Readers, pseudo-readers, and non-readers

Today is World Book Day. I hear that, in 1923, booksellers in Spain wanted to honour Miguel de Cerventes, author of Don Quixote, on 23 April, the day of his death, and that is how April 23 came to be celebrated as World Book Day all over the world. By a happy coincidence, if I might use the word “happy” in this context, William Shakespeare also died on 23 April, according to the Julian calendar, which was still in use in England at the time. In the UK, however, World Book Day is celebrated on the first Thursday of March.

That April 23 is World Book Day became part of my knowledge only a couple of years ago when I came across an article on the subject in a newspaper.  Having gained this piece of knowledge, I called a librarian friend of mine and asked him, ‘Do you know when World Book Day is celebrated?’  ‘Who celebrates 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 World Book Day is celebrated?  ‘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. 

Some little known facts about exams

Here we go again! Summer has arrived, and so have testing times. There will be examinations galore till the end of this month.  No, the ordeal will continue till the end of May because once college or university exams are over, there will be entrance exams of all kinds with little respite for students till colleges reopen in June. And exams in India are a terrible torment, given that, by and large, they are memory-oriented and content-based. As a student, I hated taking exams. And, now, as a teacher, I give exams. It's indeed one of life's little ironies! 

But I must remind myself that this post shouldn't be a diatribe against exams; it should be serious, responsible and useful. A friend brought his child to me and asked me to give her some tips -- some "inside information," as he called it -- for tackling exams. I did so with a straight face keeping in mind the key expression, inside information.

Inside information.  I liked that phrase.  As an insider, I know a thing or two about my fellow-insiders – the people who set exams and mark answers.  Knowing what kind of people they are and what will be acceptable to them will go a long way towards your securing a high score, even if you have a wonderful memory, which is basically what is tested in examinations in this country.

Examiners like neat writing.  If you have a good hand, you certainly have an advantage (not just an edge) over people whose answers are as good – or as bad – as yours.  This I discovered even as an outsider forty-three years ago.  I hadn’t expected to get more than 80 per cent in history and geography in my SSLC examination.  But I got 92 – the highest in the state of Tamil Nadu.  The extra 12, I’m sure, was for my handwriting.

Secondly, a typical examiner is a stick-in-the-mud.  So, you would do well to take the old line.  For instance, if, in the English exam, you are given the sentence, “It is me”, for correction, correct it as ‘It is I”; don’t write that there is no error in the sentence.  I know that you have heard native English people say, “It’s me” on BBC, HBO and sundry other channels, including some of our own like NDTV, CNN IBN and Times Now.  But the problem is that your examiners don’t seem to watch these channels.  In fact, “It is me” is as old as Shakespeare: in Twelfth Night, Sir Andrew says, “That’s me, I warrant you.”  Today, if someone is quirky enough to say, “It is I”, we must insist that he say, “Whither goest thou?” instead of “Where are you going?”  But the English teacher and the grammar book he has prescribed are quirky enough to believe that “It is I” is the correct form.  But give them what they want; the game you are playing in those three hours is a numbers game after all.

Thirdly, examiners love length.  If the word limit prescribed for an essay is 200 words, don't be so stupid as to use just 200 words and disappoint your examiner.  Use at least 300.  My wife often tells me that, during a meal, when I say, 'Enough,' I actually mean, 'Some more.' So is it in exams. The more, the merrier.

Fourthly, if you don’t know the answer to a question and decide to waffle away, be sensible at least in your first paragraph.  Once I evaluated a script which had tolerable first paragraphs with trash in the rest.  Curiosity led me to go in search of the earlier years’ scripts of the same student. (It's possible in an autonomous college.)  Decorated trash – that’s what I found in them: the scoundrel had got it down to a fine art.  And the rubbish had been ticked and given high marks!

Feature: Me and my PhD supervisor: tales of love and loathing | Features | Times Higher Education

Feature: Me and my PhD supervisor: tales of love and loathing | Features | Times Higher Education

10 point guide to dodging publishing pitfalls | Features | Times Higher Education

10 point guide to dodging publishing pitfalls | Features | Times Higher Education

Thoughts occasioned by Women's Day

I set about reflecting on the significance of the day while taking a walk this morning amid quite a few middle-aged and elderly women in a park just four blocks away from my house. (In the initial years of my stay in the place, I used to wonder why the male of our species and young women didn’t come to the park for a walk, but, soon, I took it for granted that the park was not for them. Over the years, the women have grown tolerant towards both my company and my Telugu.)

The reflection was on women empowerment, and it wasn’t quite a walk in the park. Two thoughts about the empowerment of women in India crossed my mind.  Both concerned urban working women – a category I am familiar with.  One of the thoughts was about the role society has set for working women, and the other was about the role women themselves choose to play.  While their acquiescence in the former doesn't seem to indicate to me empowerment of any significance, their performance in the latter shows that, in exercising their freedom of choice, they have adopted a model which can only enfeeble them rather than empower them.

Urban working women in India are better placed than their rural counterparts because education and employment have secured them a status in society.  They are no longer mere housewives and mothers; their employment has enhanced their position.  A large number of them have made noteworthy achievements in their professions, gaining recognition and prestige in society, and this has boosted their self-confidence.  This is certainly empowerment.

But the picture will look different if you consider the role a working woman actually performs within her family.  Her sharing her husband's traditional role as a breadwinner of the family doesn't seem to involve a corresponding change in her own traditional role as a homemaker.  The husband's role continues to be more or less the same in the family, while the wife struggles to do justice to her domestic responsibilities on the one hand and her additional role as a working woman on the other.  If societal values and familial expectations regard women's traditional role within the family as natural, working women themselves acquiesce in this unjust arrangement, thereby perpetuating inequality within the family.  What seemed empowerment at first sight is thus little more than a glittering façade.

