Looking back and ahead

It's 20:25 hours of the last day of 2011. I have just returned after a holiday trip, about which I have written on the other blog. Mother Nature is up to her strange antics again: I left the town much colder than it is now, so that I went away wearing warm woolens, and now I am back and typing in shirtsleeves! In Kolkata people were actually sweating...the weather bureau has been talking about a low pressure belt which has built up over the Bay of Bengal, preventing the usual western cyclonic winds from doing their thing at this time of the year. I do hope that the cold will come back: I was hoping for at least a month more of really chilly weather. 

2011 hasn't been a big deal for me, for good or for bad, but the world has been rocked by all sorts of revolutions and quasi-revolutions and pseudo-revolutions: Osama and Gaddafi killed, Mubarak deposed, Berlusconi removed, Putin and Manmohan Singh tottering, Cameron gibbering and Obama dithering, the likes of Anna Hazare sharing 15-minute-celebrity status with Lady Gaga and Steve Jobs, Dev Anand gone at last but Fidel Castro and Khushwant Singh have cocked a snook at the Great Reaper one more time, and some really far-out freaks almost eagerly looking forward to the end of it all sometime in late 2012. With all that in mind, I shall now go take a walk, then come back home to watch loonies hyperventilating as they gear up to usher in yet another new year. All the best, everybody.

It's December again

Winter began last evening, with a sudden chill in the air. As usual, the weather had become comfortable since the start of November, but the sun was still unpleasantly warm in the afternoons, and I had been going around in shirtsleeves all through the month. Last night the kids began to shiver even in a classroom with all the doors and windows shut, and  the woolens had to come out pretty abruptly. I hope, since the season has begun late, it will last at least until mid-February. It is for this very brief spell that I live every year. It coincides with the lightest workload for me, so I have a lot of time to soak in the delicious charm, God be thanked. Despite the cold water and the shivers if you go riding a two-wheeler at dawn or late in the evening, I will never see eye to eye with those who dislike winter in a country like ours. I only wish there was some rain to wash away all the dust in the air and on the leaves, and I am waiting for the sky to turn azure. I can never have enough of azure skies. And the mountains are calling me again...

Street maze

The municipal authorities in this town are driven by strange fads. Once upon a time, while naming streets in my neighbourhood, they took it into their heads to immortalize the pantheon of Russian and American astronauts. So we got a rash of streets with utterly alien names like Grissom and Chaffe and Merbold and Svetlana and Tereshkova (some of those people might have had a little difficulty in identifying themselves from the spellings!). Then someone said "Let's do something different now - let's name all the next lot of streets according to the classical Indian raagas." At once there came up signs saying Bilawal and Iman Kalyan and Malkosh and Jayjayanti and Meghmallar Path...

Of late, they have gone back to naming new roads after famous people from recent Indian history, freedom fighters and writers prominently among them. Somehow, though, someone in authority wasn't confident that the names by themselves would ring any bells with the public - we being notorious for our indifference to matters historical - so they have put tags before the names: Biplabi (revolutionary-) Rashbehari Basu Sarani (street) and Sahityik Leela Mazumdar Sarani. 

And they have been so prolific with the naming exercise that personnel from other government departments are having difficulty finding their way about. I don't know about postmen, but this morning I saw some policemen asking for directions... 

Enlightened schoolboys, exasperated teachers

One of my more educated young readers sent me this link today. It's about how ever brighter our kids are becoming at school, in this era of total freedom and Facebook. I found it a fine piece of black humour. Do let me know how it struck you.

Biggest fool of all

The emperor Akbar once made a huge advance payment to a horse trader from distant Persia for bringing him a large number of the finest horses he could find. The man took the money and vanished, never to be heard of again. Sometime later, the badshah asked Birbal to draw up a list of the biggest fools in the kingdom. Birbal dutifully complied, but left the top two places unfilled. When Akbar asked him why, he first sought protection from royal ire, then said he would like to put the emperor's name at the number two position, because he trusted complete strangers from faraway places with large amounts of money. Though rattled, Akbar could not help laughing in agreement. Then he asked the obvious question. Birbal replied, 'Jahanpanah, I should like to put myself in the top slot, because I have chosen to serve someone like you!'

