Thursday, April 30, 2015

Tribute or Homage?

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Relief for Shobhaa

...The Supreme Court on Monday stayed the privilege motion by the Maharashtra Assembly against author Shobhaa De for her remarks on twitter about Marathi movie screenings....

Between 1970 and 1975 we at IIT KGP somehow had a retired army man as our Director. Much rancor got generated in the teaching community (for good or bad) by his newfangled policies like 'rotation of headships', 'semester system', and things like that which were new to us and hence resisted...inertia of Newton's first law. And for the first time and in the first of the then six IITs we formed a Teachers Association that shouted against his policies.

 The rancor was so much that we called a GBM of our IITTA and invited our Diro to take his lonely seat on the dais which he did with lots of military phlegm, listening stonily but not speaking. One after another, the old 'rotated' Heads and their chamchas went up the dais and spoke against him and his policies. And our own Prof HNB (rotated HoD) walked up and spewed venom and said:

 "You, Sir, are not acting like a professor...you are acting like a Brigadier!"

 When the said Brigadier was to retire, Indira Gandhi's Emergency got rolled out and the Ministry felt that the new director of the oldest IIT should rather be a young man and so appointed a Delhi IIT Prof of EE, CSJ, as our newcomer. He was almost a generation younger than the senior-most professors at IIT and so he behaved like a good student, reverential and sympathetic and modest, and got to be liked by everyone from students to professors. We didn't feel at all that an Emergency was in force...it came later on, after he left, when the rest of the country was done with it ;)

 CSJ wanted to get back to his IIT Delhi soonest and so he didn't complete his 5-year term and left KGP when everyone asked: "Why so soon?" rather than "Oh, When!!!"

And so the IIT community including students and teachers assembled in the Open Air Theater (erected by the Brigadier) to bid CSJ a fond farewell. One after another, HoD's who have been reinstated (de-rotated) during his short regime went up the stage and spoke kindly about CSJ.

 And when the turn of our HNB came, he walked up the stage and began saying:

 "I stand here to pay my homage to our Director..."

 And then there was an uproar from the students assembled in the back benches shouting:

 "Hey! Hey!! Hey!!!"

 HNB waited till the howls subsided, and repeated:

 "I stand here to pay my homage to our Director..."

This time however there was complete silence from the hecklers. And HNB carried on.

I could guess the reason for the initial uproar. Students, and perhaps many polite others, thought that homage is something you pay to departed souls. But when HNB repeated it, they knew they were wrong. Perhaps they thought that what HNB ought to pay a living and kicking youngster was a 'tribute'.

So I went home and looked up my bulky Webster to get the difference.

And I did it just now again on the net.

What I found was that 'tribute' and 'homage' are like Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Not much difference. But they are surprisingly not synonyms of each other.

All I could find was that tribute is more substantial while homage is a little more ethereal. And homage is something you pay in public oftener. Otherwise they are the same thing. And homage is certainly not confined to dead men (or women) or their spirits.

Well, I too did pay my own homage to my Ph D guide, SDM, a good decade after he died and three decades after we parted. It begins with the sentence:

"This is not Homage; this is my homage, if you make allowances for my congenital irreverence."


But I don't recall paying either a tribute or homage to anyone else in my 2000-odd blog posts.

Except perhaps to Shobhaa De'.

Here it is: 

http://gpsastry.blogspot.in/2011/08/himerick.html

Dear Dr GP: When she was in her St. Agnes Convent my daughter was writing chaste English. But after shifting to KV, she is mixing a lot of Hindi words.

Dr GP: This is known as the “Shobhaa De Linguistic Modeling”. Congratulations, your daughter is poised on the threshold of a lucrative career of web-journalism.

 http://gpsastry.blogspot.com/2010/03/ask-dr-gp.html

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Well, Shobhaa De has been my longtime favorite. We were born in the same 1940s decade (don't remind her) and she after all married our own boy ultimately.

Birds of the same passage and vintage.

I just love her writing. Don't believe me?

