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This morning Ishani visited my room with her soft toy Mickey Mouse in her embrace (here is the file photo):
And brought two rubber rings and commanded me to push them into the two hands of her Mickey. Which I did, and asked why she didn't go to school today. And she said today is a holiday, and when asked why she replied:
"Today is Mickey Mouse's Birthday!"
That was a cute demo of the power of 'association' that kids have. She knew it is someone's birthday, but Gandhi is an unknown object to her right now...she is not yet three after all. And she transposed it onto someone she knew and loved...her soft toy.
An even cuter instance of this power of association is what happened the other day at the dining table. I had earlier taught Ishani how to say: "Fine! First Class! Super!" with the hand gesture of making a loop with the thumb and the forefinger of her right hand. She mastered it after some effort...it was a new hand-craft for her. And while we were eating, I asked her where she had gone all that while before lunch. And she replied:
"Supermarket!"
I didn't hear properly and she repeated, with her hand showing the "Super" gesture:
http://www.rgbstock.com/bigphoto/nrcyovQ/perfect
And when she said it was her Mickey Mouse's Birthday, I recalled Sarojini Naidu calling Gandhi, "Mickey Mouse":
http://www.mkgandhi.org/Selected%20Letters/Sarojini/preface.htm
Apparently Gandhi didn't mind the jibes of his Bulbul which was her pet name as a poetess...Bulbul-e-Hind.
And most importantly, she was not jailed for her irreverence ;-)
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Coming to the topic of irreverence, I am a sucker for it. And so I had to apologize for it in my Homage to my Guru, SDM, in the very first line:
"This is not Homage; this is my homage, if you make allowances for my congenital irreverence. The middle vowel is ever present here, more so to apologize for lapses"
http://gpsastry.blogspot.in/2009/10/sudhansu-datta-majumdar-genius-who.html
During our childhood we didn't have to show respect to our elders by explicit formal and ceremonial gestures like touching their feet which was the norm in Bengal all those decades back. And I had a tough time of it...
"To bend or not to bend"
Fortunately the two Bengali elders who won my respect, HNB and SDM, understood it and excused me for not touching their feet when I ought to have, by their standards...like thanking HNB for all my promotions and SDM for giving me my Ph D and much much more.
But occasionally I was in trouble when in the company of my Bengali colleagues who did prostrate to them while I was looking on like an embarrassed duck.
So, I decided to avoid all such occasions. And ran away happily.
I had more trouble with my out-and-out Andhra HoD, Professor K V Rao. I didn't know where he acquired a taste for it but he was very particular about all such formalities. He expected himself to be launched on his scooter at his Qrs by one Research Scholar and received in the scooter stand at the Phy Dept by another...they had a duty-roster.
And I was showing him all the respect he wanted whenever convenient...after all, he was ten years older to me. But I never knew how much of a bending I had to do without giving offense...for an inch more bending would be construed by him as 'tamasha' and he would be offended.
Once while he was our HoD he visited our home along with his wife, daughter and his niece. By then we were rather close family friends. This niece had passed B Sc (Hons) in Physics from a College in AP and was appearing in the Entrance Exam for the M. Sc. (Phy) Lateral Entry conducted at KGP a few days hence. So, she visited her mamajee's place a week earlier to have fun with her cousin and a nice time. But KVR wanted me to 'help' clear her last minute doubts in Physics and asked me in so many words. I never refused such requests...if I can help someone understand the little Physics I knew, 'Why not?' although I knew that it would be an exercise in monumental futility.
So, I said:
"Ok, Sir, when do I go to your place?"
thinking he expected that from me as his 'underling' in the Dept.
But then he grew red in his face and perhaps suspected that I was being sarcastic and fumed:
"Ammammamma! Why should a teacher go to a student? She will come to you whenever you ask her to"
So, it was always dicey for me and I never could decide when the 'respect' would degenerate into ridicule.
Mark Twain too didn't know where exactly was the thin red line between leg-pulling and sarcasm and made such an ass of himself once that he had to grovel, apologize, and run away from America on a tour 'Following The Equator'. That was when he made a public speech in Boston mocking Whittier, Longfellow, Emerson and Holmes...all sitting in his audience...the cream of American Literature and demigods to many:
So, funny men, cartoonists, humorists, jokers and clowns are all the time at the risk of getting the boot either from the public or from their targets.
They tread perennially the proverbial Razor's Edge.
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"Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its only sure defense"
......Mark Twain
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This morning Ishani visited my room with her soft toy Mickey Mouse in her embrace (here is the file photo):
And brought two rubber rings and commanded me to push them into the two hands of her Mickey. Which I did, and asked why she didn't go to school today. And she said today is a holiday, and when asked why she replied:
"Today is Mickey Mouse's Birthday!"
That was a cute demo of the power of 'association' that kids have. She knew it is someone's birthday, but Gandhi is an unknown object to her right now...she is not yet three after all. And she transposed it onto someone she knew and loved...her soft toy.