I sometimes draw up such a mental list myself, me holding the top slot for choosing to spend a lifetime trying to teach my jahanpanah, the public...

Too serious to be funny?

It is said about Antony in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra that "he was disposed to mirth, but on the sudden/ A Roman thought had struck him". I too have just been struck by a 'Roman thought'. Perhaps it is because my image is too deeply set as a solemn sort of person that too few of my readers visit this blog, and even if they do, feel uneasy about commenting on it?

If that were true, it would be sad indeed. I daresay a lot of people cannot accept the whimsical side of my character, and either haven't noticed or haven't bothered to reflect upon what I intended when I put up that quote from Bertrand Russell as a fixture on the right hand sidebar...

to see oursels as ithers see us...

A 15-year old drew the above cartoon at my behest in class. Do let me know how you liked it, everybody!

Those who are mystified by the title, look this up.

old 'naya' paise

The above is a photograph of a one ‘naya paisa’ coin dating back almost to the year of my birth.

I recently came across a few old one- and two- and five- and ten-paise coins in my collection. When  I was a child they were in wide circulation. Indeed, there were still lots of things that were available for five and ten paise: toffees and phuchka (three or four for ten paise), to name just two. With creeping but relentless inflation for more than half a century, such coins have long fallen out of use, of course (I read somewhere that a rupee today would be worth just four or five paise in 1950 in terms of purchasing power): you hardly see anything worth just a single rupee any more, and very soon, even one- and two rupee coins are going to become collectors’ items too, while one hundred rupee coins will come into vogue, as well as Rs.5- and 10,000 notes.

My grandfather used to tell me about new imported bicycles that cost Rs. 30, and my father bought a new motorbike in 1967 for about Rs. 1500. Sounds like a fairytale to the 50% of Indians who are below 25 years of age, I am sure. In 1977, the father of a friend of mine, a director of a large manufacturing firm, drew a salary of Rs. 8,000 a month, and he was considered rich.

Very soon our currency is going to go the way of the Italian lira and the Japanese yen, and we’d have millions of millionaires.

Those interested in coins might look up this website…

Jiyo, SRK!

Heard on UTV Bindass channel at 9:13 p.m. on Saturday, October 15, in the course of Preity Zinta interviewing Shah Rukh Khan: 'King' Khan not only admits that he had played a monkey during Ramlila many years ago, but that 'main toh abhi bhi bandar ke jaise acting karta hoon' (I still act like a monkey).

Well, you've got to hand it to him for honesty!

iCon gone!

Steve Jobs is dead. And this is the type who are mourning him most loudly.

Until the next poster boy comes along... that goes without saying. Then it would be 'Steve who?'

Who wants to bet they'd still be talking about him a year down the line? Five years? Ten? 

Joy maa Durga

Durga pujo has arrived again. An excuse for millions to gorge, splurge, dress up, preen, make noise, run around like beheaded hens, quarrel furiously with all and sundry in the course of having fun - and, most importantly, shirk work more or less for a whole month. 

Yay.........!

Ugly Indian, part two

Pot-bellied policemen in Delhi have been warned: get back in shape either by dancing bhangra or going to the gym, or face penalties. And in my town a lot of shopkeepers are telling me that they can't give out the wafer thin plastic 'carry bags' (what a silly name!) any more, now that the municipal authorities have seriously cracked down on this particular form of customer addiction...

At least some people in this country are bothering about some of the worst aspects of our culture. I'll keep my eyes on the news, because another aspect of the same culture is that most of our many enthusiasms are notoriously short-lived! Remember the 'anti-corruption' circus?

Fancy tag

One expression that has come into widespread use over the last decade or a little more is ‘life partner’. The Oxford online dictionary, I found, defines it as ‘a person with whom one is in a long-term monogamous relationship’.

Funny, isn’t it, that the older term spouse has been quite forgotten? Also, as far as India is concerned, I cannot get rid of the suspicion that the term is a direct translation of the expression jeevan saathi, for the popularization of which all credit must go to cable TV and the matchmaking industry.