My second thought is related to what Mary Anne Dolan, former editor of The Los Angeles Herald Examiner, said about two-and-a-half decades ago in an insightful article entitled, 'Why Feminism Failed'.  In her opinion, working women could have empowered themselves professionally if they had developed a culture different from that which characterized the male world; instead, they had simply followed the iconic male model.  ‘Out of some ancient fear, like slaves who can't give up their masters, women with decision-making powers clung either to male bosses or male models,’ said Dolan.

What constitute the iconic male model, according to Dolan?  Worship of power and money, ruthless pursuit of success, belief in coercion rather than cooperation, practice of the well-proven policy of divide-and-rule, bureaucratic attitude, faith in the so-called superior prowess of men against all evidence, and an utter lack of understanding of fellow women professional's problems and concerns.  At The Herald, which had the first 50/50-male/female masthead in the USA, Dolan only found women in executive positions taking on "the worst aspects of the stereotypical corporate ladder-climbing male."

Dolan said that in 1988.  In the years that have followed, women have gained greater access to male worlds.  But in their functioning, they have adopted man as the role model.  Their essential creed continues to be an ancient one, the male one: Power first.  This, in my opinion, acts as a limiting factor.

Potter and Wallace for folk with little imagination?

About a month ago, on a journey to Gudlavalleru, a sleepy little village about an hour’s drive from Vijayawada, I was led to talk about what Meenakshi Mukherjee had said about three-and-a-half decades ago in a perceptive article titled, ‘Teaching Literature to a Sub-Culture.’ In the article, Mukherjee had complained about what in her perception was a tremendous gap between the classroom sensibility which was switched on for the occasion, and the normal sensibility that operated in real life. When her English literature students came to the classroom, they discussed Yeats and Eliot with diligence and care and took part in discussions with suitable animation, but, when they went out, they only read Barbara Cartland, Harold Robins, James Hadley Chase, and, of course, what was unavoidable and inevitable for college students in those days – Mills and Boon!

With me in the car was Usha, who was teaching English literature in a university. I told Usha about the Mukherjee article and asked, ‘But that was in a different age. Now, do English literature students read fiction in English at all for pleasure? For that matter, do they read anything in English at all for pleasure?’

‘They read stuff like Shoba de,’ she said with some reluctance and even shame.

Her reluctance made me look back on a controversy I encountered in the world of letters over a decade ago when I was regularly launching Harry Potter books at Ashok Book Centre in Vijayawada, giving talks to children on the Potter novels, and even conducting Potter workshops occasionally.

It was AS Byatt, a British novelist, who stirred up a real hornet's nest when she said, in her column in the New York Times, which I was reading almost regularly on the Internet during those days, that the Harry Potter books were written for people with "little imaginations" -- people whose interests were confined to the "worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip".  If an ordinary person had made this comment, it would have been ignored.  But, Byatt was far from being ordinary: she was one of England's foremost writers and a distinguished critic.  Angry Potter lovers from different parts of the world registered a strong protest.  Some even hit the critic below the belt by attributing motives to her.

In spite of my Potter talks and workshops, which gave me good publicity, I didn’t quite jump on the Potter bandwagon and cry out that there were drops of sour grapes in Byatt's charge.  I was by no means a Potter lover, and I even felt that the obsession with Harry Potter was going a bit too far, thanks to an indoctrinating advertising campaign which presented the Potter books as "must have" merchandise.  At the same time, I must concede that, in spite of my being rather eggheaded (you can't help it if you have taught serious literature for a good three decades), I enjoyed reading the Potter books.  And, I insist, I didn't find the books candyfloss for the brain.  Either I was – and I am even now –  a person with very little imagination, or Byatt is outrageously wrong.

Byatt's concept of "limited imagination" is difficult to accept.  The Collins Cobuild English Language Dictionary defines imagination as "the ability that you have to think of and form pictures of ideas in your mind of things that are different, interesting, or exciting".  It follows, then, that a limited imagination is one that is unable to appreciate a wide range of books.  There should be – there is! – room in literature for all kinds of works.  If Greene and Orwell and Falukner and Fitzgerald have an assured place in literature, so, I believe, have Wodehouse and Dahl and Carroll and Rowling and Irwing Wallace and Amish. Incidentally, I have just finished reading Wallace’s The Prize decades after I had originally read it when I was a student of literature.

In any case, a little imagination, as someone in some other context so perceptively pointed out, is better than no imagination.  Any book that inspires children to read and use their imagination in this day and age is certainly good.  And Potter books have proved that they can do it.  I believe that they have the potential to encourage children to go beyond Potter.

It looks as though the bane of Potter, Wodehouse, Wallace and Amish is their popularity.  When a book is read by a large number of ordinary people, one tends to conclude that the book must be mediocre.

Workshop on CPD begins - The Hindu

Workshop on CPD begins - The Hindu

One of the significant workshops run by me - significant not just because it was a CPD workshop sponsored by the British Council but because it was held in a college in a rural area, and all the participants, who were teachers of English from schools, colleges and a university, were from institutions in rural areas. They showed remarkable interest in learning about the procedures available for continuing professional development (CPD) on the Reflective Model, worked hard, drew up action plans for their CPD with great enthusiasm , and gave me enough indications that they would implement the plans in their institutions.

The workshop was organised by my former student, Kalyan Sharma, who has recently won an ELT Research Partnership (ELTRP 2013) award from the British Council. The workshop was organised as part of the ELTRP project.