Will the new curricular framework ensure that undergraduate courses are broad-based?

It appears that the Andhra Pradesh State Council of Higher Education (APSCHE) has redesigned the undergraduate curriculum providing for the replacement of the existing three-year three-major programmes with four-year single-major honours programmes. Yesterday’s newspapers carried the APSCHE Chairman’s press release about the restructuring. Details are not available yet, but the decision in favour of the single-major pattern seems to be based on the idea that the choice-based credit system (CBCS) the new curriculum seeks to introduce can work better within a single-major framework.

Each system has its merits, but, in my opinion, at the undergraduate level, a curriculum of a general nature covering a broad spectrum of different disciplines can serve the interests of students better.  The three-major system is ideally suited to this purpose.  Giving it up in favour of the single-major system may not, therefore, be a good idea.  Incidentally, the single-major pattern is not something new to the higher education system in states like Andhra Pradesh: it had been in practice until the three-major system, a broad-based one, replaced it a few decades ago.

Why am I in favour of a broad-based curriculum at the undergraduate level?

 

In India, the undergraduate course is not a terminal programme: in a majority of cases, the students join a postgraduate course.  At the postgraduate level, a product of the single-major system has almost no choice of disciplines because of their narrow specialization at the undergraduate level.  In other words, they are ineligible for any discipline other than the one they have studied at the undergraduate level.  Their choice at the college-entry level should, therefore, be a mature and informed one.  Otherwise, it will be much more punishing than the "original sin".  Considering that the undergraduate stage is a maturation point rather than a saturation point, it stands to reason that the undergraduate should be given the opportunity to explore multiple disciplines before s/he is mature enough to decide on a subject for in-depth study at the postgraduate level. But it is not clear yet whether the honours programmes the APSCHE is introducing are designed to be terminal or non-terminal ones.

 

There is another reason – a more compelling one.  Competitive examinations for appointment to the Central civil services, and national-level tests for academic selection for fellowships and grants are comprehensive in nature.  A graduate from a multi-major system is certainly better equipped to take these tests than a graduate from the single-major system.  The poor performance of graduates from Tamil Nadu on these tests, in particular, the Civil Services Examinations, should be attributed, among other things, to their narrow specialization at the undergraduate level. 

 

There is, however, an interesting aspect to the single-major pattern of states like Tamil Nadu where I studied for all my degrees, including my PhD.  It includes two allied or ancillary subjects.  This indicates a faint recognition of the need to enrich an undergraduate programme by incorporating related disciplines into it.  But the inclusion of related disciplines does not serve the purpose of enrichment because they are not equal in status to the main subject.

 

When there is need to make even postgraduate education broad-based, reintroducing the single-major system will be a retrograde step.  What is, however, urgently needed is the strengthening of the system by introducing more useful combinations. The Chairman’s announcement says that the new system will be multi-disciplinary. I do hope it addresses the need for undergraduate courses being broad-based.

Rest in peace, Father Peter Raj!

I’m sorry to hear that Father Peter Raj has passed away. He was my colleague in the Department of English at Andhra Loyola College (ALC) for a long period of time, and my Principal from 1999 until his retirement in 2004. I have just heard from Father Peter Kishore, ALC Principal, that he died of multiple organ failure at 4.00 pm yesterday.

Fr Raj was a multi-talented person. He was a gifted teacher, an accomplished singer, a skilful keyboard player and an eloquent speaker whose oration at Father Gordon’s funeral was ringing in my ears months after the funeral. If he was so sparing in his use of these talents, it was because he wanted to keep out of the public eye; he preferred, instead, a life of splendid isolation.

There were other gifts, by no means of less value. One of them was his legendary level-headedness. Staffroom conversations often centred round Fr Raj’s uncanny ability to remain unprovoked in situations in which anybody else would fly into a fury. For all his awesome “high seriousness,” Fr Raj had a great sense of humour. He often cracked jokes and told funny stories with that sphinx-like expression of his never disappearing from the face. But, alas, not many got his jokes! For one thing, they were far too subtle. For another, they were couched in Johnsonian seesaws and so eloquently expressed with Miltonic sublimity. Not surprisingly, they sounded rather like the oration he had famously delivered! Soon, however, the sensible humorist stopped telling jokes. But he continued to read PG Wodehouse. I wonder what he enjoyed most in PGW – Bertie’s Mayfair slang or Jeeves’s Wardour Street of which he himself was a master, or both.

