I can't remember when I had met Vandana Datta for the first time. But I reckon it must have been to do with scholastic matters. It was after her eminent father's demise that she courageously took on the editorial and publication responsibility for Research, a biannual research journal in Literature, Culture and Creativity. Young as she was in a profession where grey hair is equated with wisdom, she balanced writings by acknowledged scholars with space allocated for young researchers without compromising the quality of the journal.
She attended UGC refresher courses in the Department of English, Patna University and impressed resource persons and organizers with her rare commitment, scholastic aptitude and sincerity. It is with the same sincerity that she taught and it is with the same commitment that she concluded her lectures while she had temporary reprieves from the effects of chemotherapy.
A few days ago, one of her dear colleagues who was at the English department on work, had informed us that Vandana was in hospital and not in the best of health. While we wanted to visit her, we were not too sure whether she would have liked us to see her not at her best. As May turned to June, we received the bad news. Vandana after battling cancer with courage and rare dignity was one with the elements of the universe.
I have often asked this question in a more prosaic manner than in Lear: why do the gods toy with good souls? In a world in which human beings transcribe their hopes and fears into a spiritual script, it must be comforting to know that Vandana is in the space of a painless destination. When I look up at the sky on a clear night, may be I will designate a special star to her memory. But as of now the catharsis must stem from the grief that we feel. She was a very good human- being and the world has been greatly impoverished by her absence.
Goodbye Braveheart.
Saturday, June 4, 2011
Friday, November 5, 2010
Did anyone buy a book this Dhanteras?
The car manufacturers have smiles that will last a while. So too with the major manufacturers of household utility and recreational goods: refrigerators, washing machines, microwave ovens, OTGs, dishwashers, plasma and 3D television sets, DVD players, music systems, play-stations, laptops, desktops. The list goes on.
Two thousand new cars, leave alone two -wheelers have joined the congestion on the roads and will now compete for space with pedestrians, cattle, hawkers, vendors and garbage. The carbon dioxide emissions will increase and the city’s temperature will rise. Jostling for public space will lead to jangled nerves, outraged emotions and heightened tempers.
Window shopping on Dhanteras late afternoon, I peeped into some bookshops on Ashok Rajpath and Fraser Road to check if buyers included books among the many items they sought to buy. The bookshops wore deserted looks, and I was not surprised. I asked a young student who mouthed a Good Afternoon if he knew the significance of the occasion. The doubtful looks made it amply clear that I ought to swallow my next question. In Bihar, the celebration of Diwali begins two days before the actual day of celebration as Dhanteras. It is celebrated in honour of Dhanvantari, the physician of the gods. He is believed to have risen with a pot of Amrit during the samudra manthan. Connected with this legend, people buy new utensils which are placed in the place of worship. This practice has now grown in variety and has been extended to include the entire consumerist range coveted by the middle class. The pious fast throughout the day and after sunset the fast is broken with sweets, puris and other traditional delicacies.
As the evening drew out, the traffic became a nightmare. Patna was shopping: competitively, feverishly, and furiously. I decided to finish the chores of customary greetings, caught up with friends on the net and then I curled up on the lounge sofa and started to read a book: the short stories of Catherine Lim, the highly acclaimed writer from Singapore. And for the next three hours, I was at peace. It was a kind of peace that a superior engagement with the intangible can provide. Between the Amrit and the Pot as Dhanvantari’s metaphors, I had chosen Amrit.
Two thousand new cars, leave alone two -wheelers have joined the congestion on the roads and will now compete for space with pedestrians, cattle, hawkers, vendors and garbage. The carbon dioxide emissions will increase and the city’s temperature will rise. Jostling for public space will lead to jangled nerves, outraged emotions and heightened tempers.
Window shopping on Dhanteras late afternoon, I peeped into some bookshops on Ashok Rajpath and Fraser Road to check if buyers included books among the many items they sought to buy. The bookshops wore deserted looks, and I was not surprised. I asked a young student who mouthed a Good Afternoon if he knew the significance of the occasion. The doubtful looks made it amply clear that I ought to swallow my next question. In Bihar, the celebration of Diwali begins two days before the actual day of celebration as Dhanteras. It is celebrated in honour of Dhanvantari, the physician of the gods. He is believed to have risen with a pot of Amrit during the samudra manthan. Connected with this legend, people buy new utensils which are placed in the place of worship. This practice has now grown in variety and has been extended to include the entire consumerist range coveted by the middle class. The pious fast throughout the day and after sunset the fast is broken with sweets, puris and other traditional delicacies.
