Kid stuff?

I was probably in college when I first became aware that the usually whimsical, often hilarious and apparently innocuous nursery rhymes that all children (at least in educated families) are fed with actually have convoluted, unexpected and frequently very dark histories – certainly not what in this hyper-sensitive, politically correct age we would regard as appropriate stuff for children. What surprises await the person who first explores the stories behind Jack and Jill, Humpty Dumpty, Mary Mary, quite contrary and Ring a ring o’ roses! For starters, the curious might look up this website.

Strange, indeed, that children absorb the fun without having their psyches permanently warped by such red-hot material (and lucky for literature that most mothers never find out!). Obviously kids are made of much sterner stuff than we normally credit them with…

Hello, Sir?

It happens time and time again that old boys (or girls) ring up, hear my daughter's (or wife's) voice, and say 'Hello Sir, this is X here...'.

And many of these people are sharp and bright young folk, going by their school reports. It makes me wonder about what the IQ levels and reflex speeds of their progeny are likely to be...

Overheard

...now that the dadus have retired, and we have a dada as well as a didi to look up to, no one can stop Bengal from forging full-steam ahead!

Geronimo!

The more alert and aware people of diverse social groups become of their rights, privileges and dignity, the more difficult it becomes to stay politically correct all the time. It has become well-nigh impossible to make public jokes about racial and gender stereotypes. You have to call the head of a university department a ‘chair’ these days, because both chairman and chairwoman are insulting to one or other group of sensitive people, and chairperson never really caught on. Now I hear that some native American Indians are up in arms demanding an apology from US government authorities for using ‘Geronimo’ as a codename for Osama bin Laden during the military operation that killed the latter recently (see, for instance, this link). The way things are going, commanders planning super-secret military operations are going to spend more time worrying about appropriate codenames than about the details of the operations!

"Kalyug"!

I had a bit of a fight at a bank this morning.

I won't go into the gory details, but briefly it was as follows (you must remember that as a rule I stand tamely in queues and never open my mouth more than I have to). They took a cash deposit at one counter and sent me off to another to update the passbook (which they usually don't do). There I was told to go to yet another counter, because I didn't have one of the new computer-compatible passbooks (they talked as if it was my fault they had not given me such a passbook earlier). The third man first sent me back to the second, then told me to wait, then got me one of the new passbooks which was printed so faintly that nobody could read the stuff, and I found to my horror that they had got some of the details wrong. When I pointed this out, they told me to come back later - in the afternoon or next morning. At this point I began to grow hot under the collar, and demanded that they update the old book at least, and then we could see about coming back later for the new one. When they began to raise more objections, I became loud and scathing. Then the (third-) man complained that he was being 'harassed' because this was kalyug. At which point I really blew my top, agreeing with him that it was kalyug indeed, because in satyayug the bank would have happily made mistakes and the customers would have happily suffered for it. 

The yelling worked, and someone else ran up to do the needful. But I came away with a bad taste in the mouth. I also wondered how much I would enjoy this thirty years later, when I am a doddering old man, and the people manning the counter are my children's age...

This blog and Anna Hazare

It took fifteen months for the visit counter to reach the 10,000 mark, and less than a year for it to jump to 20,000. A heartening thing to see, because it means I have not been labouring entirely in vain (as I have said before, it's hard work to keep two blogs running simultaneously, especially if one of them is dedicated to whimsy and plain fun. Somebody warned that I may not be able to keep at it for long, but lo! it's been more than two years without a break already. But it helps to see an ever-increasing visit count). I shall look forward to seeing how quickly the follower count goes up to 100 and the 30,000-visits milestone is passed.

I shall reiterate that it would be nice to have more participation from my readers - by way of comments and contributions, besides visiting regularly and enlisting as followers.

One more thing I must note in passing is that maintaining this blog has brought home to me a) how many people are utterly humourless, and b) how widely tastes in humour differ.

And one last thing before I go: I shall insist till my dying day that not only is a sense of humour an essential requisite for civilization, but especially an ability to laugh at oneself - one's own sense of self-importance as balanced against the reality that one doesn't really matter in the vast cosmic scheme of things, even if one is a President or a tycoon or a pop icon. I wish more and more Indians, the man on the street as much as the movers and shakers, would learn to cultivate that virtue, which is the essence of true humility (as opposed to the ingrained habit of cringing before powerful people in the hope of currying favour and avoiding trouble). So here's my parting shot for now: I know, unlike Anna Hazare, that I am too ignorant and too insignificant a man to believe that I am always so right and good that I can and should impose my inflexible will upon this vast country without a qualm. I would run if anyone invited me to become the First Jan Lok Pal. Let me try to become a better man first. There's no shortage of people who are quite sure about their perfect moral virtue and absolute wisdom...

Weird expectations

If people will keep talking arrant and malicious nonsense about me behind my back, I think I am within my rights to keep laughing at them here. If that makes some of my pupils angry because they know I am ridiculing their parents, I am afraid that can't be helped: they should have found themselves nicer parents.

One of the latest canards I have heard about myself doing the rounds of this one-horse town of late is that I supposedly keep sitting on my chair all the time (I don't, actually, as all my pupils blessed with eyes should know, but that is beside the point here), whereas such and such tutor puts in so much more effort, staying on his feet all the time he teaches - why can't I try to live up to his example?

I am reminded of something a friend of mine, a doctor, told me from his experience long ago: a woman had a septic ulcer on the left elbow, and as the doctor was about to give her an antibiotic injection she shrugged her arm away and walked out of the dispensary muttering angrily - 'He tries to give me an injection in the right hand when he can see the boil is on the left, and he calls himself a doctor!'

Start dancing!

Wow: Google’s come up with a technological ‘paradigm-shift’ once again. Throw out your mouse and keyboard – outdated junk – and, after installing gmail motion and checking that your webcam is in position and switched on, just start throwing your arms and legs about in front of your PC, laptop, mobile or iPad. The computer will translate your gestures into commands for email – compose, reply, send, search, go to inbox, etc etc. (you can download their printable guide to check out how wide and varied a choice of gestures is already available).

Soon, thanks to Google’s now-hypnotic clout on what used to be called human minds, we shall see people monkey-dancing before their computers. And more and more, offices are going to resemble bharatnatyam or tai-chi classes. Vive la technologie!

One nasty thought: how am I going to actually compose anything like a long letter or one of these blogposts this way? And what about people with breathing problems and creaking joints?

P.S.: I won't be surprised if this is Google's idea of an April Fool joke. It's happened before. Last year they changed the company's name for a day...

Kya mazaak hai!

Renowned scientist and the prime minister’s chief scientific advisor CNR Rao has lamented that today’s children are being forced to lose all interest in real education and becoming robots or circus-animals programmed to take examinations endlessly as a substitute for learning: see this news story.

As a telling sign of the times, the same paper carried, just below the above article, a half-page advertisement of one of those now-innumerable tutorials promising to fulfil every child’s ‘dream’ of becoming either a doctor or an engineer for a fat fee…

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...