‘A place sheweth the man,’ said Francis Bacon. A truer word has never been spoken. The real nature of a person – his “true colours” – comes out most when he holds a position of authority and exercises power. Power has shown some people to be better and some worse. ‘People would have deemed him fit for emperor had he never become emperor,’ said Tacitus, the ancient Roman historian, about Galba. That was never said about Fr Raj. In power or out of it, he was always his own true self, to wit, a gentleman.

Rest in peace, Father Peter Raj!

Visiting Kayarambedu after fifty years

When Rahul, who lives in Toronto, said he wanted to visit his ancestral village and worship at the temple where his ancestors had worshipped, I was pleasantly surprised. ‘There is something to be said for exile,’ I thought, remembering R. Parthasarathy. ‘You learn roots are deep.’

We set out for Kayarambedu on the penultimate Saturday of the holy month of Purattasi. With me were Shanthi, Rahul, and his family consisting of his wife, Sripriya, and his six-year-old daughter, Srishti. None of them had seen the village before; in fact, I was visiting the village myself after about fifty years.

The car pulled up at a square where there was a crowd of villagers. The surroundings were dotted with shanties and awful-looking roadside eats with a rough narrow road with crumbling edges meandering behind an Ambedkar in a blue coat. Behind us, horns honked impatiently.

I lowered the window and was hit by voices, music, horns, sirens and tobacco smoke. ‘Kayarambedu…’ I shouted, ‘Can you tell me the way to Kayarambedu?’

‘Kayarambedu?’ queried an old man after blowing a puff of smoke into the air. ‘Go this way,’ he said, pointing to the rough road behind the Ambedkar statue, ‘and turn right where the road forks.’

From the fork, the path wobbled above, up on an old embankment from which a herd of buffaloes was climbing down. The sense of déjà vu was overwhelming. I said, ‘Certain things don’t change.’

‘What doesn’t change, Thatha?’ asked Srishti.

I pointed to the buffaloes and said, ‘A herd of buffaloes climbing down this tank bund after a nice bath. I used to watch this day after day through the classroom window when I was a child like you.’

‘So, there is a school here?’

‘On your right.’

‘You studied here, Thatha?’

‘Sort of. I spent a couple of years here. There were only two teachers for the whole school, and they were busy chatting.’

‘And you were left to watch buffaloes.’

This evoked a peal of merry laughter.

We drove past the school and a Shiva temple. The car gingerly moved into a narrow street, slowed to a crawl and came to a halt in front of the remains of what must once have been a temple. ‘Google Map says this is Kariamanikka Perumal Temple,’ said the driver.

‘But it doesn’t look much like a temple,’ Shanthi complained. ‘It doesn’t even have a gopuram.’

‘This is the place,’ I reassured her. ‘Of course, it’s worse than it used to be in the past. But, even in the past, it never had a gopuram, but it didn’t seem to cause any unease to our ancestors who worshipped here.’ I twinkled and added, ‘And they were quite well-to-do.’ I chuckled at the astonishment on her face.

I turned my attention to the temple now. It looked much smaller than it was when I was a child, shrunken and pathetic. The dhvajastambham had disappeared, and so had the thirumadaipalli (sacred kitchen). But the balipeetam and the sacred well remained intact. So did the pradakshina patha which, to my surprise, was well laid out.

We went into the temple. Moolavar thirumanjanam was going on, and the “priest” performing it was a young man (who later told me that he was the archaka’s son and a student of MBA in an engineering college in a neighbouring town). Milk, curd, turmeric water, and plain water were pouring in a steady stream over the stone idol unaccompanied by any kattiyam (‘Kattiyam? What’s that?’ the young man later asked me). Every now and then, the young man waved his hand, and the congregation outside the sanctum responded with a rousing chorus of ‘Govinda, Go-vinda!’ It was an unconventional way of performing an abhishekam, but quite impressive, and the Lord was smiling enigmatically as if amused by this new ritual. Whenever there was a Govinda gosham (roar), his eyelids flickered open and he looked at the crowd winsomely!

