How many roads?

What with the demand for faculty outstripping the supply of competent teachers, academic hiring often ends up somewhere on the spectrum between absurdity and farce, with nonsensical dialogues and ludicrous endings. In the past ten years or so, as a subject expert, I have been a silent onlooker in hundreds of absurd and farcical faculty selection dramas in which my role has often been hijacked by KIA to my great relief.

 

In one of the latest of these dramas, KIA, who is as distant from English literature as Donald Trump is from good sense, asked a candidate, who was a postgraduate in English with several other academic qualifications and plenty of experience as a teacher, if she had studied Shakespeare in her MA. She nodded wanly. The reluctant nod encouraged KIA to drivel on about the Bard.

 

“Do you read Shakespeare even now?”

 

She both shook and nodded her head.

 

“What’s your favourite Shakespeare play?”

 

“Paradise Lost, saar” she said in a hushed voice as though she was naming a serial murderer.

KIA looked confused. He turned in my direction for a confirmation. I kept a blank face. Shakespeare or Rajamouli’s father – how the hell would the authorship of this book matter in an engineering college?

 

Never one to give up, KIA decided to address the subject without any expert guidance. “I know,” he said fixing the woman with an intimidating gaze, “Shakespeare wrote Helmet. Did he write Paradise also?”

 

“Oh yes, saar. Paradise Lost, saar, not Paradise. It’s a famous book.”

 

“Drama?”

 

“Of course, drama, saar. Shakespeare wrote only dramas.”

 

KIA has a deeply suspicious nature. “Who lost paradise in the drama?” he persisted, leaning forward as though pouncing.

 

“Angels, saar,” she said in a bright and clear voice. “They were in paradise, and they lost paradise.” Her eyes gleamed with confidence now.

 

This seemed a convincing explanation. KIA leaned back and nodded in satisfaction. “Okay, teach a demo lesson now.”

 

She got up and moved slowly like a detached wagon being shunted on to a side track in the Vijayawada railway yard. The wagon stood between the two boards, one white and the other black, on the other side of the hall, thought for a while and decided to use the white board.

‘The Road Not Taken’ – she wrote this in tiny letters on the board and started talking to the board itself. She said something about some Robert-something who wrote the poem.

 

KIA wouldn’t allow this. “Write on the board, without doubt, but speak to the students behind you. Don’t you know this? You are an experienced teacher, aren’t you?”

 

She smiled with a piteous look on her face and continued her teaching. It was a dialogic process with KIA making it as interactive as possible.

 

“There were two roads, and the traveller took one of them.”

 

“But there was only one traveller, so he could have taken only one of the roads. How could he take both roads?”

 

“Yes, saar. But there was another road also, saar.”

 

“But he did not take it. Why bother about it? Tell us what happened on the road he took.”

“Nothing happened, saar.”

 

“What are you saying? There were two roads. He took one. And nothing happened on that road. Is that what the poem is about? Funny.”

 

“Yes, saar. But no, saar. He talks about other roads also.”

 

“Other roads! You said there was only one other road, but now you are saying there were more roads. How many roads were there? Be clear about the number.” Then he turned to the subject expert and asked, “How many roads, sir?”

 

KIA is a facts-and-figures man. So, I decided to do justice to his question. “Actually, there are three roads,” I said approaching the question with deep reflection. From 2014 to 2023 I took the road on the Addada-Gudlavalleru route. When it became broken up and unusable beyond Penjendra, I took that serpentine one on the Chirichintala route – the road that takes you through several run-down cemeteries, full of tumbled tombstones, before it crosses the railway line and touches Angaluru. A few months ago, even that road become impassable. Then I went beyond and took the unfinished flyover near Dokiparru. The flyover hasn’t been opened to traffic yet, but I use it. It’s a roundabout way, of course, but it doesn’t hurt my back much.”