Funnier still is the fact that the term has caught on precisely in an age when no one can be sure any more whether a marriage will last out a single full year. Old-fashioned as I am, I should have thought no one who has not celebrated his or her silver jubilee, at least, with the same spouse can earn the right to call that spouse a ‘life-’ partner!

Ugly Indian

As I wrote in the blogpost titled Atithi devo bhavo exactly a year ago, I was thrilled to bits to see Aamir Khan in a public awareness campaign on TV, exhorting fellow Indians to mind their public manners a little. I wonder how much it has affected our behaviour: haven't seen much signs of improvement myself. Today, an old boy called Sunup Varghese Kurien sent me a link to this website. I am very glad indeed to see that some people feel the way I do, and are doing things to change things for the better, even if it is ever so little. I have immediately asked Sunup to let me know if and how I can help. Meanwhile, some of my readers can write in, if only to tell me that they too feel like us, and very strongly, and would like to pitch in whichever way they can.

Purpose of life?

Do go through this little essay, and let me know – did you find it gross, or sad, or funny, or just stupid? I couldn't make up my mind.

Just right

I often read and remark on T-shirt legends. One moronic (or uber-wise: take your pick) tag read 'I was born intelligent; education ruined me'.

But I was pleased to see that somebody has got it just right on a pupil's T-shirt this time round: 'I was born intelligent, but twitter ruined me'.

Doctors' bane

I had a very minor surgical operation on my leg under local anesthesia at a neighbourhood nursing home yesterday. I strode into the OT and chatted with the doctor while he operated (the nurse had solicitously offered to blindfold me - good heavens!), and all the while he assured me I could resume my daily routine directly the procedure was over, including normal diet, walking, using the scooter and so on. Well, I swung my legs off the table as soon as he gave the word, and was striding briskly out of the OT when he yelled after me, with obvious alarm in his voice, 'Slow down, slow down, don't hurry like that, you're acting as though nothing has happened...!' I obeyed, of course, but I was puzzled: hadn't he just been saying that I could start doing everything 'normally' as soon as he was done?

Reminded me of a more serious operation I had four years ago. On that occasion I was back on my feet within 24 hours, and insisted on leaving the hospital and getting back to work on day three, in spite of being advised 'complete rest' for at least seven days, and the doctor had grumbled about 'the patient (being) too impatient'...

Culture shocks preferable?

Someone asked what 'culture shock' meant, and I illustrated with the example of the governor of a certain northeast Indian state, himself hailing from the northwest, a passionate dog lover, who presented the chief minister with a little poodle. Sometime later he asked the CM whether he was happy with the present, and that dignitary replied, 'Oh yes, certainly. It was delicious'. This, with a smacking of the lips...

When people are very different in their tastes and manners, such experiences of culture shock are bound to happen every now and then. In one country giving a girl a red rose is a compliment; elsewhere it's a deadly insult. But, I was wondering, isn't that better than creating a world which is so homogeneous that you won't know whether you are in Sao Paolo, New York, Mumbai or Shanghai? Twenty-odd years ago, I had a feeling while going round a certain Wal-Mart outlet in a small American town that if someone were suddenly knocked unconscious and whisked away to another Wal-Mart outlet a thousand miles away, s/he would never notice any difference. Now Indian cities are beginning to give me the same feeling.

We are the music makers...

I read a remarkable line today in, of all places, a book of grammar. "Let a man be free to write the ballads, and I don't care who makes the laws". I wonder who said that. And even more so, whether it makes any kind of sense to my readers, though it took my breath away...

Looking for a new name

Mamata Banerjee's new government says it wants the name of this state to be changed. I cannot help seeing their argument: 'West' Bengal is silly and out-of-date, since East Bengal has become Bangladesh long ago. They also say that since the name starts with W, our state figures at the bottom of all lists when the central government considers the needs of the various states, which puts us at a quite avoidable disadvantage.

So I fell to musing about what alternative tag we might put on. Bangla, Bongo, Bongo Pradesh, Bengal 2? Or, harking back to history, Bangal, maybe, or even Gour? Do my readers have some suggestions?

