A visit to BSNL Bhavan

I have been associated with BSNL for over a quarter century now. In the past, I used to be in awe of the tall buildings at BSNL Bhavan, Chuttugunta (Vijayawada) and the huge crowds that packed those buildings as well as the lawns. My work was almost always at Finance which is housed in a separate building behind the GM’s office.

It was 11.30 in the morning. I dropped by Finance on my way home from the government treasury which I had visited to submit a digital life certificate for this year. Finance had owed me some money for over six months. They were supposed to transfer it to my bank account, but since that hadn’t happened, I thought meeting the accounts officer might help.

I entered Finance only to see dozens of vacant cabins. There were only three employees in the entire office on the ground floor. Two of them must have been attendants; they were chatting at the entrance. The third one, a young man, was at a table with a computer in front of him.

‘Where are the others?’ I asked him after explaining the purpose of my visit.

‘They’ve taken VRS,’ he said turning his computer on.

‘Voluntary retirement? So many of them?’

‘Yes. They didn’t want to be on a sinking ship any longer. When an option was given, they got off.’

‘How, then, will work get done here?’

He shrugged it off and smiled. ‘There is no money. We haven’t got our salaries for months together.’ He kept searching for my claim on the computer. I didn’t want to disturb him.

‘Sir, your payment was approved six months ago,’ he said lifting his head.

‘I know that,’ I said. ‘I came to collect the money.’

‘You must be joking, sir,’ he said with a nervous laugh. ‘There’s no money. Since 2018, we haven’t cleared any debts. Even if money comes in May or June, the 2018 cases will take priority. Yours is a mid-2019 one.’

‘Which means I should be prepared to write it off?’ I said. ‘But tell me, are you heading for a shutdown? I think the budget said something about funding BSNL and MTNL.’ He shrugged his shoulders as if to say he didn’t know what the hell was going on.

Time was when BSNL was a monopoly with profits over 10,000 crore a year. Now it seems to be on its last gasp. Poor management, overstaffing, hopeless services, delayed modernization, and inability to cope with competition – that’s the story on BSNL.

English medium schools: Pragmatic or problematic?

http://www.teacherplus.org/english-medium-schools-pragmatic-or-problematic/

Encountering teachers: An overwhelming sense of déjà vu

This is a month of examinations. At GEC, my college, the language lab practical exams started on Monday and will go on for about a week. The students take a written test for about an hour and are then vivaed in small groups by an external examiner from some other engineering college.

I had lunch at 12.30, as usual, and came out. In the corridor, there was a carnival atmosphere. Quite a lot of students had finished the written test and were waiting for the external examiners to call them in for a viva. Some were lounging around what my genteel colleagues call the restrooms at both ends of the corridor, some were rushing down the corridor, and some were even snacking.  Their joie de vivre was infectious. In the classroom next to the ELT Centre, however, some sincere students were still slaving away over the written test.

Would I be disturbing the examiners if I went into the language lab? I peeked in. The examiners were quite free. I went in, and they stood up. Both looked weathered; our language lab isn’t air-conditioned yet.

‘Have you had lunch?’ I asked them.

‘I have completed my meals, sir,’ said the lady.

I looked at the man. ‘I will take my lunch after completing this section,’ he said.

Then I did something foolish. I asked a question: ‘How do you quiz students in a lab viva? I mean, what are some of the questions you typically ask?’

The weathered look on the man’s face disappeared all of a sudden. ‘Students,’ he said with enthusiasm, ‘must know the distinction between the present perfect tense and the simple past tense.’

‘Do you ask such questions in a lab practical test?’ I said, bewildered. ‘Have you had a look at the guidelines we have formulated for lab practical exams, internal as well as external?’

‘Grammar is very important, sir,’ he said and went on with complete nonchalance. English-as-a-second-language teachers’ zeal for grammar is legendary. Equally legendary is the inability of the vast majority of this tribe to be grammatical in its own speech and writing. After all, how this self-willed examiner was testing the students was based on his own beliefs about the kind of communication skills in English students of engineering need as well as his own classroom practice.

After listening to him with attention for quite some time, I cast a furtive look at my watch. I was shocked.

‘Thanks for coming here as an examiner,’ I said holding out my hand.

But he wouldn’t let me go. ‘Soft skills is also an important subject, sir,’ he said, pursuing a different line with equal enthusiasm. ‘I asked different groups of your students to explain the difference between soft skills and communication skills. They couldn’t answer the question.’