OK...below is a 'zipped limerick' I wrote 2.5 years ago:

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Monday, February 23, 2009


Shobhaa strips Muthalik


Shobhaa De
She hath a way
With words
Like swords
She rips her prey!

Posted by G P Sastry (gps1943@yahoo.com) at 7:06 AM 




If you want to know more about this dynamic dame, look up:

http://yourstory.com/2010/06/shobha-de-celebrated-columnist-and-novelist-in-a-candid-conversation-with-canta-dadlaney-for-yourstory/


Meanwhile, the Shobhaa (Lustre) of our own household just now walked into my room and commanded me to take her picture in her new outfit and upload it in my today's blog:



...Posted by Ishani

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Wednesday, April 29, 2015

Hard & Soft - 3

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We now turn to the more esoteric uses of soft and hard.

 When we were in our Class VIII (3rd Form) in 1953 in our village school at Muthukur, we had a wonderful English teacher, Anjaneyulu sir. 

 One day he wrote on the blackboard: "He worked hard" and asked us to tell its meaning in Telugu. That was a breeze and all of us answered right. He then added a 'ly' to hard to make it 'hardly' and asked us the meaning of the new sentence and we all said it means the same thing. And he laughed and said it means the opposite. And we just couldn't believe him that by turning an adjective into an adverb the meaning turns turtle. And we had lots of fun on it.

 Twenty five years later I was at IIT KGP trying to catch colloquial Hindi from my friend, Tyagi from Bulandsher in UP, by listening to him...he reveled in speaking in his mother tongue all the time and it was fun. 

 One day he was saying: "Eh aasan thodi hai!" and I thought he meant that 'it is a little easy'. And he laughed and said it meant the opposite...'thodi' here meant almost 'no' and 'never'. And that use of 'thodi' delighted me since we didn't have any such fluent construction in Telugu.

 A couple of years later I was supposed to be invigilating in a big hall and was browsing the books that the students left on the dais. And there was this wonderful book that I bought that evening: FT Wood's 'Remedial English for Foreigners' (I now have 3 copies of the book...that is a different story).

 On an early page of that book Wood was talking about the difference between 'few' and 'a few' and illustrating it by examples and saying that the difference is more of an expectation than reality. Like let us say there are 20 students in the class. And one day 5 attended. If the teacher says: 'There were few students in the class', he expected more, like 15. But a different teacher could say: 'There were a few students in the class', meaning he expected much less like 2. 

 Delightful like 'little' and 'a little'.

 In Muthukur we had our own well in our backyard and used its water for washing and drinking. And it was a pleasure to bathe in that water with soap which released lots and lots of suds of lather when rubbed with water.  A few years later I was at another village called Nidubrole for my pre-university year where I found to my dismay that no soap ever succeeded in giving any lather however hard we tried...just a few bubbles and measly froth. The soap lasted forever though.

 And then I entered my university at Vizagh and on the very first day a short brown dumbish lady entered our class room and mumbled that she would teach us inorganic chemistry. And mumbled for the whole class (and for the entire year). And we asked her which book she followed. And she grumbled and said in an undertone: "peeseeray".

 We couldn't make head or tail of such a weird name and asked her to repeat it and she mumbled ever more humbly:  "peeseeray".

And we ran to the library to be the first to catch such a book if any and we found that there was a book on inorganic chemistry by one PC Ray and thought she meant that book and she did. I don't know if there are many PC Rays but when I landed in Bengal a decade later I came to know of one great man of that name who started Bengal Chemicals during the hated British rule:





And very soon our lady lecturer was mumbling about what she called 'hard water' and I couldn't stop wondering how a liquid like water could be hard like a rock. Well, we had to answer a question on it in our exams and it turned out that she was referring to my Nidubrole water. I looked up her peeseeray and read all about it and the last sentence of the chapter read: "Hard water is not bad for health"...some comfort there.

 Many decades later we heard of software and hardware and wondered what they meant. Till we were told that our 77 RPM record was the software while our HMV Star on which we played it was its hardware.

