My dear family, students, friends and colleagues,
Like the ordinary people whose heroic stories they tell and the peaceful places they belong to, local papers are charming. No big city paper can ever hope to (though it may pretend to) match the intimate way a small local paper grows up and on its readers.
I chose to work for 13 years in one such local paper, Maharashtra Herald (MH) – Pune’s very own local. Tuesday, 22 September marked the birthday of MH, founded by Abel David in 1962 as Poona Herald.
I salute you, my dear MH.
In this personal memoir, I will not try to write a history of ‘the old MH’ – before it was taken over in 2003. Far abler seniors – Harry David, Taher Shaikh and Y.V. Krishnamurthy – deserve to write the first pages. I shall tell a few stories, hoping to catch the feel of ‘the old MH’.
For me, two relics in Pune camp reveal that MH existed, once upon a time: first, the board of the Maharashtra Herald printing press on East Street; second, the location of its last office, above Nehru Memorial Hall and opposite Supriya, before ‘the old MH’ was taken over.
The silver jubilee edition of MH in 1987 includes a memoir by Dileep Padgaonkar called, “Salad days on East Street”, in which he writes of visiting the old MH office on East Street, hoping to bump into some of his old mates, who used to share that tiny space on the wooden floor, where he started his career in Poona Herald.
If I went there today, would I spot ‘the old MH’ office? East Street is become a stinking gutter, clogged with parked cars and choked by multi-storeyed buildings. Nothing on the ground – except the MH board – can evoke those days, which survive only in my mind’s eye.
“We are all in the gutter,” said Oscar Wilde, “But some of us are looking up … at the stars.” This memoir is dedicated to each of my colleagues at 'the old MH' who learned me to keep looking up.
My first full-time job as a journalist
While I was looking for a job, my wife’s friend, Vijay Lele, told me to meet Mr. S.D. Wagh, the editor of MH. Mr Wagh’s secretary, Duru Notani (later Tejwani) was the first person to welcome me to MH, at the top of the narrow staircase, outside the editor’s cabin. In the left-hand corner, a teleprinter rattled away.
After the interview, I asked Mr. Wagh about my working hours. “Twenty-four hours,” he said, trapping in three words the future of us journalists. (The 24x7 farce of ‘breaking news’ had not yet been concocted.) Thus began my first day in the profession of full-time journalism on 2 May 1983, as a sub-editor on a salary of 600 rupees per month.
(During my lecture a few days ago, I told my first-year students of journalism this story, to clearly convey the ‘24 hours’ attitude to work that is expected, if they want to become sincere, hard-working and alert journalists.)
Initiated into the taboos of the tribe of scribes by the silent Mathew Fernandes (one of the many Goan gurus who have learned me the lessons of life), I slowly stumbled across the subtleties of subbing. One by one, I met and grew to know, to love and be loved by, our three seniors – Taher, Murthy and Harry.
Since MH was the only English paper to be delivered at the doorstep and hit the stands, first thing in the morning, it was ‘the local paper’. (The Times of India and Indian Express used to come down to Pune by road from Bombay, late, in the afternoon.)
But the Yinglish snobs turned up their noses and looked down upon the evergreen ‘Cinema Calendar’ in the MH, where the matinees were devoured by college students. But everyone read the obituaries.
I worked ‘24 hours’ in MH from 1983 to 1996, being graciously granted ‘leave without pay’ during 1990-93, while I accompanied my wife, who studied abroad, to take care of our daughter J.K. Pallavi, who was then three years old.
Don’t give an opportunity to those who would wilfully distort your words
In Part 2 of this series, I shall describe who did what; where and when; why and how: the 5 Ws and one H at ‘the old MH’. Here I will take off from a Shashi Tharoor sentence that triggered this post: “I now realise I shouldn’t assume people will appreciate humour. And you shouldn’t give those who would wilfully distort your words an opportunity to do so.”
Tharoor is speaking about how Sonia sycophants like Jayanti Natarajan, disguised as Congress spokespersons, have wilfully distorted his “cattle class” tweet. Tharoor says you should not give humourless sycophants a stick and then not expect them to hit you with it. How I recall literally conjuring a stick out of my mind and giving it to a sycophant in ‘the old MH’ to beat me with it.
Our editor Mr. Wagh, a strict disciplinarian, used to write his editorials, longhand, in his cabin. My wild imagination converted him into a “waghoba” (tiger) in his den. ‘Wagh’ into ‘waghoba’. This nickname fell on the eager ears of a flatterer, who dutifully forwarded it to Mr Wagh.
One day, Mr Wagh called me into his cabin and asked me whether I called him “waghoba”. When I said yes, he smiled and said it was not proper for me to call him so, in front of others who may wilfully distort my words, implying that I thereby intended to disrespect the editor. I said I did not intend to hurt his feelings. And there the matter rested.
Till now … when the Tharoor tweet stirred a secret recess of my brain, while I was thinking out this tribute to ‘the old MH’. And out sprang a … ‘waghoba’.
*****
Any one who has worked in ‘the old MH’ may be asked, “What is the secret of the success of MH”? This is my answer: we borrowed a human recipe used by all parents who bring up their children: loving, caring and sharing; a sense of belonging.
The next post on “Journey of life: rules of the road – Part 2” will appear on or after Sunday, 4 October 2009.
Your support is my strength,
- Joe.
Pune, India, Wednesday, 23 September 2009.
Showing posts with label facts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label facts. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Monday, September 7, 2009
Journey of life: rules of the road
My dear family, students, friends and colleagues,
Describing life as a journey and asserting, “The journey is its own reward” are two common ways of seeing life.
For me these two ways are true, because travelling had been an integral part of my life till the age of 31, when I got married in 1982 and, for the first time, thought of settling down – in Pune. Moving from station to station with our father, a railwayman in the Signals & Telecom Department of the Central Railway, I had become a wanderer, a gypsy.
What are the rules of the road in the journey of life? The first and foremost is: the strong and the mighty shall protect the weak and defenceless.
While at Maharashtra Herald (MH) in Pune, I had the opportunity to interview ordinary as well as extra-ordinary persons, irrespective of their standing. But one extra-ordinary man whom I recall as ordinary and common is “S.M.”. These initials belong to one of Maharashtra’s greatest political leaders of the twentieth century, the late S.M. Joshi and the initials “S.M.” stand for: “Simple Man”.
For an MH photo-feature, with pictures by one of India’s finest photo-journalists D. Sanjay, we had interviewed “S.M.” during an entire day, travelling across the city to the places that were significant in his life.
Towards the end of our interview, I asked him, “Which was the one virtue he felt he lacked in himself but admired most in others?” The simple man replied, “Karuna”, using the Marathi word for “compassion”.
Compassion, above all, is the one human quality that is, for me, at the root of the first rule of the road in the journey of life: “The strong and the mighty shall protect the weak and defenceless”.
Glorifying greed; mocking the poor
Nowadays, this rule of the road must be underlined because the global free-marketeers, like the gamblers and smugglers and thieves of yore, inspired by the politics of Thatcher and Reagan, have glorified greed and mocked the poor, in the name of freedom for the individual and the market.
And though Prime Minister Manmohan Singh speaks of “inclusive” growth, I believe that is mere lip service to win votes, while his colleague Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission, executes the brutal agenda of Liberalisation, Privatisation and Globalisation; what I call LPG, the poisonous gas which will most surely destroy the weak and poor in India.
Some shocking indicators are the unacceptable number of infants who die every year and severe malnourishment among children in India. Among adults, look at the suicides among farmers and starvation deaths in villages, due to agrarian distress. You must find out the horror of the figures for yourselves.
On the road, this rule translates simply: the first priority should be for the pedestrian, the citizen who walks on two feet. But look at our cities. The pavements are being cut and the roads are being taken over by cars and two-wheelers.
In education, this rule means: priority for primary education in the villages. In health: save the girl child, ban female infanticide.
For the environment: embrace trees to the death, like Shahid Amritadevi and 362 other Bishnoi martyrs at Khejarli village, near Jodhpur in 1730.
In journalism, save and cherish the reporter of facts, the most endangered species in journalism, from the rampage of the advertorial-writers, the deception of the PR agencies, the target-mad circulation and marketing departments –- the whole gang of space marketeers, in the pay of corporate profiteering.
Add to this list. In general, resist the bullying and persecution of the minorities by the brute majority in any sphere of Life and Nature.
*****
I have kept this post brief, down to 600 words, because I want my readers to participate – my family, my students, my friends and my colleagues. Do you agree with my first rule of the road on the journey called Life? Do you have some other rule that you would place at No. 1? What are some of the other rules along the road to Life?
I thank all those who sent me their best wishes on completing three years of my second innings. I hope I can live up to your expectations and make our coming years worth our while.
Your support is my strength,
- Joe.
Pune, India, Sunday, 6th September 2009.
Describing life as a journey and asserting, “The journey is its own reward” are two common ways of seeing life.
For me these two ways are true, because travelling had been an integral part of my life till the age of 31, when I got married in 1982 and, for the first time, thought of settling down – in Pune. Moving from station to station with our father, a railwayman in the Signals & Telecom Department of the Central Railway, I had become a wanderer, a gypsy.
What are the rules of the road in the journey of life? The first and foremost is: the strong and the mighty shall protect the weak and defenceless.
While at Maharashtra Herald (MH) in Pune, I had the opportunity to interview ordinary as well as extra-ordinary persons, irrespective of their standing. But one extra-ordinary man whom I recall as ordinary and common is “S.M.”. These initials belong to one of Maharashtra’s greatest political leaders of the twentieth century, the late S.M. Joshi and the initials “S.M.” stand for: “Simple Man”.
For an MH photo-feature, with pictures by one of India’s finest photo-journalists D. Sanjay, we had interviewed “S.M.” during an entire day, travelling across the city to the places that were significant in his life.
Towards the end of our interview, I asked him, “Which was the one virtue he felt he lacked in himself but admired most in others?” The simple man replied, “Karuna”, using the Marathi word for “compassion”.
Compassion, above all, is the one human quality that is, for me, at the root of the first rule of the road in the journey of life: “The strong and the mighty shall protect the weak and defenceless”.
Glorifying greed; mocking the poor
Nowadays, this rule of the road must be underlined because the global free-marketeers, like the gamblers and smugglers and thieves of yore, inspired by the politics of Thatcher and Reagan, have glorified greed and mocked the poor, in the name of freedom for the individual and the market.
And though Prime Minister Manmohan Singh speaks of “inclusive” growth, I believe that is mere lip service to win votes, while his colleague Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission, executes the brutal agenda of Liberalisation, Privatisation and Globalisation; what I call LPG, the poisonous gas which will most surely destroy the weak and poor in India.
Some shocking indicators are the unacceptable number of infants who die every year and severe malnourishment among children in India. Among adults, look at the suicides among farmers and starvation deaths in villages, due to agrarian distress. You must find out the horror of the figures for yourselves.
On the road, this rule translates simply: the first priority should be for the pedestrian, the citizen who walks on two feet. But look at our cities. The pavements are being cut and the roads are being taken over by cars and two-wheelers.
In education, this rule means: priority for primary education in the villages. In health: save the girl child, ban female infanticide.
For the environment: embrace trees to the death, like Shahid Amritadevi and 362 other Bishnoi martyrs at Khejarli village, near Jodhpur in 1730.
In journalism, save and cherish the reporter of facts, the most endangered species in journalism, from the rampage of the advertorial-writers, the deception of the PR agencies, the target-mad circulation and marketing departments –- the whole gang of space marketeers, in the pay of corporate profiteering.
Add to this list. In general, resist the bullying and persecution of the minorities by the brute majority in any sphere of Life and Nature.
*****
I have kept this post brief, down to 600 words, because I want my readers to participate – my family, my students, my friends and my colleagues. Do you agree with my first rule of the road on the journey called Life? Do you have some other rule that you would place at No. 1? What are some of the other rules along the road to Life?
I thank all those who sent me their best wishes on completing three years of my second innings. I hope I can live up to your expectations and make our coming years worth our while.
Your support is my strength,
- Joe.
Pune, India, Sunday, 6th September 2009.
Monday, August 10, 2009
Fight the H1N1 flu with facts, not fear
My dear students, friends and colleagues,
The title “Fight the flu with facts, not fear” of this post is borrowed from an excellent report entitled, “To fight flu, facts not fear” (30 July 2009, Indian Express, Pune edition), written by Anuradha Mascarenhas, one of Pune’s outstanding journalists.
On Saturday, 8 August, we took our daughter for screening, since she had high fever for two days. I reached the municipal dispensary at 9.30 am. The Dr Dwarkanath Kotnis Memorial Municipal Dispensary, locally called Gadikhana, is located in the heart of old Pune city, near Mandai (the old market area). This was two days after August 6, the 64th anniversary of the dropping of the A-bomb on Hiroshima by the USA.
While waiting, I spoke with some civic employees. One of them was upset that some well-off people seemed to look down upon the civic dispensary. He felt rich folk wanted the government to allow private doctors and hospitals to treat the flu, because they did not want to mix with poor people and get treated in government hospitals. A rickshaw driver also told me that a lot of “shrimant” people, who were his customers, resented that they had to wait in queues at the govt hospitals.
This is a reflection of the sad state of public health in India. The rich have their private hospitals and the poor have to fend for themselves in govt hospitals. I have stayed in Britain and marvel as well as envy the wonderful National Health Service, which even the free-maketeering Thatcherites were unable to dismantle. This is a topic of debate and I want your comments on this point.
*****
When my wife and daughter arrived, we went to the first floor. There were around 50-60 persons waiting in two queues. One queue started near the staircase, at one end of the corridor. Here two clerks were issuing case papers. After you got a case paper, you stood in another queue to meet the doctor.
I did not go in, but my wife said the doctors were deciding, whether to take the throat swab or not and send you to Naidu Hospital for testing, on the basis of whether you had come in contact with a positive patient or you had certain symptoms.
So, on the basis of the screening, our daughter was sent home with some medicine. This “testing protocol” seemed inadequate. The next day, 7 August, I heard the government and doctors felt the H1N1 virus was getting “entrenched in the local community” and, therefore, anyone having the symptoms should be sent to Naidu Hospital for a throat swab and test. This is the proper way, but I do not know whether it is being done.
The other impression one gets is that the municipal doctors may not be sending you for the test because, they say, it is “expensive”. If you insist that a test be done, they tell you that the test costs Rs. 10,000 and not everyone who asks for it will be tested. This naturally makes people anxious. Fortunately, our daughter’s fever lasted for two days and has now subsided.
Deepthy Menon, Mumbai Bureau chief, Times Now, was also down in Pune covering the flu. I could not go to meet her, since I am a heart patient and did not want to risk going into the crowded Naidu or Sassoon Hospital areas.
