====================================================================
Seven Ages of a Lying Man
They say that everyone remembers their first kiss. I doubt it. Born during the height of the Second World War into an orthodox South Indian Brahmin family in an ultraconservative society, my first kiss was on our wedding night (no lies here). It happened at the ripe age of 36 on a stuffy moonless night when there were more pressing matters to attend to.
But I distinctly remember my first lie. It happened at the tender age of 3. Since then I must have lied a hundred times, but they were pure routine.
I have a great regard for Truth in the Abstract. Left to myself I would never have uttered a single lie. I am not one of those artistic liars who lie compulsively even to themselves. All my lies were forced upon me by others.
Though a ‘super’ dramatist and a ‘sensitive’ poet, Shakespeare was also an ‘able’ Accountant: he broke up the Life of Man neatly into Seven Ages, as is well known. I think I can cut up and package my lies into seven ages and stages of my life (such as it is):
1. Innocent Lies (below 4)
2. Student Lies (well known)
3. Teacher Lies (little known and less advertised)
4. Interview lies (for career advancement)
5. Marital lies (both pre- and post-)
6. Financial lies (PF Loans)
7. Smiling lies (ripe old age).
I now dwell on the first and the last.
First the last, the Smiling Lies. At 66 these are uttered mostly to my mother (87) and to my wife (59).
My mother asked me soon after my son’s marriage what my daughter-in-law’s salary was. I smiled and lied that I didn’t know.
A week back I did a crazy thing: going alone in a taxi touring South India for a week. On my way back I dropped at my mother’s place. She promptly asked me what the trip cost. I smiled and replied that the driver is my good friend and doesn’t charge me a single penny and drives me around with me by his side in the front seat, just for the pleasure of my witty company.
She too smiled knowingly.
I hunt all over Hyderabad for used books and get hold of a couple of very old bound volumes of antique Wodehouse donated or sold or got rid of by the great-grandson of a book-lover who bought and read them with pleasure a century ago.
My wife asks me what they cost. I reply: ‘A million dollars’.
I now come to my first lie which I cherish.
I was 3 and was playing marbles in our village street one afternoon. My father was busy penning a post card in which he used to squeeze about a thousand words of calligraphy (he ought to have attached a magnifying glass). There was then a sudden uproar as some old lady in our rented complex spotted a green snake on a green tree in our compound (she must have been on the lookout; no TVs then). My father was summoned to do the needful and he was too chivalrous to refuse.
But since it was past tine for clearing the neighborhood post box, he sent me to the Village Head Post Office with a complicated instruction:
I was to post this card if he didn’t have any incoming mail. If there was any post card meant for him (no one ever wrote anything but post cards thon), I should bring back his outgoing card without posting it, along with the incoming card.
The thing looked pretty clear to me.
But when I reached the Post Office, our ‘Friendly Neighborhood Postman’ cuddled and lifted me and showered me with stinking kisses (I must have been pretty cute or he never saw a kid of 3 handling a post card). He snatched the card from me, defaced it with a thud, and tossed it into its pigeon hole.
I was trying to swiftly return home to my playmates, but he stopped me and asked me to wait. He then scanned his stack of ‘Incoming Sheaf of Cards for Delivery’, and found one for my father.
He handed it to me asked me to RUN!
On my slow and pondering and thoughtful and guilty walk back home, I tore up the nasty card in my hands (which felt like a slithering slippery green snake) into small bits and pieces and scattered them all along the roadside one by one.
My father was back at his desk and asked me if I had posted the card. I said ‘yes’. He asked if he had no incoming cards. I said: ’no’.
I had eaten the forbidden Apple in my Garden of Eden and never looked back.
Oh, well! I am no George Washington, who was too truthful to be scared of his father in the Cherry Tree episode. But he was 6 then and his father was no Headmaster!
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Rain Drops and Pearls
======================================================
It was a late rainy evening of lyrical Bengal Monsoon in 1985. To keep ourselves out of mischief, my 4-year old son and I were tossing a shuttle cock in our spacious hall of the Faculty Quarters at IIT Kharagpur.
There was a honk and I found two gentlemen knocking at our door. Dripping wet, they alighted from the only Maruti car in the campus driven by my colleague, the Professor-in-Charge of Training and Placement, who holds as it were the future of the final year students in the hollow of his palm.
The other was a short fair well-built eminence with prematurely thinning hair, 30-ish. The features looked vaguely familiar but not the figure. I welcomed them in; and the T & P Professor introduced the gentleman as Dr. Moorty, the Personnel Manager of TVS, Madras. And I was told that Dr. Moorty generally sends an officer two rungs below him for campus recruitment, but he himself flew down this time to KGP just so he could meet me.
I was a little nonplussed and embarrassed not being able to place him firmly. But we teachers learn how to hide our ignorance and keep the small talk going. We talked of this and that, cabbages and kings, how TVS is doing, how the IITians were faring; and the weather, over cups of hot chai and biscuits for a pleasant half hour.
Before taking leave, Dr. Moorty touched my feet and pushed a sealed envelope into my pocket.
Later, upon opening the envelope, I found 5 crisp 100 Rupee notes and a small ThanQ slip explaining things.
And then it all came back to me as if in a flashback:
More than a decade earlier when I was a carefree bachelor living in the Faculty Hostel, I got a post card in an unknown hand from an unknown Moorty, who said he got my address from a friend of my friend. It turned out that Moorty didn’t do all that well in his B.A. (English) and so had to grab a seat in M. A. (Psychology) which was the only one available for his score at our alma mater at Waltair. And he didn’t do all that well in M. A. either and was footloose at the moment. He asked me if I could please find some opening for him at IIT KGP.
I was amused at Moorty’s temerity: IIT is an Institute of so-called National Importance in Science & Technology; not in Psychology!
