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"An Ambassador was sent to Kalam to civilize him for his forthcoming august job.
The first thing the Ambassador wanted was to have Kalam's famous locks clipped to his ears.
And Kalam declined politely...he being a bachelor, he had no wife, and his hanging locks were all that he loved. "
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There was always speculation why Kalam never allowed his forelocks to be clipped. They were always falling on his cheeks covering his ears.
He himself evaded answers to this question whenever put to him.
And so the internet has its own wild guesses.
One of them is that Kalm's left ear was half the size of his right ear...a genetic defect.
Unlike Gandhiji whose both ears were elephantine and he was rather proud of them.
Only the state-barber of Rashtrapti Bhavan knows.
This reminds me of a story I read in Chandamama in my school years:
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This King appeared in public always wearing an enormous crown hiding his ears.
And one day his Royal Baber died and he had to find a replacement.
And a young man, Dhenu, was selected.
The first morning he went to the King's private chamber and started his job, Dhenu discovered that the King had Donkey's Ears.
And he couldn't stop laughing.
The King got wild and threatened Dhenu with death if he ever leaked the King's secret.
And Dhenu got scared and went home after his job was done.
He wanted to tell the King's secret to someone close but was scared. And this made him sick and his tummy started bloating and he thought he would die unless...
So he went to the forest nearby and found a hole in the earth at one spot. He bent himself down and whispered: "King's ears are donkey's ears...King's ears are donkey's ears...King's ears are donkey's ears..."
And he was relieved of his stomach ache at once and he went home and slept peacefully. And went about his Royal Job for many years.
One day a rural Musician, Venu, was traveling by the forest to the Kingdom to meet the King in his Darbar and show off his musical talent and get showered with gold coins.
And Venu found a beautiful bamboo stalk growing out of a hole. And he cut it and made a lovely flute out of it.
When Venu played his song on it, the flute played faithfully:
"मन तड़पत हरि दरसन को आज..."
And Venu was pleased immensely and went to the King's Darbar and started playing on his flute.
But on looking at the King, the flute started playing:
"King's ears are donkey's ears...King's ears are donkey's ears...King's ears are donkey's ears..."
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For all of 70 years before I discovered the 'You Tube', I had trouble pronouncing outlandish proper nouns, names of persons in particular.
In our Class 8 in the 'innocent' 1950s, our Social Studies Teacher dictated in Telugu the name of the then Secretary General of the nascent UNO thus:
"Dog Hammershield"
And the whole class burst out laughing: "Dog! Dog! Dog! hehehe!!!!"
Trouble is that our Telugu script (as well as the Devanagari) had no sound like the 'a' in the English: "cat, rat, mat, sat, fat, hat..."
And so the "Dag" had to be written and pronounced as: "Dog"
And the "Hammershield" is the brave Telugu pronunciation of:
"Hammarskjöld"
Poor fellow was Swedish.
None of us knew what to do with that "j" there, not to speak of the umlaut.
Much later, I read all of Alistair MacLean novels. And his "Night Without End" was replete with the word: "fjord" with the same troublesome "j". The story was placed in Greenland.
Of course I had trouble with 'Don Quixote" and "Vincent van Gogh". You can check them for fun in your You Tube.
In 1958 when I reached my MD Uncle's house in Vizagh for my university education, for the first time in my life, I discovered a whole book shelf of the currently fashionable English novels (meant for display mostly).
And started reading all of them one by one (almost failing in Math and Chemistry; and losing the glorious Sripati Medal narrowly).
"Sherlock Holmes" was easy: the silent second "l" was familiar to us in "walk, talk, chalk..."
But what about "Somerset Maugham"; the second word, as I discovered later, was "Mom"; the "gh" being silent as in "caught, taught, brought, fought...."
What about "Wodehouse"? Is the "h" silent or not?
And Wodehouse books had these strange names:
"Archie Moffam" (pronounced as "Archie Moom"), "Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge" (pronounced as "Stanly Fasha Ukridge".
I had trouble with even Jim Corbett's "Man-Eaters of Kumaon" (what to do with that "n"?)
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Anyway I read the whole unabridged Maugham's novel: "Of Human Bondage". The prose flowed like champagne (pronounced as "shampain") and cognac (pronounced as "kawnyak").
Much later I read his "Summing Up" in which he wrote that he learned writing good prose after reading "Fyodor Dostoevsky" (pronounced as it is writ) meticulously.
So I borrowed and read Dostoevsky's fat novel of 600 pages: "Crime and Punishment" and found it eminently readable indeed.
But why 600 pages?
I came to know that the author was poor and his novel appeared in 12 monthly instalments in a journal and he was paid per instalment.
So he stretched it as long as he could, much like these serial blogs of mine.
The gist of that bulky novel is like this:
"The young hero kills an old Jewish woman money-lender and evades police successfully. In the end he couldn't contain himself and confesses"...
...like our barber Dhenu whispering: "King's ears are donkey's ears...King's ears are donkey's ears...King's ears are donkey's ears..." into the hole in the forest.
But why should a Jewish old lady take to money-lending and get killed?
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To be continued
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