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......Opening lines of "The Code of the Woosters" by P. G. Wodehouse
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In the late 1960s my room in the Faculty Hostel at IIT KGP was littered with the Penguin Paperbacks of PGW each costing Rs 2 (Rupees Two only). I lost all these as my friends borrowed and never returned them...and I didn't mind because as RKN said, "All of us love to keep our books, and also share the delight of good reading with others. This is an impossible combination and turns out to be a painful experiment." But I was young then and felt Rs 2 was peanuts and I could buy all of them again...a folly I regret now.
And then one day there was this casual guest in my room who opened my copy of "The Code of the Woosters" and read the above opening lines and tossed the book away, saying:
"It has become a fashion to read and talk of Wodehouse as the greatest humorist ever. What is terrific about those lines?...a nitwit confusing morning with evening. Is it humor?...even my kid could have written better lines."
"...His career has been one of ceaseless reinvention; from economist to poet, to travel writer, to novelist-in-verse, to popular literary novelist, to librettist, to who knows what next. Skipping from genre to genre, it's as if he's not just a writer, but a microcosm of the cultural ethos - the ethos of the post-Independence, urban, English-speaking middle class - to which he belongs, and ethos that too has felt the need indefatigably and restlessly to reinvent itself. Lacking a clearly defined tradition to fall back on, the Indian writer in English, working in isolation, has laid claim, like Borges's Argentinian writer, to all of Western and European tradition, besides his own, in a way that perhaps no European can; and so has Seth, taking whatever, and whenever, he chooses, whether it is Pushkin, or George Eliot, or the poetry of the Movement. For him, writing is partly a matter of creating genres, as if it's not enough to create an oeuvre, but a whole tradition in miniature, by which he, and his contemporaries, might be evaluated..."
Not only they bristle with all the ten-dollar words like genre, ethos, oeuvre, librettist (to quote Hemingway) but there are as many as 36 punctuation marks in 4 sentences, mostly commas. I like to read any piece in my mind (aloud) and each comma means a pause in the flow...imagine sitting in a car with the driver breaking 36 times in 50 feet. There was a great writer and ex-editor of The Statesman during my youth by name James Cowley. After he left India, he used to contribute a weekly center-spread called "Letter from England". Each of his sentences ran to one paragraph. But there were hardly any commas or semicolons...reading the whole para and coming to its end was like slaking one's thirst in the "cooling streams like the hart when heated in a chase", another favorite quote PGW:
As pants the hart for cooling streams,
When heated in the chase;
So longs my soul, O God, for Thee,
And Thy refreshing grace.
By and large I am happy that I earned my living teaching Physics and turned to English when I was done with it at last. It could have been worse...the other way round...
My problem with Physics was that I never understood it the way I wanted to. Of course, no one understands Physics the way they want to...that would be the end of Physics and of them as well. Feynman complained that he never understood the Spin-Statistics Connection the way he wanted to.
But I would have loved to understand Physics the way I felt Padma Shri N. Kumar did...I mixed with him for three days and nights at IIT Delhi and turned his fan. He was an alumnus of IIT KGP, not in Physics but in ECE.
First, I never understood for years why tension T in a string is defined as a force and yet it has two directions (and an infinity if it is Surface Tension). And then I never understood for decades how a massless photon has an 'orbital' in addition to a spin angular momentum...it couldn't be orbiting a nucleus like an electron in a Bohr Orbit (forget blackholes). Till I read Akhiezer and Bertetski whose opening remarks went like: "Photon has no wave function in coordinate space, but only in momentum space." When I felt I at last did understand it my own way, I had to derive the angular distribution, polar plots, selection rules and polarization charts my own way and teach the likes of Saswat...he says in his yesterday's Guest Column that the CGC thing sticks after a dozen years.
Sorry for talking shop...
That is one of the beauties of teaching Physics (I don't know of other subjects). When you succeed in communicating your understanding (and misunderstanding) to a bunch of IITians, their faces light up and the glow is worth the effort.
They say there is no ugliness in Nature...Jim Corbett's books sublimely communicate this feeling of his. There is occasional fury alright...but it is a small part of the cosmic fury...Shiv Tandav...
And there is no baby that is ugly....
The faces of adult men and women too are beautiful when they are pleased. The non-beauty surfaces only when they are charged with negative emotions. Of all these, I find 'jealousy' in the human face is pitiably ugly.
I am happy that the Ishani booklets gave pleasure to some school-going kids...that is enough returns indeed. I recall Prof Srinivas telling me that his younger son while in his Class X was debarred from reading the latest Ishani booklet I mailed them till his Final exams were over...but they caught him reading it on the sly in the bathroom...nothing can be a better 'blurb'...