 And soon IITians were getting recruited in software firms and management jobs by the thousands (like my son) and I heard that the secret of IITs is that they give their students 'soft skills', a term new to me. Here it is:  










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Monday, April 27, 2015

Hard & Soft - 2

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In the late 1940s, when I was a kid, all toys were made of metal, hard rubber, and nails. The soft plastics revolution reached India two decades later.

 The first gift I remember Father gave me was a tricycle. It was all metal and nails except for the tires and handle grips and seat which were of hard rubber and these cracked within a month and peeled off leaving the bare metal rims and handles and pedals and nails. These hurt like hell but I couldn't care less. I bled profusely in my ankles and hands but the tincture of iodine was always there and it was a classic case where the cure hurt more than the bleed. But I was as fast as the breeze and showed off to my friends and onlookers.

 One morning I was riding the damn thing making furious circles on the pyol in front of our home:







And a street urchin who was watching me with envy suddenly thrust his stick in front of my front wheel and I and my trike took a tumble and fell down on the road like sacks of coal. Nothing happened to my vehicle but I had a bleeding forehead which had a 1" cut and had to be stitched up in the local hospital and gifted me a permanent mark on the head which served as one of the two identification marks in my school final register.

 The next hard thing I remember using was our 'rubber' that was given to us to erase our howlers in the school made with an equally hard pencil:



The rubber was so hard that the paper got torn when we rubbed on it but nothing happened to the eraser...it lasted years and years. And when we used it to rub off our pencil marks, it left black thin long 'filings' of graphite on the paper which had to be peeled off by our hands.

A couple of decades later in our university we got soft rubber erasers which didn't tear the paper but their leavings stuck to the rubber which turned black and useless. We had to use our hand nails to peel the graphite off the eraser and I for one preferred our childhood hard rubbers. I don't know how this dichotomy was solved if it ever was.

The other toy that fascinated me was what we called 'pappu chetti' which roughly translates to our 'provision seller'. In Muthukur no one was obese at all....everyone worked and played hard and walked miles. Except for this pappu chetti who was forced to sit for the whole day in his shop ringed by his bags of rice, lentils and red chilies.  

The toy that was named for him was made of two metal hemispheres that were glued and painted to look like him. When we stood the toy on its head it stood firm alright. But when we tried to tilt it and tumble it, it refused and reverted to its vertical position no matter how much we tried. We were all delighted but confused and even Father couldn't explain it to us easily:





I was reminded of this toy fifty years later when I bought on an impulse paying all of Rs 120 the Chinese version of this as a curious and lovely bird that balanced itself on my finger tip:







I used to show it off to my physics students when they visited my home at IIT KGP. Of course the explanation was simple enough but the beauty of this bird was that the periods of its swings on its wings was precisely twice its vertical oscillations. Some nice demo there of the tensor nature of moment of inertia and its eigenvlaues and eigenstates.

It was a decade later that I saw the really soft toys that I bought for Ishani which didn't have a single nail or metal to hurt her. But before she arrived, my son one day bought a huge soft toy like a teddy bear and I asked him who it was for, and he shyly said:

 "To my new wife who wished to use it as a comforter"





...Posted by Ishani

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Sunday, April 26, 2015

Hard & Soft - 1

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The first I heard the word 'soft' applied to an object was in 1955 when I was in my high school at our village Muthukur.

 My strict HM Father one day took pity on our poor drawing teacher and let him sell (for a tiny profit) Tip-Top 'soft' pencils made in Japan and insist that we all buy them from him and use them and only them in our drawing classes. 

 The Tip-Top was a revelation. Till then all we had were cheap pencils imported from England and they were a punishment. They were bare, without the 'rubber' at their crest, writing with them was a hard travail since their 'leads' broke every minute, and all we had for shaving them was half-a- 7 O' Clock shaving blade also imported from England. We bled profusely, and the result of our writing was invisible...the leads were as hard as our heads.

 Tip-Top was a breeze. It wrote easily, the leads never broke but smoothly wore out, but the wood was as soft as butter. And the writing was as dark as Lord Krishna.

 But they cost a hell...all of Rs 0.25. But they were worth it...all of us got very high marks for our lousy drawings ;)

Half a century later, when I was shopping for pencils for my kid-son at Thackers at IIT KGP, and asked for a pencil, Mohinder asked back:

 "What brand and what grade, sir?"

