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!

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 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 take 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 vochamu!’

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

‘Oh” kooda annaru katha? Adu meeku ardhamayinda?

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.