The archaka arrived now. It turned out he was a Telugu pantulu belonging to the smarta tradition and was unacquainted with Sri Vaishnava sampradayam. There was, therefore, no chanting of ‘Tadviṣṇoḥ paramaṁ padaṁ sadā paśyanti sūrayaḥ…’ at the time of the aarti; there was no ‘Pallaandu, pallaandu…’ either. There was only an invigorating chorus of ‘Govinda, Go-vinda!’ and the Lord listened to this namasmarana with an expression of pure rapture on his face. Karumanikka Perumal is an undemanding god; he knows that the key to happiness is being easily pleased. One of the villagers had brought some naivedyam cooked in her house, and the pantulu had no hesitation in offering it to the Lord. The temple didn’t seem to be captive to brahminical traditions any longer; it had become egalitarian!

I came out of the temple to explore the street. It looked small and shrunken with abandoned or neglected houses on both sides falling apart. Didn’t people live in this street anymore?  Broken beams hung down from the tiled roof of Rangaswamy Ayyangar’s house. I looked wistfully at the raised platform adjacent to the entrance which had been reduced to rubble now. On this thinnai, Uncle Chinnappa, who was a gifted raconteur, used to regale us, children of the agraharam, with delightful tales, so full of adventure, emotion, adult content, and scatological humour, from Tamil folklore, especially Aaayiram Thalaivaangiya Apoorva Chintamani.  The house I grew up in used to be just opposite this house. I turned back and found in the place of the house a bleak and desolate landscape.

Now a group of villagers came. They were curious to know who this old man was, and why he was surveying the agraharam. I introduced myself. None of them knew me, but my father’s name worked like magic. ‘I’m Natesan’s son, Sami,’ said a 75-year-old man. ‘Your father was a great person. We miss him.’

‘Sir, not swamy,’ I corrected him, but he shook his head.

More people came now, introducing themselves as Aiyaavu’s son, Veerabhadra Naicker’s younger son, Gopalu’s elder son, Ponnuswamy’s daughter, somebody else’s daughter-in-law, and so on. They all spoke about my father with affection.

‘Can you recognize me?’ a shaky voice asked. I shook my head.

‘I’m Kasi.’

‘Meenakshi’s son?’

His dark face beamed with delight when he nodded his head. ‘You remember my mother!’ His eyes grew moist with tears of joy. ‘I am 82 now.’

I gave him a hug and said, ‘But you don’t look so, Kasi.’

The crowd watched this scene with fascination. ‘It’s like being with your father again,’ said an old man. ‘It feels so good.’

An angry, raspy voice spoke from behind. ‘What your relatives did to your family was terrible. I was here when they came to sell the property. It was rough, aggressive… the action and the language. The Lord…’

‘Oh, no,’ I turned round and protested. ‘I don’t want to hear about it. I just wanted my granddaughter’s feet to touch this soil, and I’m glad they did so. Today, three generations of my family stood together and worshipped at the temple where several generations of the Asuri family had worshipped in the past. It’s a great feeling, and I want to savour it to the full.’

As the car wound around the tank bund, I said to Shanthi, ‘I’m glad I came here at least now. I owe it to Rahul. The visit gave me an opportunity to come to terms with my father with whom I had not been on speaking terms for over a decade until his death in 1986.’

 

 

A yathaartham issue provoked by one of my stories

https://solvanam.com/2021/11/28/%e0%ae%aa%e0%af%81%e0%ae%a3%e0%af%8d%e0%ae%a3%e0%ae%bf%e0%ae%af%e0%ae%ae%e0%af%8d/

Set against the backdrop of the sufferings of teachers on account of pay cuts and job losses in the aftermath of the coronavirus outbreak, this story, titled ‘Punyam,’ is about an uncomplaining language teacher who has started working as an archaka in a temple to earn some extra income, and the support he receives from a trading community which lives in an apple-pie world, comforting but limiting, with black-and-white notions about papam and punyam, and a furniture merchant for whom helping the poverty-stricken teacher was a means of gaining some punyam.