 

It was a moment of enlightenment for KIA – a eureka moment in which all illusions are shattered and one sees things as they really are. “Is that what the poem is about?” he asked the woman who, both shook and nodded her head, as was her wont, especially when deeply confused, and that concluded the lesson.

 

‘The pain ends when you let go,’ as the song goes.

There's something in a name

"I love the story, but why don't you add some colour to the title?" said a longtime friend with literary interests when, a couple of days ago, I asked her to read a short story I had just finished writing and give her opinion. "Doesn't the title fit?" I asked her. "Oh, it does," she said. "There's no doubt about it. But, well, isn't it rather simple?"

It was. Not just simple but banal. And far from being evocative. After a good deal of futile discussion, the title I chose was 'The Smoky World of Aravamuthan.' It was clever and descriptive, but loud and lengthy. If I settled for it, it was because I had grown weary of the title discussion, and I wanted the story to be taken off my hands as soon as possible.

Now that the story has left me and become part of the editor's headache, I can look at the issue of naming with some detachment -- without being distracted by my own story, I mean. A good number of literary masterpieces have very simple titles. Tolstoy's tour de force, which is recognized as one of the greatest novels in world literature, has a plain title: War and Peace. Pasternak's Nobel-Prize-winning novel, Dr Zhivago, is plainer than that. Animal Farm and 1984, the titles of Orwell's famous novels, are matter-of-fact. Don Quixote, Gulliver's Travels, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer are some of the most fascinating books in world literature, but their titles are colourless.

It is difficult to find a title that is fitting as well as evocative. The Grapes of Wrath, the title of John Steinbeck's famous novel, is at once both. The title, taken from The Battle Hymn of the Republic, is richly evocative of the Apocalypse of John in the Bible. Similarly, If It Die, the title of André Gide's memoir, is reminiscent of St John's Gospel: "Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." The title of Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory brings to mind the doxology chanted at the end of the Lord's Prayer. Here are a few other titles that are evocative: A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Sound and the Fury, The Postman Always Rings Twice, The God of Small Things. And, of course, 'The Smoky World of Aravamuthan'!

“What's in a name?” asked Juliet. While we never tire of quoting her, we believe that there is something in a name. Many of us even believe that there is so much in a name.

Like father, like son

 "My son!" he said grinning from ear to ear. "I want you to meet him."

The young man flashed a big and bright smile that outshone his nanna's grin and put out his hand to shake mine. He looked bent and frail, and his lean and hungry look reminded me of Cassius. The father left us with an expression of accomplishment on his face.

The young man didn't seem to believe in exchanging pleasantries beyond a perfunctory handshake. He didn't even allow me to introduce myself. He got down to business. He spoke about himself. He spoke about his wife. He spoke about his job in Germany. He spoke about German society of which, he was at pains to point out, he was part. He spoke about German culture vis-à-vis himself. And he spoke about the German language -- his own mastery of it rather.

The monologue went on, and it seemed like an eternity. Somewhere a cell phone rang. Behind me a car screeched to a halt, a dog yelped as if hurt, and someone cursed. Now the electronic bell from the control room let off a piercing scream announcing the lunch break, and students spilled out of classrooms. There was an outbreak of riotous laughter in the corridor in front of me. Teachers were pushing their way through the crowd. The attendant came and asked me if he could close the door and turn the AC on. I shook my head and smiled ruefully.

But nothing disturbed the young man's tapas; he spoke and spoke, completely absorbed in himself. "In any given week," he was intoning when I turned my attention to him, "I find myself at the Frankfurt Airport waiting to catch a flight to London or Paris or New York or Abu Dhabi."

"Or Vatican City or Monaco," I added two airportless cities. He paused reflectively for a moment and then smiled in affirmation.

"You're just like your father," I said, determined not to lose that opportunity. "The yarns you spin are as enchanting as his."

This was completely lost on him. Just as I had expected. He picked up where he left off and launched into yet another lengthy account of his work. "In my company, my..."

