Bury two

A lawyer was accosted by his colleagues and asked to subscribe ten pounds (dollars?) to arranging the funeral of a fellow professional. He at once fished out some money from his pocket and exclaimed, 'Is it that cheap to bury a lawyer? Here's twenty pounds: go ahead and bury two!'

Some ascribe this mordant (and self-mocking) witticism to the great Irish legal luminary John Philpot Curran; others to someone equally likely, Abraham Lincoln himself. The only other famous (ex-) lawyer I know of who spoke about his professional brothers in the same vein was Mohandas Gandhi.

Knowing the teaching profession as I do, I daresay that in a similar situation, I'd probably come up with the same remark, despite knowing it won't be original...

The things that matter

I heard this doggerel in Bangla when I was still a boy, and like so many other things that seemed really interesting at first blush, it has stuck permanently in my memory.  Hari hey, dinobondhu, tumi amar babar bondhu/ hoy tumi dyakha dao, noy kichhu poysha dao,  the country poet says: “Lord, you are my dad’s old friend, y’know/ show yourself to me, or do give me some dough”.

Having lived and seen and thought a long time, I marvel at how this anonymous philosopher got his priorities just right, and with what sublime simplicity he has expressed them.

If you see God, you’ve got everything. Till then, it’s best to have some money.

It’s like the wag said about the American credo: In God we trust. With everyone else, we prefer cash…

Want to get rich quick? Avoid college

The British businessman Simon Dolan has written in this month’s issue of Reader’s Digest that if you want to make good money, going for ‘higher education’ would probably be a costly waste of time. Doctors and lawyers need college degrees; those who want to make it big in business don’t – certainly not fancy management degrees which cost the earth and teach you little about how to make money in the real world. Dolan’s words should count: he’s worth a hundred million pounds himself, and has drawn attention to other hugely successful college dropouts like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and Richard Branson.

We in India could draw up a goodly list ourselves, I guess, with Dhirubhai Ambani right there at the top. So these are my views exactly. You want to make real money (and don’t tell me doctors and engineers make serious money!), trust on native intelligence, hard work, willingness to take big risks and learn from experience – and get into business as soon as you leave high school. If you are even moderately lucky, all your doctor and engineer friends will be envying you by the time you are 35, and maybe asking you to give them jobs.

If, on the other hand, you belong to the (vanishingly small-) tribe of people who value learning for its own sake, because next to doing good to your fellow man it is the grandest pursuit, don’t let thoughts of how much money you are going to make deter you from studying whatever you really love, whether it is history or physics or some fine art. Go for it.

And God have mercy on your doctor and engineer friends, who will miss out on both counts in the end, neither making much money nor finding out how much fun life can offer to the bold and fancy-free...

masterji, my kid's getting married, please come!

Why do the parents of ex-students who have never once contacted me for years after they left my classes come over to invite me to their children's weddings, and actually expect me to honour the invitation? Can anybody tell me? I should so like to know. 

Cat out of the bag

The cartoon on the business page of my newspaper today shows some executives of the sales division of a large company saying to one another: 'We don't need smarter products, we just need dumber customers.'

So now it's official. That is how we keep our economies growing and civilization progressing. Gold plated WCs, personality enhancing pills, phones with 66,000 apps, banks which offer 'relationships', $10,000 pens which give you a special status in the eyes of other morons like you, coaching classes that will make Edisons, Curies and Fords out of every idiot kid, anything will do.

Just so long as the customer is dumb enough.

A future for 'stillness'?

“Around the same time I noticed that those who part with $2,285 a night to stay in a cliff-top room at the Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur pay partly for the privilege of not having a TV in their rooms; the future of travel, I’m reliably told, lies in ‘black-hole resorts’ which charge high prices precisely because you can’t get online in their rooms…”

I read the above lines in a recent and very timely article written by the expatriate writer of Indian origin, Pico Iyer, and sent over to me by an ex-student yesterday. Some other people are apparently also looking at the future, and thinking along the same lines as I do: heartening news. Do let me know what the article meant to you.

'relationships'

I found this wonderful reading because I have suffered at the hands of this strange breed of creatures (I won't call them humans-) who are titled 'relationship managers' in smart banks nowadays. I hope my readers will be forewarned. 'Relationships' mustn't be cheapened. The word is sacred...

