Cyclic Memories - 3

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 "...And this has to do not so much with the history of countries like India, where, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a sense of the authentic was indispensable to the sense of self and the past, and where it has also been imbricated with a sense of hybridity and evolving plurality that has characterized its cultures for centuries, but with Western history, where 'authenticity', or 'purity', and 'hybridity' have not only existed, since the nineteenth century (if not since the Enlightenment), in mutually exclusive intellectual and cultural compartments, but where, more recently, after Auschwitz, 'authenticity' is associated with extreme right-wing politics and the destructive nature of masculine fantasy..."

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Hmmm!

I better agree wholeheartedly with the author there since this sentence, picked at random from an erudite essay by a well-known living and highly respected Indian author and scholar, appeared in the Times Literary Supplement.

I was curious and counted the number of commas in that single sentence...it came out to be 14, give or take a couple. And there are four words under inverted commas as my Father used to call them.  And there are 5 em-braced words. And I see my Blogger Spellcheck, flummoxed with 3 strange words she didn't know what to do with, decided to take no chances and underlined them in wavy red ink...she is wrong...they are very much there in Webster.

I salute my Guardian Angel for making me an unwilling Physics Teacher rather than an unwilling English Teacher. I thought I would have enjoyed teaching English. Now I see I was absolutely wrong, for, I would have had to read, write, speak, and perhaps teach essays upon essays filled with such convoluted, involuted, and pervoluted sentences. 

God! 

I recall the plight of the only Genius English Teacher I met (at IIT KGP). He was asked to write a 30-page original literary criticism if he wanted to be confirmed in his post as a lowly Lecturer. He quit after two years to an unknown place on an unknown night to an unknown future. His name was Basudeb Ghosh and while he was at KGP he was the darling of students there.

On the other hand, while a tough subject to do original research in, Physics is the easiest to teach. All you needed during my time was a chalk-piece and duster...you start with an equation and the rest follows like hangover follows a binge.

And my Guardian Angel took immense care of me even after I quit Physics. 

She said:

"Take to mind-boggling blogging!" (sorry there...'blog' itself is the ugliest word in the English language and I prepended it with an even uglier epithet) 

During my Shakespeare Uncle's time, there were the following options for a lover of English:

1. Write for a  doubtful living

2. Teach for an assured but boring living

3. Do a Ph. D. in English and become a Scholar or Professor or a Literary Critic for journals (for a frugal living)

4. Do anything else for a living and read English for pleasure.

Nowadays there is an avenue unthinkable to my Uncle...

5. Blog...Devil take the hindmost...you may acquire readers or not...just blog away.

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This series of posts  was originally intended to be stories of my cycles...tri-and-bi-and-powered. But after the first quote from RKN where his elder brother took a bloody tumble and was slapped by his reluctant father, I lost my way and it is threatening to become Mark Twain's "Grandfather's Old Ram":

http://gpsastry.blogspot.in/2012/08/hand-to-mouse-existence.html


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So, let me start with my first cycle which had three wheels, so-called.

The other day my son bought a tricycle for Ishani that looks somewhat like this:

http://www.buygiftstoindia.com/prd-230-396-832-14773-coloma-tricycle-804-for-ages-1-year-buygiftstoindia.html


If you think this is what my Father bought for me in 1947 when I was 4, you are as mistaken as someone who thought John Gutenberg's Printing Machine (circa 1420) would be something like this:

  http://store.macconsult.com/hp-deskjet-6940-color-printer-c8970ab1h/ 

For one thing, Ishani's tricycle has practically no metal parts not covered with safe plastic. And the rest 90% is pure plastic for sure. 

Plastics didn't enter my life till 1960 and even then they were so hard and brittle that they hurt as much as sharp metals did. My teeth and gums bled daily when I started brushing them with bristling tooth brushes, giving up good old fingers.

The only non-metal stuff in my tricycle were the tires and pedals and the seat that were made of hard rubber, and cracked and peeled off in two days exposing the metallic rims and hubs and the vertical pipe that tried to enter my own 'seat'.

And there were rusted nails that hurt my legs, feet and seat. 

But speed was the novel experience and I didn't mind bleeding wounds for which burning Tincture of Iodine was always there.  

And while driving it round and round in faster and faster circles on the stone platform in my house, I took such a tumble that my Father fainted.

And that was my first and last venture with tricycles...

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