I was inclined to trash the post card when it occurred to me that there IS a small service Department of Humanities, so why not make a trip. It turned out that just that year a young Faculty member in Industrial Psychology was recruited at IIT. I met the gentleman and showed him the post card half expecting a rebuke.
But the young man bade me sit down and asked me to immediately wire Moorty to come down with his original certificates. I came to know that this newcomer was bent on starting a one-year Diploma Course in Industrial Psychology that year itself. The minimum number of students required to run a course was an inflexible 4, but since this was a new course, the entry criteria could be relaxed. He could find 3 candidates in the short time available (they were young campus ladies), and was waiting eagerly for a fourth.
Rest is fairytale: the lean young boyish Moorty joined the brand new Diploma Course which paid a handsome stipend of Rs. 400 p.m., did well in the course work under his guide’s close supervision, did his Project studiously at the fledgling IIM Calcutta, got into IIM’s Fellowship Program, completed his Ph. D. in record time, was absorbed as Manager (H. R.) in the Paper Mill at Rajamundry, changed jobs quickly over a couple of years, landed the plum job of Personnel Manager in TVS at a tender age, got happily married, had an infant son, and all was hunky-dory except that something was gnawing his conscience:
Apparently, while at IIM Calcutta as a doctoral student, his fellowship fell a little short of the city expenses, and he had come down once to KGP (the local train fare being Rs. 3) to borrow from me Rs. 50….a thing I vaguely forgot.
That explained his ‘recruiting visit’ to KGP…. to redeem his long-standing debt with a whopping Interest!
There is a charming folklore in A. P. which goes like this: In the dead of the dark monsoon midnight when the Swati Constellation is at zenith in the sky, the thirsty oyster surfaces with its mouth wide open, waiting for a tiny rain drop to fall into it. Its thirst quenched, it clams up and dives down and goes hibernating. After 3 months, lo and behold, the rain drop turns into a glowing pearl of such purity and brilliance that no hi-tech-pearl-culture-technology can ever hope to match.
Moral: The chosen rain drop that finds the oyster’s waiting open mouth turns into a pearl; while its million unlucky friends miss it, slip into the water, merge into the sea, and get lost!
It was a late rainy evening of lyrical Bengal Monsoon in 1985. To keep ourselves out of mischief, my 4-year old son and I were tossing a shuttle cock in our spacious hall of the Faculty Quarters at IIT Kharagpur.
There was a honk and I found two gentlemen knocking at our door. Dripping wet, they alighted from the only Maruti car in the campus driven by my colleague, the Professor-in-Charge of Training and Placement, who holds as it were the future of the final year students in the hollow of his palm.
The other was a short fair well-built eminence with prematurely thinning hair, 30-ish. The features looked vaguely familiar but not the figure. I welcomed them in; and the T & P Professor introduced the gentleman as Dr. Moorty, the Personnel Manager of TVS, Madras. And I was told that Dr. Moorty generally sends an officer two rungs below him for campus recruitment, but he himself flew down this time to KGP just so he could meet me.
I was a little nonplussed and embarrassed not being able to place him firmly. But we teachers learn how to hide our ignorance and keep the small talk going. We talked of this and that, cabbages and kings, how TVS is doing, how the IITians were faring; and the weather, over cups of hot chai and biscuits for a pleasant half hour.
Before taking leave, Dr. Moorty touched my feet and pushed a sealed envelope into my pocket.
Later, upon opening the envelope, I found 5 crisp 100 Rupee notes and a small ThanQ slip explaining things.
And then it all came back to me as if in a flashback:
More than a decade earlier when I was a carefree bachelor living in the Faculty Hostel, I got a post card in an unknown hand from an unknown Moorty, who said he got my address from a friend of my friend. It turned out that Moorty didn’t do all that well in his B.A. (English) and so had to grab a seat in M. A. (Psychology) which was the only one available for his score at our alma mater at Waltair. And he didn’t do all that well in M. A. either and was footloose at the moment. He asked me if I could please find some opening for him at IIT KGP.
I was amused at Moorty’s temerity: IIT is an Institute of so-called National Importance in Science & Technology; not in Psychology!
I was inclined to trash the post card when it occurred to me that there IS a small service Department of Humanities, so why not make a trip. It turned out that just that year a young Faculty member in Industrial Psychology was recruited at IIT. I met the gentleman and showed him the post card half expecting a rebuke.
But the young man bade me sit down and asked me to immediately wire Moorty to come down with his original certificates. I came to know that this newcomer was bent on starting a one-year Diploma Course in Industrial Psychology that year itself. The minimum number of students required to run a course was an inflexible 4, but since this was a new course, the entry criteria could be relaxed. He could find 3 candidates in the short time available (they were young campus ladies), and was waiting eagerly for a fourth.
Rest is fairytale: the lean young boyish Moorty joined the brand new Diploma Course which paid a handsome stipend of Rs. 400 p.m., did well in the course work under his guide’s close supervision, did his Project studiously at the fledgling IIM Calcutta, got into IIM’s Fellowship Program, completed his Ph. D. in record time, was absorbed as Manager (H. R.) in the Paper Mill at Rajamundry, changed jobs quickly over a couple of years, landed the plum job of Personnel Manager in TVS at a tender age, got happily married, had an infant son, and all was hunky-dory except that something was gnawing his conscience:
Apparently, while at IIM Calcutta as a doctoral student, his fellowship fell a little short of the city expenses, and he had come down once to KGP (the local train fare being Rs. 3) to borrow from me Rs. 50….a thing I vaguely forgot.
That explained his ‘recruiting visit’ to KGP…. to redeem his long-standing debt with a whopping Interest!
There is a charming folklore in A. P. which goes like this: In the dead of the dark monsoon midnight when the Swati Constellation is at zenith in the sky, the thirsty oyster surfaces with its mouth wide open, waiting for a tiny rain drop to fall into it. Its thirst quenched, it clams up and dives down and goes hibernating. After 3 months, lo and behold, the rain drop turns into a glowing pearl of such purity and brilliance that no hi-tech-pearl-culture-technology can ever hope to match.
