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Professor S. H. Rao is a well-known connoisseur of English Literature. He had the largest Home Library in his Qrs at IIT KGP...a position now held by Pratik.
Professor Rao was a decade senior to me at AU and he was in the Geophysics there and later at IIT KGP.
I agree with him wholeheartedly ;)
In my late teens at AU (1961) I had read all of my Maugham. He was a cult figure then and his name a password for entry into the elusive elite club. I read his books with grim determination though I could then follow only about 40% of what he wrote...but it didn't matter since he wrote highly readable prose. It was a fashion to say he deserved the Nobel but was denied it because he was a cynic; and the Nobel required uplifting literature...his was supposed to be its opposite.
Some of his books were rather straightforward like 'Cakes and Ale' which he called his best (because it treats, ahem, nymphomania with sympathy). And his 'Painted Veil' (which treats adultery with sympathy)...the sympathy in the former was with the 'doer' and in the latter with the 'done in'.
But his magnum opus, 'Of Human Bondage' (sometimes in two volumes) starts midway with the quest for the meaning of life and ends with the quest for the meaning of life...obscure at best...he finally implies it is found (and lost) in a mini-Persian Carpet...the meaning of life, if any, is left to the liver reading the message in his own mini-carpet.
And then there is this book 'Moon and Sixpence'. Its title is enigmatic and the enigma is never resolved. It is about a Paul Gaugin clone who is a stocky stockbroker with family but suddenly runs away to the Pacific Islands of Tahiti and starts painting and dies of, ahem, syphilis, a broken man. And decades later his paintings sell for millions of dollars (till date). Genius (with all her drawbacks).
The received wisdom is that our stockbroker was, metaphorically, picking up and pocketing his sixpence that fell in the mud and suddenly looks up and sees the full moon and becomes a lunatic...in the eyes of the world and his wife and friends.
I am being as cynical about his writings as he was about my life...they cancel each other.
But from the day I read his 'Moon and Sixpence', my soul was gripped by the ardent desire of getting away from it all (i.e. exams) and escaping to Tahiti or Papetee or Papua or Caledonia or Samoa or Hawaii or any of those sweet-sounding Pacific Islands labeled Oceania and settling there and start painting word-pictures, you know, of:
That is the litmus test of a great writer...he leaves a lasting imprint on a young mind that lasts till old age.
After a half century, the other day, my AU friend, Dr. PSKM, called me and asked if he could come over for a couple of hours of soothing talk about my wife. I said welcome. And he brought along a friend of his a couple of years senior to us:
http://gpsastry.blogspot.in/2012/07/end-of-mannerisms.html
And when this senior, Dr. SR, was introduced and I asked him where he retired from, he said:
"Fiseee"
And I thought he was saying FIITJEE and committed a faux pas of the first waters.
He then corrected me:
"Fiji...F..I..J..I"
Oh, Ok, then I got it...the one that was in the news lately for all its coups. And the biggest was against its Hindu-Fijian Mahendra Choudhry, the then Prime Minister.
And then I reverted to my teens and made Dr SR talk about his twenty years of teaching Physics there. It was a strange career for a physics guy because before going to Fiji, he was teaching in a couple of countries in Africa, South-East Asia, and New Zealand.
Both his kids are well-settled in the US where they did all their studies from school final onwards. He quit Fiji and settled down in Hyderabad with his wife a few months ago. And he told us that he was traveling to the US for a couple of months to look up his kids.
And then, the other day, I came to know that while in the US he got a frantic call from Fiji offering a couple of years more of contract, and he flew there from the US.
Contrast this to my steadfast career of 40 years at IIT KGP without break even for a month.
Rolling stones and couch potatoes.
He said that Suva, Fiji, was about 10 ft above sea level and it rains about 5000 mm annually.
Hmm!
I just Googled for Fiji and got these facts:
There is this Hindu temple in case you get homesick:
...Posted by Ishani
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"The culture of any University depends largely on the culture of its Physics and English Departments"
...Professor S. H. Rao
Professor S. H. Rao is a well-known connoisseur of English Literature. He had the largest Home Library in his Qrs at IIT KGP...a position now held by Pratik.
Professor Rao was a decade senior to me at AU and he was in the Geophysics there and later at IIT KGP.
I agree with him wholeheartedly ;)
In my late teens at AU (1961) I had read all of my Maugham. He was a cult figure then and his name a password for entry into the elusive elite club. I read his books with grim determination though I could then follow only about 40% of what he wrote...but it didn't matter since he wrote highly readable prose. It was a fashion to say he deserved the Nobel but was denied it because he was a cynic; and the Nobel required uplifting literature...his was supposed to be its opposite.
Some of his books were rather straightforward like 'Cakes and Ale' which he called his best (because it treats, ahem, nymphomania with sympathy). And his 'Painted Veil' (which treats adultery with sympathy)...the sympathy in the former was with the 'doer' and in the latter with the 'done in'.
