A genius mistaken for a crashing bore

Over thirty years ago, when I was a resident of Chennai (then Madras), there was a retired railway employee called Narasimhachari in my neighbourhood.  A crashing bore, he used to be the terror of the entire neighbourhood, including his wife who, however, didn’t have the means of avoiding him.  If Uncle Narasimhachari was out in the street, we wouldn’t step out of our house for fear that we might be buttonholed by the old man.  But the wily old man knew how to thwart our attempts, with the result that he had a constant supply of audience for his “cranky” ideas about how to reorganize things in the world so that the future generations were not deprived of the natural resources.

 One of his “cranky” ideas was rainwater harvesting (RWH) which, he claimed, would help recharge groundwater.  From the open terrace of his house he had had two courses laid out, using water pipes, for the rainwater to reach the open well in the backyard of his house.  “During the rainy season”, Narasimhachari said with enthusiasm, “the rooftop water won’t go waste.  It will have to go into the well through the water pipes.  I’ve installed a filter also, and so before the water goes into the well, it will get filtered.”

But people only laughed at him.  When a block of apartments was being built in our neighbourhood, Narasimhachari rushed to the builder and advised him to put up an RWH system in the block.  He spoke at length about how RWH could recharge groundwater.  “Not only that”, he persisted.  “The groundwater in this area is a bit brackish.  RWH can, in course of time, reduce the salinity, and the quality of the groundwater will certainly improve.”  The builder looked him up and down and said he didn’t need to be educated.  “In any case”, he added, “I’m providing a metrowater connection for this block, and so drinking water won’t be a problem here.”

When I visited Chennai a few years ago, I realized what a genius Narasimhachari was.  After battling for water for decades, Chennai had realized that RWH, Narasimhachari’s obsession, could mitigate its problem.  The Tamil Nadu government had promulgated an ordinance making the installation of RWH mandatory for all buildings, old and new.  The ordinance said that if an RWH structure was not set up by the date specified, the water connection would be cut.  The residents of Chennai seemed to have taken the ordinance seriously: they were installing the RWH system.

I don’t know where Uncle Narasimhachari is now.  I can only imagine him stopping a young man rushing to his office and telling him how Chennai ignored him when he proposed the RWH idea over thirty years ago.

The changing character of IAS

The Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration, Mussoorie, where IAS probationers receive their training, “has virtually become a marriage market”, said a recent newspaper report.  The price they quote is very high, but no price is too high for rich parents of ready-to-be brides.  The report also quoted the former HRD Minister, Murali Manohar Joshi, as having said that, in a recent case known to him, the dowry demanded by the officer’s family was Rs 50 lakhs.

“What a modest dowry!” exclaimed a young friend of mine some of whose friends are in the civil services.  “In our own state, Andhra Pradesh, the going rate for an IAS recruit ranges from 20 to 50 crores in two of the communities.  In others, 2 to 5 crores is very common.”  He added, “This low-mindedness is not only with regard to dowry; a good number of the new entrants to the civil services are too caste-conscious and have contempt for values such as pluralism and gender equality.”  The Academy may be situated at a height – in the Uttar Pradesh Himalayas – but the thinking of a good number of its trainees is far from Olympian.

This, in my opinion, is due to two factors.  One of them concerns the quality of the intake.  The typical IAS recruit is no longer a liberal arts educated young man from a family rooted in intellectual traditions with an inheritance that includes exposure to western liberal influences and contempt for regional and religious identities.  He comes from a rural or semi-urban background and is untouched by liberal influences either in his upbringing or in his education.  What he has received is not education in the real sense of the term, but coaching.  Consequently, he can perform well on a competitive test but is incapable of engagement at the level of ideas.  And his outlook is markedly provincial. 

The second factor is the kind of training given at the Academy.  An ideal foundation course is one that instils values such as pluralism and equality and provides for the development of managerial skills and problem-solving strategies that the officer will be called upon to employ in his day-to-day work.  But, regrettably, there is an overemphasis on the latter.

Even an emphasis on the former may not help much, given that a typical recruit is well past the impressionable stage.  The onus is, therefore, not on the training but on the recruitment scheme which must be so designed as to prevent the entry of coarse material.