In the dark

The mid-eighties – precisely the time when I was going to college and university – were the worst time to live in Calcutta, for eight-to ten hour power cuts daily were considered normal. It is a miracle I didn’t go blind, doing so much reading by candle light. They have left some permanent nightmares: one thing I most definitely would never consider romantic is a candle-light dinner…

Of late the monopolistic state-run power utility from which we are compelled to buy electricity here in Durgapur is apparently going through one of the worst phases in its chequered history: I hear it is on the brink of collapse. As a result, frequent power cuts, from minutes to hours long, have become a part of the daily routine, and no respite is likely very soon. My generator has become a heavy duty necessity, not only because my classes depend on the lights and fans going, but also because I cannot bear to have those nightmares come back.

Almost every evening my house is the only one which is a blaze of lights when the rest of the street is plunged in darkness. Most of my neighbours, well-off as they are, prefer to mope for hours together in the sweltering, stifling darkness. You can at most see a single oil lamp or ‘emergency’ lamp gleaming fitfully here and there.  Strange are the ways of men.

I still remember

Increasingly frequently, my pupils write "I still remember..." when they are narrating something that happened only a few months, or at most a year or two ago. When I use the same expression, I refer to things that happened decades ago.  

In the same vein, the newspapers gush about married couples in filmdom, "still" in love three months after getting married...

Does this say something about changing memory maps humanity-wide, or what? What does "a long time ago" mean to most people these days?

Interesting map...

If Uttar Pradesh were to declare independence, it would be the fifth most populous country in the world. Yet, when you look at the state's per capita income, it ranks nearly at the bottom of the pile on any kind of international list.

Here is the kind of comparisons that I like to draw in my classes to make my pupils aware of the reality of things. Play around with it and let me know about your reactions.

Brainwashing

An elderly neighbour came over to ask me to fill in an application form to get an extra mobile connection with his landline. A simple chore, and of course I obliged. 

What I reflected upon later was the incongruity between the fact that this gentleman, too scared to fill in an application form on his own, can give the most fiery and learned political lectures in public - I heard him going full blast during election time recently. What a miracle of indoctrination, to be sure. Like today's candidates for engineering entrance examinations, he can obviously perform very well without understanding, or bothering to understand, a word of what he is saying!

Hurrah for technology!

This is something, alas, which only my Bengali readers can really enjoy:

I recently read the Google people boasting in their blog that they have been upgrading their super-dooper technology to allow facilities for translation, and Bengali was one of the latest languages which they had taken on board. Seeing that they had sent out an open invitation to try it out, I did, to amuse myself - and I was not disappointed. On typing in 'You are a fool', they instantly translated it into aapni akta gordobh,  and when I tried to exercise their 'brains' a little harder by letting them try 'To be, or not to be, that is the question', the gem they served up was theke, hobe ba na hobe, je proshno.

Don't believe me? Try it out yourself at translate.google.com

Thus spake Baba Ranchhordas...

Indians hate corruption.

Especially when they are neither doing it themselves nor benefiting from it.

And even more than corruption, they hate fellow Indians who point out the various forms of corruption they are indulging in.

Penny pinchers

My daughter told me this one, and I couldn't resist the temptation to put it up: 

What is the definition of a miser? ... Someone who, when his house is on fire, gives a missed call to the fire brigade.

Virtual reality

I was travelling by bus along National Highway 2, and the young man beside me, after fiddling some time with his ‘smart’ phone, drew out a Lenovo notebook computer from his bag and started playing a game of cricket. I am sure all my computer-geek old boys and friends would assure me that such a game is a marvel of computer programming, but after watching closely for about fifteen minutes, I discovered just what I had expected: the ‘game’, such as it were, could be only called either insipid or asinine by anyone with a halfway developed mind. If I cannot play cricket (of the real variety), I’d much rather listen to music, read a book, or simply go to sleep (or meditate: my mind is rich enough to provide me with a whole treasury of games for which one needs no machine).

In any case, when the young man looked up for a bit, I asked him why he was so absorbed in the game, and he claimed to be a great fan of cricket. I quizzed him about legendary greats like Ranjit Singh-ji and W.G. Grace, and about the likes of Neville Cardus, and predictably enough, he had never heard of them. Nor indeed did he seem to know much about great Indian cricketers who had played more than twenty five years ago. Biggest surprise of all: he had never himself played the game – the real game – in his life.

