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.