This makes me wonder: I hope our journalists are taking proper precautions while covering the flu, since they are going into crowded areas where there a large number of patients, some of whom maybe carriers. I wish that my students and colleagues keep their health while covering this difficult assignment. This is part of the job, an occupational hazard.
As I was touching up this post, I spoke to Deepthy (an SIMC alumni) and she told me that she was at home with a cold. She had none of the three key symptoms (a sore throat and cough; a running nose; breathlessness), but since she was covering Naidu and Sassoon Hospitals in Pune, I told her she must point this out to the doctor and ensure she gets tested. I called her again, Wednesday, 19 August. She's at home, tested negative for the flu, recovering.
Journalists like doctors, nurses and other care-givers fall in the high-risk vulnerable groups. Take care.
*****
I think many newspapers in Pune, especially TV channels (my bugbear), more so the Marathi vahini like Star Mazha and IBN Lokmat, are adding to the scare by repeatedly showing photos of people in masks and long queues. This frightens citizens into a panic. Can’t they display comforting visuals? Also the copy and the sound bytes are hyped up and the headlines scream out at you.
On the other hand, a heart-warming story entitled, “Swine flu work in process” (IE, Pune, 9 August 2009) by Anuradha Mascarenhas educates us gently. She has described in detail the hard-working scientists and technicians of the National Institute of Virology (NIV), Pune, doing their job quietly. This is the kind of patient, routine, groundwork that goes on – nameless, faceless and unsung.
(Their work reminded me of my early days in Maharashtra Herald as a sub-editor from 1983 onwards. Subs correct grammar and spellings, touch up the body, iron out the creases and wrinkles, give an eye-grabbing headline and place the story where it will surely be read as soon as the reader picks up the morning paper. But the subs remain – nameless, faceless and unsung.)
By putting human names and warm faces to the “scientific” detectives at NIV tracking down the deadly virus, Anuradha has made accessible and credible what is hidden from the public, behind a veil of needless official secrecy. But nowhere has she glorified the scientific workers and created “celebrities” out of these diligent government servants, whom it has currently become fashionable to malign.
Let us thank Dr. A. C. Mishra, Director, NIV, and Dr. M. S. Chadha, Deputy Director, NIV, with their sincere team as well as the competent government authorities, for permitting Anuradha to write this report. I have covered the NIV beat and I know what it means to have public-minded scientists cooperating and collaborating with journalists in order to educate the public.
I have watched Anuradha blossom into an outstanding journalist, first at Maharashtra Herald and then Indian Express, both in Pune. She is a gold medallist from the Department of Communication and Journalism, University of Pune. I am proud of her as a colleague and wish her all that she deserves. Click here for her stories on the IE website.
Anuradha’s stories serve another public purpose. On behalf of the people of Pune, her stories are an open way of thanking the NIV team for their hard work and sincere efforts – beyond the call of duty and the monthly pay-packet.
Easy it is to criticise government officials. But difficult it is to say a good word when they do a fine job, in adverse circumstances against what Dr Margaret Chan, D-G, WHO, calls a “capricious” virus. By her stories, Anuradha says “Thank you!” to the scientists on our behalf.
*****
Another journalist who is doing excellent work educating the Pune public, rather than driving them into hysteria, is Vinita Deshmukh, editor of the weekly Intelligent Pune (iPune). She was a recipient of the Chameli Devi Jain award for Outstanding Woman Mediaperson for 2008-09.
The iPune has written about the work being done by government hospitals in Pune, "Kudos to Naidu Hospital" by Piyush Kumar Tripathi (31 July - 6 August 2009, iPune). This piece appeared when there were 59 cases (256 cases by 10 August) in Pune and even before the first death due to the H1N1 virus took place in Pune on 3 August.
At a time when most newspapers were criticising the government for its response, the iPune report shows how the Naidu Hospital doctors, nurses and staff are rising to the occasion and boosts their morale.
*****
Here are some links that you may find useful.
First, the swine influenza link on the NIV site, which leads you to other important links and documents. You can also call NIV on two phone numbers during the day. But make sure do not trouble them needlessly. They are busy doing our work day-and-night.
Second, the guidelines on the World Health Organisation (WHO) site. I found the FAQs, especially “What can I do?” most valuable. Navigate this site and unearth treasures here.
Third, the general information section on the H1N1 flu at the website of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Here I found “What to do if you get flu-like symptoms” factual and hence reassuring. This site also has a wealth of facts and figures.
Four, we have the site of our Ministry of Health & Family Welfare, Govt. of India. Please follow the instructions given here. There is also offcial data on this site. If you want to make our elected representatives answerable to the people, this is a site to monitor.
Since a lot of us are probably wearing masks, Rujuta Teredesai sent me this useful WHO advice on wearing masks. Click here.
These are some of the websites and pieces I talked about in the beginning of this post that will help us “Fight the H1N1 flu with facts, not fear”. Let us hope that, with facts and figures getting the upper hand, the man-made panic and the media-fed frenzy subsides.
Drink lots of water and wash your hands - two simple precautions we all must take. Take care.
Your support is my strength.
- Joe.
Pune, India, Monday, 10 August 2009, the day after Nagasaki Day.
The title “Fight the flu with facts, not fear” of this post is borrowed from an excellent report entitled, “To fight flu, facts not fear” (30 July 2009, Indian Express, Pune edition), written by Anuradha Mascarenhas, one of Pune’s outstanding journalists.
On Saturday, 8 August, we took our daughter for screening, since she had high fever for two days. I reached the municipal dispensary at 9.30 am. The Dr Dwarkanath Kotnis Memorial Municipal Dispensary, locally called Gadikhana, is located in the heart of old Pune city, near Mandai (the old market area). This was two days after August 6, the 64th anniversary of the dropping of the A-bomb on Hiroshima by the USA.
While waiting, I spoke with some civic employees. One of them was upset that some well-off people seemed to look down upon the civic dispensary. He felt rich folk wanted the government to allow private doctors and hospitals to treat the flu, because they did not want to mix with poor people and get treated in government hospitals. A rickshaw driver also told me that a lot of “shrimant” people, who were his customers, resented that they had to wait in queues at the govt hospitals.
This is a reflection of the sad state of public health in India. The rich have their private hospitals and the poor have to fend for themselves in govt hospitals. I have stayed in Britain and marvel as well as envy the wonderful National Health Service, which even the free-maketeering Thatcherites were unable to dismantle. This is a topic of debate and I want your comments on this point.
*****
When my wife and daughter arrived, we went to the first floor. There were around 50-60 persons waiting in two queues. One queue started near the staircase, at one end of the corridor. Here two clerks were issuing case papers. After you got a case paper, you stood in another queue to meet the doctor.
I did not go in, but my wife said the doctors were deciding, whether to take the throat swab or not and send you to Naidu Hospital for testing, on the basis of whether you had come in contact with a positive patient or you had certain symptoms.
So, on the basis of the screening, our daughter was sent home with some medicine. This “testing protocol” seemed inadequate. The next day, 7 August, I heard the government and doctors felt the H1N1 virus was getting “entrenched in the local community” and, therefore, anyone having the symptoms should be sent to Naidu Hospital for a throat swab and test. This is the proper way, but I do not know whether it is being done.
The other impression one gets is that the municipal doctors may not be sending you for the test because, they say, it is “expensive”. If you insist that a test be done, they tell you that the test costs Rs. 10,000 and not everyone who asks for it will be tested. This naturally makes people anxious. Fortunately, our daughter’s fever lasted for two days and has now subsided.
Deepthy Menon, Mumbai Bureau chief, Times Now, was also down in Pune covering the flu. I could not go to meet her, since I am a heart patient and did not want to risk going into the crowded Naidu or Sassoon Hospital areas.
This makes me wonder: I hope our journalists are taking proper precautions while covering the flu, since they are going into crowded areas where there a large number of patients, some of whom maybe carriers. I wish that my students and colleagues keep their health while covering this difficult assignment. This is part of the job, an occupational hazard.
As I was touching up this post, I spoke to Deepthy (an SIMC alumni) and she told me that she was at home with a cold. She had none of the three key symptoms (a sore throat and cough; a running nose; breathlessness), but since she was covering Naidu and Sassoon Hospitals in Pune, I told her she must point this out to the doctor and ensure she gets tested. I called her again, Wednesday, 19 August. She's at home, tested negative for the flu, recovering.
Journalists like doctors, nurses and other care-givers fall in the high-risk vulnerable groups. Take care.
*****
I think many newspapers in Pune, especially TV channels (my bugbear), more so the Marathi vahini like Star Mazha and IBN Lokmat, are adding to the scare by repeatedly showing photos of people in masks and long queues. This frightens citizens into a panic. Can’t they display comforting visuals? Also the copy and the sound bytes are hyped up and the headlines scream out at you.
On the other hand, a heart-warming story entitled, “Swine flu work in process” (IE, Pune, 9 August 2009) by Anuradha Mascarenhas educates us gently. She has described in detail the hard-working scientists and technicians of the National Institute of Virology (NIV), Pune, doing their job quietly. This is the kind of patient, routine, groundwork that goes on – nameless, faceless and unsung.
(Their work reminded me of my early days in Maharashtra Herald as a sub-editor from 1983 onwards. Subs correct grammar and spellings, touch up the body, iron out the creases and wrinkles, give an eye-grabbing headline and place the story where it will surely be read as soon as the reader picks up the morning paper. But the subs remain – nameless, faceless and unsung.)
By putting human names and warm faces to the “scientific” detectives at NIV tracking down the deadly virus, Anuradha has made accessible and credible what is hidden from the public, behind a veil of needless official secrecy. But nowhere has she glorified the scientific workers and created “celebrities” out of these diligent government servants, whom it has currently become fashionable to malign.
Let us thank Dr. A. C. Mishra, Director, NIV, and Dr. M. S. Chadha, Deputy Director, NIV, with their sincere team as well as the competent government authorities, for permitting Anuradha to write this report. I have covered the NIV beat and I know what it means to have public-minded scientists cooperating and collaborating with journalists in order to educate the public.
I have watched Anuradha blossom into an outstanding journalist, first at Maharashtra Herald and then Indian Express, both in Pune. She is a gold medallist from the Department of Communication and Journalism, University of Pune. I am proud of her as a colleague and wish her all that she deserves. Click here for her stories on the IE website.
Anuradha’s stories serve another public purpose. On behalf of the people of Pune, her stories are an open way of thanking the NIV team for their hard work and sincere efforts – beyond the call of duty and the monthly pay-packet.
Easy it is to criticise government officials. But difficult it is to say a good word when they do a fine job, in adverse circumstances against what Dr Margaret Chan, D-G, WHO, calls a “capricious” virus. By her stories, Anuradha says “Thank you!” to the scientists on our behalf.
*****
Another journalist who is doing excellent work educating the Pune public, rather than driving them into hysteria, is Vinita Deshmukh, editor of the weekly Intelligent Pune (iPune). She was a recipient of the Chameli Devi Jain award for Outstanding Woman Mediaperson for 2008-09.
The iPune has written about the work being done by government hospitals in Pune, "Kudos to Naidu Hospital" by Piyush Kumar Tripathi (31 July - 6 August 2009, iPune). This piece appeared when there were 59 cases (256 cases by 10 August) in Pune and even before the first death due to the H1N1 virus took place in Pune on 3 August.
At a time when most newspapers were criticising the government for its response, the iPune report shows how the Naidu Hospital doctors, nurses and staff are rising to the occasion and boosts their morale.
*****
Here are some links that you may find useful.
First, the swine influenza link on the NIV site, which leads you to other important links and documents. You can also call NIV on two phone numbers during the day. But make sure do not trouble them needlessly. They are busy doing our work day-and-night.
Second, the guidelines on the World Health Organisation (WHO) site. I found the FAQs, especially “What can I do?” most valuable. Navigate this site and unearth treasures here.
Third, the general information section on the H1N1 flu at the website of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Here I found “What to do if you get flu-like symptoms” factual and hence reassuring. This site also has a wealth of facts and figures.
Four, we have the site of our Ministry of Health & Family Welfare, Govt. of India. Please follow the instructions given here. There is also offcial data on this site. If you want to make our elected representatives answerable to the people, this is a site to monitor.
Since a lot of us are probably wearing masks, Rujuta Teredesai sent me this useful WHO advice on wearing masks. Click here.
These are some of the websites and pieces I talked about in the beginning of this post that will help us “Fight the H1N1 flu with facts, not fear”. Let us hope that, with facts and figures getting the upper hand, the man-made panic and the media-fed frenzy subsides.
Drink lots of water and wash your hands - two simple precautions we all must take. Take care.
Your support is my strength.
- Joe.
Pune, India, Monday, 10 August 2009, the day after Nagasaki Day.
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Our World is Connected. Why isn’t Education? – Part 2
My dear students, friends and colleagues,
“Few colleges today seem to know how learning will happen on campuses,” my dear friend and colleague, Shashidhar Nanjundaiah, had asserted last Sunday in Part 1 of his loud-thinking on the inter-disciplinary approach to education.
Shashi went on to ask, “So how can educational institutions in India change their educational methodology to make our students think independently and constantly ask themselves questions?”
“Simple,” said Shashi, “Teach our students how to ask questions and how to seek out answers. To achieve this aim, independent and proactive learning is imperative. One way is to allow interdisciplinary research projects that will help students apply those linkages.”
*****
Shashi is grateful for the informed response to his piece on my blog, “The comments were so pertinent that I was compelled to respond, each time. The response speaks volumes of the quality of your readers, and their ability to think along with their writers. Clearly, you have been building an important niche here.
“I view the whole corpus of responses to my piece as a sort of a synecdoche for the kind of participative education, I’ve been clamouring for. Participative education involves:
- thinking through the content,
- relating it to the reader’s own life experiences,
- sharing the response based on an amalgamation of those experiences,
- the knowledge earned from the piece and
- critical thinking that we are all endowed with.
This process of participative education invaluably adds to our overall body of knowledge."
To all those who commented on Part 1, thank you so much. To all those who read the piece and had an opinions but did not comment, I urge you to write a few lines, now that you have the entire article in front of you. Part 2 of his piece follows:
*****
Our World is Connected. Why isn’t Education? – Part 2
By Shashidhar Nanjundaiah *
Our world does not have walls.
For a change, let education mime life.
Why were some of us made to take a specific combination of subjects at college – Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics or Biology at pre-university; then Physics, Chemistry or Mathematics at the graduate level?
Why not a mix of Physics, English Literature and Geography? Is it because the makers of education policy wanted to make sure the degrees they were awarding were either a ‘B.Sc.’ or a ‘B.A.’ or a “B.Com”?
Why?
The easiest thing for students to understand would be linkages across disciplines in the professional world. “Interdisciplinary” indicates that our learning needs to be across disciplines, not just in one discipline, and linking disciplines along the way.
