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.