Ten minutes passed and the speaker was still gabbling away. I rose from behind my desk, stretched my cramped limbs, yawned wearily, and checked my cell phone. But the gasconade continued. I gazed fixedly at the huge clock in front of me on the wall and said in a firm tone of voice, "If you will excuse me..."

This worked. The speaker suddenly remembered an online meeting he was scheduled to address in a few minutes. He didn't, of course, leave without blabbering about the importance of the meeting.

"How did you find my son?" asked the father when he met me in the evening expressly for this purpose.

"Oh, he's just like you," I said. "A great speaker," I added after a moment's pause.

 

 

 

A nightmarish wedding pandal

The rituals in Hindu weddings are complex, elaborate, noisy and even messy. A large apartment complex in which most of the residents are Hindu families is a nightmare world. Shanthi and I live in one. There are seventy families in our complex and most of them are Hindus. Needless to say weddings are a recurring nightmare in the community.

In the nightmare we are currently experiencing, we are direct victims. Seven days ago, at 7 o’clock in the morning, I was reading the newspaper on my balcony on the first floor when I heard some noise coming from the driveway below. I looked down. A decorated bamboo pole with a knotted piece of cloth at the top was being planted by two workers in the shrubbery along the driveway. The people around them, who were members of a family living on the third floor above my flat, were giving them instructions. Once the ritual planting was over, the family offered prayers to the consecrated pole.

‘What could this be?’ I asked Shanthi

Pandakkaal, she said. ‘But that’s Tamil. I think they call it raata pathatam in Telugu. A pre-wedding ritual to ward off the evil eye – to banish the demon of Drishti, you know.’

‘So, there’s going to be a wedding.’

‘Tomorrow.’

Once the raata muhurtam was over, the family turned to us. With them was a fellow-resident I knew well. ‘Sir, we’ll set up a pandal here.’

I smiled sheepishly without fully understanding what he was saying.

By 10 o’clock, the whole landscape had changed. Bundles and bundles of bamboo and casuarina poles and lorry loads of dried palm leaves had arrived. While some of the workers were unloading them, the others were planting poles for a wedding pandal.

It was then that I realised that I had made a mistake. The pandal ran along the entire length of my balcony from one end to another, with casuarina poles and palm leaves crudely jutting out onto the balcony. It was a crude shelter, a vestigial feature of our primitive past. And it looked positively ugly.

Just for a couple of days, I said to myself; once the wedding was over, they would dismantle this primitive structure.

At quarter past four next morning, the residents woke to heart-stopping beats emerging from the third floor. In a small enclosed place, a tavil drum can produce enormous, explosive noise. It was accompanied by deep, high-pitched, disharmonious sounds from a nadaswaram, making a poor attempt to capture Thyagaraja and Annamayya. The pellikuthuru ceremony had started! The apartment complex kept trembling for hours. At 9 o’clock, when I went downstairs, I found that vehicles had been cleared from the parking lot in which there was now an over-decorated pandal where the bride was being given mangala snanam. Needless to say that the parking lot was a mess.

I went back to my apartment. Shanthi asked me to open the balcony door, and I did so. There were swarms and swarms of insects, especially ants, crawling down the balcony wall from the pandal roof. What’s worse, the domestic help told us that the pandal would stay for ten or fifteen days.

I spoke to the secretary of the owners’ association, a former student.

‘It’s a delicate issue, sir… Religious sentiments…,’ he stuttered and stammered.

‘Sanatana dharma, I suppose.’  I sighed wearily.

Now, Deepavali, the festival of noise and noxious smoke, among other things, is approaching. A few days from now, sanatana dharm
is will be busy firing crackers. If one of them falls – accidentally, of course – on the pandal, there will be a massive fireworks display on my balcony.