The story has unwittingly thrown up a yathaartham issue. Soon after its publication in a US-based – or, so I believe – webzine last month, one of the members of the editorial team was so candid as to share with me the discussion the team had had on the story as part of their selection procedures. It appears that a team member had felt that the encouragement for Hindu ritualistic practices the story presented was against the reality (“yathaartham”) of what he believed to be the increasing denigration of such practices in our times. In other words, what he/she meant was that my story presents a fictionalized and romanticized view of a benevolence which is rather anachronistic.

I’m afraid this assumption is ill-informed. Many retail outlets in places like Vijayawada are owned by people from traditional trading communities. A priest visiting these business premises in the evenings to perform a pooja is something quite common. In some, especially big shops, this takes place every day, while, in others, it is done on Fridays. A priest visits a corporate hospital in my neighbourhood and does pooja; this takes place on a daily basis. And the hospital is by no means an exception.

As a teacher educator, I am associated with a number of schools, colleges and universities in this country, and, sometime ago, I did a survey of the conditions of private school teachers, who had been rendered jobless within months of the Coronavirus outbreak. They were doing all kinds of odd jobs, not excluding online teaching on a part-time basis, to earn a living. Among them was a group of language teachers, well up in Sanskrit and Telugu. Given their home backgrounds, which had led to their initiation into Sanskrit and anushtanam in their childhood, it was possible for them to carry out priestly functions after some training and work in temples also as archakas or poojaris. One of those teachers, who seemed to be doing this with the utmost competence, claimed that his monthly income was five times the amount his school had been paying him. Not all language teachers were so lucky, of course; many of them fell by the wayside for want of competence. But those who were good at Sanskrit quickly acquired the stock-in-trade necessary for successful functioning in this field and were doing well. This is true even of Tamil Nadu where traditional Hindu religious practices have not been overridden by “secular” and anti-Hindu – not anti-religious, I must hasten to add! – movements and the overt or covert encouragement they draw from public intellectuals. In other words, traditional Hindu religious practices and the denigration of those practices co-exist, and the “support” they draw from each other is indeed paradoxical.

This, in my perception, is the contemporary reality which, I must point out, is a complex mixture. From within this reality, one can choose the kind of yathaartham one wants depending upon one’s purpose, and express a sensibility one wants one’s readers to experience. I believe that there is no such thing as hard yathaartham or soft yathaartham in literary representation; those who insist on a particular kind of yathaartham are only pontificating, using easy, dismissive, push-button expressions. When the yathaartham question was brought to my notice, I felt like asking, ‘Which yathaartham? And whose yathaartham?’ I believe that what is important is what a writer does with the yathaartham s/he has chosen.

What have I done with my choice? To a superficial reader or listener, my story, set against the backdrop of the sufferings of teachers on account of pay cuts and job losses in the aftermath of the coronavirus outbreak, is about an uncomplaining teacher who has started working as an archaka in a temple to earn some extra income, and the support he receives from a trading community and a furniture merchant for whom helping the poverty-stricken teacher was a means of gaining some punyam. But a careful reader will find that the businessman with a simplistic view of papam and punyam is subjected to an ironical treatment and that his uncharacteristic act of benevolence is treated with some complexity. So is the trading community which pays a measly Rs 10,000 for an entire month of work in the temple, though the teacher thinks that it was a magnanimous gesture. If one looks at the title (“புண்ணியம்”) in the light of all this, one will find it suggestive. At first, I chose a literary catchword for the title but rejected it on second thoughts, and settled for the simple ‘புண்ணியம் ('punyam'), hoping that the reader would reflect on its appropriateness. On a lighter note, considering that reading – or listening – has by and large become a casual affair, one may even insist that free-and-easy reading is the yathaartham, and that literature should be conducive to that kind of reading!

P.S.: One of the problems with a teacher-writer is that s/he often becomes a virtual bhashyakaar (भाष्यकार) of his/her own creations; the temptation is irresistable. Interestingly, one of the names of Sri Ramanuja, founder of the Vishishtadvaitic thought, after whom I am named, is Bhashyakaara.

