Listlessness

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  http://www.davidrisstrom.org/NewsJan-Mar03.html 

  

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Abou Ben Adhem

Leigh hunt

Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)

Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,

And saw, within the moonlight in his room,

Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom,

An angel writing in a book of gold:—

Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold,

And to the presence in the room he said,

"What writest thou?"—The vision raised its head,

And with a look made of all sweet accord,

Answered, "The names of those who love the Lord."

"And is mine one?" said Abou. "Nay, not so,"

Replied the angel. Abou spoke more low,

But cheerly still; and said, "I pray thee, then,

Write me as one that loves his fellow men."

         The angel wrote, and vanished. The next night

It came again with a great wakening light,

And showed the names whom love of God had blest,

And lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest.

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Lists have always bugged me. 

Often I found myself unequal to them. I am happy that now, at 70, I don't have to make any lists. There are only two dates I have to remember: one, the July 31 as the last date for filing my income-tax returns (my son does it for me nowadays after it went online). The other is the 1st of November when I have to file my Life Certificate to IIT KGP for renewal of pension. There is the monthly list of ten medicines I have to purchase on the first of every month. But my street-corner pharmacist, Santosh, remembers it, so I have no worry.

My troubles began when I was just about literate in Muthukur...with the perennial dhobi list. Every week the washerman would arrive with his hunch-bag and my mom would call me to fetch the New Year Diary which was meant for the dhobi-list exclusively. 

And I had to first check the safe arrival of last week's laundry. It never tallied. The dhobi would miss an item or two and there would be a big hungama and curses floating around. The dhobi would insist that I was at fault for making mistakes in the listing. And mom would look into the bundle of clothes and tell him off, citing which dhoti or lehenga or shirt of which color and size went missing. And the dhobi would open the bundle of our neighbor and fish them out. Which meant that an item or two of our neighbor would go missing...a chain reaction.

And then everyone in the house would fetch their soiled clothes and dump them on our heads. And the dhobi would dictate and I would start my listing. After the job was finally through, one of my sisters or Father would dig up a couple more blouses or lungis and ask them to be included. Which meant scratching and altering the list, and I would goof with pencil marks at the wrong places...inviting trouble on the next delivery day. The final count of the number of clothes would never match and the whole ugly kerfuffle would start off again.

Nowadays this exercise appears to be obsolete in our home. No dhobi would wash clothes anymore...where are the tanks and ponds? So we have our own washing machines and electric steam irons. Everyone uses the washing machine happily but not the iron...it is such a bore! So once a week we would call our apartment-complex-dhobi to collect clothes for ironing only. And she arrives but is always in a hurry...and so are we. Our dhobini is highly educated...she counts in English. And would just count the number of clothes and announce the result. And when she brings them back the next day but two or three, there is always a discrepancy...she would say that the number was 49 and we would say 50. She wins. 

And then there is this list of invitees for birthdays and weddings. It is a no-win exercise. Someone would always be left out, of necessity, since the list can't be endless. And they would fume and leave us out of their guest-list, happily.

I found listing ok when I was forced to do it...but not shortlisting. This always left me unhappy. At IIT KGP when I was the Course Coordinator of the Jumbo First Year Physics with more than 350 students, I had to make the Grade List and the Failure List. I found marking easy but not grading. After compiling inputs from a dozen sources like the lab marks, tutorial marks, midsem marks, endsem marks, and making up what my son calls the spreadsheet (I was into Excel by then), trouble starts looming. Fortunately there was no Relative Grading and drawing of Gaussian curves at KGP during my time. We were supposed to just convert the total marks into grades using a set-formula...which a child can do. For instance, those who aspire for the Ex grade must have their total between 90 and 100. And out of the 350 there would be say 50 qualifying for the Ex grade on their own. But since the final mark is the result of a complicated computation of the inputs with weightages, there would be students getting 89.50 and 89.45. And what should we do and why?  

The answer, my friend, was bloating in the wind...

One fine winter evening in 1973, I was asked to go to my Guide, SDM's, Qrs A-26 at IIT KGP for discussing my forthcoming thesis. And as I rang the bell, Mrs SDM kindly opened it and led me into SDM's Office (his 'guest room'). And I found him sitting bolt upright on his bed with what looked like a List about  4 pages long...shortlists are never short.

And he was as glum as a pup from whom the bone was snatched away. And he was silent for a good 5 minutes...a record for his silence...he always used to jabber away. Finally with a sigh he cast that list aside and started moaning like a kid. 

It turned out that the list contained the Eminent Teachers of West Bengal...they were gathering at the Saha Institute Auditorium in Calcutta that weekend to celebrate their mutual recognition with snacks and tea and speeches. And SDM didn't find his name in the shortlist. But he found, and this was what was jarring, the names of Gagan Babu, Harsha Babu and Girija Babu...the three other Senior Profs of our Dept. 

And SDM went on a tirade on the weaknesses of each of these three Babus...one didn't know Kirchhoff's Laws, the other couldn't explain length contraction, while the third didn't even know what he was doing...that was the 3-hour 'discussion' of my thesis that got postponed to the next Monday evening.

When I went there on dot at 7 PM the next Monday, I found SDM in an unusually gleeful mood and he asked me to sit down and gloated:

"I barged into the Celebratory Meet of the Eminent Teachers of West Bengal uninvited last Saturday. No one had the guts to throw me out. And towards the end, after Tea, I went to the podium and grabbed the mike and gave a long speech on the futility of such self-congratulatory get-togethers...the time would be better spent on improving our hopeless teaching standards...bla bla bla...None of the Eminent Teachers liked it but the student volunteers gave me a standing ovation"  

My 'thesis' got postponed to the next weekend...

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