As the evening drew out, the traffic became a nightmare. Patna was shopping: competitively, feverishly, and furiously. I decided to finish the chores of customary greetings, caught up with friends on the net and then I curled up on the lounge sofa and started to read a book: the short stories of Catherine Lim, the highly acclaimed writer from Singapore. And for the next three hours, I was at peace. It was a kind of peace that a superior engagement with the intangible can provide. Between the Amrit and the Pot as Dhanvantari’s metaphors, I had chosen Amrit.
Sunday, October 10, 2010
Magic Realism: how a teacher can make all the difference.
Two identical-looking buildings house the Soshit Samadan Kendra, a fully free English medium residential school for Musahar children. This community is possibly the state’s most oppressed and disprivileged community of rat-eaters who have been living in conditions of abysmal and degrading poverty. Most work as bonded labourers and live at the edge of villages defined by demeaning social cartography.
Soshit Seva Sangh is the brainchild of its founder and Chairman, Mr. J.K. Sinha, who after a long and distinguished career in the Indian Police service, returned to Bihar to make a difference to this uneven state. SSS in partnership with Samadhan, a Delhi based NGO established Shoshit Samadhan Kendra that provides students education, boarding, lodging, clothes and healthcare to the two hundred and twenty students. Aside of the school curriculum, there are other activities that define the transformative miracle of this project.
An economist by training, Mrs. Geetha Prasad volunteered to teach communication skills to a group of students drawn from the sixth to the ninth grade and this is what she has been pursuing with meticulous determination for twenty months. Both Mr. J.K. Sinha and Mrs. Geetha Prasad had invited me to visit the school over some months. Mrs. Prasad wished that I could evaluate the work that her students had done and the progress they had made. On the 6th of October, a day that turned out to be unusually busy for me, I decided to put my conscience to rest and visit the school. Mrs. Prasad very graciously picked me up from home and explained the kind of language exercises that she had devised for the children while we drove to school. On our arrival, I was taken to a room with many computers, an LCD projector, a white laminated board and paste-boards that displayed charts with phonemic symbols. Here I was greeted with choric cheer ‘good-afternoon Sir’. I greeted them in turn and told them by way of an introduction that I taught at the university and that I had come to learn what they had learnt. Once the ice was broken, I was amazed at the confidence with which they spoke during a communications exercise, the kind of vocabulary they used, the logical sequence of thoughts they were able to articulate and their desire to learn.
Many of the university students I know would come a distant second to their skills and we must bear in mind that twenty months ago they knew no English.
We in India, most ironically, have been gifted with an accessory of colonialism: the English language. For Macaulay, it was an instrument of subordinate recruitment to aid colonial governance. Today it is an instrument of empowerment; of liberation; of global access to knowledge and technology. Sadly our politicians in the name of linguistic chauvinism have equated English with colonialism and sought its ouster because of the fatuous belief that it had compromised national pride. Aijaz Ahmad most appropriately questions the propriety of some of the other things that came along with colonial rule such as the Indian Railways. Should we throw that out as well? I knew that the children of SSK were beneficiaries of a very special gift. However it ought not to silence the cultural traditions of their unique experience. And so I told the children that the next time I came, I would listen to all their folk tales. Time seemed to race by and the session of fun learning came to an end. I shook hands with each of the students and left the room to the choric resonance of ‘thank you Sir’.
As we sat in the library leafing through books and flip-charts, I said to Mrs. Geetha Prasad, ‘you have worked magic’.
Saturday, October 2, 2010
Sense and Sensibility
I had always thought that there are some questions whose answers are likely to be: hey, hey hey. You know questions such as 'Did Adam have a navel?' or 'Was Lord Ram born under the central dome of what was once the Babri Masjid?' Ever since Nietzsche's famous proclamation 'there are no facts only interpretations' it has become increasingly more difficult to come to a single, unalloyed, unambiguous point of view. Law is after all a verbal discipline.