Moral: The chosen rain drop that finds the oyster’s waiting open mouth turns into a pearl; while its million unlucky friends miss it, slip into the water, merge into the sea, and get lost!
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Majority Bullying
===========================================================================
“As an example to others, and not that I care for moderation myself, it has always been my rule never to smoke when asleep and never to refrain when awake.”
- Mark Twain…70th Birthday Speech
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
...when they used to tell me I would shorten my life ten years by smoking, they little knew the devotee they were wasting their puerile word upon -- they little knew how trivial and valueless I would regard a decade that had no smoking in it!
- Mark Twain… Letter to Joseph Twichell, 19 Dec 1870
============================================================
There ought to be a law against Majority Bullying. What are the Human Rights Organizations doing? They ought to shut shop and go home in shame.
..gps…forever yours truly
===============================================================
My son doesn’t smoke; It is not that he tried and didn’t like it…..he never tried:
“I hold it true, whate'er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
'Tis better to have smoked and quit
Than never to have smoked at all.”
….gps…..with apologies to Tennyson’s ‘In Memorium’
=================================================================================
My son’s colleagues are born smokers. I asked him what they do during the grueling 15-hour Trans-Atlantic flight where there is no ‘smoking zone’. He said that they puff 5 cigarettes before boarding and repeat it as soon as the flight lands.
This is blasphemy……every smoker knows it doesn’t work that way. It is worse than Hell to be put to so much suffering.
I am now no devotee of smoking…but I rebel against the authorities who don’t take care of the human rights of smokers.
Wine, spirits and alcohol flow freely, courtesy hospitality… during those 15 long hours.
Why?
Smoking can’t be a fire hazard. Technology can take care of it if it is. Alcohol is a worse flight hazard….ask our Maharashtrian Minister of yore who got ‘higher’ than the aircraft and mollycoddled the air hostess with such intense fervor that the cockpit crew had to leave the plane unattended trying to dissuade him.
Smoking should be ‘discouraged’ but not ‘prohibited’. No ‘prohibition’ ever works. The US Govt tried it with alcohol between the World Wars and failed miserably and gave it up forever. Ask the Gujerat Govt how far they have succeeded.
Our own Ramadoss tried to ‘ban’ smoking; Come to Hyderabad to see for yourselves how effective that ‘ban’ is. The silliest thing a Govt could do is to pass a law or decree that can’t be enforced. It becomes the laughing stock of the governed.
Compared to smoking, drinking is a far worse evil. During the past one year our Apartment Complex had to change 6 watchmen to get one who doesn’t drink, get high, beat up his wife and kids and become a terror to the maids. We haven’t yet succeeded.
But Ramadoss couldn’t care!
It is silly to argue that smokers suffer and die miserably of lung cancer in the long run. There is no part of this lousy human body which is not prone to cancer, suffering, and cruel death,
My best friend and ex-colleague, a goody-goody chaste Brahmin who never smoked nor drunk nor ate meat nor ever told a lie died at the tender age of 50 suffering long from prostate cancer. And my most revered ‘teacher of teachers’ is going strong at 85 following Mark Twain’s obiter dicta to the letter.
To say that smoking should be ‘banned’ as it inflicts death on ‘passive-smoking onlookers’ is equally silly. Pass a law that smokers should not smoke if anyone around objects. That is a law which can be enforced and is very civil to everyone.
This train of thought is due to something funny that happened today: I always take my delicious Iranian Chai here in a joint which displays boldly the mandatory slogan: ‘No Smoking….By Govt Order’. But everyone there smokes nonchalantly and no one ever complains. Today however, a gentleman occupied the seat opposite me, pulled out his stick, and said: ‘Ahem..may I please smoke?’.
I replied: “I come here only to enjoy free ‘passive smoking’ because my medico wife prohibited expensive ‘active smoking’ on our first wedding anniversary……thank you and please go ahead; and LONG LIVE SENSIBLE SMOKERS!”
“As an example to others, and not that I care for moderation myself, it has always been my rule never to smoke when asleep and never to refrain when awake.”
- Mark Twain…70th Birthday Speech
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
...when they used to tell me I would shorten my life ten years by smoking, they little knew the devotee they were wasting their puerile word upon -- they little knew how trivial and valueless I would regard a decade that had no smoking in it!
- Mark Twain… Letter to Joseph Twichell, 19 Dec 1870
============================================================
There ought to be a law against Majority Bullying. What are the Human Rights Organizations doing? They ought to shut shop and go home in shame.
..gps…forever yours truly
===============================================================
My son doesn’t smoke; It is not that he tried and didn’t like it…..he never tried:
“I hold it true, whate'er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
'Tis better to have smoked and quit
Than never to have smoked at all.”
….gps…..with apologies to Tennyson’s ‘In Memorium’
=================================================================================
My son’s colleagues are born smokers. I asked him what they do during the grueling 15-hour Trans-Atlantic flight where there is no ‘smoking zone’. He said that they puff 5 cigarettes before boarding and repeat it as soon as the flight lands.
This is blasphemy……every smoker knows it doesn’t work that way. It is worse than Hell to be put to so much suffering.
I am now no devotee of smoking…but I rebel against the authorities who don’t take care of the human rights of smokers.
Wine, spirits and alcohol flow freely, courtesy hospitality… during those 15 long hours.
Why?
Smoking can’t be a fire hazard. Technology can take care of it if it is. Alcohol is a worse flight hazard….ask our Maharashtrian Minister of yore who got ‘higher’ than the aircraft and mollycoddled the air hostess with such intense fervor that the cockpit crew had to leave the plane unattended trying to dissuade him.
