Talk It Out - 1

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"To be or not to be: that is the question"

And Hamlet decided, it looks, after a handful more of soulful soliloquies, that his answer was: "not to be"...and by the end of the play we see that the stage is strewn with dead bodies.

Among our ex-ministers I loved Mani most...not because of his colorful career, diplomatic and then political...but for his heartwarming confession that he learned all his Shakespeare from Jeeves.

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Friday, March 6, 2009

A little dishonesty is BRITISH!

"Most Britons falsely claim to have read Tolstoy's 'War and Peace' ": Report

I too tried 'Peace and War',
Found it an unreadable bore;
But I read all of Shakespeare
Songs & Sonnets & King Liar.

But, most I love my Bertie,
Shaken to his foundations;
He said with honesty,
"Hamlet's full of Quotations"

Posted by G P Sastry (gps1943@yahoo.com) at 5:04 AM

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Just now I Googled and found that the 30-line soli that starts with the epigraph above has at least 10 lines quoted by Jeeves off and on.

Well, to come to the fish and chips, I was always racked by the dilemma:

"To talk or not to talk: that is the question"

For which there is no universal answer...it depends, as our Sard said, when asked if he wanted to be hanged or shot, on who is doing it.

Ask any of my contemporaries, like Mani above, and they will admit that the most interesting decade of our lives is the 1960s.

There were these white and bright youth who rebelled asking why they should die for their pappas' fight against the dubious red and yellow peril. And grew long hair (saving barbers' fees), strumming their guitars and sitars, doing drugs and dopes, singing soulful songs of Beatles and Bottles, asking one and all to 'make babies not war' and ending up as teenage parents of unwelcome infants.

Punch, as usual, caught the teen-mood by its memorable Langdon (?) cartoon showing a long-haired boy and a skimpy-dressed girl looking woefully at their baby (which they ended up making) in the crib and saying:

"To think we are no longer the younger generation!"

(By the way, today's KGPhians are happy to remain the 'younger generation' till about 40...M Sc at 24, 5 years of Ph D, two or three post-docs spanning another 5 years, 2 years of job-hunting, 2 more of partner-hunting, 2 more of planning...that makes them 40ish, no?)

And then we heard a new meaning for the old word: 'shrink':

In our boyhood, it was the standard practice of fathers insisting that tailors shrink their children's cloths before stitching them...no red-blooded tailor ever did that, but made allowances for 'shrinkage' by including a zero error on their scales...say 13 inches to a foot. With the result that the new pant and shirt we wore to the school on our birthdays were as loose as our tailors' morals.

Then one day we heard of Sanforized cloth...a brand...that was pre-shrunk and all our worries were over except the viva question: What is Sanforized about it? The best answer was that the process was invented by one Sanford (it is right...I Googled just now)

But, during the sixties, our old word: 'shrink' came to mean 'a clinical psychiatrist or psychologist' (short for headshrinker)...Webster

It became as fashionable to have a family psychiatrist as a family barber. And the chap had a 'couch' in his chamber...the first time I ever heard of a 'couch' was the one on which Wordsworth lay after wandering as a lonely cloud and found that:

And then my heart with pleasure fills
And dances with the daffodils

Potty...as Bertie would say...

And all that the Shrink did was to lay his patient on his couch and make him talk, talk, talk out his worries, holding a pen and bill-book in his hands...

There must be thousands of cartoons on the Shrink and his couch's theme, but as usual the best is from Punch again:

It shows this dame getting up on the couch and asking her Shrink:

"Do I undress?"

Anyway, things changed enormously by the time I visited my Shrink in Hyderabad as soon as I retired, expecting that there would be a couch as cushiony as an AC Sleeper's and that he would ask me to talk talk talk...

Hell! All he had was a 'chamber' as tiny as a bird's nest and all he did was to ask me to push my both hands forward. He then held my two wrists with his two hands irrespectively for a moment and wrote down the prescription and waived his fees of Rs 250 since he had borrowed his expensive Medicine books from my wife half a century ago...he was her junior at the Medical College, Tirupati...

Gave me no chance to talk at all...neither did he talk soothingly...things seem to have changed drastically.

Not that I was too willing to talk. I wondered what I would say when he asked the default question: "What bothers you?"

The honest answer was: "Money"...and that would be an impolite thing to say; and so I would have had to invent others, like:

"My wife watches Zee TV all the time"

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To be continued tomorrow...as the half-penny serial novelettes used to say in our teens

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