 And it turned out that the Faber Castell pencils that were a rage then came in twenty odd grades of darkness and hardness:






I then started wondering if any crazy boy would ever buy a 9H pencil as hard as a stone, and if so why so.

The answer came a couple of years later when I was invigilating. It was a girl and not a boy but.

It was reported to me that a chap sent to our Diro an anonymous e-mail that this dame has been cheating in exams from her infancy...he was her classmate and was sore that she walked away with all the top grades while he stuck to truth like Gandhiji (the original) and got as low grades as Gandhiji.

It turned out that her technique was as simple as her swoon. She brought a clipboard with her which was perhaps allowed:




And at home the night before her exam she would take a 9H pencil and scribble in the tiniest calligraphy her class notes for the entire semester:




And none could see it but her since she brooded over her clipboard like a hen on her precious chick:






I am told that nowadays there are far more impressive ways beating cheating:








...Posted by Ishani

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Saturday, April 25, 2015

Babus

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In the 1950s in our village Muthukur on the Coromandel Coast, there were no 'babus'.

 It was always either an 'Ayya!' or 'Swami!' or 'Saar (sir)!'

 No one added a 'babu'  to his first, second or last name. It was either a 'rao' or 'sastry' or 'sarma' or 'murty' or 'reddy' et al.

 The first we met a Babu was in our 'social studies' book. We were asked to mug up the names of our country's president, vice president, prime minister and a whole lot of cabinet ministers in the center and state. How different now when the names change every fortnight...here is a news item:

...With Qureshi's sacking, the northeastern state (Mizoram)  has seen the departure of six Governors in just nine months since the Narendra Modi government assumed office...

 I wrote a fun-verse in Telugu on this news item, which goes (to the few who can read Telugu):

162. Qureshi 6th Governor to be sacked in 9 months:


నరుà°¡ు నవతరింà°šు నవమాసముà°²ు à°¨ింà°¡


à°¦ానమీయర నవధాà°¨్యమెà°²్à°²(

à°¨ాà°°ు పతుà°²ు à°®ాà°°ె నవమాసముà°²ు à°¨ింà°¡ె


à°µెంà°•à°Ÿాà°¦్à°°ి  à°¸ుà°¤ుà°¡  à°µిà°¨ుà°° à°°ంà°—


whose import is that a child is normally born after nine months of hard labor, and here is a case where in nine months a new child is awaited in Mizoram while six husbands (patis) have changed meanwhile!

 Anyway, there was this our first president of Free India, born in Bihar, and called 'Babu Rajendra Prasad'.

 We were amused at this 'babu' word and thought it was endemic to Bihar. This was proved true when we came to the other Babu also born in Bihar...Babu Jagjivan Ram.







Although we were quite a caste-conscious lot, we were not told that the first babu was a kayasth while the second a harijan (the approved term for 'mala' or 'madiga' who lived in a separate hell-hole on the outskirts of the village...we didn't yet hear of the Scheduled Castes or Dalits or Mahadalits or Neo-Buddhists).

Anyway the two babus above differed in one respect: the first one lived and died a Congressman while the second was cagey enough to remain a minister till the last day of Indira's Emergency at the end of which he became a turncoat hoping to be the next prime minister, but alas, the nation was not yet ready for the likes of him.

The first 'babu' that got added to the name in our family circles came a decade later: this cousin of mine was christened: "Ravindra Babu" and when I asked why, his poet-father told me that he was a fan of Rabindranath Tagore. I was by then in Bengal and was familiar with the babus there....their babu was an add-on to their first names, like, Gouri Babu, Girija Babu (both males though), and Gagan Babu, Barun Babu et al.

