Reco Mela - 1

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Ever since I realized that I am on a record-breaking blogspree, one haunting geeth of my youth has been continuously ringing in my ears:

"Sajan re jhoot mat bolo, khuda ke paas jaanaa hai;
na haathi hai na ghoda hai, waha paidal hi jaanaa hai..."

Basically I am a simple soul (like that Polish Math Prof who used to introduce himself as I told you earlier: "I am Bogdanvicz, a simple pole").

Ask any of my 5000 odd students if I hurt anyone's feelings ever. The answer will be a unanimous: "Nevermore, nevermore, nevermore...." like so many Poe's Ravens.

So also with my colleagues and Tech Market folks (that is about all the humanity I had to deal with).

But there is one person, at the mention of who, all my murderous subhuman instincts are roused.

Just show him to me, that is all I ask! Just show him!

You will see me breaking his bones into liquid pulp without the aid of a juicer-cum-mixer and making him drink it. And, certainly making trips on every dark drizzling moonless midnight to his grave and start dancing on it with abandon, with the Bollywood filmsong "eh raat bhegee bhegee..." on my lips. Just watch me!

You guessed it right: He is the one who invented the ghoulish 'Recommendation Letter'.

As Obama's predecessor would denounce: "He is EVIL".

The Bard sings:

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"The quality of mercy is not strain'd,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes"

.......................Portia in Merchant of Venice

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This 'blesseth him' maybe true of the 'quality of mercy'. But not of the 'quality of reco': More like "...it blasteth him that gives and him that takes".

In every way the Reco-Ritual is humiliating, demeaning, degrading, and dehumanizing on both the parties.

I asked my son why he was not 'apping'. I knew the truth....he was too lazy to study any further, like his dad was. But I was interested in what excuse he would invent.....dialogues between a Prof-father and his KGPian son are ever scintillating.....they play mind-games all the time.

Pat came the answer: "Koan jaake darwaja darwaja per khadkey bheek mangega? Vaisehi har Grand Viva may baar baar jhukna padta thaa".

You do not know how much heartache and soulburn I had to suffer when the Season descends on KGP: roughly when the Saptaparni trees all over the Campus suddenly start emitting their supersweet incense from seven-fold bunches of their tiny whitish seven-petaled flowers dangling from their seven-leafed bouquets.

A wee knock, a shy entry, an ingratiating smile, and a whopping bunch of forms in triplicate dumped on poor me; followed by more of the same, more of the same...."evermore, evermore, evermore..."

Life was pretty simple when we passed our M Sc from my alma mater in 1963.

A friend asked me: "Did you get your Testimonials?" I asked: "What are they?". I was a day-scholar not hep to the goings on in the Hostel rituals unless some kind soul takes the trouble to initiate me into the voodoo.

Then he hands over one of his to me asking me to keep it a top secret. I then go to the Departmental Office Typist, pay him Rs 3 and show him my one-short-para thing. He would ask: "Which Professors?". Then I would name the 3 Brahmin Professors. He would then dump my handwritten thing into the Great Basket and ask me to meet him the next day.

The next day he would hand over 3 typed sheets on plain paper, but with a rubber stamp under each Prof's signature. I would then take it to my friend and compare his with mine. Only the name is replaced. Otherwise they were what my MIT friend Edwin Taylor called: "Boiler Plate" [It was in the context of my squeezing 'Certificates' from him and his Guru John Wheeler (sadly no more) for their (12 + 2) online KGP disciples (including one discip-lin) on our own Last Supper....only Saswat impressed ET soooo much that he wrote up a special para and made JAW do the same...otherwise only I knew what was in each of those sealed envelopes enclosing the official letterheads of MIT & Princeton, unless 'A' and 'K' compared theirs stealthily.....fifty-fifty chance.....they were like Damon & Pythias, always together on the freeways of the Campus and in the Lecture Classes; also partners-in-crime in the Lab as one of them admitted in his blog; and co-authors of Lab-Manual Cartography-Artography as well as an earth-shaking paper with me and Sougato and RSS titled: "Tippe Top Paradox in Realitivity", the order of whose 5 authors was decided by lots late one night in my Office].

.....This holy 'rubber-stamp' business stumps me to this day. Anyone can go to the road-side stamp-making artist and get whatever he wanted made in whatever style just by shelling out Rs 5. The ink bottle is in the open market and costs another Rs 5. The latest technology doesn't even require buying messy ink and its pad...the stamp comes self- inked, good for a lifetime of stamping.

So, why should so much 'authenticity' be graced on the 'seal' which everyone always had to beg 'didi' for in the office?

There must be some dark secrecy behind this whole mystique; maybe there is an unseen 'trick' figure in the Official Seal that shows up only in ultraviolet light, much like our Subba Rao's Rs 1000 currency notes.

I don't know.

Anyway, I never had to use those Testimonials. I preserved those with me till I retired, when I sold them off to the ruddiwala. My Degree Certificates (on heavy parchment paper unlike yours on scrapsheets) and my atrocious Mark Sheets were good enough for my IIT KGP employers.

To be continued.....

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