A dictionary that doesn't discourage

"Yet another dictionary!" I said to myself when, recently, I received a complimentary copy of WordMaster, a learner's dictionary brought out by Orient Longman.

When I opened the dictionary, however, I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was an all-Indian venture.  Even more pleasant was the fact that some of the members of the editorial team were very well known to me: Bikram K Das, Usha Aroor, Vani Vasudevan, and R Vadivelu.  Traditionally, lexicography has been the special preserve of men.  WordMaster is refreshingly different: as many as 16 of the 26-member editorial team are women, and the chief editor of the team is Usha Aroor.  But the dictionary doesn't have only such trivia to recommend it.  It has some special features – features which contribute to its learner-friendliness.

Since the advent of the advanced learner's dictionaries (ALDs), the role of the dictionary has greatly changed: far from being a mere reference volume, the dictionary is now an effective teaching-learning aid.  Teachers of English expect their students to bring to class a dictionary – not a pocket-size dictionary but an ALD.  If students don't carry one, it is because an ALD is extremely large in size.  A typical ALD is a 1500 – 1700-page volume.  But WordMaster is a handy dictionary: it is half the size (724 pages) of a typical ALD with 35,000 references.  It is as easy to carry as the Cambridge Learner's Dictionary, a 767-page volume whose graphic features, however, are much more attractive than those of WordMaster.

I have repeatedly heard college students complain that dictionaries are a complete yawn because of their information overload.  I wouldn't agree it is overkill because students at the college level need different meanings of a word as well as some guidance on how to use the word appropriately to serve different purposes.  But the fact remains, at the same time, that students don't feel encouraged to read a dictionary page that is cluttered with a lot of information under one entry.  Dictionaries like the Macmillan English Dictionary have tried to compensate for this laboriousness by using attractive design features.  WordMaster takes the easy – but sensible – way out: it doesn't go beyond the most common meanings of words and the most basic information on grammatical usage.  The pursuit, I guess, of the possible!

WordMaster is different from other dictionaries in another respect.  In any dictionary, the meaning of a word is followed by an example sentence to show how the word is used in context.  In WordMaster, the illustrative sentence comes first, followed by the meaning.  The idea behind it is a language learning strategy: guess the meaning of a new word from the context in which it is found.  The guess is later confirmed when the user reads the meaning that follows.

Considering that WordMaster is basically meant for use in South Asia, it is sensitive to the 'regional' senses of some words.  Here is a sample: "blouse – a garment that covers the upper part of a woman's body, generally reaching above the waist, worn with a sari"; "bless – to express a wish that God may protect or bring happiness to someone (done by older relatives, etc. on the occasion of a wedding, birthday, etc.)"

WordMaster is a welcome addition to the already valuable stock of ALDs.

Book piracy: a flourishing trade

Some more thoughts about books.

An interesting thing happened in the world of letters six years ago,  in October 2004, to be precise.  The Latin American literary giant Gabriel Garcia Marquez's book, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, was launched on October 20, 2004.  Even before the launch, pirated versions of the book had come onto the market.  However, when the book officially came out, the pirates realized that the wily Marquez had outwitted them all: he had changed the ending of the story in the official edition!  Now, the Colombian police swung into action: they seized thousands of copies of the bootleg versions on sale on the streets of Colombia.

But it has always been the pirates' world; Garcia's pre-emptive strategy was an isolated case of an author stealing a march on pirates.  The Encyclopaedia Britannica gives an interesting account of book piracy in North America in the nineteenth century.  Publishers waiting at the dockside for new British books could produce an American edition almost within hours, as they did in 1823 with Sir Walter Scott's Peveril of the Peak.  And England paid America back in the same coin: in 1852, when Harriet Beecher Stowe's famous novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin came out in the US, 1,500,000 pirated copies rapidly appeared in England, some editions selling for six pence.

Book piracy has now assumed alarming proportions.  According to an estimate by the Inter-American Publishers' Group, 50 billion book pages are illegally reprinted every year.  In the forefront of book piracy are the Asian and Latin American countries.  In India, the Rs 7000-crore publishing industry incurs a loss of Rs 400 crore on account of book piracy.  You can imagine how notorious China is for print piracy from the fact that, in just three months (August-October 2002), 10.24 million pirated books were sized in the country.