And, there is this other kid; Dr. Mrs. NP told me that their granddaughter in the US browsed the latest Ishani booklet and asked for more...and she must be a mere ten years old...I miss my wife now...she had a phenomenal memory for dates and I could have asked her the year and month of birth of that child...she said she does it by an 'associative' process.
Talking of kids, I was stumped by Ishani today. As usual, her parents and I went to her school for her Reception Party and from there we drove to the Supermarket here. While exiting, both she and I felt tired and sat on the steps of the mall side by side and had to be physically uprooted by my son.
So far, so good. But while running up the elevator, she suddenly asked me in Telugu:
"Why are you not talking today?"
And after a baffled second I replied:
"I am thinking"
This word was new to her and she fell silent 'thinking' for a couple of seconds and smiled. Kids have a great ESP!!!
Speaking of kids and babes, here is one lovely song:
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Shamik Gupta from Lyon, France writes:
=======================================================================
I reached out a hand from under the blankets, and rang the bell for Jeeves.
'Good evening, Jeeves.'
'Good morning, sir.'
This surprised me.
'Is it morning?'
'Yes, sir.'
'Are you sure? It seems very dark outside.'
......Opening lines of "The Code of the Woosters" by P. G. Wodehouse
********************************************************************************************************
In the late 1960s my room in the Faculty Hostel at IIT KGP was littered with the Penguin Paperbacks of PGW each costing Rs 2 (Rupees Two only). I lost all these as my friends borrowed and never returned them...and I didn't mind because as RKN said, "All of us love to keep our books, and also share the delight of good reading with others. This is an impossible combination and turns out to be a painful experiment." But I was young then and felt Rs 2 was peanuts and I could buy all of them again...a folly I regret now.
And then one day there was this casual guest in my room who opened my copy of "The Code of the Woosters" and read the above opening lines and tossed the book away, saying:
"It has become a fashion to read and talk of Wodehouse as the greatest humorist ever. What is terrific about those lines?...a nitwit confusing morning with evening. Is it humor?...even my kid could have written better lines."
I kept quiet as usual. But felt he should have read the next two lines:
'There is a fog, sir. If you will recollect, we are now in autumn - season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.'
Of course, my visitor probably would have missed the delight of a Keats quote coming from Jeeves.
One doesn't read and reread Jeeves books for their stories each of which can be summed up as Bertie making a fool of himself and landing in an improbable ditch and Jeeves coming up with an impossible rescue operation. One reads PGW for his turn of the phrase, delightful similes and metaphors and apt quotations from Shakespeare to Spinoza.
It takes all kinds to make this world.
I, for one, abhor blurbs like this from poster boys of Eng Lit:
"...His career has been one of ceaseless reinvention; from economist to poet, to travel writer, to novelist-in-verse, to popular literary novelist, to librettist, to who knows what next. Skipping from genre to genre, it's as if he's not just a writer, but a microcosm of the cultural ethos - the ethos of the post-Independence, urban, English-speaking middle class - to which he belongs, and ethos that too has felt the need indefatigably and restlessly to reinvent itself. Lacking a clearly defined tradition to fall back on, the Indian writer in English, working in isolation, has laid claim, like Borges's Argentinian writer, to all of Western and European tradition, besides his own, in a way that perhaps no European can; and so has Seth, taking whatever, and whenever, he chooses, whether it is Pushkin, or George Eliot, or the poetry of the Movement. For him, writing is partly a matter of creating genres, as if it's not enough to create an oeuvre, but a whole tradition in miniature, by which he, and his contemporaries, might be evaluated..."
Not only they bristle with all the ten-dollar words like genre, ethos, oeuvre, librettist (to quote Hemingway) but there are as many as 36 punctuation marks in 4 sentences, mostly commas. I like to read any piece in my mind (aloud) and each comma means a pause in the flow...imagine sitting in a car with the driver breaking 36 times in 50 feet. There was a great writer and ex-editor of The Statesman during my youth by name James Cowley. After he left India, he used to contribute a weekly center-spread called "Letter from England". Each of his sentences ran to one paragraph. But there were hardly any commas or semicolons...reading the whole para and coming to its end was like slaking one's thirst in the "cooling streams like the hart when heated in a chase", another favorite quote PGW:
As pants the hart for cooling streams,
When heated in the chase;
So longs my soul, O God, for Thee,
And Thy refreshing grace.
The other day I happened to read a prose piece by Rabindranath Tagore. And I reread it three times at a stretch...it simply flowed. Not yet satisfied, I keyboarded the entire passage and posted it as a Sunday Bonus:
By and large I am happy that I earned my living teaching Physics and turned to English when I was done with it at last. It could have been worse...the other way round...
My problem with Physics was that I never understood it the way I wanted to. Of course, no one understands Physics the way they want to...that would be the end of Physics and of them as well. Feynman complained that he never understood the Spin-Statistics Connection the way he wanted to.