Smoking should be ‘discouraged’ but not ‘prohibited’. No ‘prohibition’ ever works. The US Govt tried it with alcohol between the World Wars and failed miserably and gave it up forever. Ask the Gujerat Govt how far they have succeeded.
Our own Ramadoss tried to ‘ban’ smoking; Come to Hyderabad to see for yourselves how effective that ‘ban’ is. The silliest thing a Govt could do is to pass a law or decree that can’t be enforced. It becomes the laughing stock of the governed.
Compared to smoking, drinking is a far worse evil. During the past one year our Apartment Complex had to change 6 watchmen to get one who doesn’t drink, get high, beat up his wife and kids and become a terror to the maids. We haven’t yet succeeded.
But Ramadoss couldn’t care!
It is silly to argue that smokers suffer and die miserably of lung cancer in the long run. There is no part of this lousy human body which is not prone to cancer, suffering, and cruel death,
My best friend and ex-colleague, a goody-goody chaste Brahmin who never smoked nor drunk nor ate meat nor ever told a lie died at the tender age of 50 suffering long from prostate cancer. And my most revered ‘teacher of teachers’ is going strong at 85 following Mark Twain’s obiter dicta to the letter.
To say that smoking should be ‘banned’ as it inflicts death on ‘passive-smoking onlookers’ is equally silly. Pass a law that smokers should not smoke if anyone around objects. That is a law which can be enforced and is very civil to everyone.
This train of thought is due to something funny that happened today: I always take my delicious Iranian Chai here in a joint which displays boldly the mandatory slogan: ‘No Smoking….By Govt Order’. But everyone there smokes nonchalantly and no one ever complains. Today however, a gentleman occupied the seat opposite me, pulled out his stick, and said: ‘Ahem..may I please smoke?’.
I replied: “I come here only to enjoy free ‘passive smoking’ because my medico wife prohibited expensive ‘active smoking’ on our first wedding anniversary……thank you and please go ahead; and LONG LIVE SENSIBLE SMOKERS!”
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Tight Rope Walk
=============================================================================
There is a stunning color photo in today’s Deccan Chronicle (19 October). A seven or eight year old girl with a serene face lit up by an almost yogic concentration. She is high up in the air balancing a column of 5 converging earthen pots on her tiny head. She is riding a single wheel grimly on a tight rope on the busy Punjagutta Road. A common enough sight in India.
The caption reads: “…For all the protestations about protecting children, especially the girl child, police and government officials were conspicuously absent”.
I am sure the ‘police’ kindly allowed the show with a ‘consideration’ for the ‘girl child’. And the ‘government officials’, if they were pressed into service would have dragged her away and put her in a school with ‘free and compulsory’ education.
Having seen these shows in my childhood village in the early 50s, I know all about the ‘Dommari’ tribe who make a living out of this hazardous family calling. I used o close my eyes when a months-old baby used to be flung from one end of the tight rope to the other in the safe hands of the sender father and the receiver mother. The training starts apparently from the womb……like Abhimanyu. The girls are not allowed to ‘ossify’ their bones…they remain as supple as rubber bands…they would break if not trained continuously from childhood.
Sad and cruel…..but what about Nadia Comaneci who made such news with her first ever perfect 10 point Gold Medal in the Montreal Olympics Gymnastics? Her training too started early in life and was even more rigorous and pitiless, with the Communist Rumanian Government bent on winning Olympic Gold Medals during the Cold War.
Put our tight rope walker in the school and she would be a fish out of water. A girl child forced to work for a meager living without any danger to her life as a maid servant in a posh household is one thing; and a born tight rope walker is quite another!
Without being facile, let us admit that life is a tight rope walk for more children than most. And that there are certain inborn genetic skills coming down from generations. The Hamiltons and the Bernoullis were cut out to do Science and nothing but science for generations; and the world is a better place for letting them do it. And there are girl children of weavers who astound one with their genes and early training and keep up our foreign exchange kitty in a floating condition. Gandhi knew all about it.
What a government ought to do is search for talent and encourage it from childhood; but not to force everyone into a straitjacket. Choice is the word! Alas, today’s front page story (with a photo of a smiling Sibaljee) is that he has decided to raise the cut-off of Class XII marks for IIT JEE to 80%.
The US knows all about what I am talking. So they have a Bill Gates who failed to complete his college,
I knew of a family of geniuses…..6 brothers who all did well except the last one (by the way, they too are all Sastrys-;). This last kid couldn’t ‘matriculate’. He was standing first in all subjects in the Board but English. He failed in it 3 times scoring 5, 8 and 5 marks out of 100. I am told he is running a Chess Academy to eke out a living. He would have been a brilliant mathematician but for the straitjacket.
I was a teacher for my living for a good 42 years willy-nilly. So I know that there is something called ‘aptitude’. While at IIT KGP one of my back-bencher students in Physics approached me in his Fourth Year for a recommendation letter. He wanted to quit Physics midway and take up his family calling which happened to be ‘business’. He went on to do his MBA in the US and turned out to be a wonderful entrepreneur earning millions of dollars for India exporting software packages and generating employment for many of our kids. Physics would have killed him.
Neither me nor my wife have an aptitude for music. So I taught my son shuttle badminton from an early age and he did turn out to be a ‘blue’ for his Hall at IIT KGP. But one day he came home from his KV school in Class X with a trophy. I asked him what he won it for and he replied: “Music”. I was stunned when he said he was playing Bongo for his House for a couple of years since they pressed him into service whenever needed.
I at once engaged a ‘tabla’ master for him, who used to visit our home late in the night. I asked his teacher why he turns up so late. He replied that throughout the day he is employed to ‘teach’ tabla to campus kids who have absolutely no aptitude for it but to please their parents and make a living for himself. So, before going home he comes to our place as the Port of Last Call because he doesn’t have to ‘teach’ my son…only show a couple of new beats and listen with rapture as my son repeated them effortlessly. He said he would do it for pleasure and not money!