When the country, paralyzed with bated breath, on the afternoon of the 30th of September, switched channels to catch the first reports of the Ayodhya title suit judgment, I went to play a round of golf. By getting the news at the dot of 4p.m. I could not have altered the course of India's history. And nobody invited me to the television studios for my opinion. I am told that all those who's opinions truly matter in India are located in metros. When I returned home and gathered the different strands that constituted the larger picture, my response was one of disbelief. The setting was Shakespearean with the foregrounding of the numeral three. And out of the cauldron emerged a pronouncement that endorsed a three-way division of the land under dispute. I know little about law although many among my friends and family have attained positions of eminence in that field. But the one thing that I do know is that a decision in a title suit would mean deciding to whom a piece of land under dispute belongs by way of legitimate title, not the parties that may be given the land by a conciliatory verdict. I had always thought that the practice of law depended on the material facts and evidence that is conclusively put forth within the ambit of public legal procedures rather than private spiritual matters. But this judgment seems to have given a new dimension to jurisprudence.
When the Supreme Court dismissed the petition for deferment of the verdict, it established the superiority of constitutional democracy over contracted populism. Sadly, Thursday's decision partially undid those gains. To live in a modern, resurgent India does not mean to resurrect the ghosts from the past but to bury them and move on. To those that are religious, please build as many places of worship on the places you own directly, but please stay out of the public spaces. These are meant for the vibrant, energetic youth of our country: our hope for the future. History, Baudrillard says is often the source of humankind's problems rather than its site. Let us use history to understand our present and transform our future. And if we must be spiritual, then remember the lines of Harivansh Rai Bacchan and do the needful. That order could also have been passed.
When the country, paralyzed with bated breath, on the afternoon of the 30th of September, switched channels to catch the first reports of the Ayodhya title suit judgment, I went to play a round of golf. By getting the news at the dot of 4p.m. I could not have altered the course of India's history. And nobody invited me to the television studios for my opinion. I am told that all those who's opinions truly matter in India are located in metros. When I returned home and gathered the different strands that constituted the larger picture, my response was one of disbelief. The setting was Shakespearean with the foregrounding of the numeral three. And out of the cauldron emerged a pronouncement that endorsed a three-way division of the land under dispute. I know little about law although many among my friends and family have attained positions of eminence in that field. But the one thing that I do know is that a decision in a title suit would mean deciding to whom a piece of land under dispute belongs by way of legitimate title, not the parties that may be given the land by a conciliatory verdict. I had always thought that the practice of law depended on the material facts and evidence that is conclusively put forth within the ambit of public legal procedures rather than private spiritual matters. But this judgment seems to have given a new dimension to jurisprudence.
When the Supreme Court dismissed the petition for deferment of the verdict, it established the superiority of constitutional democracy over contracted populism. Sadly, Thursday's decision partially undid those gains. To live in a modern, resurgent India does not mean to resurrect the ghosts from the past but to bury them and move on. To those that are religious, please build as many places of worship on the places you own directly, but please stay out of the public spaces. These are meant for the vibrant, energetic youth of our country: our hope for the future. History, Baudrillard says is often the source of humankind's problems rather than its site. Let us use history to understand our present and transform our future. And if we must be spiritual, then remember the lines of Harivansh Rai Bacchan and do the needful. That order could also have been passed.
Thursday, September 30, 2010
The Other Side of Midnight
I must confess, many of us, at one moment or another,have been soothsayers of apocalypse. The CWG has generated humour, cynicism and prophesies of doom. Yes there have been genuine debates as to whether a developing country can afford to be lavish in its expenses on a sporting extravaganza when other priorities seem more significant and pressing. As a consequence, it has also be argued, whether, if at all the games were to be held in India, it ought to be held in the capital given the perceived step-motherly treatment toward the rest of the country. The CWG has also been theoretically scrutinized by intellectuals and academics in terms of it being a perpetuation of imperialism. But the fact that these concerns have been voiced is because all of us cherish one core value: we love India.
