Multiculturalism

A first-of-its-kind conference experience

Right from the word go, everything spun off the track at the conference.  The organizers had booked me on a train which arrived at midnight. A huge family got into my cabin with a whole load of luggage and kids, dropped them – the luggage as well as the kids – all around me and debated for a good one hour in the thick of night how the cargo should be strategically arranged. When the job was done, the 2-tier cabin was a virtual luggage van with the bodies of the family, sprawled all over the luggage, adding a touch of animation to the luggage. I lay sleepless until I got off at 8 o’clock in the morning.

At the railway station, the pick-up arrangement failed. After a half-hour agonizing wait and several phone calls, a doleful-looking English professor from the university arrived at 8.30. Evidently, he liked neither chauffeuring nor English; and the conference seemed the last thing on his mind.

I was worried sick. I had been invited to play two crucial roles at the international conference the English Department was organizing – as a guest of honour at the inaugural ceremony, which was scheduled to start at 9.30 in the morning, and as a plenary speaker later in the day. And I had barely twenty-five minutes to shave, wash, change and have breakfast.

When the first three were accomplished, it was 9.25. Deciding to skip breakfast, I called the conference secretary and said I was ready. ‘Sir, please wait,’ he said. ‘Once I hear that the Chancellor has left for the conference venue, I’ll come and pick you up myself. Before that, I’ll call you.’ Or, something to that effect: the English language and the English teachers in the university seem to be poles apart.

It was 10. There was no call. I called the organizing secretary and asked him whether I could go to the conference venue. He said, ‘Oh, no, sir. I must come and pick you up myself. I’m waiting for a call from the Chancellor’s office. I’ll get back to you.’

The time was 11 now. The stomach growled a protest. ‘Shut up!’ I said. ‘I’m in no mood to think about creature comforts; I may have to leave anytime now.’ I called a fellow plenary speaker staying in a different room on the same floor in the guest house. She said she had made several calls and got the same reply as I did.

To cut a long story short, when, at last, I was led into the conference venue at 12 o’clock, the inaugural ceremony had been over – without the guest of honour! The head of the department of English was proposing a vote of thanks in unhearable English.

My immediate impulse was to walk out on the conference, registering a protest. Inviting a senior professor and a well-known conference/seminar leader as a guest of honour and keeping him away from the ceremony where he was to play the role he had been invited to play was a grievous insult, not just a faux pas. That it was done by a university which was cocking-a-hoop about its having been ranked No. 1 among institutions of its kind made it even more grievous. Resisting the impulse to walk out on the conference, I stayed on and listened to the keynote speech by a professor from a reputable university. It was a drivel – a scripted drivel which he was reading out with some difficulty.

In the afternoon, I decided not to be part of the conference anymore. The conference, I said to the organizers, could do without me. The university authorities were apologetic, and tried to persuade me to stay on, but I left.

I had a rough time on the ten-hour-long return journey by bus; it was tougher than the outward journey amid loads of luggage and kids. But it was not half so bad as the rough deal at the conference which sticks out like a sore thumb in my three-decade-long history of attending and leading professional development programmes.

Teaching Changes Lives (Oxford University Press)

Five hundred gallons of New England rum

A couple of weeks ago, a young college teacher of English came to me with a set of General English textbooks prescribed by his university for undergraduate students. The course, the cover pages of the books said, was part of the common-core curriculum (CCC) under the choice-based credit system. The CCC factor and the fact that the authors of the books belonged to different universities indicated that the books were in use in all the universities in the State.

I glanced through the books and felt sad. Underlying the instructional materials was a retrogressive literary-humanistic approach on the knowledge-transmission model of teaching with restricted opportunities for students to practise their English, let alone real-world English. Students have to process -- and answer content-based questions on -- turgid literary or semi-literary essays (e.g. Oliver Goldsmith's 'The man in black,' written 270 years ago), lengthy philosophical lectures urging one to remain unattached (e.g. Swami Vivekananda's lecture on 'The secret of work,' given over 120 years ago), modern prose of the kind written by people like Dr Kalam, and poetry of the kind written in days of yore which has been lectured on and exhausted so much so that there is no life left in it. Another book gave plenty of theoretical information on communication and on how speech sounds are produced for good measure, and yet another book preached sermons on soft skills. The books were one big yawn from start to finish. They reminded me of the sad reality that the undergraduate English classroom is still primitive.

Around the same time I watched on TV Prime Minister Modi being given a rock-star reception in Silicon Valley: Apple, Tesla, Google and Microsoft were rolling out the red-carpet for him. It was because they were able to see India leapfrogging into the latest technologies and becoming the fastest-growing market in the world in technology.

These are conflicting images -- the image of the country becoming technologically so advanced and that of the undergraduate English classroom remaining so primitive, obstinately clinging to the past, impervious to the technological advancement all around it. It reminded me of a hilarious poem by Richard Hovey I had come across about three-and-a-half decades ago when I quit a lucrative career as a sarkari babu in order to become an English teacher:

Oh, Eleazar Wheelcock was a very pious man;
He went into the wilderness to teach the Indians,

With a Gradus ad Parnassum, a Bible and a drum,

And five hundred gallons of New England rum.

Eleazar was the faculty, and the whole curriculum

Was five hundred gallons of New England rum.

Fill the Bowl up! Fill the bowl up!

The five-hundred gallons of New England rum that Eleazar brought is still flowing merrily in our English classrooms -- metaphorically speaking.

Isn't it time this flow was stopped? Our students deserve a better deal. If they are to function successfully in a job market that sets a high premium on communication skills, then, English teachers must get their act together.

The death penalty: a difficult issue

For an intellectual, Gurcharan Das, author of India Unbound, has an unusual and unhypocritical take on the death penalty. In his TOI column today (September 13, 2015), he says: ‘The UN resolution says that it (the death penalty) undermines human dignity. But I am not convinced. I would argue that retaining the death penalty, in fact, enhances human dignity.’

