work’ came his way in the shape of nonstop net surfing and channel surfing that he could never go beyond  the first page. Couldn’t some kind soul make a four-line synopsis of Gora for this unfortunate, and make a name for himself by providing millions with instant enlightenment?

Wily manipulators with an eye for the main chance have always been ready with enticing games to make money out of lazy dilettantes in  the mass. They do not criticize the age, they only want to make money out of the hordes of ignorant fools who define the age. It is a stupid and arrogant joke to claim to be able to reduce every item of news to three little paragraphs regardless of the importance of its substance, the sophistication of its argument and the quality of its writing style. This joke has thrilled a society which demands to understand an epic by reading the blurb on the book jacket. But this kind of shortcut insults both the serious journalist and the mindful reader. The collective which does not recognize it as an insult need only be contemptuously called h.l. – no point typing the whole word ‘hopeless’ to describe it (the original Bangla says hobha for hotobhagyo)

A word of thanks

I noticed today that 'The Warlock' has recently enlisted as the 95th member here, and I welcome him. We have known each other for only a short while, and that too only via the internet, but I have grown to like him, and - though he writes sparingly - his blog is listed in my blogroll (on the bemused blog), because he writes sensibly and well. I shall be glad to hear from you now and then here, Warlock!

God in heaven!

Talking about coarse and mindless, go to google images, type in the key words "82-year old fashion models" and look at the results. 

Just watching the scene

'Things in West Bengal and other parts of India are coming to such a pass that there is no guarantee that even an "educated" person will honour the unwritten codes of conduct in public life.' Not my words, but those of today's editorial in my newspaper. Good to see, at least, that other people have noticed what I have been carping about for a long time, and even considered it necessary to comment unhappily on the situation.

Without actually changing context, here is what I read on the T-shirt of a pupil today: 'If you see your ex with someone else, don't bother, because our parents have taught us to give away our used toys to those who are less privileged.' That is of course meant to be a joke, I understand. But don't jokes say a great deal about whether or not we are living in civilized times?

Then again, what can you expect in an age when the world can go gaga even over something as coarse and mindless as Gangnam style (have you read the lyrics in English)?

Fifty shades of nightsoil

Abhirup has been urging me to comment on the ongoing global phenomenon of 50 Shades of Grey for a long time. I won't: I consider it infra dig. But he has supplied me with a cartoon that says virtually all I wanted to say, so I have pasted it here (you might want to zoom out in order to read the text clearly...)

If you still can't read the text, try this link. And you can also go to google images and find out more stuff of the same sort by typing in the key words '50 shades of grey cartoons'.  I am frankly delighted that women all over the world, by buying the books by the tens of millions, have openly admitted just what they are like, as the man in the above cartoon says to his wife.