Social distancing? Hey, what does it mean?

Good books, bad reports – reflective reports written in execrable English by some 30 university teachers – and, of course, the coronavirus lockdown helped me stay indoors for four days. Without good food, this would have been impossible.

But food supplies – greengroceries, in particular – were running out, and there was a demand for replenishment yesterday. So I ventured out.

That was the first instance of my breaching the much-touted code of conduct for social distancing (SD). Not quite a breach, in fact. Hadn’t Jagan Anna sanctioned your compromising your safety a bit for the sake of creature comforts from 6 am to 1 pm? Come to think of it, I decided to go out primarily because I was consumed by curiosity: for the first time in my three-score-and-four I was going to witness a working model of social distancing.

I was excited, and this put a spring in my step. As I walked down the stairs, I slowed my steps because I was greeted by gales of laughter. A few spirited old men some of whom, for all I knew, might be harbouring milder versions of COVID-19, were having a ball. Why allow a weekend to pass without some fun? If the worst comes to the worst, heck, die the death of Dylan Thomas. But never “go gentle” into that good night! Whatever, it was not a good SD model. Far from being SD, it was SC – social converging!

There was no SD in my street or the next. Neither was it to be seen on the service road either. I was now at the greengrocer’s – a pushcart stocked with lots of fresh vegetables in front of the Novotel. It was a hub of commercial activity with the buyers literally rubbing shoulders with one another. Where the flyover descended and met Ring Road, a large group of men were exercising on the road, perhaps after an undisturbed walk on the flyover itself. The atmosphere was one of joie de vivre. What a nice social gathering! I now turned my gaze in the direction of a young plus-size woman, dressed in a white smock and black leggings. Her presence was considerable, not her physical bulk, mind you, but the quick pace she was maintaining in spite of it. Her tired and bedraggled father – or husband, I’m not sure – who was jogging to keep up with her was a poor sight.

Now a passer-by, a middle-aged chappie with a lorry-driver look, stopped by the cart. He pulled his bandanna down, took out a cigarette from his pocket and licked it, and I took a cautious SD step back. ‘Sir,’ grinned the man, amused by the look of disgust on my face, ‘the gaali (wind) is blowing in the opposite direction.’ The stub of cigarette jutting from his lips glowed like a malevolent virus. He kept at the task squinting his eyes against the smoke, and, when the cigarette could no longer be used, he stubbed out the butt, coughed violently, spat out the phlegm, watched it with satisfaction for a moment and moved off as though he had stopped at the greengrocer’s only to upset me.

‘How much?’ I asked the vendor, a burly woman who reminded me of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath.

‘Two twenty,’ she said.

‘Two hundred and twenty rupees! Before the lockdown ends, you will be rich enough to buy the Novotel,’ I said handing her the money.

‘Why would I need the Novotel, Ayyagaru?’ she said with a coy smile which showed through her mask, a playful tilt of her head and a quick spin of the sari around herself.

In front of us the Novotel wore a deserted look not least because of SD.

#COVID19Stories

Father Arakal goes the way of all flesh

Father Jacob Arakal, SJ, has passed away. He breathed his last, last night. I’ve just got the news from Father C J John, a former Principal of Andhra Loyola College (ALC). The funeral will be held at Loyola Academy, Secunderabad, at 3 o’clock in the afternoon tomorrow (13 March 2020).

I’m sure that everyone who was acquainted with this wise and lovely priest in his 96-year-long life has a story to tell. Here’s my own story.

It was my first day at ALC. The moment I stepped on to the campus, I gasped in wonderment at the lofty luxuriance that lay before me. Not that I was unused to the lushness of nature: there was a lavish display of nature’s bounty on the campus of Madras Christian College where I had studied for five years. But the Loyola landscape had something mystical about it. The “wild secluded scene,” as Wordsworth would have described it, seemed to fill the mind with thoughts of deep seclusion. As I walked further down reflecting that the place was redolent of the peace and quiet of a hermitage, a hermit-like figure came cycling along. When the cycle came closer, the “hermit” peered over his spectacles for a moment, gave a faint smile through his grey beard, and rode on. And I took an instant liking to him. About a month later, when I joined ALC as a lecturer, I ran into the “hermit” again. He asked me to stay in a guest room in his hostel where I led almost a cloistered life for more than two years.

Father Jacob Arakal was that “hermit.” I have since been acquainted with scores of Jesuits. I have admired some of them, hero-worshipped one or two of them, and been indifferent to many of them. But I have always regarded that “hermit” on the bicycle, the first ever Jesuit in my life, as a special person. I have even said in an interview to a Jesuit magazine that Father Arakal, a priest of indisputable excellence, is a kind of touchstone that could be applied to other Jesuits to assess their priestly merits.

Simple, sincere, austere – it is easy to describe Father Arakal. These trite expressions, mindlessly bandied about on occasions such as this, acquire a rare elegance and a ring of authenticity when used with reference to priests like Douglas Gordon (1912-1994), Joseph Kuriakose (1925-1994) and Jacob Arakal (1924-2020). There was nothing contrived about their practice of these great virtues because it was a part of their vocation. It is said that the test of a vocation is the love of drudgery it involves. The Jesuit administrative system is of necessity sheer drudgery: unless the Jesuits who operate the system are devoted to a life of humdrum chores, they cannot ensure the smooth functioning of the system. By accepting the drudgery that the operation of the system involved with the greatest willingness and interest, Father Arakal has contributed significantly to the smooth functioning of the system.

Let me conclude my humble tribute to this great Jesuit with a prayer I put together, after Holland’s ‘God, give us men!’ when Fr Arakal celebrated his diamond jubilee as a Jesuit in 2005:

God, give us men like Jacob Arakal:
Strong minds, great hearts, true faith and ready hands;
Men whom the lust of office does not kill;
Men whom the spoils of office cannot buy;
Men who possess opinions and a will;
Men who have honour: Men who will not lie;
Men who can stand before a demagogue
And damn his treacherous flatteries without winking!
Tall men, sun-crowned, who live above the fog
In public duty and in private thinking.

Rest in peace, Fr Arakal!

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.