‘Perhaps you could have tested their procedural knowledge of soft skills rather than their declarative or propositional knowledge,’ I said. ‘I’m sure their personality traits and communication abilities are fairly good.’

But he held forth with dogged determination on the theoretical aspects of soft skills. I cast another agonized look at my watch and thanked him, this time in a firm tone of voice. Now the woman caught my eye – the examiner who had “completed” her “meals.” She was regarding her lecturing counterpart with admiration: he was after all confirming her own beliefs.

It was by no means a new experience. Teacher professional development programmes are a dime a dozen. Teachers attend quite a lot of them, but when they come out of them, they do so with their beliefs and practices remaining “unscathed.” I have explored this phenomenon – the phenomenon of the mismatch between teachers’ received knowledge and their classroom practices – both in scholarly papers and in feature articles. With these thoughts, I came out of the language lab.

The sun was at its blazing best, and the air simmered in the mid-day heat. I walked across the hot, noisy corridor and moved into the ELT Centre closing the door behind me. I felt safe again within the cool and quiet confines of the Centre. But I knew that it was a deceptive sense of safety.

The smutty side of Shakespeare

A young college teacher who came to discuss Shakespeare with me was shocked when I said, in the course of our discussion, that, in his time, Shakespeare was primarily known as a great provider of masala entertainment. It was this, I said, that attracted to The Globe both the groundlings, the members of the poorer audience paying one penny for a place in “the pit,” and the richer patrons paying half a crown for a seat in the galleries. The young woman was completely nonplussed. ‘Don’t you like Shakespeare, sir?’ she asked.

I sighed one of those deep sighs of exasperation that had inevitably been part of my conversation with English teachers for well over three-and-a-half decades. If teachers were capable of higher levels of comprehension or thinking, they would be doing something more challenging and much more profitable than teaching. After this sobering thought, I resumed speaking. There’s no avoiding teachers; I’m paid for speaking to them after all.

I spoke to her about Jonathan Gil Harris’s 2018 book, Masala Shakespeare: How a Firangi Writer Became Indian. ‘The book,' I said, ‘talks about the commonalities between the Bard and Bollywood.’  I remembered what Gil Harris had said in a recent  interview about his masala thesis, and I shared it with her. ‘Look at Antony and Cleopatra. You have these two eponymous lovers from two different continents, you have high tragedy as well as earthy comedy, you have plenty of music, and you have Bahubali-like scenes filled with melodramatic performers. Plus, of course, as in Bollywood films, you have a heroine who is believed to be embodying “infinite variety”!  Isn’t this masala entertainment par excellence?’ It appears Bollywood made Gil Harris re-read Shakespeare. ‘Here’s God’s plenty!’ said Dryden, gushing over the amazing range he found in Chaucer. Gil Harris says some such thing in Masala Shakespeare.

Well, all this is too much for English teachers: for the vast majority of them, Shakespeare is little more than a “tough” paper on the MA English Literature syllabus. The young woman listening to me had heard enough for comprehension, I thought; so I dismissed her and began to reflect on a related aspect of Shakespeare: the dark underside of his English. This hidden underbelly was opened up to me when, over a quarter century ago, I came across a very scholarly book called A Dictionary of Shakespeare’s Sexual Puns and Their Significance, compiled by Frankie Rubinstein and published by Macmillan, London.

Allow me to provide a tantalizing glimpse of this dark underbelly. When Shakespeare used the word “altar,” he sometimes meant arse. He used the word “chin” to mean penis and “dulcet” to mean testicles – sometimes, I mean. “Pretty” sometimes meant buttocks for him. Worse still, “froth” could mean semen in Shakespeare, “grace” vulva, “caterpillar” pederast, and “lean” pimp. It looks as though a large number of words used by the immortal Bard of Avon and quoted with great enthusiasm by prudish professors of English referred to the sexual act, sexual organs, accessories to the sexual act, emotions related to the act, and the scatological parts and functions. If you want to know the extent to which the Bard could go in his penchant for the sexual and the scatological, you can read Rubinstein’s Dictionary.

Rubinstein has an illustrious and much more scholarly (by which I do not at all mean dirty-minded) predecessor in Eric Partridge whose pioneering book, Shakespeare’s Bawdy, on this valuable subject, is marketed as a Routledge classic. But Partridge is not so scrupulous as Rubinstein. His definition of “bawdy” is not so comprehensive as to include all the erotic practices of heterosexuals, homosexuals, lesbians, perverts, castrates, and what have you; and, more importantly, he doesn’t throw so much light.

