Monday, June 30, 2014

Rules of Teaching - 6

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The other day I was saying that father is the natural teacher of his son.

But fathers can also learn a lot from their sons, if they wish to. For this, however, the father should be friends with his son.

There are many tales of father-son duels like 'Jakkanna & Dankanna', the famed sculptors of the Chennakeswara temple in Karnataka; and the fighters 'Rustum & Sohrab'.

Incidentally, the English version of the story rendered in the epic poem, 'Sohrab and Rustum', was written by Matthew Arnold whose father,Thomas Arnold, was the famed HM of the Rugby School and so happened to be his teacher. Both of them have memorials in the Westminster Abbey.

Unfortunately my Father and I don't share memorials in the Westminster Abbey although I happen to be his student in his famed high school at Muthukur. I left home at 13 and so was never friends with my Father. As a consequence, he never learned anything from me, not even smoking...he was a pious man unlike me and was rather aloof. Indeed in later life whenever I felt rather close to him I used to address him as 'Sir' and he never objected...maybe he was pleased with it.

But he used to tell me with a twinkle in his eye the story of one of his senior colleagues who had to sit in the Eng Lit class taught by his own son. 

It so happened that towards their retirement many HMs of Government schools in AP had to undergo a 3-month Refresher Course in their chosen subjects at the Andhra University at Vizagh. Father also came down to Vizagh for his summer Refresher Course in 1960 and so landed up as my junior there...I guided him on the whereabouts of his department and canteen and bus stop.  

And that was when this gray-haired colleague of his had to sit down in their class and take his son's exam and pass (with grace marks).

I watched a curious incident of a father-son medico duo a couple of decades back. They came down to Madras to look up a patient who was their very close relative and had just then undergone a heart bypass surgery and developed post-operative complications in his ICCU. And the nurses and docs monitoring him were rushing in and out declaring that their patient had developed the unfortunate ARDS and was very critical...he recovered alright after a couple of days on tenterhooks.  

The father-doc was asked by crowding laymen like me what this ARDS thing was. And he said it was short for:

'Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome'

His son, who was in his twenties and just out of his medical college, corrected his dad at once saying:

"NO! It stands for Adult Respiratory Distress Syndrome"

I was afraid there would be an ugly spat in public but the father-doc simply smiled and said:

"Is that so?"

and left it at that. I felt relieved thinking what does the color of the cat matter as long as it catches mice...

Just now I Googled for ARDS and was tickled to know that both were right. During the father-doc's time it had meant: 'Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome', but a generation later it stood for the son-doc's: 'Adult Respiratory Distress Syndrome' since by then the medical science (if it is really a science and not witchcraft) tried to distinguish it from IRDS which required a different style of management...'I' stands, as you guessed it right, for 'Infant'.

I have always been friends with my only son although I didn't teach him how to smoke or drink and so he never learned them. But I learned and continue to learn a lot from him all the time.

You see, unlike Thomas Arnold and Matthew Arnold's times, I belong to a generation where there has been a tech revolution every decade or so. You learn with difficulty the Morse Code and they come up with teleprinters. You learn with equal difficulty how to tune a pocket transistor-radio and they come up with a wall-mounted HD TV.

And so on and so forth. It is not possible to expose your stark ignorance every time to the street-corner technician who arrives with his bulky kit and changes a blown cartridge fuse but charges you ten times the cost of that saying he had hell of a trouble 'troubleshooting'.

I managed to learn typing on a Remington RKN typewriter but when I had to compose my 300-page 'book' with Prof RSS, I had acquired a free IBM PC that came with Windows 98 (a failure) and a built-in Word 6.0. And time was running out and I wanted a teacher with whom I suffered no sense of shame. 

And so I called up my son for help...he was just out of his Class X at the KV, IIT KGP and had composed and printed a rather good-looking Project Report on the PC of my friend NP in his home.

My son didn't turn out to be a very patient teacher...he is into project management as you know. So I had to face lots of rebukes from him for my slow-learning, but it was all in the family, so it didn't matter much.

A few months later I taught him how to manage Word 6.0's ugly Equation Editor which I learned all by myself, and so retrieved some of my lost glory.

Let me conclude this with a charming shlok which I often recall, particularly when Ishani chides me for my slow-learning of how to correctly pronounce: 'girl':


Yukti yuktam upadeyam vachanam balakaadapi
Anyad trinamiva tyajyam api yuktam padmajaananaa


Meaning roughly:


The word of a child, if reasonable, should be accepted. All else should be rejected like a blade of grass even if it comes from the mouth of Brahma, the Creator.



..Posted by Ishani

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Sunday, June 29, 2014

Repeat Telecast - Ulat Puran

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It is a lazy Sunday morning here in Hyderabad. The cool monsoon winds are blowing awash the balconies and front-yards and backyards of our Nile Valley Township...houses on a hill...the poor man's hill station.

After a to-and-fro morning walk in our 7th floor front-yard, I just now looked up my blogspot stats and found that somewhere in this big world there have just now been 4 readers viewing a blog I posted all of four years back. It is titled Ulat Puran. And I couldn't recall what I wrote in that forgotten piece. So I looked it up and found it very nostalgic. 