Another decade later, there were these twins in my friend's household who were named: Raam Babu and Giri Babu. The babu culture seemed to have caught on, when another decade later we had our Chief Minister called Chandra Babu Naidu:





Another decade later I met a chap named Sai Babu and when I told him I knew all about the Sai part but why 'babu', he said his parents were fans of a Telugu film hero called Mohan Babu:


Another decade later by when I had lost my wife and was musing in the balcony what to blog that day, little Ishani (3) arrived singing a film song and I asked her what film it was from and she replied: 'Sitamma Vakitlo' and she added that the hero of that film was named Mahesh Babu:



And I ribbed her saying that he looked more like a 'baby' than a 'babu', and she hit me hard with her tiny fist... Mahesh babu turned out to be her favorite hero then.

This 'baby-babu' dichotomy was by then common in our South Indian households for a female and a male kid respectively. And here is a true story:  
There was this Tamilian Lecturer, by name Chandrasekar, who was biting his nails at KGP awaiting the results of the nine-month labor that his wife was undergoing in Bangalore. And one fine morning he got his much-awaited telegram from his brother-in-law stationed at Bangalore:

"Congratulations new arrival stop mother baby fine"

He was relieved but not overjoyed till he traveled to Bangalore and found to his shocking surprise that it was not a 'baby' but a 'babu' after all...

The meaning of Babu has completely changed now, and everywhere in India Babus and Babudom go with our IAS officials and their red tape:






The cartoon shows Cameron greeting an elephant, symbolizing India. Riding on the elephant are a group of what we can suppose to be Indian politicians and businesspeople (note the factory). Cameron is accompanied by Business Secretary Vince Cable, who is holding a Hawk jet (a £500m deal for BAE Systems to supply Hawk jets is expected to be one of a string of high-profile contracts signed during the trip). Meanwhile, the elephant's legs are caught up in red tape.
...Posted by Ishani

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Friday, April 24, 2015

Old is Cold

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This is about a fast-vanishing institution like me...an old man in his 70s who lost his wife years ago and lives with his only son and daughter-in-law and a grandkid or two.

 He is fit enough to eat and drowse and talk and grouse except that he suffers from a chronic IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome) which naturally makes him highly irritable.

 He can see and hear and read and write but not go out and mix with other old hags like him and happily exchange gossip, talk about their good old days and health problems, the high cost of living, and modern girls.

 He has his own bedroom with his old double-bed (still intact), an attached bath with a geyser, a split air-conditioner, a laptop with a free wi-fi connection, his book case and books both as old as his misspent youth. 

 But he prefers to spend most of his days and sleepless nights in the vast hall on a roomy single soft sofa overlooking the kitchen, the master bedroom, the toy's room and balconies and the front door. It is his throne that he resents if a visitor usurps it, and clings to it like the very devil.

 He has lost every worthwhile thing of his youth like his teeth except his bloating ego and a meager pension which he cherishes like his million dollars. His days are spent looking forward to the pittance of his pension...on the first of the month he feels like a king till the 10th, and for the next ten days till the 20th he feels forlorn like Raama agonizing about his misplaced Sita, and during the last ten days from the 20th to the month-end he is as lustful as an engaged groom waiting for his wedding day.







As he ages and ripens, his critical faculty increases and gets sharper like a thorn on the dying bush:



http://www.survivopedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/bad-bush.jpg
He is critical of the way his son dresses in his fading jeans to his office and knee-length Bermudas at home instead of starched dhotis and ankle-length lungis. And the skimpy way ladies dress at home in anything but a sari with a pallu...and their habit of incessantly punching the buttons and swiping their fingers on their cell phones while cooking, eating, and perhaps...

If they ask him about his health he pretends to be offended, saying he is far more healthy than the present day youth with their pot bellies and burps. And scolds them to mind their health first. And if they forget to ask him about his failing digestion and hearing for two consecutive days, he sulks and frowns and feels neglected.

And fondly wishes his wife were alive, and reminisces his long and happy married blissful decades although, while he was married, he was forever pining for his long-lost bachelor decades when he looked at the world through the protective haze of his cigarette smoke and dirty teeth.

I guess you get the drift...   






...Posted by Ishani

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Wednesday, April 22, 2015

Babas

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Questioning Shirdi Sai Baba's status as a Hindu god, Shankaracharya Swaroopanand Saraswati said that Sai Baba was someone "who used to eat meat and worshipped Allah, (and) a man like that can never be a Hindu god."