When I said “light” in the last paragraph, I meant it. Quite a few lines in Shakespeare’s plays have remained a mystery even to Shakespeare scholars. The traditional annotations provided by different editors are drab and unconvincing. Rubinstein’s Dictionary throws light on those hitherto dark and obscure areas; they are dazzlingly bright now, thanks to the punning dimensions Rubinstein has provided. He lists each usage of pun and illustrates it with a number of examples from Shakespeare’s poems and plays. The Dictionary would have one believe that Bill Shakespeare was not just ribald but vulgar.

Partridge, Rubinstein, and Gil Harris are interesting additions indeed to Shakespeare scholarship.

Primitive place, primitive people

There certainly is an old-world charm about post-offices and their antediluvian work practices.  If you are unhappy about the modernization drive around yourself, and complain that people – and institutions – are playing fast and loose, step into a post-office.  You will no longer complain.

A couple of days ago, I was at a post office to get my PPF validity period extended for five more years.  There were not even ten people in the queue. On the other side of the crude partition in front of us was a staid old gentleman sitting behind a four-legged, ink-stained object which might, a quarter century ago, have passed for a table, with a peculiar-looking contraption swinging above his head producing more noise than air. There were, however, two things in this primitive environment which sat oddly with the people and the things around them: a computer and a franking-machine. On closer inspection, however, there seemed nothing odd about them.  A Dot-Matrix printer was attached to the computer – what a perfect combination for this exotic locale! – and the franking-machine, for good measure, was non-functional.

For well over twenty minutes, the line didn’t move an inch. For want of anything better, I started watching the activities at the neighbouring counter where a young clerk, who looked well-fed and contented, was registering letters at a leisurely pace. Each customer had his article weighed and bought the required stamps. After sticking the stamps, he stood in the line again to have the articles registered. The clerk wrote a composition about each article on a printed form and then disfigured the composition and virtually tore the receipt by stamping on it with a new-found vigour. After this sudden spurt of momentary robustness, he swung back to his self-indulgent writing. If patience, I reflected, is a virtue, post-offices contribute a lot to it by teaching people how to be patient.  You may be – you are! – impatient on the road, but in a post-office, your behaviour would try the patience of  a Job.

‘Mmm…’ This threatening growl was emerging from the staid old gentleman. He was now peering at me through his bifocals. I handed in my application and passbook.

‘No!’ he snorted when he ran his eye over the application. ‘Extension not possible. You may open a new account.’ He threw the application and the passbook in front of me.

“It is possible,’ I said trying not to let my irritation show. ‘It has been possible four times so far. Why don’t you take a look at the PPF rules on your website?’

‘Rules?’ he grunted, looking at me with disdain. Then he turned to the well-fed young man at the next counter and mumbled something. The young man checked the website with an impassive face and turned the monitor towards him.

There was a note of embarrassment on the staid visage now. ‘Extension is possible,’ he drawled in a placatory tone. The voice had turned into a hoarse croak. But, when he continued after a brief pause, he became the ranting, domineering bully he was. ‘But it cannot be done here. You have to go to the head post office.’ The words had a tone of finality.

‘Perhaps I must ask the postmaster general to speak you,’ I said. ‘Then you will realize that it is possible in your own post office.’ I took out my mobile phone wondering who the PMG was and whether the official belonged to the male or female division of the species. 

The man stood up. He was no longer a bully. His face looked pale and drawn. ‘Sir,’ he said lowering his voice until it was barely audible and addressing me with respect for the first time, ‘The plain fact is that I don’t know how to do it. None of us here has the technical knowledge required for it. But I’ll find out how it should be done from the head post office and do it. If you could come at 3 o’clock in the afternoon…’  He still stood twisting his hands together nervously.

If, earlier, I had been outraged by the man’s arrogance and his dismissive attitude, I was now disgusted by his abject apology and self-abasing posture. I stared at him with total contempt for a minute. Then I came out.

A curious case of linguistic “inventions” in journalism

The journalistic gaffe which was the subject of my earlier blog post reminds me of an imaginative word derivation achieved by a novice journalist. With a degree in mass communication from an Australian university, she came to Vijayawada with a lovely lilting accent at the dawn of this century and started working, at my suggestion, as a feature writer for an English language newspaper. Within a month, she did what lily-livered veterans couldn’t do: she introduced quite a lot of new words into the English language using the national newspaper as a medium for the purpose. The paper simply printed whatever she wrote – and she wrote a good deal, unleashing a veritable morphological and syntactical revolution. ‘The feature articles in your paper,’ I said to the bureau chief, ‘are Bold and Beautiful.’