In China, there is at least a government crackdown against book piracy.  But in Bangladesh, where there is no such action, book piracy is a flourishing trade.  A few years ago, Dr U Satyanarayana, a friend of mine who was a professor of biochemistry at Siddhartha Medical College, Vijayawada, wrote a book on biochemistry which was quite popular in India and abroad.  The book with illustrations in four colours was originally priced Rs 440, but pirated black-and-white editions of the book began to sell for Rs 250 in Bangladesh.  Then the publisher did something very sensible: he reduced the price of the original to Rs 250.  If you can't beat the pirates, join them!

Publishers of textbooks must learn a lesson from this.  One reason why students buy cheaper pirated editions of books on specialized subjects such as medicine and engineering is because the original editions are prohibitively expensive.  But it would be simplistic to think that by reducing prices alone, book piracy could be eliminated.

How is the situation in my own town, Vijayawada?  On a Sunday, I visited about fifteen second-hand books shops, and was unimpressed by the small-scale bootlegging that was going on there.  On offer were awful-looking Sidney Sheldons (Rs 50 a copy) and Jeffrey Archers (Rs 75) and plenty of stolen volumes from college/public libraries.

Why is book piracy not a roaring business in places like Vijayawada?  The answer is quite simple: piracy can flourish only where the reading habit flourishes.

Readers, pseudo-readers and non-readers

That October is International School Library Month became part of my knowledge only this morning when I came across an article on the subject in The Hindu (Metroplus).  Having gained this piece of knowledge, I called a librarian friend of mine and asked him, "Do you know when International School Library Month is observed?"  "Who observes it?"  he asked in reply.

On reflection, that seemed the right answer to the question.  In a world where reading is fast disappearing, how does it matter when International School Library Month comes?  "My only books", said Thomas Moore in the nineteenth century, "were women's looks, and folly's all they've taught me."  A modern Moore may mourn: "My only books are the box's looks, and folly's all they've taught me."

To be fair, however, there are readers and readers.  For some, reading is a pleasure.  I know a number of die-hard book-lovers who have grown up on grandmother's tales, on adventure stories, and on such all-time favourites as Dickens, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, and P G Wodehouse -- and, of course, on the unavoidable (and inevitable!) Shakespeare and Shaw.  They can read Macaulay and Gibbon with as much interest and excitement as they can R L Stevenson and P G Wodehouse.  They wouldn't wax eloquent on their reading like Francis Bacon ("Reading maketh a full man"); they read for the simple reason that it gives them pleasure.

For some, reading is a kind of penance.  It is because they read books either in the hope of gaining some knowledge or for practical purposes, such as writing an examination.  I know a person who looks at every new book with suspicion and wonders if it is good value for money and time.

There is a third group that consists of people who love books, who want to be able to say that they have read all the books worth reading, but who never manage to read any books.  Typical of the "reading" style of this group is what a fellow teacher living in Chennai does: she goes to the British Council Library and borrows five attractive-looking books which have just entered the library, keeps them for a fortnight and then returns them unread. 

Readers, pseudo-readers, and non-readers – well, it takes all sorts to make a world. 

The little-used repositories of learning

Let me share with you a couple of thoughts I have in this International School Library Month.

In Chennai, where I was born and bred, there is a 115-year-old public library.  Housed in an architecturally noteworthy building with an ornate Indo-Saracenic interior and a stained glass roof, it has thousands of rare books on different subjects.  You can find in its archives, the oldest in Asia, the despatches of the Court of Directors of the East India Company, sent out from England in 1670, and the very first issue of Madras Courier, an English newspaper published in 1795.  The library is relatively cool even in summer and it is equipped with very comfortable furniture.  In summer, people go there – to sleep.  And in rainy season – when it rains in the season, I mean – the library is found useful again: people enter the building to seek protection from the rain.

