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http://gpsastry.blogspot.in/2009/10/seven-ages-of-lying-man.html
Lying is natural to kids as they don't have a clear idea of the holiness of truth. Their whole life is centered around wants. If a lie quickly gets that toffee they keenly desire, they find nothing wrong in it...indeed they innovate. A kid that always tells the truth (as we see it) is either dysfunctional or dull, lacking imagination...seeing idols instead of gods. No good for a Teaching Career in Physics.
It was the middle floor apartment of a 3-story building. But, we were not used to what my ground-floor tenant, Prof Z, dubbed 'corporate living'.
Z was hospitable enough for a week, but gradually he started disliking our existence over his head. The trouble was the usual: they were 3 larks and we were 3 owls. So, our sleeping and waking hours never coincided. And the slab that did duty as our floor and their roof was perhaps the thinnest ever.
So, one day, he rushed into our Qrs when I was away at Harry's, and shouted at my wife and son and asked us to mend our ways or quit. He made quite a ruckus and my wife was scared and my son amused. When I returned home, my wife told me the incident and I asked her to ignore it.
The next week, he revisited our Qrs and told my wife that he could 'trace' her footsteps and my son's and mine while we walked to and fro in our train-like apartment, and tell the difference. Also that he could, by leaning on the drain pipe in his bathroom, clearly make out the pillow-talk between my wife and me.
Clearly, we had a 'case' on our hands and I advised my wife to ignore him completely. But of course we never mended our owlish ghoulish ways.
Next month, we found copies of an unsigned Notice he wrote and circulated and pasted on the walls detailing his 'Ten Rules of Corporate Living (and Loving)'...a Notice loaded against us. The other co-residents of the Block had a fun time reading his memos and Injunctions and laughing and tearing them down.
At one time I was scared he would go to either our Director or even the Police Station with a written complaint against us.
But, as usual, I kept quiet...I was by then known as Professor Cool.
Two long years later, one fine morning, he visited us bearing a packet of sweets and trying to embrace me...it happened to be Holi.
I sort of wriggled and skipped...
And then on his overtures turned groovier and groovier.
Upon discreet inquiries, I came to know that all his long-dreamed desires got suddenly fulfilled: an overdue promotion, birth of a grandkid, a fellowship for his son...and maybe a Lottery Jackpot...
His Oldy-Baldy Katti-Bhaap syndrome was truly childish...even Ishani would laugh...
...Posted by Ishani
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I am wary of kids who don't lie and adults who do:
http://gpsastry.blogspot.in/2009/10/seven-ages-of-lying-man.html
Lying is natural to kids as they don't have a clear idea of the holiness of truth. Their whole life is centered around wants. If a lie quickly gets that toffee they keenly desire, they find nothing wrong in it...indeed they innovate. A kid that always tells the truth (as we see it) is either dysfunctional or dull, lacking imagination...seeing idols instead of gods. No good for a Teaching Career in Physics.
I have this ambivalent stand on truth...I do indulge in prevarication, fabrication, adumbration, sophistication, simplification, obfuscation, equivocation, but never in outright falsification in my life and blogs (nowadays the two are synonymous).
But I studiously avoid adults who tell lies...
One day, in the Dining Hall of the Faculty Hostel at IIT KGP, I was freely floating a titillating campus story about a Professor who made an ass of himself in the class room. And Prof RSN asked me:
"Who told you this?"
"Prof Sikand"
"Then, it must be true...Sikand never tells lies"
I thought it was a rare tribute...and then on, Prof Sikand became my Guru in Physics...for, he would frequently say:
"I don't know"
The other day I taught Ishani the technology of Katti-Bhaap, the Bengali method of cutting and restoring friendly relations between two kids that I learned from my son when he was in St Agnes School at KGP. The two kids concerned extend their right little fingers and 'cut' them away and say "Katti!"; and after a period of reconciliation, they come together and extend their thumbs and enfold them saying "Bhaap!". Nowadays whenever she visits my bedroom, we play Katti-Bhaap.
This doesn't seem to work always in adult world...
1993 Qrs B-140, IIT KGP:
From 1974 to 1993 we were living in Qrs C1-97, a bungalow with an enormous garden. And over the previous five years the woodwork in that Qrs was crumbling. Also, the trees in the compound grew tall and dense and no sunlight was streaming in. The whole house got dark, dingy and suffocating even during daytime. So, we bided our time and shifted to what I used to call the best Qrs at KGP...B-140.
It was the middle floor apartment of a 3-story building. But, we were not used to what my ground-floor tenant, Prof Z, dubbed 'corporate living'.
Z was hospitable enough for a week, but gradually he started disliking our existence over his head. The trouble was the usual: they were 3 larks and we were 3 owls. So, our sleeping and waking hours never coincided. And the slab that did duty as our floor and their roof was perhaps the thinnest ever.
So, one day, he rushed into our Qrs when I was away at Harry's, and shouted at my wife and son and asked us to mend our ways or quit. He made quite a ruckus and my wife was scared and my son amused. When I returned home, my wife told me the incident and I asked her to ignore it.
The next week, he revisited our Qrs and told my wife that he could 'trace' her footsteps and my son's and mine while we walked to and fro in our train-like apartment, and tell the difference. Also that he could, by leaning on the drain pipe in his bathroom, clearly make out the pillow-talk between my wife and me.
Clearly, we had a 'case' on our hands and I advised my wife to ignore him completely. But of course we never mended our owlish ghoulish ways.
Next month, we found copies of an unsigned Notice he wrote and circulated and pasted on the walls detailing his 'Ten Rules of Corporate Living (and Loving)'...a Notice loaded against us. The other co-residents of the Block had a fun time reading his memos and Injunctions and laughing and tearing them down.
At one time I was scared he would go to either our Director or even the Police Station with a written complaint against us.
But, as usual, I kept quiet...I was by then known as Professor Cool.
Two long years later, one fine morning, he visited us bearing a packet of sweets and trying to embrace me...it happened to be Holi.
I sort of wriggled and skipped...
And then on his overtures turned groovier and groovier.
Upon discreet inquiries, I came to know that all his long-dreamed desires got suddenly fulfilled: an overdue promotion, birth of a grandkid, a fellowship for his son...and maybe a Lottery Jackpot...
His Oldy-Baldy Katti-Bhaap syndrome was truly childish...even Ishani would laugh...
...Posted by Ishani
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