If you relish controversy, like I do, come and stay in modern India and stay for good.

 Everyday in my Deccan Chronicle I read titillating news items and enjoy them. And use them in my blogs and the Shatakam (100 verses) that I composed last month.

 In the 1950s in my village Muthukur in the Nellore District of AP, I never heard the word: 'Baba'. We had our quota of Muslim holy men and we called them 'fakirs'. 

 Nor were there any babas at KGP in the 1960s...Bengalis are devotees of Shakti and Shiva and Tagore.

 The first I heard of any baba was on my wedding night on the 17th May, 1979 (if I remember the date correctly). My newlywed wife and I started chatting for want of any constructive work and she told me in all seriousness:

 "I have one and only one wish that you should fulfill"

 And I was wondering if it was that I should quit IIT KGP and shift to IIT Madras (which I didn't like), or maybe a diamond necklace. But I was relieved when she said:

 "I had a vow that I would travel to Shirdi with my husband"

 And I asked her where this Shirdi was and she was dismayed at my ignorance and said it is the abode of Sai Baba (then no more) in Maharshtra. Although my wife was born and studied in AP, her parents were working in Maharashtra, so I could guess the connection.

 I then lit a relieved cigarette and said: "Oh, Ok, fine, why not?"

 And it took exactly 20 years for me to fulfill her vow. By then the Shirdi Sai Baba was famous all over in India...so famous that the above Shankaracharya got furious with him.

 Reason: By 2000, there were a score and more of Shirdi Sai Baba temples in my remote town Nellore and even a couple in Muthukur.

 I don't think there is any in Calcutta yet...I have to check...Bengalis are hidebound happily.

 One of my physics colleagues at KGP, Late Prof AVK Rao, hailing from AP, one day told me somewhat shyly that he was a devotee of Sai Baba. And I said I knew all about this Muslim saint. He was flabbergasted and rebuked me:

 "I am not talking of the dead Muslim Sai Baba...I am talking of the living Hindu one at Puttaparti in AP"

 And I asked him what was so great about him. And he demurred and said:

 "He is very powerful and does magic tricks and cures his devotees of all their ills, temporal and spiritual."

 I asked him how he got his powers and he replied hesitantly:

 "People say his powers rest in his weird hairdo": 




I was about to crack a joke about this modern Samson but desisted...AVKR was a decade older to me.

 This junior Sai Baba, who it seems claimed that he was a reincarnation of the senior one, had his quota of controversies about his magic tricks and the fact that he once ran away and hid in his basement abandoning his devotees when they were attacked by knife-wielding goons:
...On June 6, 1993, an attempt was allegedly made on his life by his close aides. Six inmates of Prasanthi Nilayam were killed right inside the Baba's bedroom. All of them were part of the "inner circle" of Baba. His personal assistant Radha Krishna Menon was among those killed in the incident...

 http://www.ndtv.com/people/who-is-sri-sathya-sai-baba-453784
Oh, well! Didn't Christ cry on his cross?:

  King James Bible

 ...And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?...



And then there is this very much alive and kicking Baba who once ran away from the Ramlila Maidan at midnight hiding in a lady's dress:
...The maverick Baba disappeared from the Ramlila ground, jumping down from the stage when a huge contingent of police and RAF personnel came to detain him. Police claim he was caught at the Ranjit Singh flyover around 3.40 am, trying to escape dressed in a salwar-kameez, with a dupatta wrapped over his beard. 

Cops said the Baba, posing as an injured woman, was walking away with his arms around two women supporters. When the police offered an ambulance, he refused. That's when his beard became visible and he started running, but was caught and detained...

 http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Baba-Ramdev-almost-got-away-in-womans-garb/articleshow/8741239.cms
This Baba, who is alleged to be a multimillionaire, is again in the news. Apparently the Haryana Government offered him a cabinet rank and appointed him as its yoga guru and brand ambassador but of course he declined since he is a 'fakir'...so we are back to my Muthukur of the 1950s, happily:





...Posted by Ishani
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