The proponents of the death penalty argue that it acts as a deterrent.  In other words, it deters crime by discouraging would-be offenders.   Does it really?  But the abolition of capital punishment seems to act as a deterrent.  In Canada, for instance, there has been a sharp fall in the rate of homicide since the death penalty was abolished.  Execution, as the Italian political theorist, Cesare Beccaria, rightly pointed out, is after all transient and so cannot be as powerful as long-term imprisonment.

But there is a difficulty with this line of reasoning.  Isn't life imprisonment with assured food, clothing and shelter more a reward than a punishment?  Isn't it actually a punishment for the taxpayers?  In a Tolstoy story ('Too Dear'), a criminal who gets life for a murder turns out to be drain on the exchequer.  After some time, the government tells him to go away, but he wouldn't. To get rid of him, the government finally offers him a pension of 600 francs, which was much cheaper!

Though the Tolstoy story exaggerates the situation, the fact remains that execution is much cheaper than life imprisonment. Two things, however, justify life imprisonment.  One, it is a more powerful deterrent.  Two, we have come a long way since we burnt criminals at the stake as a form of capital punishment; we consider it barbaric now.  By parity of reasoning, we must consider the death penalty itself barbaric.

Barbaric it may be, but retributive certainly – this is the argument of a large number of people.  What they mean is that, as a fundamental principle, the punishment should be equal to the offence.  But this is only a refined form of the old fiat, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’  Laws about punishment, as James Fieser pointed out, should be based not on extreme feelings but tempered ones.

Much as the case for doing away with capital punishment is strong, it is not likely to be abolished in the foreseeable future in our country.  ‘To everything there is a season and a time,’ as the Bible so perceptively points out.  The time hasn't come yet: the belief in retributive punishment is still so deeply entrenched in this land of Mahatma Gandhi who, we must remember, was "executed" for advocating moderation.

PhD: is the doctoral thesis obsolete? | Features | Times Higher Education

PhD: is the doctoral thesis obsolete? | Features | Times Higher Education

Fancy killing Julius Caesar on the Ides of May

A couple of months ago, on a quiet Sunday morning, I was absorbed in a magazine article about the Dingo, an Australian pure breed canine, and the Rajapalayam, its South Indian counterpart, when the landline phone rang off the hook and almost terrified me.

‘This is about Caesar,’ said the caller, an oldish man who called me often and bullied me with queries about Shakespeare. ‘If you are free on Sunday the 15^th, shall we get back to Caesar?’

‘Getting back to that Rajapayalam? No!’ I almost screamed.

‘Rajapalayam?’ he asked quizzically.

‘Yes, of course, Rajapalayam.’ My mind went back to my college days at Guduvanchery in Tamil Nadu when a huge, tough, white-coated guard dog used to strike terror into my heart by merely fixing me with a ferocious look.  Its owner, Major Ramaswamy's wife, called it Caesar.  The Major's house was on our way to the railway station.  We would avoid that route to avoid Caesar; we took a roundabout route instead.  That dog was a terror to the Major himself.  But it was not such a great terror as its lookalike, the Major’s wife, who was as white as her pet but whose communication skills were much more ferocious than those of the beast. 

The old man was all ears. I concluded my reminiscences and asked, ‘But why are you scaring me now with a query about Caesar?’

‘I'm not scaring you,’ he replied in a surly tone.  ‘Neither am I interested in your Major's wife's Rajapalayam or Alsatian.  Your story about Caesar was interesting, no doubt, but it was Shakespeare's Caesar that I wanted discuss with you on Sunday.’

‘You mean, Julius Caesar?’  I said, breathing a sigh of relief. 

Though I felt relieved to know that it was not that old terror he was talking about, I stiffened at the very prospect of discussing Shakespeare with him.  The old man's company is one of those rare occasions on which you realize that the Bard of Avon could be a dull and dreary subject.

But there was a ray of hope: the date, March 15, suggested by him for the discussion.  ‘Let's not meet on the Ides of March,’ I said seizing the opportunity. 

‘Ides of March!  What's that?’  he asked with a note of confusion in his voice. 

‘March 15 is the Ides of March,’ I said, ‘the day on which Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44 BC.  It's a day of infamy.’

‘Beware the ides of March,’ says a soothsayer in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.  Caesar asks the man to come closer and repeat the prophecy.  After studying the man's face, Caesar says, ‘He is a dreamer, let us leave him.’  Later, when Caesar meets the soothsayer again on the way to the Senate, he says to the latter with great confidence, ‘The ides of March have come.’  ‘Aye, Caesar, but not gone,’ the soothsayer reminds him.  Caesar ignores this warning and goes to meet his death.  His bloody assassination on March 15 marked the day as a day of infamy.

The Shakespeare enthusiast was listening with rapt attention.  ‘Beware, March 15 is a bad day!’  I cautioned him.  ‘Besides, you must make a careful study of all those scenes in Julius Caesar before you come to me for a discussion.  That will take about a month's time.  So, what if we meet on the Ides of, say, May?’

‘May has its ides, too?’

‘Every month, for that matter. According to the ancient Romans, every month has calendas at the beginning, ides around the middle, and nones eight days before the ides.’

I now realized that, in my enthusiasm, I had gone too far. I was doing the opposite of what I had intended to do: instead of discouraging the old man, I was whetting his appetite with a lecture on the ancient Roman system. An occupationally-induced disease! I muttered a curse at myself, and spelt calendas, ides and nones for the old man. Sure enough, before I hung up and went back to my Rajapalayam, he promised to meet me on the ides of May.

How time flies! The ides of May are approaching, and the old man may call me any time now.