Rising star

There's a 13-year old moron who has scribbled on the cover of his homework book "I'm a hot guy with a cool attitude". From what I have found out about him, he's neither very intelligent nor very studious, and pathetically lacking in the GK and worldly wisdom that I should consider appropriate for his age. He thinks, for instance, that you need to be 'brilliant' to get through the West Bengal Joint Entrance examination, and that they teach engineering at the 'prestigious' Presidency College in Kolkata. 

If I know something of the career trajectories of creatures like this, he will be working at Rs. 20-30,000  a month for TCS or Infosys in ten years' time, or if he's very lucky he'll have a slightly better job at a public sector enterprise such as NTPC or SAIL or SBI, and his mother would preen about how well-'established' her son is, and look for a bride whose dad would be willing to cough up at least Rs. 50 lakhs as dahej.

Any comments?

Looking back and ahead

It's 20:25 hours of the last day of 2011. I have just returned after a holiday trip, about which I have written on the other blog. Mother Nature is up to her strange antics again: I left the town much colder than it is now, so that I went away wearing warm woolens, and now I am back and typing in shirtsleeves! In Kolkata people were actually sweating...the weather bureau has been talking about a low pressure belt which has built up over the Bay of Bengal, preventing the usual western cyclonic winds from doing their thing at this time of the year. I do hope that the cold will come back: I was hoping for at least a month more of really chilly weather. 

2011 hasn't been a big deal for me, for good or for bad, but the world has been rocked by all sorts of revolutions and quasi-revolutions and pseudo-revolutions: Osama and Gaddafi killed, Mubarak deposed, Berlusconi removed, Putin and Manmohan Singh tottering, Cameron gibbering and Obama dithering, the likes of Anna Hazare sharing 15-minute-celebrity status with Lady Gaga and Steve Jobs, Dev Anand gone at last but Fidel Castro and Khushwant Singh have cocked a snook at the Great Reaper one more time, and some really far-out freaks almost eagerly looking forward to the end of it all sometime in late 2012. With all that in mind, I shall now go take a walk, then come back home to watch loonies hyperventilating as they gear up to usher in yet another new year. All the best, everybody.

It's December again

Winter began last evening, with a sudden chill in the air. As usual, the weather had become comfortable since the start of November, but the sun was still unpleasantly warm in the afternoons, and I had been going around in shirtsleeves all through the month. Last night the kids began to shiver even in a classroom with all the doors and windows shut, and  the woolens had to come out pretty abruptly. I hope, since the season has begun late, it will last at least until mid-February. It is for this very brief spell that I live every year. It coincides with the lightest workload for me, so I have a lot of time to soak in the delicious charm, God be thanked. Despite the cold water and the shivers if you go riding a two-wheeler at dawn or late in the evening, I will never see eye to eye with those who dislike winter in a country like ours. I only wish there was some rain to wash away all the dust in the air and on the leaves, and I am waiting for the sky to turn azure. I can never have enough of azure skies. And the mountains are calling me again...

Street maze

The municipal authorities in this town are driven by strange fads. Once upon a time, while naming streets in my neighbourhood, they took it into their heads to immortalize the pantheon of Russian and American astronauts. So we got a rash of streets with utterly alien names like Grissom and Chaffe and Merbold and Svetlana and Tereshkova (some of those people might have had a little difficulty in identifying themselves from the spellings!). Then someone said "Let's do something different now - let's name all the next lot of streets according to the classical Indian raagas." At once there came up signs saying Bilawal and Iman Kalyan and Malkosh and Jayjayanti and Meghmallar Path...

Of late, they have gone back to naming new roads after famous people from recent Indian history, freedom fighters and writers prominently among them. Somehow, though, someone in authority wasn't confident that the names by themselves would ring any bells with the public - we being notorious for our indifference to matters historical - so they have put tags before the names: Biplabi (revolutionary-) Rashbehari Basu Sarani (street) and Sahityik Leela Mazumdar Sarani. 

And they have been so prolific with the naming exercise that personnel from other government departments are having difficulty finding their way about. I don't know about postmen, but this morning I saw some policemen asking for directions... 

Enlightened schoolboys, exasperated teachers

One of my more educated young readers sent me this link today. It's about how ever brighter our kids are becoming at school, in this era of total freedom and Facebook. I found it a fine piece of black humour. Do let me know how it struck you.