It is time that we shed the history of ineptitude and corruption and prove to ourselves that in spite of the many discouragements and adverse representations, we are among the best in the comity of nations. Let us acknowledge and respect much good that has been done and let us restore pride in ourselves. Let us encourage our sports-persons. We have a wonderful national anthem, let's sing it out loud. The school I went to many moons ago had for its motto 'For God and Country'. Lets celebrate India.
It is time that we shed the history of ineptitude and corruption and prove to ourselves that in spite of the many discouragements and adverse representations, we are among the best in the comity of nations. Let us acknowledge and respect much good that has been done and let us restore pride in ourselves. Let us encourage our sports-persons. We have a wonderful national anthem, let's sing it out loud. The school I went to many moons ago had for its motto 'For God and Country'. Lets celebrate India.
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
City of Djinns
In 1993, William Dalrymple published a book I greatly treasure: The City of Djinns. It was at Feroz Shah Kotla that this Cambridge narrative historian met his first Sufi, the weasel eyed Pir Sadr-ud-Din. The mystic told the author that when the world was new and humans were created out of clay by Allah, he also manufactured another race from fire. These were the djinns, ordinarily invisible but capable of being seen after a substantial period of ascetic abstinence and prayers. Delhi is a city of many secrets, a city resplendent with the brilliance of untold chronicles but a city cursed to repeated catastrophes by the deeds of imperious vanity. From the stretched history of Indraprastha, through the medieval exuberance of magnificence and treachery, the rise and fall of the good, the bad and the ugly both white and dark skinned, Delhi remains an enigma beyond the understanding of historians and scholars, poets and journalists. It may only be revealed by the djinns. After all it is the city of djinns.
The newspapers this morning carried the headlines of a overhead walk-way collapse, embarrassingly just twelve days before the start of the Commonwealth Games. Earlier there have been other stories, big and small that has made non-thick-skinned India run to opticians for sun glasses. The djinns need to be appeased. Every day for the next twelve days, I propose all those that call themselves lovers of our dear country, find poky corners in the city of Delhi: old monuments, under flyovers, the garbage dumps in non-metropolitan Delhi, slums with dogs but without millionaires and light earthen lamps while whispering a small prayer for India. In an unobtrusive Sufi sort of way. Quietly, in hushed baritones. After all the common citizens of the country can't make televised speeches on Rajpath.
The newspapers this morning carried the headlines of a overhead walk-way collapse, embarrassingly just twelve days before the start of the Commonwealth Games. Earlier there have been other stories, big and small that has made non-thick-skinned India run to opticians for sun glasses. The djinns need to be appeased. Every day for the next twelve days, I propose all those that call themselves lovers of our dear country, find poky corners in the city of Delhi: old monuments, under flyovers, the garbage dumps in non-metropolitan Delhi, slums with dogs but without millionaires and light earthen lamps while whispering a small prayer for India. In an unobtrusive Sufi sort of way. Quietly, in hushed baritones. After all the common citizens of the country can't make televised speeches on Rajpath.
Monday, September 20, 2010
Confessions of a challenged Economics student
Keywords:
Confession= acknowledgment or admission of insufficiency or fault
Challenged= impaired
economics= a discipline involving the study of the administration of material
resources
student= a person who studies.
Maun= willful silence of an ascetic
Opening apology: I am not a lexicographer, nor an economist.
When you open your mouth, your foot may be the first in it. Such sayings are normally credited to the ancient Chinese sage called Confucius or to some of his modern day disciples but I can assure you, and I am being very honest, Confucius did not say this. The truth is, I just said it although some American may patent it even before I can say, may be Zandu Balm.(Since it is much in the news as a source of pain rather than being whatever it is supposed to be)
Monday is the cruellest day, breeding doubts in thinking minds. And so it happened when I tried to mix literature and development into a heady cocktail of uncontrollable exhilaration. Some of my students got into a discussion on development statistics. Figures flew thick and fast. India is growing at around 8%, someone said. There was an all-round feeling of pride despite the apprehensions of droughts and floods and the Commonwealth Games. Then one quiet, bespectacled, last-bench, latecomer spoilt it all by asking this question. If India is growing at around 8%, how is it that Bihar, which has little or no industries, has generated little or no employment, where education is a sigh of despair, where agricultural output has been on the decline, growing at 11+ percent? I was caught out of my crease. I gulped, wiped by eyebrows like a batsman beaten by a wicket-keeper's agility, waiting for the third umpire's verdict to be displayed on the giant LCD screen.