Bad tidings, glad tidings

February didn’t start on a good note. Or so I thought. As dawn broke over Indrakeeladri and the city yawned awake, I writhed and twisted as pain wracked my body. It was Omicron of a harsher kind striking down with force without any advance notice. Apparently, Omicron doesn’t think much of Cleopatra’s advice: "Though it be honest, it is never good to bring bad news; Give to a gracious message an host of tongues, but let ill tidings tell themselves when they be felt."

Well, it was evening, I had still been down with the infection and barely got out of bed, when the phone rang.

‘Dr Parthasarathy?’

‘Yes, this is Ramanujam.’

‘I’m Anatara Dev Sen.’ The accent was unmistakably British.

‘You mean, Prof. Amartya Sen’s daughter and the founding editor of TLM?... Ms Sen, this is a privilege.’

‘Call me Antara, please.’

‘If you could call me Ramanujam.’

‘I would. I hope you read Sahitya Akademi’s Indian Literature. I am the editor of the journal.’

I had last read an issue of this journal some fifteen years ago. When I said that – how I wish I hadn’t! – she sounded disappointed.

As it turned out, Indian Literature wants to carry an English translation of one of my Tamil stories published over three decades ago in a literary magazine called Kanaiyazhi, which was a little magazine devoted to serious and even avant-garde writings in Tamil when Mr Asokamitran and Dr Indira Parthasarathi were the editors, and Mr K Kasturirangan, a veteran journalist and a former correspondent of The New York Times, was the publisher. The story was re-published as a special story in a webzine just three months ago.

Good tidings indeed – amid the clouds of the Omicron gloom.

 

Please, sir, may I have one more teaspoon of…?

The muhurtam was over. The knot had been tied, but rituals were still going on. It was one o’clock already, and I was driven by a sense of urgency.

‘Let’s grab a bite to eat and leave at least by 2,’ I said to Shanthi.

‘A bite!’ exclaimed the member of the host family who was accompanying us to the dining hall. He looked offended. I had a knack for annoying authority figures, and it was playing out now.

‘I mean, a meal,’ I said correcting myself.

‘It’s a wedding feast,’ the patriarch said authoritatively with an overemphasis on the last word. His long lean face had fallen into an expression of grim disappointment.  

‘Oh, I’m sorry, sir,’ I lied, ‘I know it’s going to be a veritable banquet, and I do look forward to it.’ This helped. Lies often do. He seemed to like the expression “banquet.” The grimness slightly disappeared from his face, and he was trying to smile now.

Never one to lose an opportunity to lecture, he said, ‘You’ll find the feast an interesting combination of the best of Telugu and Tamil brahmin delicacies.’ He then went into elaborate details on the subject, ignoring the look of disapproval on Shanthi’s face and my agonized looks at my watch. ‘You both must do justice to it,’ he concluded before ushering us into the dining hall and taking leave of us.

It was a large hall with a high ceiling and ornate walls, reminding one of a concert hall in Mysore Palace. Four hundred people could comfortably sit and eat in the place, maintaining physical distancing of the kind Covid-19 protocol would demand, but there were hardly two hundred guests.  A dozen or so paricharaks were in attendance. They were bare from the waist up, perhaps to show off their yagnopaveetham and convince the guests that they were indeed brahmins.  I settled in front of a large banana leaf, determined to keep my promise of doing justice to the wedding feast.

Discipline was the watchword in the dining hall. Once all the guests were seated, the paricharaks came marching one behind the other, each person carrying a dish, and started serving. I was so fascinated watching this parade of paricharaks without, of course, a drum in the front that I didn’t look at my leaf-plate for some time. When my gaze finally fell on the leaf, I couldn’t believe what I saw.

 

The leaf was spotted with tiny dots of some ten food items – a teaspoon each of Andhra pappu, Tamil paruppu, Andhra-Tamil potato curry, Tamil koottu, Andhra pulihora (not Tamil puliyodarai), and so on. ‘There must be some mistake,’ I said aloud, and looked at the table in front of me. The plates were just like mine with a bemused expression on the faces of the people behind them. What was happening? I craned forward to view the serving style of the paricharaks.

 

‘Don’t trouble yourself; they’re using teaspoons,’ said Shanthi suppressing her laughter.

 

‘What spoons?’