And in Class XI I had to stop his tabla classes much to the chagrin of his teacher because I had to myself ‘coach’ my son for the bloody IIT JEE. He went on to do his M. Sc. in Industry Chemistry there but now earns his decent living doing software for which he turned out to have a FLAIR!
And on inquiry we found that his first cousin dropped out from college and grew up to be a professional percussionist visiting the US regularly and making a big splash and a great living…his mom was the late Principal of a renowned Music College.
After clearing his B. A. in English (failing in one paper for not reading an unreadable book on Amundsen’s ‘Expeditions to the South Pole’) R. K. Narayan was walking up the stairs of their University College with a filled-up application form for M. A. in English. Fortunately he was met by a senior of his coming downstairs who advised him to tear up the forms if he wanted to keep up his love for English.
Ask Shyamal about ‘aptitude’!
And then talk about Life as a ‘Tight Rope Walk’!!!
============================================================================================
There is a stunning color photo in today’s Deccan Chronicle (19 October). A seven or eight year old girl with a serene face lit up by an almost yogic concentration. She is high up in the air balancing a column of 5 converging earthen pots on her tiny head. She is riding a single wheel grimly on a tight rope on the busy Punjagutta Road. A common enough sight in India.
The caption reads: “…For all the protestations about protecting children, especially the girl child, police and government officials were conspicuously absent”.
I am sure the ‘police’ kindly allowed the show with a ‘consideration’ for the ‘girl child’. And the ‘government officials’, if they were pressed into service would have dragged her away and put her in a school with ‘free and compulsory’ education.
Having seen these shows in my childhood village in the early 50s, I know all about the ‘Dommari’ tribe who make a living out of this hazardous family calling. I used o close my eyes when a months-old baby used to be flung from one end of the tight rope to the other in the safe hands of the sender father and the receiver mother. The training starts apparently from the womb……like Abhimanyu. The girls are not allowed to ‘ossify’ their bones…they remain as supple as rubber bands…they would break if not trained continuously from childhood.
Sad and cruel…..but what about Nadia Comaneci who made such news with her first ever perfect 10 point Gold Medal in the Montreal Olympics Gymnastics? Her training too started early in life and was even more rigorous and pitiless, with the Communist Rumanian Government bent on winning Olympic Gold Medals during the Cold War.
Put our tight rope walker in the school and she would be a fish out of water. A girl child forced to work for a meager living without any danger to her life as a maid servant in a posh household is one thing; and a born tight rope walker is quite another!
Without being facile, let us admit that life is a tight rope walk for more children than most. And that there are certain inborn genetic skills coming down from generations. The Hamiltons and the Bernoullis were cut out to do Science and nothing but science for generations; and the world is a better place for letting them do it. And there are girl children of weavers who astound one with their genes and early training and keep up our foreign exchange kitty in a floating condition. Gandhi knew all about it.
What a government ought to do is search for talent and encourage it from childhood; but not to force everyone into a straitjacket. Choice is the word! Alas, today’s front page story (with a photo of a smiling Sibaljee) is that he has decided to raise the cut-off of Class XII marks for IIT JEE to 80%.
The US knows all about what I am talking. So they have a Bill Gates who failed to complete his college,
I knew of a family of geniuses…..6 brothers who all did well except the last one (by the way, they too are all Sastrys-;). This last kid couldn’t ‘matriculate’. He was standing first in all subjects in the Board but English. He failed in it 3 times scoring 5, 8 and 5 marks out of 100. I am told he is running a Chess Academy to eke out a living. He would have been a brilliant mathematician but for the straitjacket.
I was a teacher for my living for a good 42 years willy-nilly. So I know that there is something called ‘aptitude’. While at IIT KGP one of my back-bencher students in Physics approached me in his Fourth Year for a recommendation letter. He wanted to quit Physics midway and take up his family calling which happened to be ‘business’. He went on to do his MBA in the US and turned out to be a wonderful entrepreneur earning millions of dollars for India exporting software packages and generating employment for many of our kids. Physics would have killed him.
Neither me nor my wife have an aptitude for music. So I taught my son shuttle badminton from an early age and he did turn out to be a ‘blue’ for his Hall at IIT KGP. But one day he came home from his KV school in Class X with a trophy. I asked him what he won it for and he replied: “Music”. I was stunned when he said he was playing Bongo for his House for a couple of years since they pressed him into service whenever needed.
I at once engaged a ‘tabla’ master for him, who used to visit our home late in the night. I asked his teacher why he turns up so late. He replied that throughout the day he is employed to ‘teach’ tabla to campus kids who have absolutely no aptitude for it but to please their parents and make a living for himself. So, before going home he comes to our place as the Port of Last Call because he doesn’t have to ‘teach’ my son…only show a couple of new beats and listen with rapture as my son repeated them effortlessly. He said he would do it for pleasure and not money!
And in Class XI I had to stop his tabla classes much to the chagrin of his teacher because I had to myself ‘coach’ my son for the bloody IIT JEE. He went on to do his M. Sc. in Industry Chemistry there but now earns his decent living doing software for which he turned out to have a FLAIR!
And on inquiry we found that his first cousin dropped out from college and grew up to be a professional percussionist visiting the US regularly and making a big splash and a great living…his mom was the late Principal of a renowned Music College.
After clearing his B. A. in English (failing in one paper for not reading an unreadable book on Amundsen’s ‘Expeditions to the South Pole’) R. K. Narayan was walking up the stairs of their University College with a filled-up application form for M. A. in English. Fortunately he was met by a senior of his coming downstairs who advised him to tear up the forms if he wanted to keep up his love for English.
Ask Shyamal about ‘aptitude’!
And then talk about Life as a ‘Tight Rope Walk’!!!
