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There was an interesting topic in yesterday's Debate Column of ToI:
"Do all cinema starlets wish to be stars in their heart of hearts?"
or something like that.
One point of view was that it is not true...there are many starlets who are happy to be away from the grueling glamor of stardom and are content to do their art for art's sake. Like many talented actors like Paresh Rawal or Nasiruddeen Shaw or the many actresses in the Art Films.
The other view was that it is all sour grapes and, given a chance, they would all be dying to be one of those Khans or Kapoors...fame and popularity is the summum bonum of all film folks.
Both points of view were well-argued but, as often happens, truth is somewhere in the middle...neither stars or starlets are entirely happy with their success or lack of it.
What is true of filmdom is true of every other dom that has interaction with the public...like say cricket...Hmmm!!!!
Or medicine...or politics...or business...or even acads...
The division of all into two categories like haves and havenots is glossing over the rich pantheon of our gods and goddesses and demigods and street-corner gods.
There are a variety of stars as we all know...long-lived stars, exploding stars, collapsing stars, giant stars red and blue, dying stars, dead stars, protostars in their birth pangs, streaking stars, fake stars or planets that look big but don't shine....
I have not come into close contact with any film star, unfortunately, so I don't know what is in their heart of hearts...but my M.D. Uncle at Vizagh was a Star in his profession throughout the major part of his life in Vizagh and its environs. And I knew him quite well.
There was this Andhra Medical College attached to the huge King George Hospital at Vizagh. In their second year at AMC there were two famous Prize Exams for students of MBBS:
1. Swaminathan Prize for Anatomy
2. Alahasinger Prize for Physiology.
Neither I nor my friends there knew who this Swaminathan or Alahasinger was but everyone was talking about these Prize Exams as the equivalent of the Nobels in Physics and Chemistry.
But, unlike the Nobels, aspirants for either of these two Prizes had to write a tough competitive exam, and get into the top two who were then interviewed by a panel exhaustively for hours, and one of the two got selected as the winner...his or her name is then written in gold on a huge teak board in each of the two departments.
If you happen to visit the Anatomy dept of AMC anytime, you will see my Uncle's name, K. Krishna Murthy, on the Swaminthan Board circa 1947.
And, as I happened to mention elsewhere, Anatomy was deemed Macho while Physiology, Sissy, for strange reasons.
My Uncle never looked back and won prizes all along and completed an M.D. in General Medicine and quickly became a young Professor of Medicine at AMC and Physician at KGH simultaneously. And his fame spread far and wide and he remained a Star in his profession throughout.
I also mentioned that students of AMC considered Surgery Macho and Medicine, Sissy.
So, I put this question to a student of AMC who was my close friend who himself got the Alahasinger Prize for Physiology circa 1960.
And he said I was wrong about this general perception, because, apparently, the Top Dog of Surgery there found once in a while that his patient was dying on his Operating Table for reasons unknown to surgeons. The patient's B.P. was falling rapidly and his heartbeat sinking and his tongue protruding like a sick dog's or whatever...
Immediately, it seems, the general strategy was for the Surgeon-General to call up my Uncle on an SOS basis.
And my Uncle would thrust a handful of weird injection ampules in one of the pockets of his overalls and a syringe kit in the other and run to the O.T.
And push them serially in a strict order, known only to him, into the dying patient's arms and thighs and chest.
And the patient not only revived instantly but asked for his girl friend pronto...stories of Stars go like that.
It was like one of the episodes of Walter Mitty's daydreams but the other way round...
One day however I found my Uncle in a gloomy mood when I was around.
And my Uncle confessed to me in strict confidence that he would die to be in the IAS rather than this drudgery of Medicine.
Apparently he just returned from the District Magistrate's Bungalow after giving him as simple a thing as a shot of Penicillin.
The protocol was that, whenever His Majesty the DM has a sore throat or running nose, he would send his official ZEEP (which was a dream vehicle then) to my Uncle, and he had to travel to the huge bungalow built for the whites and inject Penicillin in the hallowed Arm of the King of Vizagh District... a thing which he said any Sister in his Bhavanagar Ward could do well enough.