An even cuter instance of this power of association is what happened the other day at the dining table. I had earlier taught Ishani how to say: "Fine! First Class! Super!" with the hand gesture of making a loop with the thumb and the forefinger of her right hand. She mastered it after some effort...it was a new hand-craft for her. And while we were eating, I asked her where she had gone all that while before lunch. And she replied:
"Supermarket!"
I didn't hear properly and she repeated, with her hand showing the "Super" gesture:
http://www.rgbstock.com/bigphoto/nrcyovQ/perfect
And when she said it was her Mickey Mouse's Birthday, I recalled Sarojini Naidu calling Gandhi, "Mickey Mouse":
"Gandhiji's letter to Sarojini dated August
8, 1932 is addressed to "Dear Bulbul" and he signs off as
"Little Man". Somewhere along the line Sarojini had described the
Mahatma as a "Micky Mouse," a "Little Man" and Gandhiji must have
enjoyed the description"
Apparently Gandhi didn't mind the jibes of his Bulbul which was her pet name as a poetess...Bulbul-e-Hind.
And most importantly, she was not jailed for her irreverence ;-)
*********************************************************************************************************
Coming to the topic of irreverence, I am a sucker for it. And so I had to apologize for it in my Homage to my Guru, SDM, in the very first line:
"This is not Homage; this is my homage, if you make allowances for my congenital irreverence. The middle vowel is ever present here, more so to apologize for lapses"
http://gpsastry.blogspot.in/2009/10/sudhansu-datta-majumdar-genius-who.html
During our childhood we didn't have to show respect to our elders by explicit formal and ceremonial gestures like touching their feet which was the norm in Bengal all those decades back. And I had a tough time of it...
"To bend or not to bend"
Fortunately the two Bengali elders who won my respect, HNB and SDM, understood it and excused me for not touching their feet when I ought to have, by their standards...like thanking HNB for all my promotions and SDM for giving me my Ph D and much much more.
But occasionally I was in trouble when in the company of my Bengali colleagues who did prostrate to them while I was looking on like an embarrassed duck.
So, I decided to avoid all such occasions. And ran away happily.
I had more trouble with my out-and-out Andhra HoD, Professor K V Rao. I didn't know where he acquired a taste for it but he was very particular about all such formalities. He expected himself to be launched on his scooter at his Qrs by one Research Scholar and received in the scooter stand at the Phy Dept by another...they had a duty-roster.
And I was showing him all the respect he wanted whenever convenient...after all, he was ten years older to me. But I never knew how much of a bending I had to do without giving offense...for an inch more bending would be construed by him as 'tamasha' and he would be offended.
Once while he was our HoD he visited our home along with his wife, daughter and his niece. By then we were rather close family friends. This niece had passed B Sc (Hons) in Physics from a College in AP and was appearing in the Entrance Exam for the M. Sc. (Phy) Lateral Entry conducted at KGP a few days hence. So, she visited her mamajee's place a week earlier to have fun with her cousin and a nice time. But KVR wanted me to 'help' clear her last minute doubts in Physics and asked me in so many words. I never refused such requests...if I can help someone understand the little Physics I knew, 'Why not?' although I knew that it would be an exercise in monumental futility.
So, I said:
"Ok, Sir, when do I go to your place?"
thinking he expected that from me as his 'underling' in the Dept.
But then he grew red in his face and perhaps suspected that I was being sarcastic and fumed:
"Ammammamma! Why should a teacher go to a student? She will come to you whenever you ask her to"
So, it was always dicey for me and I never could decide when the 'respect' would degenerate into ridicule.
Mark Twain too didn't know where exactly was the thin red line between leg-pulling and sarcasm and made such an ass of himself once that he had to grovel, apologize, and run away from America on a tour 'Following The Equator'. That was when he made a public speech in Boston mocking Whittier, Longfellow, Emerson and Holmes...all sitting in his audience...the cream of American Literature and demigods to many:
"In his analysis of this event in Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer,
Smith provides an excellent account of both MT's motivation for using
his humor to deconstruct this cultural idol and middle-brow American
society's angry response to the
speech. On December 26, for example, the Globe reprinted an attack from the Cincinnati Commercial that accused MT of lacking "the instincts of a gentleman." As far away as Colorado, the Rocky Mountain News, while poking fun at Boston's excessive outrage, called MT's "bar-room" speech offensive to every intelligent reader. And on 5 January 1878, the same day that article appeared in Denver, the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin
ran this brief item, attributing it to Dexter Smith: "Booksellers
report a marked wane in the sale of Mark Twain's writings." There is
evidence to suggest that MT's decision to leave for Europe in March was
hurried up by his desire to disappear from public view until the
negative publicity died down."
So, funny men, cartoonists, humorists, jokers and clowns are all the time at the risk of getting the boot either from the public or from their targets.
They tread perennially the proverbial Razor's Edge.
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