============================================================================================
Monday, October 19, 2009
In Praise of Laziness
***********************************************************************************************
There is nothing like Pure Laziness….all laziness is work-specific. And what appears to be laziness may indeed be incessant activity….like that of the sleeping top. Those who speak ill of laziness are ill-advised, to say the least.
Compared with the busy bees, drones are proverbially the laziest in the insect species. But they do serve a noble purpose beyond the ability of bees. Anyone who read Maeterlinck’s ‘The Life of the Bee’ would like to be the fortunate drone rather than the worker bee. The chosen drone does only one thing in its blessed life….mating with the Virgin Queen mid-flight and dropping dead. An act which is the consummation of all sacrifice and virtue to keep the family going.
Among our epic folks Kumbhakarn of Ramayan appears to be lazy and slothful but anyone who read the epic between the lines would realize that in spite of his curse he was much wiser than his brother Ravan.
There is really no simple word which is the exact opposite of laziness (I Googled for it and the nearest is activity..a poor substitute). The ant is proverbially the symbol of unceasing activity. But what does it achieve? I am told by the learned poets that the anthills they build are home to serpents. And anyone who read Maugham’s ‘Ant and the Grasshopper’ would rather be the lazy grasshopper than the ant. Maugham also wrote a wonderful story, ‘The Verger’, in which an illiterate who declined to learn reading and writing becomes a millionaire just by virtue of his choice not to learn.
That brings me to the work-specificity of so-called laziness. Some people who appear to be lazy most of the time suddenly become active when something interests them. Sherlock Holmes is the typical lazy bum, fiddling with his violin and getting dopy on his cocaine prick, but he is really charging his batteries for the next burst of relentless activity. He has an elder brother called Mycroft Holmes who is more talented than Sherlock but too ‘lazy’ to do detective work; but Sherlock has to appeal to him for clues when he himself is at a loss after his legwork.
In my experience my Ph. D. guide SDM was physically the laziest I have ever seen. He wisely chose a vocation that suits his laziness….Theoretical Physics. That requires no overalls and dirtying his hands with lab work. Indeed he was too lazy to use his leaky fountain pen. He would sit, stare, do a long calculation in his head and would grudgingly jot down the result on paper. But when he was visited by an admirer, he would drivel incessantly without giving a chance to the other. He once explained the reason to me: he could calculate in his head when he was talking…but not while listening. When he joined IIT KGP, many invited him with family to their homes for a social call. Within weeks he stopped visiting. He told me his reason charmingly: ‘I enjoy visiting people’s homes…but the drawback is that they return my visits’.
When I was younger, I keenly used to look forward to ‘doing’ the ‘Jumble’ (the word-picture puzzle in the daily newspaper). I would pick up my pen and turn to the Crossword Page and write up the four unscrambled words in the margin and do the final un-jumbling with a triumphant feeling. Nowadays I read the newspaper lying supine in my bed and so feel too lazy to get up, pick up a pen, write the words etc. Instead, I do the whole thing in my head….a pleasing accomplishment at my age (66+).
My son takes 3 hours of doing nothing after getting up from sleep and before walking to his job. I often wonder why their Company is paying a fat amount to this lazy lubber. Once I happened to read a testimonial from one of his juniors in his Peer Appraisal. It read that this lazy lubber can conduct an online meeting with his US customers for six continuous hours sitting in his chair without getting up, while the Americans on the other side and his team-mates here do job-rotating at least thrice during that time.
And my wife who works like a busy bee in her kitchen day in and day out (she loves it) refuses to give me her shopping list on a piece of paper because she is too lazy to pick up pen and paper.
And those who read this though are the laziest of all…no other worthwhile work?
...Posted by Ishani
*********************************************************************************************
There is nothing like Pure Laziness….all laziness is work-specific. And what appears to be laziness may indeed be incessant activity….like that of the sleeping top. Those who speak ill of laziness are ill-advised, to say the least.
Compared with the busy bees, drones are proverbially the laziest in the insect species. But they do serve a noble purpose beyond the ability of bees. Anyone who read Maeterlinck’s ‘The Life of the Bee’ would like to be the fortunate drone rather than the worker bee. The chosen drone does only one thing in its blessed life….mating with the Virgin Queen mid-flight and dropping dead. An act which is the consummation of all sacrifice and virtue to keep the family going.
Among our epic folks Kumbhakarn of Ramayan appears to be lazy and slothful but anyone who read the epic between the lines would realize that in spite of his curse he was much wiser than his brother Ravan.
There is really no simple word which is the exact opposite of laziness (I Googled for it and the nearest is activity..a poor substitute). The ant is proverbially the symbol of unceasing activity. But what does it achieve? I am told by the learned poets that the anthills they build are home to serpents. And anyone who read Maugham’s ‘Ant and the Grasshopper’ would rather be the lazy grasshopper than the ant. Maugham also wrote a wonderful story, ‘The Verger’, in which an illiterate who declined to learn reading and writing becomes a millionaire just by virtue of his choice not to learn.
That brings me to the work-specificity of so-called laziness. Some people who appear to be lazy most of the time suddenly become active when something interests them. Sherlock Holmes is the typical lazy bum, fiddling with his violin and getting dopy on his cocaine prick, but he is really charging his batteries for the next burst of relentless activity. He has an elder brother called Mycroft Holmes who is more talented than Sherlock but too ‘lazy’ to do detective work; but Sherlock has to appeal to him for clues when he himself is at a loss after his legwork.
In my experience my Ph. D. guide SDM was physically the laziest I have ever seen. He wisely chose a vocation that suits his laziness….Theoretical Physics. That requires no overalls and dirtying his hands with lab work. Indeed he was too lazy to use his leaky fountain pen. He would sit, stare, do a long calculation in his head and would grudgingly jot down the result on paper. But when he was visited by an admirer, he would drivel incessantly without giving a chance to the other. He once explained the reason to me: he could calculate in his head when he was talking…but not while listening. When he joined IIT KGP, many invited him with family to their homes for a social call. Within weeks he stopped visiting. He told me his reason charmingly: ‘I enjoy visiting people’s homes…but the drawback is that they return my visits’.