I wonder whether the thought that flashed across my mind was, or was not, really incongruous – I was reminded of the great animal expert, conservationist and maverick zoo keeper Gerald Durrell once remarking that the world has grown full of young people who believe that milk grows in plastic bottles on the front doorstep every morning…

Kid stuff?

I was probably in college when I first became aware that the usually whimsical, often hilarious and apparently innocuous nursery rhymes that all children (at least in educated families) are fed with actually have convoluted, unexpected and frequently very dark histories – certainly not what in this hyper-sensitive, politically correct age we would regard as appropriate stuff for children. What surprises await the person who first explores the stories behind Jack and Jill, Humpty Dumpty, Mary Mary, quite contrary and Ring a ring o’ roses! For starters, the curious might look up this website.

Strange, indeed, that children absorb the fun without having their psyches permanently warped by such red-hot material (and lucky for literature that most mothers never find out!). Obviously kids are made of much sterner stuff than we normally credit them with…

Hello, Sir?

It happens time and time again that old boys (or girls) ring up, hear my daughter's (or wife's) voice, and say 'Hello Sir, this is X here...'.

And many of these people are sharp and bright young folk, going by their school reports. It makes me wonder about what the IQ levels and reflex speeds of their progeny are likely to be...

Overheard

...now that the dadus have retired, and we have a dada as well as a didi to look up to, no one can stop Bengal from forging full-steam ahead!

Geronimo!

The more alert and aware people of diverse social groups become of their rights, privileges and dignity, the more difficult it becomes to stay politically correct all the time. It has become well-nigh impossible to make public jokes about racial and gender stereotypes. You have to call the head of a university department a ‘chair’ these days, because both chairman and chairwoman are insulting to one or other group of sensitive people, and chairperson never really caught on. Now I hear that some native American Indians are up in arms demanding an apology from US government authorities for using ‘Geronimo’ as a codename for Osama bin Laden during the military operation that killed the latter recently (see, for instance, this link). The way things are going, commanders planning super-secret military operations are going to spend more time worrying about appropriate codenames than about the details of the operations!

"Kalyug"!

I had a bit of a fight at a bank this morning.

I won't go into the gory details, but briefly it was as follows (you must remember that as a rule I stand tamely in queues and never open my mouth more than I have to). They took a cash deposit at one counter and sent me off to another to update the passbook (which they usually don't do). There I was told to go to yet another counter, because I didn't have one of the new computer-compatible passbooks (they talked as if it was my fault they had not given me such a passbook earlier). The third man first sent me back to the second, then told me to wait, then got me one of the new passbooks which was printed so faintly that nobody could read the stuff, and I found to my horror that they had got some of the details wrong. When I pointed this out, they told me to come back later - in the afternoon or next morning. At this point I began to grow hot under the collar, and demanded that they update the old book at least, and then we could see about coming back later for the new one. When they began to raise more objections, I became loud and scathing. Then the (third-) man complained that he was being 'harassed' because this was kalyug. At which point I really blew my top, agreeing with him that it was kalyug indeed, because in satyayug the bank would have happily made mistakes and the customers would have happily suffered for it. 

The yelling worked, and someone else ran up to do the needful. But I came away with a bad taste in the mouth. I also wondered how much I would enjoy this thirty years later, when I am a doddering old man, and the people manning the counter are my children's age...

This blog and Anna Hazare

It took fifteen months for the visit counter to reach the 10,000 mark, and less than a year for it to jump to 20,000. A heartening thing to see, because it means I have not been labouring entirely in vain (as I have said before, it's hard work to keep two blogs running simultaneously, especially if one of them is dedicated to whimsy and plain fun. Somebody warned that I may not be able to keep at it for long, but lo! it's been more than two years without a break already. But it helps to see an ever-increasing visit count). I shall look forward to seeing how quickly the follower count goes up to 100 and the 30,000-visits milestone is passed.

I shall reiterate that it would be nice to have more participation from my readers - by way of comments and contributions, besides visiting regularly and enlisting as followers.

One more thing I must note in passing is that maintaining this blog has brought home to me a) how many people are utterly humourless, and b) how widely tastes in humour differ.

