Literary Matters

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Pratik's Take on Parashuram:

"...In fact I don't like social messages in novels and stories. In this regard my ideal is Conan Doyle. The reading should be for sheer entertainment, at least for me... I like the messages separately in essay form. Among Bengalis my favourite essayist is Parashuram. In Hindi I liked a person called Rambriksh Benipuri. And in English we are becoming acquainted with the `Autocrat' through your blogs.

Parashuram was always appealing for his rationality. His childhood was spent in Darbhanga / Bihar and he did not know any Bengali till the age of fifteen or so when he passed the Entrance examination; Hindi was like his mother tongue.

I don't think Bengal has produced any bigger `Pundit' than him be it language / literature or science he was a true master. There was this friendly war between Tagore and Acharya P. C. Ray whether Parashuram should pursue Literature or Science. He always hid himself from limelight. Shy and introvert, very very reluctant to attend any felicitation ceremonies and public meetings but very particular in replying his letters in self made envelopes using a self made ink..."

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I first heard of Parashuram from DB who was his devotee, sort of; and he was a 'Basu' too ;-) DB used to tell me tall tales about his own wacky ancestor Ramram Basu, the leading light of early Bengali Literature, whose crafty business acumen would have been the envy of today's luminaries who are landing up in the cooler like so many moths on the hot shade of our good old hurricane lantern. But of course he used it against our British rulers.

And it was Shyamal who gifted me the English translation. I didn't know Parashuram started learning Bengali in his teens. I think it is an advantage...most of us learned English at that age.

Parashuram was awarded Padmabhushan in 1956, Google tells me. Saswat was in India last month and he called me up and we had long chats for a couple of hours. He said his father wonders why RKN was not awarded the Nobel. Such is the admiration our generation have for RKN. Of all his works, I like Next Sunday best. It is the first collection of his 'personal essays' that appeared weekly in the Hindu in the 1950s...our teens, and so we relate to those period pieces best.

Of course I agree heartily with Pratik that reading should be for pleasure, and any message therein should be woven so subtly that it is not loud; and should be between the author and his reader (sorry for the masculine gender).

The litmus test of a book you love is that you should reread it. I read the Autocrat five times in as many decades at regular intervals. Very few 'connoisseurs' to whom I passed on my copy (including Edwin who gifted me a gilt-edged copy of 1885 vintage bought from the Harvard Square) could proceed beyond the third page. So, it is a matter of a very very personal taste.

By the way, it is the second round that matters most in many things. Great writers like Harper Lee (To Kill a Mocking Bird) and J D Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)...I read both the books...couldn't come up with a second bestseller...I don't now why.

I was always very careful about my Second Lecture to a new batch...the first is pourparlers...

The Madame in one of Maugham's (?) stories instructs her new recruit: "It is the second innings that hooks a customer...not the first...always keep something in store" or something like that...

Sorry for mixing up instruction in Physics and the Physical...

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My friend NP quotes in re The Rime of the Ancient Mariner:

"...However, when Lyrical Ballads was reprinted, Wordsworth included it despite Coleridge's objections, writing:

The Poem of my Friend has indeed great defects; first, that the principal person has no distinct character, either in his profession of Mariner, or as a human being who having been long under the control of supernatural impressions might be supposed himself to partake of something supernatural; secondly, that he does not act, but is continually acted upon; thirdly, that the events having no necessary connection do not produce each other; and lastly, that the imagery is somewhat too laboriously accumulated. Yet the Poem contains many delicate touches of passion, and indeed the passion is every where true to nature, a great number of the stanzas present beautiful images, and are expressed with unusual felicity of language; and the versification, though the metre is itself unfit for long poems, is harmonious and artfully varied, exhibiting the utmost powers of that metre, and every variety of which it is capable. It therefore appeared to me that these several merits (the first of which, namely that of the passion, is of the highest kind) gave to the Poem a value which is not often possessed by better Poems.

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As you all know, it is my favorite poem...when Pratik was sharing the fourth year lab classes with me for three long hours, I used to hold him first 'by the hand' and then 'by the eye' and talk talk talk as if:

"..I have strange power of speech;
That moment that his face I see,
I know the man that must hear me:
To him my tale I teach..."

It is now seven years that I left KGP but still I hold him, now, 'by the blog' ;-)

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