The Harvard Business School, in its review seminar in November 2008, felt that its MBAs were increasingly becoming irrelevant in a globalizing world. The solution? Their MBA programs will become increasingly interdisciplinary in approach.
If each level of higher education provided the following to our budding managers, communicators and, even, techies, each of us would feel far more educated than we do today:
- Provide input in a variety of general subjects – Geography, History, Statistics, Economics, Psychology, to name a few – but convert that input in an applied way; applied to the student’s major field of study. All it takes is a refresher course of what we already learnt at school. But this time around, the subjects are linked to the profession that we have chosen.
In a survey I conducted in late 2008, senior industry practitioners and hiring managers in India, USA and UK unanimously agreed that this approach would provide a more global world-view and make students more employable.
- Allow students to choose independent research projects. Then allow them to choose which subjects would be most useful to their project. They could then choose which classes to take. The successful completion of an interdisciplinary project is a sure way of making graduates think analytically and to break down academic walls.
- Take the interdisciplinary approach, whereby curriculum experts and teachers collaborate to carefully ‘map’ the content of a subject on to the desired learning outcome.
(For example, in a management institute, that goal could be to produce an effective manager, equipped with a well-rounded world-view and sound judgment. A question we could be asking ourselves in designing such a course is, “Which portions of, say, Psychology, would be most relevant to a manager?”)
*****
Why are we learning what we’re learning? This is the trickiest question, of them all.
Why was I doing all that burette-pipette color-change stuff in the school lab? Why did I need to know the laws of probability? Did I ever question why I needed to know that Akbar died in 1605, while I didn’t know what his contribution was to our modern society?
The answer is: we don’t know. Input (and output) among a majority of our educational institutions has been largely tools-oriented. If you asked professional graduates why they should or ought to know what they know, a large percentage would draw a blank.
The global marketplace is more demanding of broader skill-sets than before. The requirement set is solutions-driven: a combination of technological, professional, business, social and life skills – and much more that is intangible.
No longer is it enough to “super-specialize” – there is more demand for multi-skilled multi-specialists and generalists, who can adapt to specific environments. While some of these skills may evolve over time, many of them need a fundamental change in the way academic institutions think.
*****
Unesco’s four noble principles of learning
UNESCO’s International Commission on Education for the 21st Century states that education must be organized around four types of learning:
– learning to know, that is acquiring the instruments of understanding;
– learning to do, so as to be able to act creatively in one’s environment;
– learning to live together, so as to participate and cooperate with other people in all human activities; and
– learning to be, a progression toward sustainable existence.
The true integration of these four principles can only occur when learning is the acquisition of skills for employment and/or entrepreneurship.
*****
Right now, our system does not allow students to understand and use the interdisciplinary nature of their professional world. Some of us educators have pontificated on the application of subjects to the dreaded ‘real world’.
Some of the more daring ones among us have even attempted to point out what ought to have been the obvious: that the subjects we teach have a bearing on our life’s experiences.
But very few educators have attempted to show how. Further, few, if any, have attempted to draw linkages between subjects, or areas of study.
The integration and interaction of disciplines at once widens the boundaries, but expects an employee to quickly learn to specialize. It is important to recognize that education is only a trigger to learn, and often results in individuals understanding their own capabilities in a better way.
(Concluded.)
* Shashidhar Nanjundaiah was the Founding Director of the Pune-based Indira School of Communication (ISC) in 2004. For the first time in India, ISC modestly attempted an interdisciplinary approach. He was also the Director of the Symbiosis Institute of Mass Communication, Pune, and the Managing Editor of The Indian Express (North American Editions), New York.
Shashi now consults for educational institutions and is building an international college of interdisciplinary studies in India.
For more insight on the interdisciplinary approach, visit an interview dated 21 October 2008 with the author in “Higher Education Management”, founded by Keith Hampson, PhD. To read the full interview, click here.
You may also write directly to Shashi at: shashi.nanjundaiah@hotmail.com OR snanjundiah@hotmail.com
To all my dear readers who took the care and trouble to comment on Part 1: we thank you so much. To all who read the piece and had an opinion, but did not comment: we urge you to write this time, now that you have the entire article in front of you.
Please comment now, before you proceed to read the rest of my blog for this Sunday.
“Few colleges today seem to know how learning will happen on campuses,” my dear friend and colleague, Shashidhar Nanjundaiah, had asserted last Sunday in Part 1 of his loud-thinking on the inter-disciplinary approach to education.
Shashi went on to ask, “So how can educational institutions in India change their educational methodology to make our students think independently and constantly ask themselves questions?”
“Simple,” said Shashi, “Teach our students how to ask questions and how to seek out answers. To achieve this aim, independent and proactive learning is imperative. One way is to allow interdisciplinary research projects that will help students apply those linkages.”
*****
Shashi is grateful for the informed response to his piece on my blog, “The comments were so pertinent that I was compelled to respond, each time. The response speaks volumes of the quality of your readers, and their ability to think along with their writers. Clearly, you have been building an important niche here.
“I view the whole corpus of responses to my piece as a sort of a synecdoche for the kind of participative education, I’ve been clamouring for. Participative education involves:
- thinking through the content,
- relating it to the reader’s own life experiences,
- sharing the response based on an amalgamation of those experiences,
- the knowledge earned from the piece and
- critical thinking that we are all endowed with.
This process of participative education invaluably adds to our overall body of knowledge."
To all those who commented on Part 1, thank you so much. To all those who read the piece and had an opinions but did not comment, I urge you to write a few lines, now that you have the entire article in front of you. Part 2 of his piece follows:
*****
Our World is Connected. Why isn’t Education? – Part 2
By Shashidhar Nanjundaiah *
Our world does not have walls.
For a change, let education mime life.
Why were some of us made to take a specific combination of subjects at college – Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics or Biology at pre-university; then Physics, Chemistry or Mathematics at the graduate level?
Why not a mix of Physics, English Literature and Geography? Is it because the makers of education policy wanted to make sure the degrees they were awarding were either a ‘B.Sc.’ or a ‘B.A.’ or a “B.Com”?
Why?
The easiest thing for students to understand would be linkages across disciplines in the professional world. “Interdisciplinary” indicates that our learning needs to be across disciplines, not just in one discipline, and linking disciplines along the way.
The Harvard Business School, in its review seminar in November 2008, felt that its MBAs were increasingly becoming irrelevant in a globalizing world. The solution? Their MBA programs will become increasingly interdisciplinary in approach.
If each level of higher education provided the following to our budding managers, communicators and, even, techies, each of us would feel far more educated than we do today:
- Provide input in a variety of general subjects – Geography, History, Statistics, Economics, Psychology, to name a few – but convert that input in an applied way; applied to the student’s major field of study. All it takes is a refresher course of what we already learnt at school. But this time around, the subjects are linked to the profession that we have chosen.
In a survey I conducted in late 2008, senior industry practitioners and hiring managers in India, USA and UK unanimously agreed that this approach would provide a more global world-view and make students more employable.
- Allow students to choose independent research projects. Then allow them to choose which subjects would be most useful to their project. They could then choose which classes to take. The successful completion of an interdisciplinary project is a sure way of making graduates think analytically and to break down academic walls.
- Take the interdisciplinary approach, whereby curriculum experts and teachers collaborate to carefully ‘map’ the content of a subject on to the desired learning outcome.
(For example, in a management institute, that goal could be to produce an effective manager, equipped with a well-rounded world-view and sound judgment. A question we could be asking ourselves in designing such a course is, “Which portions of, say, Psychology, would be most relevant to a manager?”)
*****
Why are we learning what we’re learning? This is the trickiest question, of them all.
Why was I doing all that burette-pipette color-change stuff in the school lab? Why did I need to know the laws of probability? Did I ever question why I needed to know that Akbar died in 1605, while I didn’t know what his contribution was to our modern society?
The answer is: we don’t know. Input (and output) among a majority of our educational institutions has been largely tools-oriented. If you asked professional graduates why they should or ought to know what they know, a large percentage would draw a blank.
The global marketplace is more demanding of broader skill-sets than before. The requirement set is solutions-driven: a combination of technological, professional, business, social and life skills – and much more that is intangible.
No longer is it enough to “super-specialize” – there is more demand for multi-skilled multi-specialists and generalists, who can adapt to specific environments. While some of these skills may evolve over time, many of them need a fundamental change in the way academic institutions think.
*****
Unesco’s four noble principles of learning
UNESCO’s International Commission on Education for the 21st Century states that education must be organized around four types of learning:
– learning to know, that is acquiring the instruments of understanding;
– learning to do, so as to be able to act creatively in one’s environment;
– learning to live together, so as to participate and cooperate with other people in all human activities; and
– learning to be, a progression toward sustainable existence.
The true integration of these four principles can only occur when learning is the acquisition of skills for employment and/or entrepreneurship.
*****
Right now, our system does not allow students to understand and use the interdisciplinary nature of their professional world. Some of us educators have pontificated on the application of subjects to the dreaded ‘real world’.
Some of the more daring ones among us have even attempted to point out what ought to have been the obvious: that the subjects we teach have a bearing on our life’s experiences.
But very few educators have attempted to show how. Further, few, if any, have attempted to draw linkages between subjects, or areas of study.
The integration and interaction of disciplines at once widens the boundaries, but expects an employee to quickly learn to specialize. It is important to recognize that education is only a trigger to learn, and often results in individuals understanding their own capabilities in a better way.
(Concluded.)
* Shashidhar Nanjundaiah was the Founding Director of the Pune-based Indira School of Communication (ISC) in 2004. For the first time in India, ISC modestly attempted an interdisciplinary approach. He was also the Director of the Symbiosis Institute of Mass Communication, Pune, and the Managing Editor of The Indian Express (North American Editions), New York.
Shashi now consults for educational institutions and is building an international college of interdisciplinary studies in India.
For more insight on the interdisciplinary approach, visit an interview dated 21 October 2008 with the author in “Higher Education Management”, founded by Keith Hampson, PhD. To read the full interview, click here.
You may also write directly to Shashi at: shashi.nanjundaiah@hotmail.com OR snanjundiah@hotmail.com
To all my dear readers who took the care and trouble to comment on Part 1: we thank you so much. To all who read the piece and had an opinion, but did not comment: we urge you to write this time, now that you have the entire article in front of you.
Please comment now, before you proceed to read the rest of my blog for this Sunday.
Sunday, July 5, 2009
Our World is Connected. Why isn’t Education? – Part 1
My dear students, friends and colleagues,
Not just film-stars and cricketers, but journalists, editors and directors of educational institutions are greedy to become celebrities. Soon, there are no engrossing movies, no great cricket matches, no facts in our newspapers, no editorials inspiring us to thought and action and no "drawing forth" of young minds.
On the 9th of June, I met again with Shashi Nanjundaiah in Pune. Some of you are his students, when he was a director at SIMC and then a founding director of the Indira School of Communication in 2004 in Pune. Others may have taught at the places he gave direction to.
I admire him. Shashi is different. He is not a celebrity. Shashi is committed to excellence in the quality of education.
Like some of my editor friends who can still write and inspire their readers to action, but unlike some cricketers who spend less time on the field but more seconds on the TV screen endorsing brands, Shashi thinks deeply and acts.
We sat with coffee and idlis at Wadeshwar Restaurant on F.C. Road, catching up with the waters that passed under Lakdi Pul. Soon the minutes passed into hours. What was it that swallowed our time? When we finished our academic conversation, I asked Shashi to write, for my blog, a piece about the inter-disciplinary approach in education, that gripped his mind. Here it is:
*****
Our World is Connected. Why isn’t Education? – Part 1
By Shashidhar Nanjundaiah *
Can you imagine a switch that lights up each time there is mail in your outdoor postal mailbox, and another switch transfers the mail indoors through a pipe? Suitable for the elderly, especially in treacherous weather. Too American? Well, that’s because it is.
Recently, I had an opportunity to attend an "Invention Convention" for school children up to nine years, whose products were chosen from about 10 schools in rural Warren County in New Jersey, USA — certainly not known for scientific geniuses.
The children came up with products that were practical, and provided practical answers to some household and social problems of modern American life. What impressed me even more than the design elements was the preparation of the school children to explain, pitch, market and sell effectively.
The mail-switch product, fully functional, was one such on display there — designed by an 8-year-old, sparkling-eyed, shy young woman of Indian origin. (Would it surprise us, if this young woman went on to do something innovative in her career?) There were 20 such products on display.
The ability of the students to come up with complete solutions, suitable for their local community, reflected their ability to identify a need, engage with their local environment and think seamlessly between physics, the social sciences, economics, design, as well as theory and common sense. They did so, in their own way, independently, and with some simple but effective guidance from their teachers.
Are our professional graduates employable?
Higher education in India typically suffers from "little creation of knowledge". This was a conclusion reached at a 2006 seminar called Washington Symposium NAFSA: Association of International Educators. They probably stopped short of another obvious fact: the lack of knowledge creation in our campuses is a major reason that many of our professional graduates may not be "employable".
Less than 25 percent of our country’s professional graduates are employable, says a Government of India research. As Michael Spence said in the 1970s, and Infosys's Chief Mentor N. R. Narayanamurthy echoed more recently, educational institutes have merely become a captive space, from where employers pick up inherently bright students.
*****
We have heard the rhetoric from management gurus and industry experts about the category of Indian professional graduates, who are largely unemployable:
- Employees who lack the ability to apply classroom education to the professions. In particular, fresh graduates who lack the ability to analyze situations from an all-round or 360-degree approach.
- Students from institutions, typically restricted by lack of quality input and innovative teachers.
- Graduates who do not know the basic facts about their environment and their world and, in general, have neither developed a world-view nor can they independently analyze professional situations.
- Graduates who do not have the ability or attitude to learn — that supreme capability of problem-solving, to constantly ask fundamental (and original) questions and to seek out innovative answers.
*****
Unfortunately, the above list would include a majority of professional graduates and institutions in India. Individual talent will always continue to shine through, despite the system. But systemically, educational training in India does not prepare our graduates to solve problems in a practical world, where they must apply their field of study, as well as put their worldviews and life skills to test.
Surely, the education system in India and we cannot look the other way, while our industries (Infy itself, for example) are starting their own training institutes to transform professional graduates into employable professional graduates?
And it's not content that’s the problem, is it? Information is at our fingertips today — literally. It is the structure of learning, or pedagogy, that's dubious. Few colleges today seem to know how learning will happen on campuses.
So how can educational institutions in India change their educational methodology to make our students think independently and constantly ask themselves questions?
Simple: teach them how to ask questions and how to seek out answers. To achieve this aim, independent and proactive learning is imperative. One way is to allow interdisciplinary research projects that will help students apply those linkages.