Then one day, my wife asked me, ‘Do you know what “rangy furniture” means?’  I had heard of office furniture, patio furniture, lawn furniture, outdoor furniture, modern furniture, antique furniture, period furniture, and secondhand furniture, but never of rangy furniture.  But I liked that expression.  When I said I liked it, she began to laugh.  Then she showed me a newspaper article.  ‘Your young friend from Australia has written this,’ she said. ‘The house has rangy furniture,’ read a sentence in the article.  What the author meant was that the house had a wide range of furniture. But “a wide range of furniture” would be long-winded and wearisome, so perhaps my young friend added the derivational suffix “y” to “range” and put life into that tame expression. Quite a stroke of genius!

Rangy!  I tried to get my tongue round that interesting word.  It stayed for quite sometime inside the mouth until the tongue unwillingly loosened its grip on it and let it out with a vowel to accompany it.  And when it came out, it sounded nice.  Besides, it was crisp, laconic – and even Delphic! It made me reflect on the author who had taken the idea of compression thus far. I thought she was as inventive as Shakespeare.  And her guiding spirit must be the unforgettable Humpty-Dumpty.  Remember what Humpty-Dumpty said in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: ‘When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’

Come to think of it, what is wrong with “rangy”? Why shouldn’t it be used to mean having a great range?  When Richard Sullivan could talk about “rangy considerations,” why shouldn't our young newspaper correspondent talk about “rangy furniture”? 'Besides, “rangy” has an illustrious forebear in “hopefully,” another describing word.  Michael Beresford, in his Modern English, points out that “hopefully” was originally used to mean in a hopeful manner. But in the 1960s, when the word began to be used as a disjunct or comment adverb to mean “it is to be hoped” or “I hope,” there was a great outcry against it, first in America, then in Britain.  The protesters pointed out that, in the sentence, ‘Hopefully, the plan will succeed,’ the plan was not full of hope.  But “hopefully” as a comment adverb finally won the battle, as did “thankfully,” “mercifully” and “sadly” earlier.

“Reliable,” a commonly used word now, had had a stormier passage a hundred years before “hopefully” began its journey.  The objection was this: you don't rely something, but rely on it; so don't say reliable but rely-on-able!  Fortunately good sense prevailed soon enough.  Otherwise, we would now be using not only rely-on-able but account-for-able, dispense-with-able, dispose-of-able and a plethora of others.

Will “rangy” in the sense in which our inventive writer used it gain the acceptability that “hopefully” and “reliable” did?  Why not?  If the national newspaper the writer once represented doesn't wince at the word “rangy,” and uses it liberally not only in news stories but in editorials, the word will gain wide currency and become as commonplace as “prepone,” “bio-data,” “reputed” (in the sense of reputable), “good name” and “whybecause.” It may not become part of Queen's English, but it will certainly be part of Rani English. With the emergence of World Englishes, the erstwhile native speakers have lost the exclusive prerogative to control the standardization of the language; they can’t tell us “rangy” is wrong.

Heim, in his book, The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality, says: ‘What is the state of the English language?  No state at all.  It is in process… If languages have states of health, sick or well, then ours is manic.’  Manic indeed!  And rangy!

Thoughts occasioned by a journalistic gaffe

‘This diminutive writer has been an inspiration for many young writers and scholars,’ said the clumsily-written cover-page story on a Telugu playwright in a ‘Metroplus’ supplement to the Vijayawada edition of a national newspaper.

Diminutive? Did the reporter really mean this? Diminutive in what sense? In physical size or in literary standing? Asymmetrically inset into the text was a huge picture of a tall broad-shouldered middle-aged man with a lugubrious face making a pathetic attempt at smiling which deepened the mournful expression on his face. ‘This towering figure,’ I said to myself, ‘would perhaps be diminutive in a land of Brobdingnagians.’  Did the author of the article, then, mean that the writer was a man of poor literary reputation? But the caption to the picture dispelled this doubt. ‘Writer par excellence … … wears many hats with elan’ screamed the red-and-black caption.  As a matter of fact, the entire article, though marred by awkward syntax, was a panegyric on the playwright; “diminutive” was the only jarring note.

