Sunday, January 26, 2014

In Praise of Illiteracy

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I surely don't mean to encourage illiteracy...far from it. I just want to remind myself that illiterate wise folks are better than highly educated city-slicks. And no one should have a quarrel with it.

I don't know if Jesus Christ was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Harvard which failed to recruit our Yella in her faculty:



  
Umpteen are the stories showing that illiterates are not to be reviled prima facie.

There is this famous story of the boatman who had to lift up on his shoulders and save the Sanskrit pundit who had been ridiculing his illiteracy.  And the story of the poor Verger by Somerset Maugham where this gent who refused to learn the English alphabet, and was dismissed for it, turns a millionaire. 

In the summer vacation of 1993, I decided on the spot to build an attached bathroom to my Father's old gold bedroom at Gudur:

http://gpsastry.blogspot.in/2011/01/bathroom-i-built.html


My resident sister, Padma at Gudur, fetched her trusted mason, Subbulu, who was then in his 70s. He had cataract in his eyes and was illiterate but was renowned for his expertise with trowel and bricks and cement. He came round to our house with his young assistant paid to help him with his tape measures and calculations. It was a sight for me to watch this jovial combo hard at work for a month. 

One evening, after paying them their daily wages, Padma asked Subbulu:

Padma: Subbulu, how is your wife Subbamma?

Subbulu: Oh, she has gone last month...

Padma: Gone where?

Subbulu (petulantly):  What do you mean, where? Where everyone of us has to go... (lifting his hands heavenwards) Up, Up, Up...

Padma: Why?

Subbulu: What do you mean, why? Just like why everyone of us has to go...

Padma: I mean, what came and snatched  her away?

Subbulu: Oh, Ubbasam Ubbasam (asthma, asthma)...

Padma: I am so sorry

Subbulu: Never mind...she was suffering hopelessly...

Padma: Who looks after you nowadays...your son?

Subbulu: Hmm...actually, he and his wife...

I was too young then to understand Subbulu's wisdom with my proclaimed knowledge of physics and philosophy...no longer, though...

I take Deccan Chronicle and Times of India daily. And at the end of the day I store my day's newsprint securely in my bedroom. And the two heaps mount by leaps and bounds. And being lazy to the core, I keep watching them grow doing nothing about it...till a day comes when Ishani finds it slippery to climb on to my bed...they are in the way like the grandpa's whiskers of that nursery rhyme. 

And then I take 7 bags and fill them up with my old dailies, carry the heavy bags down, dump them in my car, and drive to the nearby waste-paper outlet manned by a rustic middle-aged woman. 

This morning the lady downloaded my bags, weighed them, and announced that there were 45 kg in all. And that a kilo sells nowadays for Rs 8. I didn't haggle and asked her for my money. Neither she nor I carry a pocket calculator visible on every hand nowadays. I did the calculation in my head in a trice and waited for her result as she went into her figuring on her fingers. After lisping for a long minute she announced: Rs 360. And I agreed with her and she opened the knot in her sari-corner and produced a crisp Rs 500 note. And I opened my wallet and briskly gave her a Rs 100 note, a Rs 50 note and a Rs 10 note, all of which went duly into her sari-knot.

After returning home to my ritual bath called avabhrudha snanam performed on the successful completion of a yagna,  I realized that I had goofed up in my subtraction and returned her 20 more rupees than I should have. And became thoughtful. Anyway, I decided, for the fun of it, to drive back to her shop spending Rs 50 worth of petrol, and ask her casually. And as I beckoned her to my car and reminded her of our transaction, she blushed pink, and promptly returned two Rs 10 notes from her sari-knot. 

The Rs 30 I lost in petrol was worth the blush I saw in her aging face.

Our so-called literacy is of little avail when we travel to a land of alien tongue. We are often worse than illiterates. When we traveled to Calcutta in the 1960s from our KGP campus, we used to get quite flummoxed. We knew our Telugu, English, and Devanagari scripts but not the Bengali. And those days (perhaps even now) the city-buses in Calcutta never carried their messages in any script other than Bengali, for both the destinations and bus-numbers. 

And this is what happened once: 

  
Dangerous indeed is half-knowledge:
Nudging in Calcutta's surge-surge-surge
Pining for the plush airport at Dum-Dum
Double words on buses being very very seldom
Semi-literacy led us to the sludgy Budge-Budge!


Talking of the good old Dum-Dum airport, I arrived there from Madras by my maiden flight one night in 1984. And was holed up for the night on the floors of the airport, swept away often by night-time sweepers with their water cannons. And had to hide in the toilet once every while to escape the ruthless sweepers. 

And saw two majestic figures adorning the toilets: a Diamond King and a Diamond Queen nailed on the gents and ladies doors respectively. So there was very little confusion...my illiteracy didn't matter at all.
But when I recently visited our Hyderabad airport, looking for my King and Queen, all I could find was the two figures pictured above. I don't think these are any great improvement. To my dirty mind they look as dirty as the contents behind their closed doors...


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