And one last thing before I go: I shall insist till my dying day that not only is a sense of humour an essential requisite for civilization, but especially an ability to laugh at oneself - one's own sense of self-importance as balanced against the reality that one doesn't really matter in the vast cosmic scheme of things, even if one is a President or a tycoon or a pop icon. I wish more and more Indians, the man on the street as much as the movers and shakers, would learn to cultivate that virtue, which is the essence of true humility (as opposed to the ingrained habit of cringing before powerful people in the hope of currying favour and avoiding trouble). So here's my parting shot for now: I know, unlike Anna Hazare, that I am too ignorant and too insignificant a man to believe that I am always so right and good that I can and should impose my inflexible will upon this vast country without a qualm. I would run if anyone invited me to become the First Jan Lok Pal. Let me try to become a better man first. There's no shortage of people who are quite sure about their perfect moral virtue and absolute wisdom...

Weird expectations

If people will keep talking arrant and malicious nonsense about me behind my back, I think I am within my rights to keep laughing at them here. If that makes some of my pupils angry because they know I am ridiculing their parents, I am afraid that can't be helped: they should have found themselves nicer parents.

One of the latest canards I have heard about myself doing the rounds of this one-horse town of late is that I supposedly keep sitting on my chair all the time (I don't, actually, as all my pupils blessed with eyes should know, but that is beside the point here), whereas such and such tutor puts in so much more effort, staying on his feet all the time he teaches - why can't I try to live up to his example?

I am reminded of something a friend of mine, a doctor, told me from his experience long ago: a woman had a septic ulcer on the left elbow, and as the doctor was about to give her an antibiotic injection she shrugged her arm away and walked out of the dispensary muttering angrily - 'He tries to give me an injection in the right hand when he can see the boil is on the left, and he calls himself a doctor!'

Start dancing!

Wow: Google’s come up with a technological ‘paradigm-shift’ once again. Throw out your mouse and keyboard – outdated junk – and, after installing gmail motion and checking that your webcam is in position and switched on, just start throwing your arms and legs about in front of your PC, laptop, mobile or iPad. The computer will translate your gestures into commands for email – compose, reply, send, search, go to inbox, etc etc. (you can download their printable guide to check out how wide and varied a choice of gestures is already available).

Soon, thanks to Google’s now-hypnotic clout on what used to be called human minds, we shall see people monkey-dancing before their computers. And more and more, offices are going to resemble bharatnatyam or tai-chi classes. Vive la technologie!

One nasty thought: how am I going to actually compose anything like a long letter or one of these blogposts this way? And what about people with breathing problems and creaking joints?

P.S.: I won't be surprised if this is Google's idea of an April Fool joke. It's happened before. Last year they changed the company's name for a day...

Kya mazaak hai!

Renowned scientist and the prime minister’s chief scientific advisor CNR Rao has lamented that today’s children are being forced to lose all interest in real education and becoming robots or circus-animals programmed to take examinations endlessly as a substitute for learning: see this news story.

As a telling sign of the times, the same paper carried, just below the above article, a half-page advertisement of one of those now-innumerable tutorials promising to fulfil every child’s ‘dream’ of becoming either a doctor or an engineer for a fat fee…

One word can make a world of difference

Sayan Datta's recent confession in a comment on my other blog that he now understands much better how much of a difference single words (and even inflexions on words) can make reminded me of a joke that I read in a book of humour:

The ship had docked at port, and on the first night spent on land after a long time, the first officer became so disgracefully drunk that he could not report for duty for the whole of the next day. The stern captain entered the following comment in the ship's log - 'Unfortunately the first mate was drunk all day'. On hearing about it, the said officer was aghast, and he pleaded strenuously with the captain to strike that comment off the record, since otherwise it could permanently mar his career. But the captain was unbending, insisting that it was a serious infringement of service rules, and besides, he had written nothing but the literal truth. Realising that it was a lost cause, the first officer went away to take revenge by writing his own entry in the log - 'Fortunately, the captain was sober all day.'