However, what caused this curious incongruity was not hard to understand. Newspaper reporters who want to embellish their stories often depend on online dictionaries and thesauruses; the dependence seems to be excessive in provincial towns where, for want of competent writers in English, people with a nodding acquaintance with the English language are appointed as reporters. Not having the advantage of wide reading which can help one to be discriminating in one’s word choice, these novice reporters mindlessly pick up high-flown expressions from online thesauruses and use them in their stories with amusing results: the words either fail to collocate or sound pretentious or produce paradoxical figures of speech. Perhaps the journalist who wrote the story wanted to say that the playwright was a great writer and looked for grand-sounding synonyms for “great” in an online thesaurus which displayed both synonyms and antonyms for the word. Perhaps, instead of picking a synonym, he hastily picked up an antonym which didn’t quite roll of his tongue (When an English word doesn’t roll off an Indian tongue with ease, it is considered powerful.)

Interestingly, the goof-up doesn’t seem to have provoked any protest; in any case, the Reader’s Editor (RE) hasn’t listed it in his errata so far. But if all the goofs and gaffes on the regional pages of English-language newspapers were to be listed, an entire broadsheet of errata would have to be published every day with a large team of senior editors dealing exclusively with corrections. Mercifully, newspapers don’t do that. Even the best of newspapers correct less than 2 per cent of their errors, the majority of which, I must hasten to add, are factual rather than grammatical ones. Correcting grammatical errors will never be more than a pipe dream.

Let me explain what I mean with some examples from a newspaper that ranks well in accuracy, both factual and grammatical. At the ELT Centre of Gudlavalleru Engineering College, I offer a 70-hour FDP on writing. As part of the programme, the trainees, consisting of engineering faculty, analyse discourse features of written texts. Newspapers come in handy here; as often as not, the trainees choose newspaper reports for their analysis. In March 2017, the trainees, under the guidance of the trainers, identified errors of different kinds – clumsy syntax, elephantine constructions that tend to obscure the meaning, poor connection between ideas, weak grammar, incongruity, and tautology – in news reports from the Vijayawada edition of one particular newspaper which I don’t want to name here. Here are some of the discourse-level corrections from that long list:

March 14, 2017

Nod for 11 private universities to set up campuses in State

Vijayawada

 

The representatives of private universities are seen making rounds in the corridors of Secretariat these days to find out the status of their applications. The government, sources say, however, is insisting on the schedule of academic year and admissions.

The representatives of private universities which have not yet received permission are seen making rounds in the corridors of the Secretariat these days to find out the status of their applications. Sources, however, say that the government insists on the universities announcing the schedule of the academic year and admissions first.

The universities are expected to commence the admissions from the coming academic year. The buildings and infrastructure could be developed in a phased manner. “The universities would have to start functioning immediately if they get permission,” says an official, who didn’t want to be quoted.

The government expects the universities to commence admissions in the coming academic year and then develop buildings and other infrastructure in a phased manner. ‘Once permission is given, the universities will have to start functioning immediately,’ said an official who did not want to be quoted.

March 14, 2017

Nellore

Collector seeks to allay fears over airport project

In the backdrop of reports of a possible shifting of the airport project, the district administration has allayed the fears stating that there have been no hurdles for the implementation of Dagadarthi airport project near Kavali town in Nellore district. District Collector R. Mutyala Raju said there were no plans to shift the entire airport project from Dagadarthi regardless of the fact that demands came up for location of the same nearer to the Krishnapatnam industrial area considering the potential for cargo traffic.

The district administration has sought to allay the fears of the people of Nellore in the wake of speculations that the Dagadarthi airport project might be shifted from Kavali. District Collector R Mutyala Raju has reassured them that there are no such plans though there have been demands for relocating the airport project closer to the Krishnapatnam industrial area, considering its potential for cargo traffic.

March 21, 2017

Guntur

Central parking at Brodipet evokes mixed reaction

The Guntur Urban Police have begun enforcing a proposal to have central parking on the busy Brodipet 4th lane, a hub of commercial shops. While the results have been encouraging so far as the space is just enough for parking of two-wheelers, parking of cars is becoming extremely difficult.

The Guntur Urban Police have started enforcing their decision of central parking on the busy Brodipet 4th lane, a hub of commercial shops, and the results have been encouraging so far. However, there is room for only two-wheelers, and it is difficult to park cars there.

Nihal Singh, who had a five-decade-long distinguished career in journalism, said in a blog post a couple of months before his death on 16 April 2018: ‘The mélange of Indian English, British English, American English and plain bad English is a unique contribution of our newspapers to world journalism.’