(To be continued. Part 2 will appear Sunday, 12 July.)
* Shashidhar Nanjundaiah was the Founding Director of the Pune-based Indira School of Communication (ISC), which modestly attempted an interdisciplinary approach, for the first time in India. He was also the Director of the Symbiosis Institute of Media & Communication (SIMC), Pune, and the Managing Editor of The Indian Express (North American Editions), New York. He now consults for educational institutions and is building an international college of interdisciplinary studies in India.
For more insight on the interdisciplinary approach, visit an interview dated 21 October 2008 with the author in "Higher Education Management" founded by Keith Hampson, PhD. To read the full interview, click here.
Email: shashi.nanjundaiah@hotmail.com. He is also on Facebook.
Before you proceed with the rest of my blog below, Shashi and I would be grateful for your comments on his paper.
Not just film-stars and cricketers, but journalists, editors and directors of educational institutions are greedy to become celebrities. Soon, there are no engrossing movies, no great cricket matches, no facts in our newspapers, no editorials inspiring us to thought and action and no "drawing forth" of young minds.
On the 9th of June, I met again with Shashi Nanjundaiah in Pune. Some of you are his students, when he was a director at SIMC and then a founding director of the Indira School of Communication in 2004 in Pune. Others may have taught at the places he gave direction to.
I admire him. Shashi is different. He is not a celebrity. Shashi is committed to excellence in the quality of education.
Like some of my editor friends who can still write and inspire their readers to action, but unlike some cricketers who spend less time on the field but more seconds on the TV screen endorsing brands, Shashi thinks deeply and acts.
We sat with coffee and idlis at Wadeshwar Restaurant on F.C. Road, catching up with the waters that passed under Lakdi Pul. Soon the minutes passed into hours. What was it that swallowed our time? When we finished our academic conversation, I asked Shashi to write, for my blog, a piece about the inter-disciplinary approach in education, that gripped his mind. Here it is:
*****
Our World is Connected. Why isn’t Education? – Part 1
By Shashidhar Nanjundaiah *
Can you imagine a switch that lights up each time there is mail in your outdoor postal mailbox, and another switch transfers the mail indoors through a pipe? Suitable for the elderly, especially in treacherous weather. Too American? Well, that’s because it is.
Recently, I had an opportunity to attend an "Invention Convention" for school children up to nine years, whose products were chosen from about 10 schools in rural Warren County in New Jersey, USA — certainly not known for scientific geniuses.
The children came up with products that were practical, and provided practical answers to some household and social problems of modern American life. What impressed me even more than the design elements was the preparation of the school children to explain, pitch, market and sell effectively.
The mail-switch product, fully functional, was one such on display there — designed by an 8-year-old, sparkling-eyed, shy young woman of Indian origin. (Would it surprise us, if this young woman went on to do something innovative in her career?) There were 20 such products on display.
The ability of the students to come up with complete solutions, suitable for their local community, reflected their ability to identify a need, engage with their local environment and think seamlessly between physics, the social sciences, economics, design, as well as theory and common sense. They did so, in their own way, independently, and with some simple but effective guidance from their teachers.
Are our professional graduates employable?
Higher education in India typically suffers from "little creation of knowledge". This was a conclusion reached at a 2006 seminar called Washington Symposium NAFSA: Association of International Educators. They probably stopped short of another obvious fact: the lack of knowledge creation in our campuses is a major reason that many of our professional graduates may not be "employable".
Less than 25 percent of our country’s professional graduates are employable, says a Government of India research. As Michael Spence said in the 1970s, and Infosys's Chief Mentor N. R. Narayanamurthy echoed more recently, educational institutes have merely become a captive space, from where employers pick up inherently bright students.
*****
We have heard the rhetoric from management gurus and industry experts about the category of Indian professional graduates, who are largely unemployable:
- Employees who lack the ability to apply classroom education to the professions. In particular, fresh graduates who lack the ability to analyze situations from an all-round or 360-degree approach.
- Students from institutions, typically restricted by lack of quality input and innovative teachers.
- Graduates who do not know the basic facts about their environment and their world and, in general, have neither developed a world-view nor can they independently analyze professional situations.
- Graduates who do not have the ability or attitude to learn — that supreme capability of problem-solving, to constantly ask fundamental (and original) questions and to seek out innovative answers.
*****
Unfortunately, the above list would include a majority of professional graduates and institutions in India. Individual talent will always continue to shine through, despite the system. But systemically, educational training in India does not prepare our graduates to solve problems in a practical world, where they must apply their field of study, as well as put their worldviews and life skills to test.
Surely, the education system in India and we cannot look the other way, while our industries (Infy itself, for example) are starting their own training institutes to transform professional graduates into employable professional graduates?
And it's not content that’s the problem, is it? Information is at our fingertips today — literally. It is the structure of learning, or pedagogy, that's dubious. Few colleges today seem to know how learning will happen on campuses.
So how can educational institutions in India change their educational methodology to make our students think independently and constantly ask themselves questions?
Simple: teach them how to ask questions and how to seek out answers. To achieve this aim, independent and proactive learning is imperative. One way is to allow interdisciplinary research projects that will help students apply those linkages.
(To be continued. Part 2 will appear Sunday, 12 July.)
* Shashidhar Nanjundaiah was the Founding Director of the Pune-based Indira School of Communication (ISC), which modestly attempted an interdisciplinary approach, for the first time in India. He was also the Director of the Symbiosis Institute of Media & Communication (SIMC), Pune, and the Managing Editor of The Indian Express (North American Editions), New York. He now consults for educational institutions and is building an international college of interdisciplinary studies in India.
For more insight on the interdisciplinary approach, visit an interview dated 21 October 2008 with the author in "Higher Education Management" founded by Keith Hampson, PhD. To read the full interview, click here.
Email: shashi.nanjundaiah@hotmail.com. He is also on Facebook.
Before you proceed with the rest of my blog below, Shashi and I would be grateful for your comments on his paper.
Sunday, June 7, 2009
Ways of seeing ... with compassion
My dear students, friends and colleagues,
When the news first broke in India about racism in Australia, frankly I thought it was a recent phenomenon. So in response, I wrote a mild piece about how I had suffered at the hands of the racists when I was in Leeds, West Yorkshire, England, during 1990-93. And how I could stand up, resist and ... survive, with a little help from my friends.
My intention was to encourage the sharing of experiences -- ugly or bad or good -- from other parts of India and the world, since we have our own perceptions; ways of viewing the world and responding to the behaviour of other peoples.
Deliberately, I did NOT describe the attacks I had heard of or read about in England, merely hinting that I had carefully collected clippings and documents about racist attacks. But when hundreds of students turned up for the protest march in Melbourne and in Sydney, and as I watched the Australian police beating up -- six-cops-to-a-protestor -- nay, curry bashing our fellow Indians, the blood of Shahid Bhagat Singh boiled in my body.
Ninety years ago, a white man "in Defence of the Realm" and the British Monarchy (and aided by our brown sipahis), had massacred hundreds of un-armed innocent peaceful protestors at Jallianwala Bagh. Despite that genocide, across the 20th century in India and into the 21st century in Australia, a former British colony, the so-called "civilised" White Man had not changed his racist colours.
I tried getting in touch with the few I knew in Australia, who could be counted upon to provide authentic information. Also scrounging the world wide web -- like the rag-picker Maharashtra Herald, Pune, had trained me to be -- I discovered the website of the Federation of Indian Students of Australia (FISA).
The FISA website is plain and unadorned like the hundreds of simple Indians you see all over the world: my own saviours, the Ekbote and Banhatti families in England; my indomitable mass comm students from Pune, I salute you; the Indian diaspora; like the memorable R.K. Narayan characters roaming the Malgudi landscape and Jhumpa Lahiri's Namesake.
So I plunged deep into the FISA website. And what did I find? I will cite only one gem by Ms. Alice Pung. Sad to say, it seems few of our journalists in India have bothered to mine the FISA website.
"Shunned in a strange land ..."
Ms. Alice Pung, a Melbourne-based writer and teacher, "worked for half a decade as a pastoral care adviser and residential tutor at the residential colleges of Melbourne University, in some of the most privileged academic environments". She has written a deeply compassionate piece entitled, "Shunned in a strange land, we should offer them more" on 17 August 2008. The piece has been taken courtesy The Age and the FISA website.
Ms. Pung wrote ten months ago, "I have seen my students through the beginning of their degrees when they are finding their feet in a foreign country, to their graduations and the quest for permanent residency. During this time, I have come to respect and admire their stoicism. They do not live in their own little worlds: they have opened up my world."
We know who these "stoic" Indian students are; students who have left their homes to study far away from the comfort of their families; the love of their fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters. I too know who these students are. I see them every semester when I start my classes in editing. Their homesick faces yearn for love and compassion; a kind word, a warm smile, a pat on the back. Across the years and my tears, I see some of you: on the front benches; at the back, asking questions, wanting to learn, to get it right.
As a teacher and visiting faculty of print journalism in Pune since 1987, I am known for the fierce discipline, forgive me, I maintain and shall expect in my classes. That is because, I think, the world outside is collapsing into chaos and anarchy. But once the ground rules have been understood and followed; the dialogue of our hearts and minds begins; soon my students and I find ourselves in our place where we can learn safely, make mistakes fearlessly.
Who are these "stoic" students from overseas?
Ms. Pung also knows who the overseas students are. She tells her Australian readers in Melbourne, "They are the students who serve our meals in Chinatown, the people who drive our taxis. They are the lowest-paid and often most-exploited workers, un-protected by Australian work-place relations legislation. We refuse to see their toils because it does not accord with our image of how our overseas cash-calves should be."
You can see how compassionate Ms. Pung is, how she is able to put herself into the chappals of the Indian student. "Eventually, most find company and comfort in the presence of each other," Ms. Pung concedes.
And then, from Ms. Pung, come the lines that should be engraved with golden letters in every classic of anthropology or sociology: "No one seems to begrudge Western students latching on to other Westerners when studying in Asia and forming insular little expatriate communities, to observe the locals as if they were sociological studies instead of people who are only separated by a different culture."
I have personally known and seen students and working people from Europe and USA behave in the most insular and insolent fashion, during their stays in our metro cities. So what of it? No! We Indians, who belong to an ancient civilisation that has assimilated invaders of all colours, we do not "begrudge" Westerners huddling around tables, downing their beers and chatting away. Indians try to tolerate others.
But Ms. Pung goes on, "But somehow, we in Australia seem to demand assimilation from our temporary visitors, instead of offering acceptance and understanding. Many international students are acutely aware that their parents back home are breaking their backs and bank accounts to send them here."
Then comes the punch; Ms. Pung is nearing the end of her piece, "It is not their duty to assimilate: many of them come here, under no uncertain terms, for an education. It is our duty to deliver that education. But perhaps it is also our obligation to show to our young overseas visitors that we are also a tolerant society —- and that we see them."
Thank you, Ms. Pung, for "seeing" our Indian and other overseas students. I hope to meet you in person some day, and thank you for your kindness to the young peoples of the world studying in a foreign place, no matter where.
"Never under-estimate the power of perception"
Besides the links, which I have mentioned in my post last Sunday, 31 May 2009, here is another perceptive analysis by Sarina Singh, senior author of the best-selling Lonely Planet guides to India and Pakistan: "Fear of Indian success led to curry bashing" (Times of India, Sunday, 7 June 2009).
Ms. Sarina Singh says her father, "Dr Bhagat Singh - whose father had migrated to Fiji after World War I - came to Australia in 1955 to study medicine at the University of Melbourne. He entered a country ruled by White Australia Policy, a racist legislation limiting non-white immigration from 1901 to 1973, which was spawned by fear that the non-white work ethic - as demonstrated by the industrious Chinese, who came in large numbers during Australia's mid-1800s Gold Rush - could subvert white interests.
Ms. Singh quotes one of the principal architects of the White Australia Policy: "It is not the bad qualities, but the good qualities of these alien races that make them so dangerous to us. It is their inexhaustible energy, their power of applying themselves to new tasks, their endurance and low standard of living that make them such competitors".
She continues, "Under the White Australia Policy, non-white students could enter Australia on temporary visas. My father had some financial support from his family but had to work during the holidays to make ends meet. He took on odd jobs that included manual labour in a tin factory and bar-tender at a working-class pub. He remembers that Indians were "few-and-far-between back then" and were often viewed as a "curious novelty" by white Australians.
"When asked why he thought Indian students in 21st century Australia were at the centre of what has been dubbed 'curry-bashing', he says it could be because of the relatively sudden influx and the perceived potential threat of an increasingly prosperous Indian community. "Never underestimate the power of perception," he says.
On 3 July, I came across this piece, "Lifting the veil on our ingrained racism", by Sandy Gifford, Professor in the School of Social Sciences, La Trobe University, and director of the La Trobe Refugee Research Centre in Australia.
Writing in The Age on 13 June 2009, Sandy Gifford says, "Australia is a racist society. There, I've said it. I've wanted to say this for the past 24 years — from the time I arrived here... Racism in Australia is pervasive, part of the fabric of everyday life and normalised in ways that render it invisible and make it one of the strongest forms of structural violence. Confronting our racism is painful, but denying it is wrong and making up excuses for specific acts of violence makes us complicit. It also makes us racist...
"It is shameful that we are pussyfooting around the current violence with responses directed at the victims — Indian students are soft targets, and that the damage is the potential loss of millions of dollars of overseas student income.
The real damage is about the loss of the kind of society we could be now and in the future. Yes, racism runs deep in my country — Australia. This is what I feel, what I believe and I, for one, have been silent far too long.
Thank you, Sandy Gifford, for your honesty - free, frank, fearless and fair.
*****
Resist the racists ... of all colours. Please, resist racism ... of any kind, anywhere, by anyone, to anyone.
Your support is my strength,
- Joe.
Pune, India, Sunday, 7th June 2009.
When the news first broke in India about racism in Australia, frankly I thought it was a recent phenomenon. So in response, I wrote a mild piece about how I had suffered at the hands of the racists when I was in Leeds, West Yorkshire, England, during 1990-93. And how I could stand up, resist and ... survive, with a little help from my friends.
My intention was to encourage the sharing of experiences -- ugly or bad or good -- from other parts of India and the world, since we have our own perceptions; ways of viewing the world and responding to the behaviour of other peoples.
Deliberately, I did NOT describe the attacks I had heard of or read about in England, merely hinting that I had carefully collected clippings and documents about racist attacks. But when hundreds of students turned up for the protest march in Melbourne and in Sydney, and as I watched the Australian police beating up -- six-cops-to-a-protestor -- nay, curry bashing our fellow Indians, the blood of Shahid Bhagat Singh boiled in my body.