 

From the sidelines

A few days ago, I was at the barber’s for a hair-cut. When I entered the narrow, air-conditioned salon, a programme had been on on a Telugu TV channel. It was a musical show on which different groups of young people were presenting a series of music-cum-dance performances, and the competition was being judged by a panel of judges consisting of a Tollywood star of yesteryear, a music director, and two playback singers. The show was being anchored by a pretty young girl in bridal outfit. All the eyes inside the salon were fixed on the TV screen. The three barbers were no exception: they managed the cutting and the shaving with one eye firmly fixed on the TV screen and another eye on the head or the chin where the hands were dexterously at work. Time and again, the anchor, the participants, and the judges were screaming out exciting exclamations in half-Telugu-half-English, and this provoked a good deal of giggling inside the salon.

All of a sudden, the anchor screamed, ‘Come on, guys, time is running out.’

I asked my barber, ‘Ammayi cheppindi meekku ardhamayinda?’

‘Emi cheppindi, saar?’

‘Time is running out.’

‘Ante, time ayipoyindi, katha?’

‘Ayipoyindi kathu; ayipovuthunnadi.’

‘Time’s running out. Cheppu,’ I said.

My barber is not the type that would have taken shelter from a rain in a school. He may have been “conscripted” into a Telugu medium school for a couple of years, but the school itself and the English language would have been poles apart. With some difficulty, he said, ‘Time’s running out.’

The programme progressed. The anchor, the actress and the participants kept squealing with excitement, either individually or all of them at the same time, and this generated quite a lot of English expressions. I noticed a perceptible change in the barber’s behaviour now: he seemed to be listening carefully rather than casually, as he had been earlier.

All of a sudden, the anchor screamed, ‘”Oh” momentnurchi ippudu manam “wow” momentkku vachamu!’

Now, the barber asked me, ‘Sir, “wow” ante enti?’

‘Oh” kooda annaru katha? Adu meeku ardhamaindha?

He gave a sheepish smile.

I said, ‘oh ante ascharyam.’

‘Wow ante?’

‘Wow ante chala ascharyam.’

The first round of presentations in the series was perhaps the “oh” moment for the anchor. They were in the last round now, and the sense of surprise, from the anchor’s point of view, had reached a crescendo. Hence her description of it as the “wow” moment.

Film-based dance-and-music shows of this kind take place almost every day on television channels, and they are keenly watched by young people like my barber. But, hereafter, when he watches these programmes, he will do so with yet another purpose added to his watching: he will not let go of the English-language expressions in the exclamations being screamed out without thinking about them and making sense of them because his attention has been focused on this particular aspect. And, given this attention, he will have little difficulty in understanding those expressions in their context. In other words, what I did with the barber was consciousness-raising, and I believe this works eminently in adult language learning.

Perhaps the basic principles that operate in the barber situation should be the guiding principles behind our instructional efforts on a foreign language programme meant for adult learners – namely, motivation, consciousness-raising, a certain amount of teaching followed by practice, with the rest of the responsibility for pursuing and consolidating their learning in an ongoing way – throughout their lives – being left to the individual learners.

 

Will the new curricular framework ensure that undergraduate courses are broad-based?

It appears that the Andhra Pradesh State Council of Higher Education (APSCHE) has redesigned the undergraduate curriculum providing for the replacement of the existing three-year three-major programmes with four-year single-major honours programmes. Yesterday’s newspapers carried the APSCHE Chairman’s press release about the restructuring. Details are not available yet, but the decision in favour of the single-major pattern seems to be based on the idea that the choice-based credit system (CBCS) the new curriculum seeks to introduce can work better within a single-major framework.

Each system has its merits, but, in my opinion, at the undergraduate level, a curriculum of a general nature covering a broad spectrum of different disciplines can serve the interests of students better.  The three-major system is ideally suited to this purpose.  Giving it up in favour of the single-major system may not, therefore, be a good idea.  Incidentally, the single-major pattern is not something new to the higher education system in states like Andhra Pradesh: it had been in practice until the three-major system, a broad-based one, replaced it a few decades ago.