But his magnum opus, 'Of Human Bondage' (sometimes in two volumes) starts midway with the quest for the meaning of life and ends with the quest for the meaning of life...obscure at best...he finally implies it is found (and lost) in a mini-Persian Carpet...the meaning of life, if any, is left to the liver reading the message in his own mini-carpet.
And then there is this book 'Moon and Sixpence'. Its title is enigmatic and the enigma is never resolved. It is about a Paul Gaugin clone who is a stocky stockbroker with family but suddenly runs away to the Pacific Islands of Tahiti and starts painting and dies of, ahem, syphilis, a broken man. And decades later his paintings sell for millions of dollars (till date). Genius (with all her drawbacks).
The received wisdom is that our stockbroker was, metaphorically, picking up and pocketing his sixpence that fell in the mud and suddenly looks up and sees the full moon and becomes a lunatic...in the eyes of the world and his wife and friends.
I am being as cynical about his writings as he was about my life...they cancel each other.
But from the day I read his 'Moon and Sixpence', my soul was gripped by the ardent desire of getting away from it all (i.e. exams) and escaping to Tahiti or Papetee or Papua or Caledonia or Samoa or Hawaii or any of those sweet-sounding Pacific Islands labeled Oceania and settling there and start painting word-pictures, you know, of:
That is the litmus test of a great writer...he leaves a lasting imprint on a young mind that lasts till old age.
After a half century, the other day, my AU friend, Dr. PSKM, called me and asked if he could come over for a couple of hours of soothing talk about my wife. I said welcome. And he brought along a friend of his a couple of years senior to us:
http://gpsastry.blogspot.in/2012/07/end-of-mannerisms.html
And when this senior, Dr. SR, was introduced and I asked him where he retired from, he said:
"Fiseee"
And I thought he was saying FIITJEE and committed a faux pas of the first waters.
He then corrected me:
"Fiji...F..I..J..I"
Oh, Ok, then I got it...the one that was in the news lately for all its coups. And the biggest was against its Hindu-Fijian Mahendra Choudhry, the then Prime Minister.
And then I reverted to my teens and made Dr SR talk about his twenty years of teaching Physics there. It was a strange career for a physics guy because before going to Fiji, he was teaching in a couple of countries in Africa, South-East Asia, and New Zealand.
Both his kids are well-settled in the US where they did all their studies from school final onwards. He quit Fiji and settled down in Hyderabad with his wife a few months ago. And he told us that he was traveling to the US for a couple of months to look up his kids.
And then, the other day, I came to know that while in the US he got a frantic call from Fiji offering a couple of years more of contract, and he flew there from the US.
Contrast this to my steadfast career of 40 years at IIT KGP without break even for a month.
Rolling stones and couch potatoes.
He said that Suva, Fiji, was about 10 ft above sea level and it rains about 5000 mm annually.
Hmm!
I just Googled for Fiji and got these facts:
There is this Hindu temple in case you get homesick:
Across 1000 kilometres from east to west, Fiji has been a nation of many languages. Fiji's history was one of settlement but also of mobility. Over the centuries, a unique Fijian culture developed. Constant warfare and cannibalism between warring tribes were quite rampant and very much part of everyday life.[16] During the 19th century, Ratu Udre Udre is said to have consumed 872 people and to have made a pile of stones to record his achievement.[17]
According to Deryck Scarr ("A Short History of Fiji", 1984, page 3), "Ceremonial occasions saw freshly killed corpses piled up for eating. 'Eat me!' was a proper ritual greeting from a commoner to a chief." Scarr also reported that the posts that supported the chief's house or the priest's temple would have sacrificed bodies buried underneath them, with the rationale that the spirit of the ritually sacrificed person would invoke the gods to help support the structure, and "men were sacrificed whenever posts had to be renewed" (Scarr, page 3). Also, when a new boat, or drua, was launched, if it was not hauled over men as rollers, crushing them to death, "it would not be expected to float long" (Scarr, page 19). Fijians today regard those times as "na gauna ni tevoro" (time of the devil). The ferocity of the cannibal lifestyle deterred European sailors from going near Fijian waters, giving Fiji the name Cannibal Isles; in turn, Fiji was unknown to the rest of the outside world.[18]
Not to worry...Dr. SR assures me; it is all a bad dream and Fiji is now one of the most modern and developed of the Pacific islands.
Indeed Suva National University (SNU) is quite famous in the region:
Fiji National University[1] (FNU) formed in 2010 as a result of a merger between six institutions in Fiji, namely the Fiji Institute of Technology, Fiji School of Nursing, Fiji College of Advanced Education, Lautoka Teachers College, Fiji School of Medicine and Fiji College of Agriculture. It is currently led by vice chancellor Dr. Ganesh Chand[2] who has been an academic of theUniversity of the South Pacific and also founder of the University of Fiji.
FNU now has campuses and centres at 33 locations throughout the country, running a total of approximately 30 different courses and programmes with a staff complement of more than 1800 and in January 2012, hitting a record student enrolment of more than 20,000.
Any takers?
...Posted by Ishani
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