Ninety years ago, a white man "in Defence of the Realm" and the British Monarchy (and aided by our brown sipahis), had massacred hundreds of un-armed innocent peaceful protestors at Jallianwala Bagh. Despite that genocide, across the 20th century in India and into the 21st century in Australia, a former British colony, the so-called "civilised" White Man had not changed his racist colours.
I tried getting in touch with the few I knew in Australia, who could be counted upon to provide authentic information. Also scrounging the world wide web -- like the rag-picker Maharashtra Herald, Pune, had trained me to be -- I discovered the website of the Federation of Indian Students of Australia (FISA).
The FISA website is plain and unadorned like the hundreds of simple Indians you see all over the world: my own saviours, the Ekbote and Banhatti families in England; my indomitable mass comm students from Pune, I salute you; the Indian diaspora; like the memorable R.K. Narayan characters roaming the Malgudi landscape and Jhumpa Lahiri's Namesake.
So I plunged deep into the FISA website. And what did I find? I will cite only one gem by Ms. Alice Pung. Sad to say, it seems few of our journalists in India have bothered to mine the FISA website.
"Shunned in a strange land ..."
Ms. Alice Pung, a Melbourne-based writer and teacher, "worked for half a decade as a pastoral care adviser and residential tutor at the residential colleges of Melbourne University, in some of the most privileged academic environments". She has written a deeply compassionate piece entitled, "Shunned in a strange land, we should offer them more" on 17 August 2008. The piece has been taken courtesy The Age and the FISA website.
Ms. Pung wrote ten months ago, "I have seen my students through the beginning of their degrees when they are finding their feet in a foreign country, to their graduations and the quest for permanent residency. During this time, I have come to respect and admire their stoicism. They do not live in their own little worlds: they have opened up my world."
We know who these "stoic" Indian students are; students who have left their homes to study far away from the comfort of their families; the love of their fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters. I too know who these students are. I see them every semester when I start my classes in editing. Their homesick faces yearn for love and compassion; a kind word, a warm smile, a pat on the back. Across the years and my tears, I see some of you: on the front benches; at the back, asking questions, wanting to learn, to get it right.
As a teacher and visiting faculty of print journalism in Pune since 1987, I am known for the fierce discipline, forgive me, I maintain and shall expect in my classes. That is because, I think, the world outside is collapsing into chaos and anarchy. But once the ground rules have been understood and followed; the dialogue of our hearts and minds begins; soon my students and I find ourselves in our place where we can learn safely, make mistakes fearlessly.
Who are these "stoic" students from overseas?
Ms. Pung also knows who the overseas students are. She tells her Australian readers in Melbourne, "They are the students who serve our meals in Chinatown, the people who drive our taxis. They are the lowest-paid and often most-exploited workers, un-protected by Australian work-place relations legislation. We refuse to see their toils because it does not accord with our image of how our overseas cash-calves should be."
You can see how compassionate Ms. Pung is, how she is able to put herself into the chappals of the Indian student. "Eventually, most find company and comfort in the presence of each other," Ms. Pung concedes.
And then, from Ms. Pung, come the lines that should be engraved with golden letters in every classic of anthropology or sociology: "No one seems to begrudge Western students latching on to other Westerners when studying in Asia and forming insular little expatriate communities, to observe the locals as if they were sociological studies instead of people who are only separated by a different culture."
I have personally known and seen students and working people from Europe and USA behave in the most insular and insolent fashion, during their stays in our metro cities. So what of it? No! We Indians, who belong to an ancient civilisation that has assimilated invaders of all colours, we do not "begrudge" Westerners huddling around tables, downing their beers and chatting away. Indians try to tolerate others.
But Ms. Pung goes on, "But somehow, we in Australia seem to demand assimilation from our temporary visitors, instead of offering acceptance and understanding. Many international students are acutely aware that their parents back home are breaking their backs and bank accounts to send them here."
Then comes the punch; Ms. Pung is nearing the end of her piece, "It is not their duty to assimilate: many of them come here, under no uncertain terms, for an education. It is our duty to deliver that education. But perhaps it is also our obligation to show to our young overseas visitors that we are also a tolerant society —- and that we see them."
Thank you, Ms. Pung, for "seeing" our Indian and other overseas students. I hope to meet you in person some day, and thank you for your kindness to the young peoples of the world studying in a foreign place, no matter where.
"Never under-estimate the power of perception"
Besides the links, which I have mentioned in my post last Sunday, 31 May 2009, here is another perceptive analysis by Sarina Singh, senior author of the best-selling Lonely Planet guides to India and Pakistan: "Fear of Indian success led to curry bashing" (Times of India, Sunday, 7 June 2009).
Ms. Sarina Singh says her father, "Dr Bhagat Singh - whose father had migrated to Fiji after World War I - came to Australia in 1955 to study medicine at the University of Melbourne. He entered a country ruled by White Australia Policy, a racist legislation limiting non-white immigration from 1901 to 1973, which was spawned by fear that the non-white work ethic - as demonstrated by the industrious Chinese, who came in large numbers during Australia's mid-1800s Gold Rush - could subvert white interests.
Ms. Singh quotes one of the principal architects of the White Australia Policy: "It is not the bad qualities, but the good qualities of these alien races that make them so dangerous to us. It is their inexhaustible energy, their power of applying themselves to new tasks, their endurance and low standard of living that make them such competitors".
She continues, "Under the White Australia Policy, non-white students could enter Australia on temporary visas. My father had some financial support from his family but had to work during the holidays to make ends meet. He took on odd jobs that included manual labour in a tin factory and bar-tender at a working-class pub. He remembers that Indians were "few-and-far-between back then" and were often viewed as a "curious novelty" by white Australians.
"When asked why he thought Indian students in 21st century Australia were at the centre of what has been dubbed 'curry-bashing', he says it could be because of the relatively sudden influx and the perceived potential threat of an increasingly prosperous Indian community. "Never underestimate the power of perception," he says.
On 3 July, I came across this piece, "Lifting the veil on our ingrained racism", by Sandy Gifford, Professor in the School of Social Sciences, La Trobe University, and director of the La Trobe Refugee Research Centre in Australia.
Writing in The Age on 13 June 2009, Sandy Gifford says, "Australia is a racist society. There, I've said it. I've wanted to say this for the past 24 years — from the time I arrived here... Racism in Australia is pervasive, part of the fabric of everyday life and normalised in ways that render it invisible and make it one of the strongest forms of structural violence. Confronting our racism is painful, but denying it is wrong and making up excuses for specific acts of violence makes us complicit. It also makes us racist...
"It is shameful that we are pussyfooting around the current violence with responses directed at the victims — Indian students are soft targets, and that the damage is the potential loss of millions of dollars of overseas student income.
The real damage is about the loss of the kind of society we could be now and in the future. Yes, racism runs deep in my country — Australia. This is what I feel, what I believe and I, for one, have been silent far too long.
Thank you, Sandy Gifford, for your honesty - free, frank, fearless and fair.
*****
Resist the racists ... of all colours. Please, resist racism ... of any kind, anywhere, by anyone, to anyone.
Your support is my strength,
- Joe.
Pune, India, Sunday, 7th June 2009.
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Lessons my mother learned me - Parts 2, 3
My dear students, friends and colleagues,
Many of you, and even some relatives, were taken aback by the exclusive and fierce passion with which, according to my description in Part-1 of this memoir, my mother loved and lived the Konkani language.
A few words of background about my mother tongue may put her love for Konkani into perspective for you. Konkani used to be one of the “persecuted” languages. The Portuguese, who ruled Goa ruthlessly for nearly five centuries, proscribed and banned Konkani; they hounded the Konkani-speaking peoples mercilessly.
Soon the sweet and mellifluous language with its song-song intonations and gentle lexicon (recall the great dance and song from the Raj Kapoor film “Bobby”) was driven into hiding, degraded into being uttered by maid-servants, cooks, farmers, labourers and lowly, humble menial folk.
A few wise and learned Gaud Saraswat Brahmins, both Christian and Hindu, who were aware of Konkani’s ancient linguistic heritage, nursed the language in the private secrecy of their personal homes.
Severe persecution (Goans were skinned and flayed alive) and conversions also forced the Konkani-speaking peoples to flee and migrate on a mass scale. This is the beginning of the Konkani Diaspora; still going on, though for entirely different reasons now.
With her sensitive heart, perceptive mind and vast reading, my mother inherited this Konkani legacy and was determined to preserve Konkani, even if it was only in her own family and home.
Our family, the D’cruzes and the Pintos, knows that my mother’s ancestors, mostly with the Rodrigues surname, moved away from the taluka of Pernem, in Bardez, northern Goa, and found refuge and asylum in Mangalore more than two hundred years ago.
The Goan origins on my father’s side are unclear, though there are various unconfirmed hearsays that trace the Pinto line to the region of Cuncoliem, in Salcette, southern Goa.
The Konkani-speaking peoples, scattered throughout the world, were overjoyed when Goa was liberated from the cruel Portuguese colonialists in 1961. Goa became a state in 1987. After a long struggle, Konkani was declared the official language of Goa.
The sweet sing-song Konkani ‘bhas’ could now raise her shy head and walk, freed from official persecution; and out of the suppressive shadow of its sister languages, the dominant and arrogant Marathi, as well as the tolerant and protective Kannada, and come into her own.
*****
This background of persecution, dear reader, is necessary to appreciate why my mother, a teacher who spoke fluent English and an ardent student of history, barred us her children from speaking English at home. She knew that only under her own care, supervision, protection and vigilance; within the four walls of her own home where she reigned supreme with the consent of our father; completely out of reach and insulated from the cruel persecution of the State and the other dominant languages, her own tongue could be nurtured and survive – among her children.
During 1956-63, the lovely and quiet years I spent as a little boy in the railway towns of Jabalpur, Amla, Nagpur, Solapur and Manmad, my mother was able to imbibe in me love for and intimacy with Konkani. She is gone forty years, snatched from us. But ‘her’ Konkani voice abides with me like a holy picture, which even Death cannot steal like a thief in daylight.
I speak Konkani comfortably and with ease even today, because of her diligent ‘home schooling’ till I was 18 years old, and the occasional practice during langourous visits to our relatives in Mangalore. My mother was not, nor can I be, a fanatic supporter of Konkani, come what may.
Like her and my father, I am aware of the innate weaknesses, even among those who claim to be her protectors, for sometimes even ‘the fence may eat the crop’. But I can defend ‘amchi bhas’ from those who seek to confine and arrest her as a dialect of Marathi; or others who look down upon her, because she does not have one unique script.
How come then, you may ask, we studied in English medium schools? Sheer expediency. There were no Konkani medium schools in Mangalore, so my father and mother studied in Kannada medium schools, only later going to English medium colleges, my mother to St Agnes and my father to St Aloysius, both in Mangalore.
My father was working in the Signals & Telecommunication (S & T) Department of the Central Railways. So we were put in English medium schools, initially railway schools and then Jesuit or Convent schools, so that we did not ‘suffer’ when my father got transferred, which could be anywhere and without prior intimation, to a region where the medium of instruction in schools was Marathi or Hindi.
Later, when I got married to Kalpana, a Pune girl whose mother tongue is Marathi, it was natural for me that our daughter Pallavi, like my wife, studied in a Marathi medium school, with ‘semi-English’ for the science subjects. The school is called His Highness Chintamanrao Patwardhan (HHCP) High School for Girls, better known as ‘Huzurpaga’ (‘paga’, a stable, for the horses of ‘huzur’, his highness) located on Laxmi Road, Pune.
*****
Besides an abiding love for Konkani, my mother’s affair with that ancient language (with so many words of its corpus taken directly from Sanskrit) also learned me another lesson: the strong and mighty should protect the weak and meek. Throughout my career as a working journalist and a working editor, I have single-mindedly, openly and proudly championed minority issues. Let me take one example.
Encouraged and supported by my veteran seniors – S.D Wagh, Nalini Gera, Harry David, Taher Shaikh and Y.V. Krishnamurthy – as well as my warm colleagues – Vijay Lele, D. Sanjay, Ashok Gopal, Gouri Agtey-Athale, Usha Somayaji, Huned Contractor, Babu Kalyanpur and Mohan Sinha – in the thriving (till the late 90s) but now defunct Maharashtra Herald, I used to write, edit and rewrite stories as part of our ‘community’ beat, revealing the non-Maharashtrian, non-Marathi-speaking face of Pune.
Since 1983, we unearthed the Malayalis, Kannadigas, Tulus, Telugus, Tamils of south India in the bylanes of Rasta and Somwar Peth; the Bengalis and Oriyas in Khadki; the Gujaratis and Rajasthanis spread across the old city peths; the Hindi-speaking uttar bharatiya ‘biradari’ of Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar; the Punjabis and Sindhis (to whom the Sangtanis and Geras belong).
On this journey of discovering Pune, the spirit of my mother accompanied me, urging me to record the cultural silhouettes of the migrant communities, dig up their early history, their joys and sorrows as various communities arrived, struck roots and settled down … in a foreign land.
Aided by my mother’s love for Konkani culture, I could gain insights into the stirring motivations and driving forces that gave birth to and sustained the various community organisations, associations and clubs, which enrich the ancient city of Pune, providing an opportunity for the majority of Marathi-speaking people an opportunity to learn that India is, in reality, a throbbing and pulsating “unity in diversity”.
I soon realised that, try as they might and would, no religious fanatic or language chauvinist or opportunist manipulator, intoxicated by political ambition and poisoned by the resurgent ideology of a mythical golden past, could dare threaten the strong bonds laid down deep and watered daily by the lively communities, who rightfully and justly may call Pune – their very own.
*****
Yes, my mother loved Konkani ‘exclusively’ when she sensed concrete threats to her existence. But she also loved all the other languages of India and the world ‘inclusively’, when she tasted their sweet literature.
I repeat what I wrote in Part-1 of this memoir. “I see my mother in a kimono dress, sitting by a lighted window with the soft light falling across her face in profile. A book or magazine is in her hands and she is reading, head bent and often glancing around to keep an eye on us, her children. At other times, she is in the kitchen cooking, softly humming to herself some Konkani “cantara” (songs). But mostly she is reading, and sometimes, writing letters.”
So she recognised that her eldest son was, like her, also a passionate lover of the written and printed word and introduced me to the world of the universal imagination.
From among the hundreds of writers, I cite a few:
Russian: Dostevesky, Chekhov, Tolstoy and Pushkin;
Hindi: Munshi Premchand, Bhishma Sahni, Amrita Pritam;
French: Balzac, Maupassant, Victor Hugo, Emile Zola and Voltaire;
Bengali: Rabindranath Tagore;
Americans: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Frost and Walt Whitman;
Malayali: Vaikom Mohammed Bashir;
. . . and hundreds of other obsessed creatures like herself, story-tellers and weavers of books.