And my Uncle resented it....but had no guts to say 'no' for fear he would be transferred to a remote village in AP for the benefit of the poor and needy aam admi...
There is a moral there....
Talking of Stars, when I first landed in IIT KGP in 1965, the local Hijli High school was at the pinnacle of its glory...The Best School in Bengal.
One day, a Senior Professor of our dept was ecstatic and embracing everybody around, and I discreetly asked my young Bengali friend, AKC, what was the reason for the prof's unwonted ebullience.
And I was told:
"Ohr meye phyicse Star peyeche!"
which is my translation for:
"His daughter got a Star in Physics!"
And I asked him what a Star meant in Class XII of Bengal Board. And I could gather that it meant what we called in our AU a "D" for Distinction.
When I left KGP in 2005, I wasn't aware if the Star System was still around in Bengal Board, since no one boasted of any Star any longer for any of their daughters from Hijli High School.
But my "D" got devalued at the IIT since it stood for a D Grade.
And often one or the other of the first year girls whom I was teaching then would approach me and reproach me for the D they got in my Physics I.
And I asked what grade they would like. And they would say, tears welling in their eyes:
"At least a C sir!"
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A young and impressionable moth once set his heart on a certain star.
He told his mother about this and she counseled him to set his heart on
a bridge lamp instead. “Stars aren’t the thing to hang around,” she
said; “lamps are the thing to hang around.” “You get somewhere that
way,” said the moth’s father. “You don’t get anywhere chasing stars.”
But the moth would not heed the words of either parent. Every evening at
dusk when the star came out he would start flying toward it and every
morning at dawn he would crawl back home worn out with his vain
endeavor. One day his father said to him, “You haven’t burned a wing in
months, boy, and it looks to me as if you were never going to. All your
brothers have been badly burned flying around street lamps and all your
sisters have been terribly singed flying around house lamps. Come on,
now, get out of here and get yourself scorched! A big strapping moth
like you without a mark on him!”
The moth left his father’s house, but he would not fly around street
lamps and he would not fly around house lamps. He went right on trying
to reach the star, which was four and one-third light years, or
twenty-five trillion miles, away. The moth thought it was just caught up
in the top branches of an elm. He never did reach the star, but he went
right on trying, night after night, and when he was a very, very old
moth he began to think that he really had reached the star and he went
around saying so. This gave him a deep and lasting pleasure, and he
lived to a great old age. His parents and his brothers and his sisters
had all been burned to death when they were quite young.
Moral: Who flies afar from the sphere of our sorrow is here today and here tomorrow.
...James Thurber....The Moth and the Star
There was an interesting topic in yesterday's Debate Column of ToI:
"Do all cinema starlets wish to be stars in their heart of hearts?"
or something like that.
One point of view was that it is not true...there are many starlets who are happy to be away from the grueling glamor of stardom and are content to do their art for art's sake. Like many talented actors like Paresh Rawal or Nasiruddeen Shaw or the many actresses in the Art Films.
The other view was that it is all sour grapes and, given a chance, they would all be dying to be one of those Khans or Kapoors...fame and popularity is the summum bonum of all film folks.
Both points of view were well-argued but, as often happens, truth is somewhere in the middle...neither stars or starlets are entirely happy with their success or lack of it.
What is true of filmdom is true of every other dom that has interaction with the public...like say cricket...Hmmm!!!!
Or medicine...or politics...or business...or even acads...
The division of all into two categories like haves and havenots is glossing over the rich pantheon of our gods and goddesses and demigods and street-corner gods.
There are a variety of stars as we all know...long-lived stars, exploding stars, collapsing stars, giant stars red and blue, dying stars, dead stars, protostars in their birth pangs, streaking stars, fake stars or planets that look big but don't shine....
I have not come into close contact with any film star, unfortunately, so I don't know what is in their heart of hearts...but my M.D. Uncle at Vizagh was a Star in his profession throughout the major part of his life in Vizagh and its environs. And I knew him quite well.