When I was younger, I keenly used to look forward to ‘doing’ the ‘Jumble’ (the word-picture puzzle in the daily newspaper). I would pick up my pen and turn to the Crossword Page and write up the four unscrambled words in the margin and do the final un-jumbling with a triumphant feeling. Nowadays I read the newspaper lying supine in my bed and so feel too lazy to get up, pick up a pen, write the words etc. Instead, I do the whole thing in my head….a pleasing accomplishment at my age (66+).
My son takes 3 hours of doing nothing after getting up from sleep and before walking to his job. I often wonder why their Company is paying a fat amount to this lazy lubber. Once I happened to read a testimonial from one of his juniors in his Peer Appraisal. It read that this lazy lubber can conduct an online meeting with his US customers for six continuous hours sitting in his chair without getting up, while the Americans on the other side and his team-mates here do job-rotating at least thrice during that time.
And my wife who works like a busy bee in her kitchen day in and day out (she loves it) refuses to give me her shopping list on a piece of paper because she is too lazy to pick up pen and paper.
And those who read this though are the laziest of all…no other worthwhile work?
...Posted by Ishani
*********************************************************************************************
Sunday, October 18, 2009
The Future Castes
========================================================================
Like my father, my Ph. D. guide SDM was born during the First World War and grew up during the Second. Having seen the Freedom Struggle and the ‘Made in Britain’ Bengal Famine, SDM was fiercely anti-racist and anti-colonial. But the only thing he was equipped to do in life was Research in Theoretical Physics. Other than this and a great talent for English he was as innocent as a babe in the woods throughout his life.
Soon after his marriage, SDM and his newly-wed bride were visiting his in-law’s village in charming rural Bengal. Having nothing else to do, he was pursuing an idea he had of finding a new class of solutions to the famous General Relativity Equations of Einstein. And while returning from an evening walk, he hit the jackpot. Coming home entirely flushed, he pulled his wife aside and ‘announced’ that her husband would soon be a ‘famous man’. (Upon which she chided him for returning so late after dusk and ordered him to quickly wash his hands and get ready for ‘sumptuous loochies’.)
On returning to Calcutta, he wrote up his ‘invention’ and, wanting to teach the ‘goras’ a lesson, submitted it to the Bulletin of the Calcutta Mathematical Society just to show that Indian Science is no leaner and meaner than the Western.
To his bewilderment, his manuscript bounced from the Editor’s desk without as much as a ‘referee comment’. Disgusted, he sent it to the top class American Journal, Physical Review which accepted it without revision and published it urgently without the mandatory Abstract (the referee wrote it up himself!). Within a few months of its publication SDM did become a ‘famous man’ in Relativity circles and his outlandish work entered text books in no time.
Thereafter SDM never sent any of his papers to Indian Journals. To this day our Babu would promote only those candidates who publish in American Journals and trash all papers published in Indian Journals. This is God’s Truth. He would rather bring Harvard, Yale & MIT to India but not give academic and financial freedom to our own backyard IITs despite ‘intellectual’ hunger strikes.
SDM used to remark that the worth of any country is determined by the quality of its Physics Journals. And would say that China will never be any good because the ‘Acta Physica Sinica’ is worse than the ‘Indian Journal of Physics’.
During the Soviet regime USSR had the great good fortune of Landau and his school which lifted up the standards of Russian Physics Journals and also of the Communist East European nations like Poland and Czechoslovakia. The post-war Japan also had good Physics journals. I doubt if it is true nowadays.
All worthwhile Scientific Research and Invention continue to be American with crumbs thrown here and there…..none to India and China, which are boasting of becoming World Powers in the near future.
Yes; the US, Europe and Japan are turning out to be nations peopled by the old, the retired and the sick, while China and India will profusely breed young blood which can be exploited as ill-paid manufacturing and intellectual labor force. This advantage will certainly make them rich Economic Powers, but not Scientific Powers.
I will be watching from up there soon when the ‘New Caste System Among Nations’ (NCSAN) will be as follows:
1. The US will be the poor sick but learned Obama Brahmins. All other nations will take their intellectual inputs from the Navi Brahmins paying them a pittance other than great reverence.
2. China will be the New Khatriyas with their burgeoning arms and ammunitions and a vast army of Yellow Soldiers bereft of freedom and ideas but only taking orders from the Top Manchurian Kings and Mandarins.
3. India will be the New Baniyas, full of tricks to make money and invest it here and there to pile it up without paying their slave labor more than enough to keep their body and soul in ‘working’ condition.
4. Rest of the World will be Shudras, apart from:
5. Africa which will be the New SC.
6. Britain, Canada and Australia will turn Buddhist Dalit erecting statues of Newton and Hawking.
7. Shorn of oil revenue (the US will find alternate sources of Energy) the oil-rich Sheikdoms will vanish from the Earth like Dinosaurs having no new ideas how to cope with life apart from jihad.
This is the ‘Prediction of gps’, Allah be kind to his soul!
=================================================================================
Like my father, my Ph. D. guide SDM was born during the First World War and grew up during the Second. Having seen the Freedom Struggle and the ‘Made in Britain’ Bengal Famine, SDM was fiercely anti-racist and anti-colonial. But the only thing he was equipped to do in life was Research in Theoretical Physics. Other than this and a great talent for English he was as innocent as a babe in the woods throughout his life.
Soon after his marriage, SDM and his newly-wed bride were visiting his in-law’s village in charming rural Bengal. Having nothing else to do, he was pursuing an idea he had of finding a new class of solutions to the famous General Relativity Equations of Einstein. And while returning from an evening walk, he hit the jackpot. Coming home entirely flushed, he pulled his wife aside and ‘announced’ that her husband would soon be a ‘famous man’. (Upon which she chided him for returning so late after dusk and ordered him to quickly wash his hands and get ready for ‘sumptuous loochies’.)