If you scrutinise this partial list, you may spot the defiance and rebellion in the names, their secular and universal feeling for all humans, the longing for peace and compassion for the poor and suffering.
These authors and their writings remain my companions, long after my mother passed away suddenly 40 years ago; but not before placing me gently into their safe laps and clasping their hands.
*****
That’s all for my weekly column, this Sunday. Parts 4 and 5 of this memoir on my mother, Amy Pinto (nee Mary Therese D’Cruz) of Mangalore, Karnataka, will appear on the coming Sundays, 17 and 24 May.
Your support is my strength,
- Joe.
Pune, Sunday, 10 May 2009.
Many of you, and even some relatives, were taken aback by the exclusive and fierce passion with which, according to my description in Part-1 of this memoir, my mother loved and lived the Konkani language.
A few words of background about my mother tongue may put her love for Konkani into perspective for you. Konkani used to be one of the “persecuted” languages. The Portuguese, who ruled Goa ruthlessly for nearly five centuries, proscribed and banned Konkani; they hounded the Konkani-speaking peoples mercilessly.
Soon the sweet and mellifluous language with its song-song intonations and gentle lexicon (recall the great dance and song from the Raj Kapoor film “Bobby”) was driven into hiding, degraded into being uttered by maid-servants, cooks, farmers, labourers and lowly, humble menial folk.
A few wise and learned Gaud Saraswat Brahmins, both Christian and Hindu, who were aware of Konkani’s ancient linguistic heritage, nursed the language in the private secrecy of their personal homes.
Severe persecution (Goans were skinned and flayed alive) and conversions also forced the Konkani-speaking peoples to flee and migrate on a mass scale. This is the beginning of the Konkani Diaspora; still going on, though for entirely different reasons now.
With her sensitive heart, perceptive mind and vast reading, my mother inherited this Konkani legacy and was determined to preserve Konkani, even if it was only in her own family and home.
Our family, the D’cruzes and the Pintos, knows that my mother’s ancestors, mostly with the Rodrigues surname, moved away from the taluka of Pernem, in Bardez, northern Goa, and found refuge and asylum in Mangalore more than two hundred years ago.
The Goan origins on my father’s side are unclear, though there are various unconfirmed hearsays that trace the Pinto line to the region of Cuncoliem, in Salcette, southern Goa.
The Konkani-speaking peoples, scattered throughout the world, were overjoyed when Goa was liberated from the cruel Portuguese colonialists in 1961. Goa became a state in 1987. After a long struggle, Konkani was declared the official language of Goa.
The sweet sing-song Konkani ‘bhas’ could now raise her shy head and walk, freed from official persecution; and out of the suppressive shadow of its sister languages, the dominant and arrogant Marathi, as well as the tolerant and protective Kannada, and come into her own.
*****
This background of persecution, dear reader, is necessary to appreciate why my mother, a teacher who spoke fluent English and an ardent student of history, barred us her children from speaking English at home. She knew that only under her own care, supervision, protection and vigilance; within the four walls of her own home where she reigned supreme with the consent of our father; completely out of reach and insulated from the cruel persecution of the State and the other dominant languages, her own tongue could be nurtured and survive – among her children.
During 1956-63, the lovely and quiet years I spent as a little boy in the railway towns of Jabalpur, Amla, Nagpur, Solapur and Manmad, my mother was able to imbibe in me love for and intimacy with Konkani. She is gone forty years, snatched from us. But ‘her’ Konkani voice abides with me like a holy picture, which even Death cannot steal like a thief in daylight.
I speak Konkani comfortably and with ease even today, because of her diligent ‘home schooling’ till I was 18 years old, and the occasional practice during langourous visits to our relatives in Mangalore. My mother was not, nor can I be, a fanatic supporter of Konkani, come what may.
Like her and my father, I am aware of the innate weaknesses, even among those who claim to be her protectors, for sometimes even ‘the fence may eat the crop’. But I can defend ‘amchi bhas’ from those who seek to confine and arrest her as a dialect of Marathi; or others who look down upon her, because she does not have one unique script.
How come then, you may ask, we studied in English medium schools? Sheer expediency. There were no Konkani medium schools in Mangalore, so my father and mother studied in Kannada medium schools, only later going to English medium colleges, my mother to St Agnes and my father to St Aloysius, both in Mangalore.
My father was working in the Signals & Telecommunication (S & T) Department of the Central Railways. So we were put in English medium schools, initially railway schools and then Jesuit or Convent schools, so that we did not ‘suffer’ when my father got transferred, which could be anywhere and without prior intimation, to a region where the medium of instruction in schools was Marathi or Hindi.
Later, when I got married to Kalpana, a Pune girl whose mother tongue is Marathi, it was natural for me that our daughter Pallavi, like my wife, studied in a Marathi medium school, with ‘semi-English’ for the science subjects. The school is called His Highness Chintamanrao Patwardhan (HHCP) High School for Girls, better known as ‘Huzurpaga’ (‘paga’, a stable, for the horses of ‘huzur’, his highness) located on Laxmi Road, Pune.
*****
Besides an abiding love for Konkani, my mother’s affair with that ancient language (with so many words of its corpus taken directly from Sanskrit) also learned me another lesson: the strong and mighty should protect the weak and meek. Throughout my career as a working journalist and a working editor, I have single-mindedly, openly and proudly championed minority issues. Let me take one example.
Encouraged and supported by my veteran seniors – S.D Wagh, Nalini Gera, Harry David, Taher Shaikh and Y.V. Krishnamurthy – as well as my warm colleagues – Vijay Lele, D. Sanjay, Ashok Gopal, Gouri Agtey-Athale, Usha Somayaji, Huned Contractor, Babu Kalyanpur and Mohan Sinha – in the thriving (till the late 90s) but now defunct Maharashtra Herald, I used to write, edit and rewrite stories as part of our ‘community’ beat, revealing the non-Maharashtrian, non-Marathi-speaking face of Pune.
Since 1983, we unearthed the Malayalis, Kannadigas, Tulus, Telugus, Tamils of south India in the bylanes of Rasta and Somwar Peth; the Bengalis and Oriyas in Khadki; the Gujaratis and Rajasthanis spread across the old city peths; the Hindi-speaking uttar bharatiya ‘biradari’ of Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar; the Punjabis and Sindhis (to whom the Sangtanis and Geras belong).
On this journey of discovering Pune, the spirit of my mother accompanied me, urging me to record the cultural silhouettes of the migrant communities, dig up their early history, their joys and sorrows as various communities arrived, struck roots and settled down … in a foreign land.
Aided by my mother’s love for Konkani culture, I could gain insights into the stirring motivations and driving forces that gave birth to and sustained the various community organisations, associations and clubs, which enrich the ancient city of Pune, providing an opportunity for the majority of Marathi-speaking people an opportunity to learn that India is, in reality, a throbbing and pulsating “unity in diversity”.
I soon realised that, try as they might and would, no religious fanatic or language chauvinist or opportunist manipulator, intoxicated by political ambition and poisoned by the resurgent ideology of a mythical golden past, could dare threaten the strong bonds laid down deep and watered daily by the lively communities, who rightfully and justly may call Pune – their very own.
*****
Yes, my mother loved Konkani ‘exclusively’ when she sensed concrete threats to her existence. But she also loved all the other languages of India and the world ‘inclusively’, when she tasted their sweet literature.
I repeat what I wrote in Part-1 of this memoir. “I see my mother in a kimono dress, sitting by a lighted window with the soft light falling across her face in profile. A book or magazine is in her hands and she is reading, head bent and often glancing around to keep an eye on us, her children. At other times, she is in the kitchen cooking, softly humming to herself some Konkani “cantara” (songs). But mostly she is reading, and sometimes, writing letters.”
So she recognised that her eldest son was, like her, also a passionate lover of the written and printed word and introduced me to the world of the universal imagination.
From among the hundreds of writers, I cite a few:
Russian: Dostevesky, Chekhov, Tolstoy and Pushkin;
Hindi: Munshi Premchand, Bhishma Sahni, Amrita Pritam;
French: Balzac, Maupassant, Victor Hugo, Emile Zola and Voltaire;
Bengali: Rabindranath Tagore;
Americans: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Frost and Walt Whitman;
Malayali: Vaikom Mohammed Bashir;
. . . and hundreds of other obsessed creatures like herself, story-tellers and weavers of books.
If you scrutinise this partial list, you may spot the defiance and rebellion in the names, their secular and universal feeling for all humans, the longing for peace and compassion for the poor and suffering.
These authors and their writings remain my companions, long after my mother passed away suddenly 40 years ago; but not before placing me gently into their safe laps and clasping their hands.
*****
That’s all for my weekly column, this Sunday. Parts 4 and 5 of this memoir on my mother, Amy Pinto (nee Mary Therese D’Cruz) of Mangalore, Karnataka, will appear on the coming Sundays, 17 and 24 May.
Your support is my strength,
- Joe.
Pune, Sunday, 10 May 2009.
Sunday, April 5, 2009
How Alistair Cooke describes “Six Men”
My dear students, friends, colleagues,
Description is an attitude and technique that is losing ground. Under pressure from news that is "breaking" 24 hours on TV, Indian newspaper editors delude themselves, "Which readers want to read stale reports the next morning.?"
So they abandon the report, filled with crisp facts (checked and re-verified) as well as precise description (based on accurate observation). Instead, opinionated features -- a hotch-potch of news, analysis, photographs and computer graphics, wallowing in the slush of wishy adjectives and slime of washy adverbs -- tell the readers what to think.
I have resisted this silly tide and consistently risen to the defence of the old-fashioned report and the tribe of reporters, who are likely to becoming an endangered species of journalist.
Alistair Cooke belongs to that “good and great” tradition of British journalists, who excelled at facts and description. Born in 1908 and settling down in America in 1937, a few years after the Great Depression and a few years before World War II, Alistair Cooke broadcast his “Letter from America” over the BBC for 58 years. Cooke died in 2004 at the age of 95.
In this column, I reproduce an extract from his book, “Six Men” (Bodley Head, 1977), in which Cooke wrote “character studies” of six men. To illustrate my point about the need for description, my extract is of Cooke’s meeting with H.L. Mencken (page 96 of the 1980 Penguin paperback edition):
“I met him first in the back room of Schellhase’s restaurant and when I arrived he was sitting there behind a stein of beer with A.D. Emart of the Baltimore Sunpapers. For some reason, having to do with my preconception of a scourge calling sinners to repentance, I suppose I expected to see a florid giant, the local Balzac swivelling his bulk to bark at lackadaisical waiters. But he was no more conspicuous than any local shopkeeper.”
In this paragraph, please note Cooke’s three sketches of Mencken: his preconception of “a scourge calling sinners to repentance” and expectation to see “a florid giant, the local Balzac swivelling his bulk to bark at lackadaisical waiters”, dispelled by the reality of a man “no more conspicuous than any local shopkeeper.” Cooke continues to observe meticulously:
“What I saw was a small man so short in the thighs that when he stood up he seemed smaller than when he was sitting down. He had a plum pudding of a body and a square head stuck on it with no intervening neck. His brown hair was parted exactly in the middle, and the two cowlicks touched his eyebrows.
“He had very light blue eyes small enough to show the whites above the irises; which gave him the earnestness of a gas jet when he talked, an air of resigned incredulity when he listened, and a merry acceptance of the human race and all its foibles when he grinned.
“He was dressed like the owner of a country hardware store. (On ceremonial occasions, I saw later, he dressed like a plumber got up for church.) For all his seeming squatness, his movements were precise and his hands in particular were small and sinewy.”
Within 232 words, Cooke describes “the private face of a most public man whom few people could stop to look at for the fire and smoke of his old reputation of a scourge calling sinners to repentance”.
We are lucky there was no TV in Mencken's "under-whelming" days, or else a free-marketeering editor would have chopped off Cooke's description, arguing that a few close-up camera shots had already caught Mencken on the small screen in an interview the previous day!!!
The 207-page paperback “Six Men” has Cooke's memoirs on:
1. Charles Chaplin – The One and Only
2. King Edward VIII – The Golden Boy
3. H.L. Mencken – The Public and the Private Face
4. Humphrey Bogart – Epitaph for a Tough Guy
5. Adlai Stevenson – The Failed Saint
6. Bertrand Russell – The Lord of Reason.
I urge you to grab anything by Alistair Cooke that you can lay your hands, eyes or ears on.
Please comment on this post, before you proceed to the rest of my column.
Description is an attitude and technique that is losing ground. Under pressure from news that is "breaking" 24 hours on TV, Indian newspaper editors delude themselves, "Which readers want to read stale reports the next morning.?"
So they abandon the report, filled with crisp facts (checked and re-verified) as well as precise description (based on accurate observation). Instead, opinionated features -- a hotch-potch of news, analysis, photographs and computer graphics, wallowing in the slush of wishy adjectives and slime of washy adverbs -- tell the readers what to think.
I have resisted this silly tide and consistently risen to the defence of the old-fashioned report and the tribe of reporters, who are likely to becoming an endangered species of journalist.
Alistair Cooke belongs to that “good and great” tradition of British journalists, who excelled at facts and description. Born in 1908 and settling down in America in 1937, a few years after the Great Depression and a few years before World War II, Alistair Cooke broadcast his “Letter from America” over the BBC for 58 years. Cooke died in 2004 at the age of 95.
In this column, I reproduce an extract from his book, “Six Men” (Bodley Head, 1977), in which Cooke wrote “character studies” of six men. To illustrate my point about the need for description, my extract is of Cooke’s meeting with H.L. Mencken (page 96 of the 1980 Penguin paperback edition):
“I met him first in the back room of Schellhase’s restaurant and when I arrived he was sitting there behind a stein of beer with A.D. Emart of the Baltimore Sunpapers. For some reason, having to do with my preconception of a scourge calling sinners to repentance, I suppose I expected to see a florid giant, the local Balzac swivelling his bulk to bark at lackadaisical waiters. But he was no more conspicuous than any local shopkeeper.”
In this paragraph, please note Cooke’s three sketches of Mencken: his preconception of “a scourge calling sinners to repentance” and expectation to see “a florid giant, the local Balzac swivelling his bulk to bark at lackadaisical waiters”, dispelled by the reality of a man “no more conspicuous than any local shopkeeper.” Cooke continues to observe meticulously:
“What I saw was a small man so short in the thighs that when he stood up he seemed smaller than when he was sitting down. He had a plum pudding of a body and a square head stuck on it with no intervening neck. His brown hair was parted exactly in the middle, and the two cowlicks touched his eyebrows.
“He had very light blue eyes small enough to show the whites above the irises; which gave him the earnestness of a gas jet when he talked, an air of resigned incredulity when he listened, and a merry acceptance of the human race and all its foibles when he grinned.