 

‘Tea…tea… teaspoons. Their serving spoons are teaspoons.’

 

‘You mean, the kind of spoons used for measuring cough syrup?’

 

‘Yes, and for adding sugar to your tea.’

 

‘But why should they use that spoon?’

 

She stared at me for a moment. Then she said with a straight face, ‘Thrift, thrift, Horatio…’

 

Realization slowly dawned on my weary mind. ‘Thrift, indeed!’ I said reflectively, having been chastened by Hamlet’s words.

 

Rice had not been served yet, but Shanthi’s plate was empty and well-polished. ‘How did you gobble up so many items so soon?’ I asked her.

 

‘Simple. I gathered all the items together, and they made one small handful. I needed just a single effort to swallow it.’

 

It seemed a sensible approach, and I decided to adopt it. I gathered all the items together and stared at the multi-coloured ball of food in front of me. I wondered what Appambhotlu of Amaravathi Kathalu would have done in a situation of this kind. Would the bhojana chakravarthi have proved equal to this situation? Not at all. He only knew what to do with plenty; he wouldn’t know how to eat this.  By the time I came back from this reflection with my hand and mouth at work on the food ball in front of me, my plate had looked greener and well-polished. And I was hungry. Appetite, as Hamlet ruefully reflected, grows upon what it feeds. Would there be a second helping of each item with a larger spoon? Or, was I required to beg like Oliver: ‘Please, sir, I want some more.’

 

‘Don’t be silly,’ said Shanthi as though reading my thoughts. ‘There will be another serving. Otherwise, what will you eat the rice with?’

 

She was right. The paricharaks were by no means Fagin & Co. They might be thrifty, but they were not hard-hearted. They might use a teaspoon, but they would serve you again – and perhaps again! And they wouldn’t shout, ‘What!’ like Fagin. They were now serving rice for which, mercifully, they used a bigger spoon, and it was followed by a teaspoonful of each dish they had served earlier.

 

A brown round object of the size of a grape with an overburnt side fell on my leaf now. ‘What’s this?’ I asked Shanthi, holding the tiny hot ball in my hand.

 

‘You have been in Andhra for about four decades now. Don’t you know what it is? It’s poornalu.’

 

‘Oh, poornalu?  But why that –lu ending for a noun in the singular? There’s only one poornam, so use the singular form. Grammar apart, why in God’s name is it so tiny? I have never seen poornalu of this size in Andhra.’

 

‘That’s the point,’ she said with her voice dropping to a low whisper. ‘This is not Andhra. We are in Telangana, and this is the Telangana variety. Perhaps the poornalu standards are different here.’

 

I broke the tiny poornam into halves, and asked one of the paricharaks to pour some ghee into it. He generously poured – spilled rather – a quarter teaspoon of ghee, and the combination was heavenly. The perugu that followed added to the dining experience.

 

‘What are you waiting for? You’ve finished eating,’ said Shanthi shaking my shoulders. I got up with a start.

 

We re-entered the marriage hall to say goodbye to the hosts. The host’s family and their relatives were on stage now posing for photographs with the bride and the bridegroom. Encrusted with chunky gold jewellery, almost every one of them was a veritable jeweller’s shop. There was a gold girdle round every woman’s waist. ‘This place is quite unlike the dining hall,’ I whispered to Shanthi. ‘It is a land of plenty.’

 

The patriarch was nowhere in sight now, but a younger member of the family spoke to us. ‘How did you find the wedding feast?’ he asked me. ‘It was healthy…wholesome…I mean, balanced,’ I stammered.’  And added, ‘Just the kind of diet that should be prescribed on weight loss programmes.’

Unlocking a Tata air conditioner

A couple of days ago, I bought an air conditioner to replace the one we had used in our bedroom for ages – and thereby hangs a tale.

The AC was not a high-tech machine. Far from it. A non-inverter window AC, it looked more conventional than the one it was meant to replace. But, unfortunately for me, it was one of those “special” models whose “activation,” demanded what the manufacturing company, Voltas, called “unlocking.” What followed was a comedy of errors in three scenes.