I decided to be forthright. Look here, I said, I am not a professor of Economics. I shall verify this for you. So I made my way downstairs to the man-who-knows-it- all. Every theory, every piece of data, multiple interpretations of diverse statistics, the entire mechanics of a la carte economics. Tailor-made for the listener. Luckily he spotted me as I tried to catch his eye at the perimeter of his circle of students. I told him of my predicament. Without blinking an eyelid, he said Bihar is growing at 3.7 percent. How do you explain the difference between the official figures and the one that you are giving me? He smiled at my innocence. He said there are more things on heaven and earth Horatio that are known of in your philosophy. I felt slighted. Short of insulting me, he was pointing out the sin of my willingness to believe what the state was representing to it people. That is why, the Knowing One said education is the last of the priorities in a popular democracy. The more popular the democracy, the less popular is education. Education makes you think. Education makes you ask questions. You interrogate and analyse the rhetoric. And when you do that you are not popular any more. You can pick up a zerox of Tagore's Ekla Cholo Re, learn it by heart, sing it if you can and be a lonely Munnabhai minus the celebrity status of a celluloid cut-out.
I went upstairs and declared it was my moment of maun. Good mauning.
Confession= acknowledgment or admission of insufficiency or fault
Challenged= impaired
economics= a discipline involving the study of the administration of material
resources
student= a person who studies.
Maun= willful silence of an ascetic
Opening apology: I am not a lexicographer, nor an economist.
When you open your mouth, your foot may be the first in it. Such sayings are normally credited to the ancient Chinese sage called Confucius or to some of his modern day disciples but I can assure you, and I am being very honest, Confucius did not say this. The truth is, I just said it although some American may patent it even before I can say, may be Zandu Balm.(Since it is much in the news as a source of pain rather than being whatever it is supposed to be)
Monday is the cruellest day, breeding doubts in thinking minds. And so it happened when I tried to mix literature and development into a heady cocktail of uncontrollable exhilaration. Some of my students got into a discussion on development statistics. Figures flew thick and fast. India is growing at around 8%, someone said. There was an all-round feeling of pride despite the apprehensions of droughts and floods and the Commonwealth Games. Then one quiet, bespectacled, last-bench, latecomer spoilt it all by asking this question. If India is growing at around 8%, how is it that Bihar, which has little or no industries, has generated little or no employment, where education is a sigh of despair, where agricultural output has been on the decline, growing at 11+ percent? I was caught out of my crease. I gulped, wiped by eyebrows like a batsman beaten by a wicket-keeper's agility, waiting for the third umpire's verdict to be displayed on the giant LCD screen.
I decided to be forthright. Look here, I said, I am not a professor of Economics. I shall verify this for you. So I made my way downstairs to the man-who-knows-it- all. Every theory, every piece of data, multiple interpretations of diverse statistics, the entire mechanics of a la carte economics. Tailor-made for the listener. Luckily he spotted me as I tried to catch his eye at the perimeter of his circle of students. I told him of my predicament. Without blinking an eyelid, he said Bihar is growing at 3.7 percent. How do you explain the difference between the official figures and the one that you are giving me? He smiled at my innocence. He said there are more things on heaven and earth Horatio that are known of in your philosophy. I felt slighted. Short of insulting me, he was pointing out the sin of my willingness to believe what the state was representing to it people. That is why, the Knowing One said education is the last of the priorities in a popular democracy. The more popular the democracy, the less popular is education. Education makes you think. Education makes you ask questions. You interrogate and analyse the rhetoric. And when you do that you are not popular any more. You can pick up a zerox of Tagore's Ekla Cholo Re, learn it by heart, sing it if you can and be a lonely Munnabhai minus the celebrity status of a celluloid cut-out.
I went upstairs and declared it was my moment of maun. Good mauning.
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