Biggest fool of all

The emperor Akbar once made a huge advance payment to a horse trader from distant Persia for bringing him a large number of the finest horses he could find. The man took the money and vanished, never to be heard of again. Sometime later, the badshah asked Birbal to draw up a list of the biggest fools in the kingdom. Birbal dutifully complied, but left the top two places unfilled. When Akbar asked him why, he first sought protection from royal ire, then said he would like to put the emperor's name at the number two position, because he trusted complete strangers from faraway places with large amounts of money. Though rattled, Akbar could not help laughing in agreement. Then he asked the obvious question. Birbal replied, 'Jahanpanah, I should like to put myself in the top slot, because I have chosen to serve someone like you!'

I sometimes draw up such a mental list myself, me holding the top slot for choosing to spend a lifetime trying to teach my jahanpanah, the public...

Too serious to be funny?

It is said about Antony in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra that "he was disposed to mirth, but on the sudden/ A Roman thought had struck him". I too have just been struck by a 'Roman thought'. Perhaps it is because my image is too deeply set as a solemn sort of person that too few of my readers visit this blog, and even if they do, feel uneasy about commenting on it?

If that were true, it would be sad indeed. I daresay a lot of people cannot accept the whimsical side of my character, and either haven't noticed or haven't bothered to reflect upon what I intended when I put up that quote from Bertrand Russell as a fixture on the right hand sidebar...

to see oursels as ithers see us...

A 15-year old drew the above cartoon at my behest in class. Do let me know how you liked it, everybody!

Those who are mystified by the title, look this up.

old 'naya' paise

The above is a photograph of a one ‘naya paisa’ coin dating back almost to the year of my birth.

I recently came across a few old one- and two- and five- and ten-paise coins in my collection. When  I was a child they were in wide circulation. Indeed, there were still lots of things that were available for five and ten paise: toffees and phuchka (three or four for ten paise), to name just two. With creeping but relentless inflation for more than half a century, such coins have long fallen out of use, of course (I read somewhere that a rupee today would be worth just four or five paise in 1950 in terms of purchasing power): you hardly see anything worth just a single rupee any more, and very soon, even one- and two rupee coins are going to become collectors’ items too, while one hundred rupee coins will come into vogue, as well as Rs.5- and 10,000 notes.

My grandfather used to tell me about new imported bicycles that cost Rs. 30, and my father bought a new motorbike in 1967 for about Rs. 1500. Sounds like a fairytale to the 50% of Indians who are below 25 years of age, I am sure. In 1977, the father of a friend of mine, a director of a large manufacturing firm, drew a salary of Rs. 8,000 a month, and he was considered rich.

Very soon our currency is going to go the way of the Italian lira and the Japanese yen, and we’d have millions of millionaires.

Those interested in coins might look up this website…

Jiyo, SRK!

Heard on UTV Bindass channel at 9:13 p.m. on Saturday, October 15, in the course of Preity Zinta interviewing Shah Rukh Khan: 'King' Khan not only admits that he had played a monkey during Ramlila many years ago, but that 'main toh abhi bhi bandar ke jaise acting karta hoon' (I still act like a monkey).

Well, you've got to hand it to him for honesty!

iCon gone!

Steve Jobs is dead. And this is the type who are mourning him most loudly.

Until the next poster boy comes along... that goes without saying. Then it would be 'Steve who?'

Who wants to bet they'd still be talking about him a year down the line? Five years? Ten? 

Joy maa Durga

Durga pujo has arrived again. An excuse for millions to gorge, splurge, dress up, preen, make noise, run around like beheaded hens, quarrel furiously with all and sundry in the course of having fun - and, most importantly, shirk work more or less for a whole month. 

Yay.........!

Ugly Indian, part two

Pot-bellied policemen in Delhi have been warned: get back in shape either by dancing bhangra or going to the gym, or face penalties. And in my town a lot of shopkeepers are telling me that they can't give out the wafer thin plastic 'carry bags' (what a silly name!) any more, now that the municipal authorities have seriously cracked down on this particular form of customer addiction...

At least some people in this country are bothering about some of the worst aspects of our culture. I'll keep my eyes on the news, because another aspect of the same culture is that most of our many enthusiasms are notoriously short-lived! Remember the 'anti-corruption' circus?