In Scene One, my electrician, who never tires of telling me and my wife that he is a world-class electrician, plumber and carpenter all rolled into one, spent about an hour removing the old AC, doing a bit of carpentry for the frame, fixing the new cabinet, and placing the new AC unit into it, lecturing me all the time about the significance of each piece of work. Pausing for some time to view and admire his own accomplishment, he now set about the task of weatherproofing and insulation. When the demonstration-cum-lecture was over, he strutted peacock-like from one side of the machine to the other, and announced with something of the air of Molvolio that everything was perfect. Then he turned the MCB on and pressed the power button on the remote.

Nothing happened. There was no response from the AC.

It was a classic bedroom farce: plenty of flirting and foreplay with no fulfilment. I heard a slight snort now and looked back. Shanthi was doubled over with silent laughter. She gestured me to follow her, and we quietly moved out of the bedroom.  When we reached the living room, she burst out laughing like a free-flowing drain and said, ‘It serves him right for making a drama out of nothing. God, how he strutted and bragged like Chaunticleer!’ I rebuked her, ‘Why are you gloating at his failure? The AC is ours after all.’

When, a minute later, we went back to the scene of no action, the electrician looked completely spent. There was no need to ask him whether I could call a Voltas technician.

Scene Two opens on a short, undernourished Voltas technician (SUVT) arriving on my balcony. He wore a pair of skimpy jeans far below his belly button, which accentuated his shortness, and a cheap, crumpled casual shirt with fading designs on it. With a scruffy beard and long, scraggly hair perfectly matching this sartorial disorder, he walked into the bedroom with a scraggier-looking technician following him. After fumbling with the AC for some time and attempting a conversation with Voltas Customer Care (CC), he looked at his scraggier colleague in a gesture of helplessness.

‘What’s the problem?’ I asked him.

‘CC cannot speak Telugu, sir,’ he said.

‘And that’s the only language you can understand, I suppose… Perhaps I can speak to CC.’

I called CC, opting for English. A CC executive spoke. It took me some time to figure out that what she spoke was English. And when, eventually, my ears got attuned to her lingo, I started passing on her instructions to SUVT.

‘Turn the power on. Does a code appear on the display screen?’

‘Yes, c1.’

‘c1, OK. Now, note down this password.’

‘OK.’

‘Turn the remote on now.’

‘Done it.’

‘Press the saver key on the remote. Keep pressing it for ten seconds. Now, what do you see on the remote display?’

‘0’

‘Now, use the UP or DOWN keys to select alphanumeric characters…’

This went on. After a certain stage, she said, ‘Sorry, sir, there is a technical problem. Please call us after some time.’

SUVT and his colleague looked tired after this exercise. They went out, came back, and went out again. When they returned, I asked them, ‘What’s the point of this walking exercise? Are you really Voltas technicians?’ ‘Yes, sir, but we’ve recently joined the company,’ SUVT said. ‘And we are not well up in activation techniques.’ ‘Why did you come then?’ I asked him. With a sheepish look, he took out of his pocket a smartphone whose size was disproportionate to his own diminutive figure and called a senior technician. ‘He’s on the way, sir. Will be here in five minutes.’

An hour later, two more technicians arrived, and Scene Three opened on a large congregation of Voltas technicians in my bedroom with my anxiety levels reaching a crescendo, given that the coronavirus was still around. The most senior of the technicians called the CC now, and started dancing like a cat on a hot tin roof: there was no one to speak to him in Telugu. I was the only one on the scene who could understand the Voltas CC lingo to some extent, and so I girded up my loins and pitched in. To cut a long story short, the AC was at last unlocked.

There was a serious epilogue to this otherwise farcical comedy. ‘Can you pay the installation charge, sir?’ asked the senior technician without looking shamefaced. ‘Rs 499 plus 18% GST plus…’ I gave him Rs 625 and dismissed all four of them. My electrician, who had been uncharacteristically silent throughout the activation drama, collected Rs 1800 and quietly left the place. The place was now rid of all the farceurs.

‘Tata is a great man,’ Shanthi mused reflectively.

‘How did you discover that?’

‘With employees whose skills seem to be little better than Neanderthal, he is able to produce a successful air conditioner. Isn’t that greatness?’

‘Indeed.’