There was this Andhra Medical College attached to the huge King George Hospital at Vizagh. In their second year at AMC there were two famous Prize Exams for students of MBBS:
1. Swaminathan Prize for Anatomy
2. Alahasinger Prize for Physiology.
Neither I nor my friends there knew who this Swaminathan or Alahasinger was but everyone was talking about these Prize Exams as the equivalent of the Nobels in Physics and Chemistry.
But, unlike the Nobels, aspirants for either of these two Prizes had to write a tough competitive exam, and get into the top two who were then interviewed by a panel exhaustively for hours, and one of the two got selected as the winner...his or her name is then written in gold on a huge teak board in each of the two departments.
If you happen to visit the Anatomy dept of AMC anytime, you will see my Uncle's name, K. Krishna Murthy, on the Swaminthan Board circa 1947.
And, as I happened to mention elsewhere, Anatomy was deemed Macho while Physiology, Sissy, for strange reasons.
My Uncle never looked back and won prizes all along and completed an M.D. in General Medicine and quickly became a young Professor of Medicine at AMC and Physician at KGH simultaneously. And his fame spread far and wide and he remained a Star in his profession throughout.
I also mentioned that students of AMC considered Surgery Macho and Medicine, Sissy.
So, I put this question to a student of AMC who was my close friend who himself got the Alahasinger Prize for Physiology circa 1960.
And he said I was wrong about this general perception, because, apparently, the Top Dog of Surgery there found once in a while that his patient was dying on his Operating Table for reasons unknown to surgeons. The patient's B.P. was falling rapidly and his heartbeat sinking and his tongue protruding like a sick dog's or whatever...
Immediately, it seems, the general strategy was for the Surgeon-General to call up my Uncle on an SOS basis.
And my Uncle would thrust a handful of weird injection ampules in one of the pockets of his overalls and a syringe kit in the other and run to the O.T.
And push them serially in a strict order, known only to him, into the dying patient's arms and thighs and chest.
And the patient not only revived instantly but asked for his girl friend pronto...stories of Stars go like that.
It was like one of the episodes of Walter Mitty's daydreams but the other way round...
One day however I found my Uncle in a gloomy mood when I was around.
And my Uncle confessed to me in strict confidence that he would die to be in the IAS rather than this drudgery of Medicine.
Apparently he just returned from the District Magistrate's Bungalow after giving him as simple a thing as a shot of Penicillin.
The protocol was that, whenever His Majesty the DM has a sore throat or running nose, he would send his official ZEEP (which was a dream vehicle then) to my Uncle, and he had to travel to the huge bungalow built for the whites and inject Penicillin in the hallowed Arm of the King of Vizagh District... a thing which he said any Sister in his Bhavanagar Ward could do well enough.
And my Uncle resented it....but had no guts to say 'no' for fear he would be transferred to a remote village in AP for the benefit of the poor and needy aam admi...
There is a moral there....
Talking of Stars, when I first landed in IIT KGP in 1965, the local Hijli High school was at the pinnacle of its glory...The Best School in Bengal.
One day, a Senior Professor of our dept was ecstatic and embracing everybody around, and I discreetly asked my young Bengali friend, AKC, what was the reason for the prof's unwonted ebullience.
And I was told:
"Ohr meye phyicse Star peyeche!"
which is my translation for:
"His daughter got a Star in Physics!"
And I asked him what a Star meant in Class XII of Bengal Board. And I could gather that it meant what we called in our AU a "D" for Distinction.
When I left KGP in 2005, I wasn't aware if the Star System was still around in Bengal Board, since no one boasted of any Star any longer for any of their daughters from Hijli High School.
But my "D" got devalued at the IIT since it stood for a D Grade.
And often one or the other of the first year girls whom I was teaching then would approach me and reproach me for the D they got in my Physics I.
And I asked what grade they would like. And they would say, tears welling in their eyes:
"At least a C sir!"
************************************************************************************************************
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