But I would have loved to understand Physics the way I felt Padma Shri N. Kumar did...I mixed with him for three days and nights at IIT Delhi and turned his fan. He was an alumnus of IIT KGP, not in Physics but in ECE.
First, I never understood for years why tension T in a string is defined as a force and yet it has two directions (and an infinity if it is Surface Tension). And then I never understood for decades how a massless photon has an 'orbital' in addition to a spin angular momentum...it couldn't be orbiting a nucleus like an electron in a Bohr Orbit (forget blackholes). Till I read Akhiezer and Bertetski whose opening remarks went like: "Photon has no wave function in coordinate space, but only in momentum space." When I felt I at last did understand it my own way, I had to derive the angular distribution, polar plots, selection rules and polarization charts my own way and teach the likes of Saswat...he says in his yesterday's Guest Column that the CGC thing sticks after a dozen years.
Sorry for talking shop...
That is one of the beauties of teaching Physics (I don't know of other subjects). When you succeed in communicating your understanding (and misunderstanding) to a bunch of IITians, their faces light up and the glow is worth the effort.
They say there is no ugliness in Nature...Jim Corbett's books sublimely communicate this feeling of his. There is occasional fury alright...but it is a small part of the cosmic fury...Shiv Tandav...
And there is no baby that is ugly....
The faces of adult men and women too are beautiful when they are pleased. The non-beauty surfaces only when they are charged with negative emotions. Of all these, I find 'jealousy' in the human face is pitiably ugly.
I am happy that the Ishani booklets gave pleasure to some school-going kids...that is enough returns indeed. I recall Prof Srinivas telling me that his younger son while in his Class X was debarred from reading the latest Ishani booklet I mailed them till his Final exams were over...but they caught him reading it on the sly in the bathroom...nothing can be a better 'blurb'...
And, there is this other kid; Dr. Mrs. NP told me that their granddaughter in the US browsed the latest Ishani booklet and asked for more...and she must be a mere ten years old...I miss my wife now...she had a phenomenal memory for dates and I could have asked her the year and month of birth of that child...she said she does it by an 'associative' process.
Talking of kids, I was stumped by Ishani today. As usual, her parents and I went to her school for her Reception Party and from there we drove to the Supermarket here. While exiting, both she and I felt tired and sat on the steps of the mall side by side and had to be physically uprooted by my son.
So far, so good. But while running up the elevator, she suddenly asked me in Telugu:
"Why are you not talking today?"
And after a baffled second I replied:
"I am thinking"
This word was new to her and she fell silent 'thinking' for a couple of seconds and smiled. Kids have a great ESP!!!
Speaking of kids and babes, here is one lovely song:
********************************************************************************************************
Epilogue
Dear Sir,
Ishani's photo on today's blog made my day. I chat with my parents everyday in the evening over skype. They were also very happy to see her.
Let me send you a favorite song of mine that says it all
Ishani's photo on today's blog made my day. I chat with my parents everyday in the evening over skype. They were also very happy to see her.
Let me send you a favorite song of mine that says it all
..........The Last Laugh....Baby is yours.
This one is for Ishani.
Don't you love the sound
Of the last laugh my friend
Don't you love the sound
Of the last laugh at the end
Down in the gutter with the mad old soldiers
Down in the scuppers with the drunken sailors
Down in the gutter with the mad old soldiers
But the last laugh, baby is yours
And don't you love the sound
Of the last laugh going down
Games you thought you'd learned
You neither lost nor won
Dreams have crashed and burned
You still keep on keeping on
Out on the highway with the road gang working
Up on the mountain with the cold wind blowing
Out on the highway with the road band working
But the last laugh, baby is yours
And don't you love the sound
Of the last laugh going down
They had you crying but you came up smiling
They had you crawling and you came up flying
They had you crying and you came up smiling
And the last laugh, baby is yours
And don't you love the sound
Of the last laugh going down
Yeh don't you love the sound
Of the last laugh going down
Don't you love the sound
Of the last laugh my friend
Don't you love the sound
Of the last laugh at the end
Down in the gutter with the mad old soldiers
Down in the scuppers with the drunken sailors
Down in the gutter with the mad old soldiers
But the last laugh, baby is yours
And don't you love the sound
Of the last laugh going down
Games you thought you'd learned
You neither lost nor won
Dreams have crashed and burned
You still keep on keeping on
Out on the highway with the road gang working
Up on the mountain with the cold wind blowing
Out on the highway with the road band working
But the last laugh, baby is yours
And don't you love the sound
Of the last laugh going down
They had you crying but you came up smiling
They had you crawling and you came up flying
They had you crying and you came up smiling
And the last laugh, baby is yours
And don't you love the sound
Of the last laugh going down
Yeh don't you love the sound
Of the last laugh going down
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