Only a game

My daughter found this game by chance on the net. I was aghast. Do take a tour. It is actually teaching children (most players, I guess, would be children and teenagers) that to run a big business organization profitably, just about everything goes. Politicians, workers, environmentalists, scientists, health regulators, consumers – they are all either interfering busybodies meant to be bought off with bribes, or slaves to be worked to the bone for as little as possible, or suckers to be parted from their money in the most ‘efficient’ (read profitable-) way possible: all other considerations, especially ethical ones, be damned.

I used to think that you had to get into business school, at least, to be drilled in this most pernicious doctrine, but now it seems that you cannot be too young!

desi diners

I happened to lunch at one of the new 'Food courts' run by Haldiram's in Kolkata the other day, and I am glad to report that they are doing good business. It seems it's childishly easy to give the likes of Macdonald's and KFC a run for their money by just cloning them, even with an all-vegetarian menu. And given the clean, quiet ambience and airconditioning, the Rs. 75 you have to shell out for a standard (and adequately filling-) thaali  is reasonable pricing indeed. May the tribe prosper. 

thumbs down again

I must say I am disappointed that the last post fetched not one comment in a whole week.

That's one reason I don't write about books and movies too often - I have found out the hard way that either people are uninterested, or they have nothing to say.

And this made me thank my lucky stars once again that I don't have to depend on writing for a living: even writing light-hearted stuff. The very thought makes my flesh creep... in this country, it's much safer to lance ulcers or patch up boilers in a power plant, or even count notes in a bank. You might go back to the post titled "Ten thousand visits" which I wrote back in May 2010.

Fun movie

Just watched a newly released offbeat satirical-comedy movie titled Phas gaya re Obama. The story-line can be found here. NRI businessman loses everything in the 2008 American economic meltdown, desperate to raise money quickly, comes home to sell off his ancestral haveli, has qualms of conscience about throwing out a lot of dependants, then kidnapped by a series of increasingly more menacing roughnecks who are all slavering over the imagined ransom he would fetch – ending up with a powerful state minister who is aspiring to be CM – and using his wits to get out of their clutches, while simultaneously getting them to pay over all the money he needs to save his house back in New Jersey, then taking the first flight back, presumably forever.

It’s no great shakes, but I liked the movie for a number of reasons. It does not depend on a star cast and big-yawn ‘item numbers’, it avoids sleaze almost entirely, it ruthlessly mocks the cow belt political class as well as the now-ancient Indian obsession with Umrica and big bucks (one young man has an epiphanic moment near the end), as well as the way we (including our so-called English teachers!) are mangling the English language beyond recognition in our mad bid to get smart, it uses wit of fairly good quality (by which I mean something better than slapstick) effectively, it portrays Neha Dhupia as someone who can sometimes rise to things better than being a modeling bimbo (here, a female Gabbar Singh), it manages to convey danger and fear without resorting to crude and bloody violence on-screen, it depicts low-level goons as rather sympathetic, or at least pitiable creatures (everybody is down at heel thanks to the recession, even kidnappers!), and it lets Rajat Kapoor play the finest role I’ve seen him in since Bheja Fry: a basically good man though he is a businessman, who, floundering in an alien and hostile environment, is nevertheless ready to fight tooth and nail with everything he’s got to save himself and his family when put into a nearly hopeless situation, but who never gets greedy, never seeks vengeance, and even discovers imaandaari among his tormentors, and pays back in the same coin. Also, the use of Barack Obama’s now-famous ‘Yes, we can’ speech as the background leitmotif is both clever and entertaining. No matter what the box-office figures might tell you, it’s worth watching.

Without comment

This is The Telegraph's Valentine's Day special for Durgapur.

What do my readers feel about it?

yeesh!

I just heard that a very 'successful' and 'modern-minded' couple - husband a CA/MBA and senior executive in a large MNC, wife an engineer - arranged for a lavish Saraswati puja at home because their child, apparently, has been running from pillar to post to get a scholarship to some undergraduate course in the USA but has been unsuccessful so far. 

Just wanted my readers to know.

Humbugs

Wielding his pen dipped in vitriol and still going strong at 96, Khushwant Singh in today's newspaper remarks on the strange contradiction of a nation that boasts of Gandhi as its greatest icon and also takes great pride in showing off its military muscle in public pageants (as on Republic Day in New Delhi). He sums up by saying that 'India is not the land of Gandhi, it is the land of humbuggery'. 