What is true of that great library in Chennai is more or less true of any other library.  Libraries are quiet, silent and secluded places for the simple reason that they are unvisited.  Not only libraries; even bookshops – any other place, for that matter, where there are books.  People keep their distance from the place.

Not that I am saying that reading has disappeared.  People do read; in fact, they do a lot of reading.  But the old excitement has gone out of the business.  That's because reading has become business: people have become by and large utilitarian in their reading as they have become commercial in their approach to anything else.  They read not for pleasure but for information.

"Reading" is probably a wrong word in this World of Non-Readers or in this Age of Information Technology; browsing is the mot juste.  You browse through brochures and tables, you browse around bookshops, and you browse the Internet.

Every cloud has a silver lining.  A couple of months ago, a friend of mine, whose name is Gopala Krishna, called to share with me the ecstasies Bipin Pal's autobiography had sent him into.  It reminded me of the ecstasy Keats had experienced when he had first "looked into" Chapman's Homer.  For a good half hour the old man rhapsodized almost like Ruper Hughes:

       Dear little child,

       This little book

       Is less a primer

       Than a key

       To sunder gates

       Where wonder waits

       Your "Open Sesame"!

Libraries exist for a small and vanishing tribe of book-lovers represented by Gopala Krishna.

Homely girls can be good-looking indeed

During the course of a guest-lecture I gave at Eluru, a neighbouring town, I was led to talk about the different varieties of the English language, including the non-native varieties, and also about how users of English as a foreign language attempt to nativize the language in their own non-English cultures.  The more culture-bound, I said, a non-native user's style is, the more deviant it becomes from the native varieties of English: it acquires a distinctive stylistic characteristic.  One of the examples I gave was "You, spoiler of my salt" (namak haram) from Mulk Raj Anand's novel, Untouchable.

Though I gave examples from non-literary sources also, I was not very satisfied with them.  On a Sunday morning, while glancing through the matrimonial column in an English newspaper, I realized that I had failed to use in my lecture two important resources which our newspapers offer – matrimonial advertisements and obituaries in which the advertisers' non-English identity is so wonderfully captured in the English language.  Incidentally, my interest in matrimonial columns is purely linguistic: I am curious to know how fellow-Indians express their choice of a bride or bridegroom in English.

Look at this gem which I picked up from the paper:

Iyer, Vadama, Srivatsa, 34/154, Bharani, no dosham, BA, DCA, homely, good-looking, medium-complexioned, father holding a senior position in a reputed Chennai company, seeks suitable groom.  Subsect no bar.  Widowers with clean habits and no issues may also send their horoscopes.

This advertisement is so highly contextualized that a person who does not share the native culture cannot understand it.

And a native English speaker who reads it will be confused.  If the entire discourse is a mystery to him, he will be perplexed by a contradiction in the advertisement, namely, that the advertiser is a "homely, good-looking" woman.  What the advertiser actually means is that she is domestically well-trained ("homely") and pretty ("good-looking").  But "homely" actually means "plain" (Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary), or "not very attractive to look at" (Collins Cobuild English Language Dictionary), or "ugly" (Macmillan English Dictionary)!

If the native English speaker is perplexed by the "homely" woman's "good" looks, he will be either amused by her father working for a "reputed" company or struck by her honesty in admitting it.  "Reputed" actually means: "generally supposed but with some doubt" (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English), or "said or believed by many people, but not definitely known to be true" (Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners, 2002).  The two dictionaries give the following examples: "(He is) the reputed father of her baby"; and "(He is) a reputed Mafia boss".  I'm sure what the "homely, good-looking" lady means is that the company her father works for is a reputable (= having a good name) one.

But I wonder if an Indian can take a hard line over "reputed".  After all, the word doesn't seem to exist at all in Indian English; it is not even part of the vocabulary of several good Indian professors of English who swear by Queen's English.  Furthermore, a new English dictionary that has just come onto the market has enhanced the reputation of the word "reputed": it doesn't list "reputable" at all; it has only "reputed". This dictionary, which is an Indian attempt at lexicography, gives the following example: "Sanath Jayasuriya is a reputed batsman."  If Sanath Jayasuriya is a reputed batsman, the company the "homely, good-looking" woman's father works for must be reputed indeed!