On returning to Calcutta, he wrote up his ‘invention’ and, wanting to teach the ‘goras’ a lesson, submitted it to the Bulletin of the Calcutta Mathematical Society just to show that Indian Science is no leaner and meaner than the Western.
To his bewilderment, his manuscript bounced from the Editor’s desk without as much as a ‘referee comment’. Disgusted, he sent it to the top class American Journal, Physical Review which accepted it without revision and published it urgently without the mandatory Abstract (the referee wrote it up himself!). Within a few months of its publication SDM did become a ‘famous man’ in Relativity circles and his outlandish work entered text books in no time.
Thereafter SDM never sent any of his papers to Indian Journals. To this day our Babu would promote only those candidates who publish in American Journals and trash all papers published in Indian Journals. This is God’s Truth. He would rather bring Harvard, Yale & MIT to India but not give academic and financial freedom to our own backyard IITs despite ‘intellectual’ hunger strikes.
SDM used to remark that the worth of any country is determined by the quality of its Physics Journals. And would say that China will never be any good because the ‘Acta Physica Sinica’ is worse than the ‘Indian Journal of Physics’.
During the Soviet regime USSR had the great good fortune of Landau and his school which lifted up the standards of Russian Physics Journals and also of the Communist East European nations like Poland and Czechoslovakia. The post-war Japan also had good Physics journals. I doubt if it is true nowadays.
All worthwhile Scientific Research and Invention continue to be American with crumbs thrown here and there…..none to India and China, which are boasting of becoming World Powers in the near future.
Yes; the US, Europe and Japan are turning out to be nations peopled by the old, the retired and the sick, while China and India will profusely breed young blood which can be exploited as ill-paid manufacturing and intellectual labor force. This advantage will certainly make them rich Economic Powers, but not Scientific Powers.
I will be watching from up there soon when the ‘New Caste System Among Nations’ (NCSAN) will be as follows:
1. The US will be the poor sick but learned Obama Brahmins. All other nations will take their intellectual inputs from the Navi Brahmins paying them a pittance other than great reverence.
2. China will be the New Khatriyas with their burgeoning arms and ammunitions and a vast army of Yellow Soldiers bereft of freedom and ideas but only taking orders from the Top Manchurian Kings and Mandarins.
3. India will be the New Baniyas, full of tricks to make money and invest it here and there to pile it up without paying their slave labor more than enough to keep their body and soul in ‘working’ condition.
4. Rest of the World will be Shudras, apart from:
5. Africa which will be the New SC.
6. Britain, Canada and Australia will turn Buddhist Dalit erecting statues of Newton and Hawking.
7. Shorn of oil revenue (the US will find alternate sources of Energy) the oil-rich Sheikdoms will vanish from the Earth like Dinosaurs having no new ideas how to cope with life apart from jihad.
This is the ‘Prediction of gps’, Allah be kind to his soul!
=================================================================================
Saturday, October 17, 2009
Mehsud mehsud
==============================================================================
Mehsud mehsud
Dear Hakimulla Bhai:
I was delighted at your statement that after Islamizing Pakistan you will turn your attention to India.
I keenly look forward to the Day! To my utter disgust I find India a totally irreligious and corrupting civilization (if you can call it that). Our forefathers from Ghazni to Aurangzeb tried hard to achieve what you laudably propose to do, but utterly failed.
Instead, they settled down here and got themselves corrupted thoroughly. (Akbar, the Great,…[no not the Allah Ho Akbar]…, even proposed a new mongrel religion that is neither here nor there).
I have been living in Nizam’s own Hyderabad for over 5 years now and I am distressed to find our Hyderabadi Muslim Bhais participating whole-heartedly in Ganesh Puja, Durga Puja, Diwali and even Bathkamma Puja.
On the other hand, the non-Muslims of Hyderbad, chiefly the Kafir Hindus, after gorging their full meals throughout the day during the Holy Ramzan month, eagerly queue up at Iftar time at the famed Hyderabadi Haleem outlets and gobble up all the available delicious Irani Haleem, leaving nothing to our starving Muslim bhais. (They even sell Veg Haleem nowadays for pony-tailed Brahmins).
Please do something about this as early as possible. But make sure you won’t settle down in Hyderabad and take to its mysterious ways (in which case I offer to be your mentor in the Hyderabadi culture, such as it is).
Happy Diwali!
Mehsud mehsud
Dear Hakimulla Bhai:
I was delighted at your statement that after Islamizing Pakistan you will turn your attention to India.
I keenly look forward to the Day! To my utter disgust I find India a totally irreligious and corrupting civilization (if you can call it that). Our forefathers from Ghazni to Aurangzeb tried hard to achieve what you laudably propose to do, but utterly failed.
Instead, they settled down here and got themselves corrupted thoroughly. (Akbar, the Great,…[no not the Allah Ho Akbar]…, even proposed a new mongrel religion that is neither here nor there).
I have been living in Nizam’s own Hyderabad for over 5 years now and I am distressed to find our Hyderabadi Muslim Bhais participating whole-heartedly in Ganesh Puja, Durga Puja, Diwali and even Bathkamma Puja.
On the other hand, the non-Muslims of Hyderbad, chiefly the Kafir Hindus, after gorging their full meals throughout the day during the Holy Ramzan month, eagerly queue up at Iftar time at the famed Hyderabadi Haleem outlets and gobble up all the available delicious Irani Haleem, leaving nothing to our starving Muslim bhais. (They even sell Veg Haleem nowadays for pony-tailed Brahmins).
Please do something about this as early as possible. But make sure you won’t settle down in Hyderabad and take to its mysterious ways (in which case I offer to be your mentor in the Hyderabadi culture, such as it is).
Happy Diwali!
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