So I decided to re-post it for new readers for whatever it is worth.

Here it is verbatim:


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Sunday, May 23, 2010


Ulat Puran

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During my Donkey's Years at KGP, I must have toured Victoria Memorial a dozen times; surely more than any Calcutta student of mine did.

July 1, B C Roy's Birthday is the best time to visit VM. Monsoon has just set in, it is drizzling fitfully, but not yet dark and damp, Sun and Cloud playing hide and seek, Greens are as green as they come, the Fat Girl in Stone drenched and dripping deliciously, winding water bodies full to the brim, Bakul trees lining them shedding silver drops on couples huddled beneath; Oh, well, When all the World is not yet too Old, it is the one place as none else.

I am as fascinated as any Saratchandra girl when I happen to pass by a Bakul Tree. There are half a dozen of them lined up in a row across the Director's Bungalow at IIT KGP. The tree's canopy is a perfect hemisphere. It is like a Nature-Made Umbrella, better than any of Pal Brothers. The leaves are just the right size and shape; let's not talk about the tiny tot flowers drenching the road. Their cute shape, color, scent; everything is perfect. Hundreds of poems and songs must have been written and sung in Bengali romancing these trees and flowers.

But, as they say, I must not tarry, for, I have promises to keep. It has long ben a passion with me to straight go the interior section of the dark and deep cells of VM to peek at the facsimiles of the letters written by the Bengali Renaissance Greats to the Governors-General and Viceroys of the Empire urging them to let Indian students learn Western Science rather than just preparing them to be their perfect Writers, fed to their teeth in English language and Literature, great though it is.

The White Man discovered his best Place under the Sun in India to root his Empire in.

While he had to 'Kill and Till' to make his Home in the New World, and Pray and Feast on Thanksgiving, in India he had the Granaries all ready for him to 'Loot and Scoot'. A fertile land under cultivation and a civilization a few thousand years older than his.

Just bump off and steal and ship it Home.

Make no mistake, there maybe individual exceptions, but as a policy matter, the Brits had no other business in India than to enrich themselves come what may, by plain and simple looting. Telegraph, Telephone, Railways, Colleges, Universities, Hospitals, Cities, Ports, Mines and Industries were all started to get a permanent grip on the Empire and get it going with as little British Manpower as they could afford.

Unlike the other looters who looted and fled, or looted but settled here, the Brits just looted, shipped, looted, shipped and intended to loot and ship ad infinitum till the land bled as white as their freckled skins.

The Great Men of the Bengali Renaissance realized this. And tried by sweet or sour methods to beat the 'System' the White Man built like a Fortress.

Well, rampant looting goes well only till other thieves get jealous and enter the arena. Then we have Gang Warfare and World Wars till each one emaciates the others till they all fall down like Alice's Pack of Cards.

We then celebrate that we fought for and achieved Independence.

Around the time my father was enrolling himself for B A in the Christian College at Madras (1929) so that he can help run the Wheels of the Empire smoothly, Parashuram wrote one of the Greatest Political Satires ever written.

I didn't know of it till Shyamal gifted me the book of that title translated by Sukanta Choudhuri and Palash Pal, a couple of years ago. I read the other stories once, but 'Ulat Puran' (The Scripture Read Backwards) many many times.

It is a Wonder! In 1929, there was no hint of the mighty British Empire collapsing like dominoes 20 years hence.

And the Empire Striking back a century later.

He satirized the Birth of the European Union half a Century before any Europeans could have dreamed it up. Europe was then disintegrating and getting Balkanized. Everyone fighting everyone else to their heart's content.

As Parashuram predicted, it is the fear of subjugation, economical and political by the Rest of the World that led and is leading to the Loveless Euro Union.

And, as Parashu whimsically wrote, my nephew working for the National Health Service in a modest town in Northern England says that all the Doctors there are expected to follow and speak Gujerati and Punjabi. Not out of Love for the 'East India Company Running Backwards'...but just so they can get their next meal after their Glorious Empire with India as Her Crown Jewel vanished into thin air as their Bard 'predicted' long back:

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Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

The Tempest Act 4, scene 1, 148–158

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And how poignant that this Indian-born Doctor who studied in the Medical College and Hospital set up by the Brits so their Army Personnel can be in fighting shape, should get the 'Officer of the [Defunct] British Empire' from Her Majesty the Queen of Hearts a hundred years later!

How prescient that just as the First British Traders were pleading for trading rights with the Mughal Emperor, Britain's Greatest Poet and Dramatist should foresee the End of their Empire two or three centuries later!

And the way Parashuram ridiculed the tin-pot Indian Slave Kings paying obeisance to the Emperor in His Durbar with strictly limited competing gun-salutes; and Her own shameless mouth-piece The Statesman descended from her so-called Friend of India are just MARVELOUS!

I am sure I will read this Parashuram Piece as and when I get a chance.

The Man is truly 'divine' in the word's verbal meaning: "to discover by intuition or insight"!

Thank you Shyamal!


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...Posted by Ishani

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