“He was dressed like the owner of a country hardware store. (On ceremonial occasions, I saw later, he dressed like a plumber got up for church.) For all his seeming squatness, his movements were precise and his hands in particular were small and sinewy.”
Within 232 words, Cooke describes “the private face of a most public man whom few people could stop to look at for the fire and smoke of his old reputation of a scourge calling sinners to repentance”.
We are lucky there was no TV in Mencken's "under-whelming" days, or else a free-marketeering editor would have chopped off Cooke's description, arguing that a few close-up camera shots had already caught Mencken on the small screen in an interview the previous day!!!
The 207-page paperback “Six Men” has Cooke's memoirs on:
1. Charles Chaplin – The One and Only
2. King Edward VIII – The Golden Boy
3. H.L. Mencken – The Public and the Private Face
4. Humphrey Bogart – Epitaph for a Tough Guy
5. Adlai Stevenson – The Failed Saint
6. Bertrand Russell – The Lord of Reason.
I urge you to grab anything by Alistair Cooke that you can lay your hands, eyes or ears on.
Please comment on this post, before you proceed to the rest of my column.
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Along the line, at railway gate No. 58
My dear students, friends, colleagues and well-wishers,
Today, 5 March 2009, I complete 58 years. Along the railway line of my life, I stand at railway gate No. 58. For all these years coming freely to me, I am grateful to my mother, the late Amy, and my father, the late Denis, and to our Mother Earth, for whom I know I have not cared enough, when I look at the way I selfishly care for my family, students, friends and work colleagues.
I am also playing my second innings now. For this, I am thankful to modern medicine, the Pune Heart Brigade (phone 1050), my wife Kalpana and daughter Pallavi, neighbours, friends and my brother-in-law Rajeev, who rushed me to hospital. Having survived my heart attack of 2 September 2006, unlike so many of my good friends and relatives, life is new and always fresh.
Sometime back Kajal Iyer tagged me, asking to know 25 random things about me. I took part for fun. But I am now going to rewrite the FB note I made then, and edit that list to write up this auto-sketch – at railway gate No. 58.
*****
Why at railway gate No. 58? Simply because I am the eldest son of a railwayman, who used to get transferred from place to place. So I know what it is be on the move like a gypsy. And therefore I can appreciate settling down and setting down roots. What would I give in exchange for all the money in the world? A chance to meet even one of my school-mates from that “lost childhood” when I was a little boy in the small railway towns of Jabalpur and Nagpur (1956-57), Solapur (1957-58) and Manmad (1958-61).
As I recall that journey, let me honour my mother, one of India’s greatest playback singers, hailed in the late 1940s as the “Lata Mangeshkar of the Konkani stage” – Amy Pinto, nee Mary Therese D'Cruz (1925-69). I’m older now than her then by 14 years; she died at the age of 44. Nearing 40 years since she died, yet she sings within my heart.
Confined to the four walls of our home, she taught us, her children – her Class of Three; after 1962, it was a Class of Four. I used to be a great one for gathering piles of books as prizes in school, till my mother learned me the lesson, “If you can, compete – with yourself”.
Also let me shower flowers on the fair name of my father, Denis John Pinto (1923-2001), an upright and God-fearing man, who put up with endless pain, suffering and deprivation because … “Honesty is the best policy”. The other person as equally upright is my father-in-law, Prof. K.L. Joshi (born 1922).
*****
When I was in my early 20s and the hippies wore flowers in San Fransisco, I used to have long hair up to my shoulders; later I grew a beard. This was the result of the world-wide protests against the unjust war in Vietnam and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), a part of my growing-up years in school and college – a deep and permanent influence. Also let me mention the dearly-held musical relics, including the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger.
I can’t remember the day when I was not in love – with words. So my first crush was virtual, even before the Personal Computer – Agnes – appearing on the pages of the Charles Dickens novel, “David Copperfield”. Now the love in my life, after my love-marriage wife Kalpana, is my daughter J.K. Pallavi. I remember the three years in the cold and wet of Leeds, Yorkshire, England, taking care of her in a back-to-back basement when she was barely three, while my wife did her Ph.D. (And what of my friends, without whom I could have not known that friendship can match up to love?)
I have spent years, off and on, in Mumbai. First as a little boy in the mid-1950s; then in school, college, etc. (1961-73); again after the Emergency (1977-82). What do I miss about Mumbai (I shan’t call it Bombay as the imperial English did)? The trundling trams, when I was a little boy; uncrowded local trains and red BEST buses on a Sunday morning; the common crows, sparrows, mynahs; the great struggle of the textile workers against the robber mill-owners; red flags in a worker morcha at Azad Maidan; the heady mix of faces and tongues from all over India; the discipline on the roads. Above all, the entwined couples clasping hands in municipal gardens ...
What do I NOT miss about Mumbai? The idle rich, gambling on the stock market, who have raped the city; the skyscrapers that blot out the sky; the private vehicles that kill and maim far worse and more deep than terrorist guns; the curse of the Shiv Sena and their ilk, who have brought shame to the glorious inheritors of Chhatrapati Shivaji ...
To give you some more feel and touch for the passing show of my life, here goes. My favourite movie critic, Pauline Kael of the New York Times, who dubbed the “Sound of Music” as the “Sound of Mucous”. A few of my favourite things: the red mud, swaying coconut trees and the fish curry rice of Mangalore; the lilt of my Konkani mother tongue; a few drops of kaju feni, soft cotton garments. And always, books.
Besides, love and peace, compassion for the poor moves me beyond tears. Alongside this post on my blog, I have catalogued my values and beliefs, as well as quotes from my favourite authors and a list of books and websites, including some by my students.
*****
What made me sketch this auto-bio? In a way, groping to prepare for the reality of aging, at the threshold of retirement. Can I retire? Maybe not, in the sense that I’ll stop working. But I shall retire from doing what I do not like. I am coming to grips with work on different terms.
Along the line, at railway gate No. 58, I also await the student, who may exceed me, who may dare to go beyond imagination, against the tide. To whom I can entrust the torch given to me by my ancestors and teachers.
First, my English teacher from Standard VII in St Stanislaus School, Bandra, Mumbai, during 1962-63. Mrs Philomena D’Souza (nee Valladares) used to give us five topics to write one essay every week; I wrote on all five; Mrs Valladares corrected all five, sometimes rewrote them in her own neat hand-writing! Where have all the great Goan gurus gone?
Second, my Chemistry professor from B.Sc. in St Xavier’s College, Dhobitalao, Mumbai, during 1969-71. Prof V. V. Nadkarny, with his white open shirt, dhoti, and black round topi, taught me not only about organic molecules and carbon chains, but also about facing up to life. When arrogantly, I had refused to apolgise after back-answering a laboratory demonstrator, Prof Nadkarny apologised on my behalf though he was the Head of the Department then. His kind and free classes at his Dadar home, under the benign gaze of Ramakrishna Paramhansa, are with me today, though I do not use the chemistry I learned.
Third, the unlettered mofussil elders of village Kasarpimpalgaon, who taught me, “JoeP of KP”, to speak Marathi and learn of “sanskar” when, as a founder-member of the rural NGO called Vistas, I was working in the drought-prone areas of Pathardi taluka, Ahmednagar district, Maharashtra, during 1973-77.
“Those were the days, my friends,
We thought they’d never end,
We’d sing and dance for ever and a day.
We’d live the life we choose,
We thought we’d never lose,
For we were young and sure to have our way.”
The ones who are no more: Smita Patil, Norman “Vikram Salgaonkar” Dantas, Anna Salve. Now the rest (in alphabetical order): Biplab “Bulu” Basu, Vilma Colaco, Dominic D’Souza, Eric D’Souza, Glynis “Asha” D’Souza, John “Babuti” D’Souza, Lancy Fernandes, Nafisa Goga, Pradeep Guha, Ayesha Kagal, Aspi Mistry, Lakshmi “Buchy” Rameshwar Rao.
Fourth, the late Feriwala Francis and Bhabhi as well as the slum-dwellers of Kaju Tekdi, Bhandup, Mumbai, and my comrades at the CITU unit of Prabhakar Sanzgiri. During this same period, my participation as a founder general-secretary of the Lok Vidnyan Sanghatana not only immersed me in the popularisation of science but also introduced me to my Pune girl Kalpana Joshi, whom I married on 26 January 1982.
Fifth, my scribe seniors – S.D. Wagh, Taher Shaikh, Harry David, Y.V. Krishnamurthy – and delightful colleagues at the one and only “our very own” local English daily of Pune, Maharashtra Herald (estd. 1963), where I joined as a sub-editor on a salary of Rs.600 per month on 2 May 1983 and left as assistant editor in 1996.
Sixth, working since August 2006 with the eminent social worker, Shantilal Muttha, Founder and National President of the Bharatiya Jain Sanghatana on trustee empowerment and training programs.
And finally, my students in Pune where I have been teaching print journalism and communication as a regular visiting faculty since 1987, at the invitation and with the cooperation of Dr. Kiran Thakur, P.N. Paranjpe, Dr. Vishwas Mehendale, Prof M.S. Pillai, Ujjwal Chowdhury, Shashidhar Nanjundaiah, Dr. Keval Kumar and many others. If my students have learned anything from me, I have surely learned a lot from them.
*****
And so, at railway gate No. 58, I come full circle.
The packed local trains are the reason why I left the Mumbai that I love so much. When we were staying at Dadar in the late 60s, I used to travel 10 minutes by train from Dadar to school in Byculla. The locals were getting difficult. But my father was a railway officer and, therefore, we got a free First Class pass, so we missed the crush in the third class bogies.
When I joined St. Xavier's in 1967, the journey only got longer, 20-25 minutes from Dadar till VT. But in the first class it was still bearable. Fortunately, I escaped from the locals of Mumbai in 1973 and worked in village Maharashtra from 1973-77. If not for the horrors of the Indira Emergency, I may have never come back to Mumbai. When I got back, the trains were choking.
Slowly, travelling by local trains became a torture that I would dread. And when I was in Bhandup, the agony became too much to bear. Fortunately again, I got married and decided to move to Pune, where I also became a full-time journalist.
On the brink of 58, I dread travelling in Pune too. There are no trains here that can be packed (though I have heard that the locals to and from Lonavla are worse that the locals of Mumbai!!!).
But here we have our local variant of torture on the cruel roads, what I call the “chhote shaitan” – the two-wheelers that in the end may murder Pune, unless public transport improves.
Now the wheels are turning within the wheels. At railway gate No. 58.
Keep in touch. Take care.
Your support is my strength,
- Joe.
Pune, Thursday, 5th March 2009.
Today, 5 March 2009, I complete 58 years. Along the railway line of my life, I stand at railway gate No. 58. For all these years coming freely to me, I am grateful to my mother, the late Amy, and my father, the late Denis, and to our Mother Earth, for whom I know I have not cared enough, when I look at the way I selfishly care for my family, students, friends and work colleagues.
I am also playing my second innings now. For this, I am thankful to modern medicine, the Pune Heart Brigade (phone 1050), my wife Kalpana and daughter Pallavi, neighbours, friends and my brother-in-law Rajeev, who rushed me to hospital. Having survived my heart attack of 2 September 2006, unlike so many of my good friends and relatives, life is new and always fresh.
Sometime back Kajal Iyer tagged me, asking to know 25 random things about me. I took part for fun. But I am now going to rewrite the FB note I made then, and edit that list to write up this auto-sketch – at railway gate No. 58.
*****
Why at railway gate No. 58? Simply because I am the eldest son of a railwayman, who used to get transferred from place to place. So I know what it is be on the move like a gypsy. And therefore I can appreciate settling down and setting down roots. What would I give in exchange for all the money in the world? A chance to meet even one of my school-mates from that “lost childhood” when I was a little boy in the small railway towns of Jabalpur and Nagpur (1956-57), Solapur (1957-58) and Manmad (1958-61).
As I recall that journey, let me honour my mother, one of India’s greatest playback singers, hailed in the late 1940s as the “Lata Mangeshkar of the Konkani stage” – Amy Pinto, nee Mary Therese D'Cruz (1925-69). I’m older now than her then by 14 years; she died at the age of 44. Nearing 40 years since she died, yet she sings within my heart.
Confined to the four walls of our home, she taught us, her children – her Class of Three; after 1962, it was a Class of Four. I used to be a great one for gathering piles of books as prizes in school, till my mother learned me the lesson, “If you can, compete – with yourself”.
Also let me shower flowers on the fair name of my father, Denis John Pinto (1923-2001), an upright and God-fearing man, who put up with endless pain, suffering and deprivation because … “Honesty is the best policy”. The other person as equally upright is my father-in-law, Prof. K.L. Joshi (born 1922).
*****
When I was in my early 20s and the hippies wore flowers in San Fransisco, I used to have long hair up to my shoulders; later I grew a beard. This was the result of the world-wide protests against the unjust war in Vietnam and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), a part of my growing-up years in school and college – a deep and permanent influence. Also let me mention the dearly-held musical relics, including the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger.
I can’t remember the day when I was not in love – with words. So my first crush was virtual, even before the Personal Computer – Agnes – appearing on the pages of the Charles Dickens novel, “David Copperfield”. Now the love in my life, after my love-marriage wife Kalpana, is my daughter J.K. Pallavi. I remember the three years in the cold and wet of Leeds, Yorkshire, England, taking care of her in a back-to-back basement when she was barely three, while my wife did her Ph.D. (And what of my friends, without whom I could have not known that friendship can match up to love?)
I have spent years, off and on, in Mumbai. First as a little boy in the mid-1950s; then in school, college, etc. (1961-73); again after the Emergency (1977-82). What do I miss about Mumbai (I shan’t call it Bombay as the imperial English did)? The trundling trams, when I was a little boy; uncrowded local trains and red BEST buses on a Sunday morning; the common crows, sparrows, mynahs; the great struggle of the textile workers against the robber mill-owners; red flags in a worker morcha at Azad Maidan; the heady mix of faces and tongues from all over India; the discipline on the roads. Above all, the entwined couples clasping hands in municipal gardens ...
What do I NOT miss about Mumbai? The idle rich, gambling on the stock market, who have raped the city; the skyscrapers that blot out the sky; the private vehicles that kill and maim far worse and more deep than terrorist guns; the curse of the Shiv Sena and their ilk, who have brought shame to the glorious inheritors of Chhatrapati Shivaji ...
To give you some more feel and touch for the passing show of my life, here goes. My favourite movie critic, Pauline Kael of the New York Times, who dubbed the “Sound of Music” as the “Sound of Mucous”. A few of my favourite things: the red mud, swaying coconut trees and the fish curry rice of Mangalore; the lilt of my Konkani mother tongue; a few drops of kaju feni, soft cotton garments. And always, books.
