Googling in Bed

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They say education is never complete...one lives and learns...if she wants to.

And it is always a pleasure mixed with pain if your learning comes from your kids...like the extraction of an inflamed tooth.

In 1998, Prof MLM, our then HoD at IIT KGP, thrust the latest IBM PC on me for free:

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_computer 

My earlier affair with PCs was confined to the ancient models PC XT and PC AT a decade back while running Edwin Taylor's Spacetime Software for the benefit of my students.

This gleaming new one that MLM gifted me had too many features. It came loaded with Windows 95 and an early version of Word that I badly wanted to master quickly. 

I was then 55 and I asked my son (17) who was then in school (Class XII)  to teach me. I guess sons think that their old gold dads are as smart as them. So, he gave me a superfast Lec-Dem that lasted no more than 5 minutes, and left.

That was the first time in my life I knew what is meant by being 'disoriented'. There is a charming allegory in Chandogyopanishad where a man from Gandhara is blindfolded by robbers and left far far away from his home. When he was released, what he felt was a typical case of disorientation. And the chap had to find his way back home asking, asking, and asking...the verse goes:

" Etam disham gandhara:

Etam disham vrajeti

Sa gramad gramad pricchan

pandito medhavi gandharan evopasampadyet"

"In that direction are the gandharas, 'Go in that direction', thereupon being informed and capable of judgement he would, by asking his way from village to village, arrive at Gandhara"

Kids have no hesitation in asking their teachers to repeat and repeat till they understand (teachers are paid for it). No so, dads...look at Calvins' dad. So I kept quiet and it took me a fortnight to learn the ropes somewhat...and I used to think I was smart at handling new gadgets. Of course then on I learned its ugly Equation Editor on my own and used it for the benefit of my students, mostly.

There was no Google then at KGP...nor much of a high-speed internet (it took a good ten minutes to download a picture via the Internet Explorer that came riding on Windows)...not to speak of cell phones.

The other day my son gifted me a QWERTY Nokia with wi-fi compatibility and taught me how to use it in his fast-forward way.

I am so happy with it. For, most of the day (and night) I check my mails, browse my blogspot, and Google for things I need to blog about, all the time lying supine on my bed. 

And it is such an educating experience.

Just now, a propos de rien, I recalled my father's favorite lines:

This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,--
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

 

William Shakespeare, "King Richard II", Act 2 scene 1

  http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/25255.html 


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This praise of one's own homeland sounded awesome-toothsome. If I had a tenth of the gifts of Shakespeare, I too would have written a few lines in blank verse on the KGP Campus of my times...this virgin jungle...this lonesome Eden...its  loaded trees...its dhami-snakes...its giant spiders...and mammoth snails...

Then I recalled England being referred to rather contemptuously for its weather as Old Blighty by Gavaskar in his Sunny Days.

Just now I Googled for Old Blighty in my bed and discovered that I was wrong..."Blighty" is a term of endearment that has its origin in "Vilayati":

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Blighty is a British English slang term for England,^[1] deriving from the Hindustani word vilāyatī (विलायती; pronounced bilāti in many Indian dialects and languages), from Persian velayat and ultimately from Arabic wilayah, originally meaning something like "province". In India the term came to refer to Europe, and more specifically England and Britain.^[2]

The term was more common in the latter days of the British Raj, and is now more commonly used as a term of endearment by the expatriate British community or those on holiday to refer to home.

In their 1886 Anglo-Indian dictionary, Hobson-Jobson, Sir Henry Yule and Arthur C. Burnell explained that the word came to be used in British India for several things the British had brought into the country, such as the tomato (bilayati baingan, whose literal translation is "foreign aubergine") and soda water, which was commonly called bilayati pani ("foreign water").

During World War I, "Dear Old Blighty" was a common sentimental reference, suggesting a longing for home by soldiers in the trenches. The term was particularly used by World War I poets such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. During that war, a Blighty wound — a wound serious enough to require recuperation away from the trenches but not serious enough to kill or maim the victim—was hoped for by many, and sometimes self-inflicted.^[3]

The Music Hall artiste Vesta Tilley had a hit in 1916 with the song I'm Glad I've Got a Bit of a Blighty One (1916), in which she played a soldier delighted to have been wounded and in hospital. "When I think about my dugout" she sang, "where I dare not stick my mug out... I'm glad I've got a bit of a blighty one". Another Music Hall hit was "Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty" (1917), which was sampled at the beginning of The Queen Is Dead by The Smiths. The term was also referenced in the song "All American Alien Boy" by Ian Hunter ("I'm just a whitey from Blighty"), from the 1976 album of the same name.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blighty 

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I then recalled the incident when my friend SGH of the Math Dept at IIT KGP, steeped in my Jeeves novels in 1968, called one of his colleagues:

"Hello Old Man!"

and got a stinging rebuke...he looked old alright for his age.

In Hyderabad, its equivalent: "Musilodu" is frequently used for an old woman's husband.

When I was new here, one day, I was standing in a long queue in the SBI in our Balkampet Branch and found an old woman looking for help filling her old-age pension form. The young lad ahead of me in the queue helped her and, closing his pen, asked her:

"Musioldu bathikunnada?"

meaning:

"Is your Old Man alive?"

I thought she would slap him. But she giggled like a pre-teen and replied:

"Aaadeppudo poyadu"

meaning:

"That chap died long long ago"

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