'The Society of Mediocre Engineers'

This is an essay after my own heart, and Saptarshi has excelled himself. For the sake of comparison, you can look up the post titled 'Engineer or bust' on my bemused blog.

Saptarshi's latest

My young friend Saptarshi Moitra has written a post in the best tradition of whimsical writing. Look it up here. Thanks and congratulations, Saptarshi.

Readers who are really interested may visit my earlier posts titled 'Pretty good doctors' and 'Of noses and other profound things' (the search bar helps). Indeed, it won't hurt if they explore this blog a little more on their own, either...

Oh, and yes, I almost forgot: Happy Birthday, America!

this and that

Three observations for now.

Driving through the old MAMC township the day before yesterday, I saw a young man galloping past on a horse. I kid you not. Too bad I did not have a camera with me...

This blog remains the poor cousin of the other one. Pity. My readers would not have regretted it if they had explored this one a bit more.

There are few men in my town whom I admire, leave alone respect. One of those is a poor cycle-van driver who goes by my house hawking cowdung manure. He alternately yells to tell people about his ware, and breaks loudly and tunelessly into shyamasangeet or some vaishnav padavali number immediately afterwards. Those who cannot figure out why I admire and respect this man will never know anything essential about me.

Oh, a fourth one. I am sick and tired of people laying claim upon my time without bothering to weigh their words and considering how I might feel reading them...they shouldn't mind that I ignore them completely. After very long and careful deliberation, I have decided that is the only sane thing to do. No man either has infinite patience, nor owes it to anyone. But that could be one reason why some might think of me being wantonly whimsical. Which is why I put this here.

Dwarf vying with giant

Chetan Bhagat, who's lately got too big for his boots riding on the admiration of millions of pinhead teenagers, was firmly put in his place recently by a man whose boots he is not fit to lick - see this - and I am happy.

Thank you, Rajdeep, for sending me the link.

A German who loves India

Here's something written by a well-known man, a man even more whimsical than myself. Read, and let him or me know whether, if you are an Indian, you feel sorry for him and sorry about ourselves. The man loves India despite everything! He can be reached by email at m.kaempchen@gmx.de 

The virus of consumerism, and how it was spread

This is hardly funny, but do look up this link, everybody. This is something I have been writing about in various ways for a long time, this is how it actually happened, and this is how the US, once a truly 'leading' nation in the proper sense of the term, has been polluting the whole world's mindset continuously since the time radio and TV spread around the world... if you know about the disease and how it is spreading, it is slightly easier to resist it.

Conditioners and such things

Wow, ten whole days have passed since the last post here, and I didn't even notice.

Yesterday I saw a young man, a college goer, buying conditioner for his hair. Funny, I have managed to spend and enjoy fifty years of life without feeling the need for such things. And it was a coincidence that the same day I read an article  in The Telegraph titled 'Secrets of beauty' written by Ashok Desai: the author, an economist of some repute, is advising Indians to work less hard and spend more time and money on looking good. I wonder how many readers will even understand that this essay was written with tongue firmly planted in cheek...

Nature's violent beauty

There was the most incredible hailstorm here late this afternoon. Seriously, I am not given to exaggeration, but I have certainly never seen anything like it with my own eyes in all my fifty years. One minute, there was a regular nor’wester raging, sky black, wind howling, rain pouring, the next minute there was the familiar rat-a-rat on the window panes, signaling the beginning of the hail onslaught, but unlike hundreds of previous occasions the noise rose to a thunderous crescendo, like a thousand machine guns going off at once, and I was so terrified all my west-facing window panes would shatter that I ran to open the windows, and the furious gust of wind laden with literally scores of hailstones the size of large marbles almost pushed me off my feet. Within seconds half the room was covered with ice, and so was my whole garden and the road in front: it was as though someone had suddenly covered everything in a winding sheet! Thank God the fury lasted only a few minutes, else heaven knows how things would have turned out. It is still raining as I write, but now it’s only a mild drizzle, and all the accumulated ice is visibly melting away. Soon enough it will be only a dream. This is the nearest thing to a snowfall that Durgapur will ever see, I think, located as we are bang on the Tropic of Cancer, but what a spectacle it was, how much more awesome, yes awesome, than a gentle, silent snowfall could ever be!

(The road in front, my garden, a close-up of the garden, and my doorstep half an hour after)

budding talents galore

I have been feeling a lot of things lately - as readers of the other blog will know - but humorous was not one of them. Still, I must admit people have been supplying me with things to laugh about every now and then. I notice, for instance, that the number of kids who, after ten to twelve years of schooling have virtually no grasp of spelling nor any clear idea about how to use number and tenses while constructing basic sentences is steadily on the rise, as also those who invent words like 'teached' and 'seeked' and 'catched'. And they all go to expensive private schools, mind you; also, many of them are going to land up in the so-called 'elite' engineering colleges in this country. I can name a lot of them from my own erstwhile batches.

As for knowledge of the world, here's a recent gem I discovered in a 15-year old's essay: 'Raja Rammohun Roy fought hard against the custom of sati, but it was emporer (I wasn't the one who misspelled the word) Akbar who finally abolished it. And this is one of the toppers in his class, too...

P.S., April 21: I was marking someone's essay yesterday, and I read that he was 'busy relaxing'. Speaks volumes about which way the world is going.

pop wisdom again

I read on a teenager's t-shirt today 'Hard work never killed anybody, but why take the risk?'

I am not a sourpuss: I get the joke, and under certain circumstances I can enjoy it too. But, professionally speaking and as a parent as well, I cannot but wonder that parents who buy their kids such things also come over to seek counsel about why those kids are becoming cussedly lazy...

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...