Which reminded me of a schoolboy who recently told me his teachers had taken away the offer to let him speak before the assembly because he had demurred at needlessly buttering up an ex-principal by calling him a 'great' man ( though it is common knowledge that the teachers and the entire student body almost without exception privately despise the man in question, and in any case he has not left any significant achievement behind). 

Not only are we humbugs, we elders as teachers and parents insist that the children in our charge must grow into humbugs too! Otherwise, our 'glorious civilization' will be in danger...

What young India can teach us

I was dealing with a class which is about to go up to the seniormost year in school - class 12. We were studying F. Max Mueller's famous 150-year old essay What India can teach us (from which Jawaharlal Nehru quotes proudly in The Discovery of India). We had reached the point where he was waxing eloquent on India's rich mythology - whereupon I stopped and grinned at the boys and girls, saying, 'Of course, you know all about that, don't you? Any one of you could impress any westerner with gems from our rich storehouse of myths, surely, you, the smartest lot of today's Indians?... Let's see now,' and I picked on one girl at random and quizzed her 'What was Kacha's relationship with Devayani?' She looked blank, just as I had expected. 'Well, then, how were Bali and Sugriva related?' Again, she shook her head doubtfully, looking more flustered than before. No one came to her aid, though there were a few hushed mutterings. I tried one last time: 'What was the name of Lakshmana's wife?' The girl's face lit up with delight - she knew this one - and she declared, 'Sita, Sir!'

Home truth

There's a comic strip titled "Golmele Ginni" (Troublesome Housewife) in Anandabazar Patrika which often gives me stuff good for belly laughs. Recently there was one strip in which the little grandchild says 'Grandma, don't you want to go to the zoo?' Pat comes the reply: 'No, I don't like the idea of buying tickets to visit my relatives...'

I've got a double!

Imitation, they say, is the sincerest form of flattery. So - since so many people, students and teachers alike - pass off my writing as their own, I guess I should feel flattered. I have lately been told by some pupils of mine (and I checked) that someone has flattered me even more by opening a fake account in my name on Facebook, using the same photo as I use on my real profile. 

'How did you know it wasn't really me?' I asked them. 'Well, Sir, you don't send or grant friend requests to schoolgirls, do you?' they said charmingly. Clever, I must say...

A better way to travel

Travelling around swathes of West Bengal and the metropolis of Kolkata this time round (it was full holiday season too), it struck me with renewed force how utterly alike people are becoming everywhere – in this country at least. And it wouldn’t have bothered me so much if they had become alike in good manners and civic sense. But it is most evident to anyone who cares to notice that all the resemblance applies to undesirable traits: the same spitting and littering right and left, the same unconcern for traffic and parking rules (and eagerness to quarrel if anyone points out they are breaking rules), the same loud and coarse jokes, the same hogging (and it is hogging I mean – I have nothing against decent eating!), the same jostling and queue-jumping, the same disdain for other people’s convenience, the same vulgar display of new-gotten wealth, the same obsession with shopping malls everywhere (why go to places which are of historical/cultural significance, then, if all you want to do is shop and eat?). I don’t go abroad, but I am alarmed to hear that the streets of Singapore and Dubai are crowded with Indians exactly of the sort I have described, and road signs in Switzerland are being written in Hindi, and there are streets in London and New York which sound and smell like any town in India, and imagining what kind of crowds I might have to rub shoulders with in such places, I say a quiet ‘God forbid’ inside my mind.

I used to love travelling, and have travelled far and wide for a long time. Of late, however, I notice I am becoming less inclined to travel for pleasure. Travel-related books and video CDs, meanwhile, have become widely and cheaply available – you can visit any place from Antarctica to Greece to the Ajanta caves to Shantiniketan from the comfort and safety of home, avoiding all the expense, worry, risk and annoyance of having to rub shoulders with vast hordes of unpleasant people. Even watching Durga puja or Christmas celebrations around the town is done best on TV. Maybe, in the years to come, that is the way I will travel for choice!

P.S., Jan. 10: I found this absolutely hilarious little essay on the net, and though the author is a foreigner, my sympathies lie entirely with him.