Why am I in favour of a broad-based curriculum at the undergraduate level?

 

In India, the undergraduate course is not a terminal programme: in a majority of cases, the students join a postgraduate course.  At the postgraduate level, a product of the single-major system has almost no choice of disciplines because of their narrow specialization at the undergraduate level.  In other words, they are ineligible for any discipline other than the one they have studied at the undergraduate level.  Their choice at the college-entry level should, therefore, be a mature and informed one.  Otherwise, it will be much more punishing than the "original sin".  Considering that the undergraduate stage is a maturation point rather than a saturation point, it stands to reason that the undergraduate should be given the opportunity to explore multiple disciplines before s/he is mature enough to decide on a subject for in-depth study at the postgraduate level. But it is not clear yet whether the honours programmes the APSCHE is introducing are designed to be terminal or non-terminal ones.

 

There is another reason – a more compelling one.  Competitive examinations for appointment to the Central civil services, and national-level tests for academic selection for fellowships and grants are comprehensive in nature.  A graduate from a multi-major system is certainly better equipped to take these tests than a graduate from the single-major system.  The poor performance of graduates from Tamil Nadu on these tests, in particular, the Civil Services Examinations, should be attributed, among other things, to their narrow specialization at the undergraduate level. 

 

There is, however, an interesting aspect to the single-major pattern of states like Tamil Nadu where I studied for all my degrees, including my PhD.  It includes two allied or ancillary subjects.  This indicates a faint recognition of the need to enrich an undergraduate programme by incorporating related disciplines into it.  But the inclusion of related disciplines does not serve the purpose of enrichment because they are not equal in status to the main subject.

 

When there is need to make even postgraduate education broad-based, reintroducing the single-major system will be a retrograde step.  What is, however, urgently needed is the strengthening of the system by introducing more useful combinations. The Chairman’s announcement says that the new system will be multi-disciplinary. I do hope it addresses the need for undergraduate courses being broad-based.

Rest in peace, Father Peter Raj!

I’m sorry to hear that Father Peter Raj has passed away. He was my colleague in the Department of English at Andhra Loyola College (ALC) for a long period of time, and my Principal from 1999 until his retirement in 2004. I have just heard from Father Peter Kishore, ALC Principal, that he died of multiple organ failure at 4.00 pm yesterday.

Fr Raj was a multi-talented person. He was a gifted teacher, an accomplished singer, a skilful keyboard player and an eloquent speaker whose oration at Father Gordon’s funeral was ringing in my ears months after the funeral. If he was so sparing in his use of these talents, it was because he wanted to keep out of the public eye; he preferred, instead, a life of splendid isolation.

There were other gifts, by no means of less value. One of them was his legendary level-headedness. Staffroom conversations often centred round Fr Raj’s uncanny ability to remain unprovoked in situations in which anybody else would fly into a fury. For all his awesome “high seriousness,” Fr Raj had a great sense of humour. He often cracked jokes and told funny stories with that sphinx-like expression of his never disappearing from the face. But, alas, not many got his jokes! For one thing, they were far too subtle. For another, they were couched in Johnsonian seesaws and so eloquently expressed with Miltonic sublimity. Not surprisingly, they sounded rather like the oration he had famously delivered! Soon, however, the sensible humorist stopped telling jokes. But he continued to read PG Wodehouse. I wonder what he enjoyed most in PGW – Bertie’s Mayfair slang or Jeeves’s Wardour Street of which he himself was a master, or both.

‘A place sheweth the man,’ said Francis Bacon. A truer word has never been spoken. The real nature of a person – his “true colours” – comes out most when he holds a position of authority and exercises power. Power has shown some people to be better and some worse. ‘People would have deemed him fit for emperor had he never become emperor,’ said Tacitus, the ancient Roman historian, about Galba. That was never said about Fr Raj. In power or out of it, he was always his own true self, to wit, a gentleman.

Rest in peace, Father Peter Raj!