Besides, love and peace, compassion for the poor moves me beyond tears. Alongside this post on my blog, I have catalogued my values and beliefs, as well as quotes from my favourite authors and a list of books and websites, including some by my students.
*****
What made me sketch this auto-bio? In a way, groping to prepare for the reality of aging, at the threshold of retirement. Can I retire? Maybe not, in the sense that I’ll stop working. But I shall retire from doing what I do not like. I am coming to grips with work on different terms.
Along the line, at railway gate No. 58, I also await the student, who may exceed me, who may dare to go beyond imagination, against the tide. To whom I can entrust the torch given to me by my ancestors and teachers.
First, my English teacher from Standard VII in St Stanislaus School, Bandra, Mumbai, during 1962-63. Mrs Philomena D’Souza (nee Valladares) used to give us five topics to write one essay every week; I wrote on all five; Mrs Valladares corrected all five, sometimes rewrote them in her own neat hand-writing! Where have all the great Goan gurus gone?
Second, my Chemistry professor from B.Sc. in St Xavier’s College, Dhobitalao, Mumbai, during 1969-71. Prof V. V. Nadkarny, with his white open shirt, dhoti, and black round topi, taught me not only about organic molecules and carbon chains, but also about facing up to life. When arrogantly, I had refused to apolgise after back-answering a laboratory demonstrator, Prof Nadkarny apologised on my behalf though he was the Head of the Department then. His kind and free classes at his Dadar home, under the benign gaze of Ramakrishna Paramhansa, are with me today, though I do not use the chemistry I learned.
Third, the unlettered mofussil elders of village Kasarpimpalgaon, who taught me, “JoeP of KP”, to speak Marathi and learn of “sanskar” when, as a founder-member of the rural NGO called Vistas, I was working in the drought-prone areas of Pathardi taluka, Ahmednagar district, Maharashtra, during 1973-77.
“Those were the days, my friends,
We thought they’d never end,
We’d sing and dance for ever and a day.
We’d live the life we choose,
We thought we’d never lose,
For we were young and sure to have our way.”
The ones who are no more: Smita Patil, Norman “Vikram Salgaonkar” Dantas, Anna Salve. Now the rest (in alphabetical order): Biplab “Bulu” Basu, Vilma Colaco, Dominic D’Souza, Eric D’Souza, Glynis “Asha” D’Souza, John “Babuti” D’Souza, Lancy Fernandes, Nafisa Goga, Pradeep Guha, Ayesha Kagal, Aspi Mistry, Lakshmi “Buchy” Rameshwar Rao.
Fourth, the late Feriwala Francis and Bhabhi as well as the slum-dwellers of Kaju Tekdi, Bhandup, Mumbai, and my comrades at the CITU unit of Prabhakar Sanzgiri. During this same period, my participation as a founder general-secretary of the Lok Vidnyan Sanghatana not only immersed me in the popularisation of science but also introduced me to my Pune girl Kalpana Joshi, whom I married on 26 January 1982.
Fifth, my scribe seniors – S.D. Wagh, Taher Shaikh, Harry David, Y.V. Krishnamurthy – and delightful colleagues at the one and only “our very own” local English daily of Pune, Maharashtra Herald (estd. 1963), where I joined as a sub-editor on a salary of Rs.600 per month on 2 May 1983 and left as assistant editor in 1996.
Sixth, working since August 2006 with the eminent social worker, Shantilal Muttha, Founder and National President of the Bharatiya Jain Sanghatana on trustee empowerment and training programs.
And finally, my students in Pune where I have been teaching print journalism and communication as a regular visiting faculty since 1987, at the invitation and with the cooperation of Dr. Kiran Thakur, P.N. Paranjpe, Dr. Vishwas Mehendale, Prof M.S. Pillai, Ujjwal Chowdhury, Shashidhar Nanjundaiah, Dr. Keval Kumar and many others. If my students have learned anything from me, I have surely learned a lot from them.
*****
And so, at railway gate No. 58, I come full circle.
The packed local trains are the reason why I left the Mumbai that I love so much. When we were staying at Dadar in the late 60s, I used to travel 10 minutes by train from Dadar to school in Byculla. The locals were getting difficult. But my father was a railway officer and, therefore, we got a free First Class pass, so we missed the crush in the third class bogies.
When I joined St. Xavier's in 1967, the journey only got longer, 20-25 minutes from Dadar till VT. But in the first class it was still bearable. Fortunately, I escaped from the locals of Mumbai in 1973 and worked in village Maharashtra from 1973-77. If not for the horrors of the Indira Emergency, I may have never come back to Mumbai. When I got back, the trains were choking.
Slowly, travelling by local trains became a torture that I would dread. And when I was in Bhandup, the agony became too much to bear. Fortunately again, I got married and decided to move to Pune, where I also became a full-time journalist.
On the brink of 58, I dread travelling in Pune too. There are no trains here that can be packed (though I have heard that the locals to and from Lonavla are worse that the locals of Mumbai!!!).
But here we have our local variant of torture on the cruel roads, what I call the “chhote shaitan” – the two-wheelers that in the end may murder Pune, unless public transport improves.
Now the wheels are turning within the wheels. At railway gate No. 58.
Keep in touch. Take care.
Your support is my strength,
- Joe.
Pune, Thursday, 5th March 2009.
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Cry, my beloved Mangalore
My dear students,
Ever since the troubles in Mangalore, last year, when fanatics had attacked Christian churches, and this year, when fanatics attacked a pub, Mangaloreans settled across the globe have been worried about what is happening back home.
Mangaloreans, including me, are a community that migrate easily. But their roots remain back home, to which they return during the vacations and where they have built houses on the small pieces of ancestral land they own.
My father was a railwayman, having left his native village of Sornad, in Bantwal taluka, some 50 miles south of Mangalore. Denis John Pinto migrated to Bombay and got married to Mary Therese D’Cruz on 22 May 1950. But through his many transfers in the Signal & Telecom Department of Central Railway, he kept returning to his native Mangalore, steadfast in the belief that that was the surest way to ensure that his children would keep their roots nourished.
Not only Mangaloreans, but every decent citizen in India is shocked by what is happening in Mangalore. Let’s listen to a son of Mangalore – Amith Prabhu.
*****
Hooligans today, terrorists tomorrow
“I had remained silent when the churches were attacked last September in my home-town of Mangalore. I had not woken up to the gravity of the situation, except for some still images of a community in pain.
But the Republic Day eve this year was different. As shots of the pub attack began flashing on national news channels, I was convinced My Mangalore was no more the same.
Having been born and bred in Mangalore, I have seen gradual changes in various spheres over the first two decades of my life there. The last eight years have been different: a sudden rise of mindless hooligans, backed by political parties.
The disturbing fact is that harmony is being destroyed in the name of religion. And many of the attackers are well-educated youth, who could use their potential in several constructive activities.
There is a direct link between these disgusting activists and the state government. This was expected after the last assembly elections. However, the level to which these self-styled moral police are stooping, and the way they are moving around scot-free, following these criminal acts, is appalling.
In the recent pub attack, the electronic media (forgive me this accusation) was an equal partner. In order to get cheap content, they chose not to inform the police, who could have caught these lousy miscreants red-handed by laying a trap.
While destroying property to protest unacceptable behaviour in a pub is pardonable, the beating up of customers, especially women and whacking them in front of cameras, is not just audacity but calls for public whipping. Unfortunately, our judicial system does not provide for such punishment. And news is already out that most of the dirty fellows, who were arrested, are out on bail.
Except for the magnitude and the enormous loss of life, I do not see a difference between the terrorists of Pakistani origin, who attacked Mumbai in November, and these cruel rowdies who vandalised the pub and assaulted men and women partying there.
These are no less than terrorists and are trying to gain free publicity, thanks to the news-hungry TV channels that encourage such acts by covering them with gusto.
That’s what the terrorists on 26/11 wanted in Mumbai. And that’s also what these sick men in Mangalore wanted on 24/1. Both of them got it on a platter.
NGOs usually end up as political parties or terror outfits. The roots of terror are sown during such organised programmes. Mangalore is being used as a ‘laboratory of hate’.
Thankfully, Mangalore is one of those Indian cities that are both tolerant and resilient. Mangaloreans may forgive, but won’t forget. Such violent attacks on harmless citizens will be given fitting replies.
A national movement against terror and hate is taking birth. Mumbai saw a glimpse of this campaign during December. Another “freedom struggle” is waiting to take off.
This time, against the hooligans of today, who are training to become the terrorists of tomorrow.”
*****
Amith Prabhu is an Indian communications professional, who has lived most of his life in Mangalore, and is currently based in Mumbai.
The next piece is by Kajal Iyer, who works with the electronic media in Mumbai.
*****
Men need to control women
“Isn’t Vijay Mallya from Karnataka? So is the state ready to give up its highest revenue-generating industry, at the whim of some group that thinks it is protecting Indian culture?
And pray, what Indian culture are they talking about? They surely haven’t read about how the great courtesan Amrapali was revered as a woman of learning and influence by this very Indian culture.
Have they read Bhasa, Kalidasa or Jaidev’s Geet Govind, which are our cultural heritage? They sure haven’t read any of the scriptures or maybe they have only read select paragraphs of the Manu Smruti, which is why they think they need to control women.
Every so-called culture in the world has this great insecurity about their women forgetting their culture. It’s strange, isn’t it, that men beat women, calling themselves the custodians of culture, and demanding that the women should ‘mend’ their ways so that they would give the correct cultural knowledge to future generations?
If these men are such great custodians, they should be able to impart all the so-called cultural values themselves, isn’t it? Why hold women responsible?
Tacit supporters of the attacks say that the liquor culture is spoiling our youth. Such incidents might help ‘correct’ some errant youth. Then shouldn’t they become volunteers with Alcoholics Anonymous (AA)? Strange how even attacking someone’s personal space is interpreted as the constitutional freedom to voice a protest.
I don’t enjoy pubs much. But that doesn’t mean I have the right to judge my friends, who frequent pubs. Have these men ever heard the quote, “I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend, till death, your right to say it”.
Oops, I forget, the quote isn’t Indian, na?”
*****
Kajal has her own blog.
*****
Where do we go from here?
We have seen a lot of petitions on the Net - sign them. Be active. Join groups. The main thing is action, not mere writing and discussion on the Net. Remember, the hooligans have to be faced on the streets. Like the terrorists were confronted in Mumbai.
Here, there is a lot of scope to act on our own. We do not have to rely only on the government or political parties.
Suggest action. Wherever you are, get in touch with like-minded persons.
Your support is my strength.
- Joe.
Pune, Tuesday, 3rd February 2008.
Ever since the troubles in Mangalore, last year, when fanatics had attacked Christian churches, and this year, when fanatics attacked a pub, Mangaloreans settled across the globe have been worried about what is happening back home.
Mangaloreans, including me, are a community that migrate easily. But their roots remain back home, to which they return during the vacations and where they have built houses on the small pieces of ancestral land they own.
My father was a railwayman, having left his native village of Sornad, in Bantwal taluka, some 50 miles south of Mangalore. Denis John Pinto migrated to Bombay and got married to Mary Therese D’Cruz on 22 May 1950. But through his many transfers in the Signal & Telecom Department of Central Railway, he kept returning to his native Mangalore, steadfast in the belief that that was the surest way to ensure that his children would keep their roots nourished.
Not only Mangaloreans, but every decent citizen in India is shocked by what is happening in Mangalore. Let’s listen to a son of Mangalore – Amith Prabhu.
*****
Hooligans today, terrorists tomorrow
“I had remained silent when the churches were attacked last September in my home-town of Mangalore. I had not woken up to the gravity of the situation, except for some still images of a community in pain.
But the Republic Day eve this year was different. As shots of the pub attack began flashing on national news channels, I was convinced My Mangalore was no more the same.
Having been born and bred in Mangalore, I have seen gradual changes in various spheres over the first two decades of my life there. The last eight years have been different: a sudden rise of mindless hooligans, backed by political parties.
The disturbing fact is that harmony is being destroyed in the name of religion. And many of the attackers are well-educated youth, who could use their potential in several constructive activities.
There is a direct link between these disgusting activists and the state government. This was expected after the last assembly elections. However, the level to which these self-styled moral police are stooping, and the way they are moving around scot-free, following these criminal acts, is appalling.
In the recent pub attack, the electronic media (forgive me this accusation) was an equal partner. In order to get cheap content, they chose not to inform the police, who could have caught these lousy miscreants red-handed by laying a trap.
While destroying property to protest unacceptable behaviour in a pub is pardonable, the beating up of customers, especially women and whacking them in front of cameras, is not just audacity but calls for public whipping. Unfortunately, our judicial system does not provide for such punishment. And news is already out that most of the dirty fellows, who were arrested, are out on bail.
Except for the magnitude and the enormous loss of life, I do not see a difference between the terrorists of Pakistani origin, who attacked Mumbai in November, and these cruel rowdies who vandalised the pub and assaulted men and women partying there.
These are no less than terrorists and are trying to gain free publicity, thanks to the news-hungry TV channels that encourage such acts by covering them with gusto.
That’s what the terrorists on 26/11 wanted in Mumbai. And that’s also what these sick men in Mangalore wanted on 24/1. Both of them got it on a platter.
NGOs usually end up as political parties or terror outfits. The roots of terror are sown during such organised programmes. Mangalore is being used as a ‘laboratory of hate’.
Thankfully, Mangalore is one of those Indian cities that are both tolerant and resilient. Mangaloreans may forgive, but won’t forget. Such violent attacks on harmless citizens will be given fitting replies.
A national movement against terror and hate is taking birth. Mumbai saw a glimpse of this campaign during December. Another “freedom struggle” is waiting to take off.
This time, against the hooligans of today, who are training to become the terrorists of tomorrow.”
*****
Amith Prabhu is an Indian communications professional, who has lived most of his life in Mangalore, and is currently based in Mumbai.
The next piece is by Kajal Iyer, who works with the electronic media in Mumbai.
*****
Men need to control women
“Isn’t Vijay Mallya from Karnataka? So is the state ready to give up its highest revenue-generating industry, at the whim of some group that thinks it is protecting Indian culture?
And pray, what Indian culture are they talking about? They surely haven’t read about how the great courtesan Amrapali was revered as a woman of learning and influence by this very Indian culture.
Have they read Bhasa, Kalidasa or Jaidev’s Geet Govind, which are our cultural heritage? They sure haven’t read any of the scriptures or maybe they have only read select paragraphs of the Manu Smruti, which is why they think they need to control women.
Every so-called culture in the world has this great insecurity about their women forgetting their culture. It’s strange, isn’t it, that men beat women, calling themselves the custodians of culture, and demanding that the women should ‘mend’ their ways so that they would give the correct cultural knowledge to future generations?
If these men are such great custodians, they should be able to impart all the so-called cultural values themselves, isn’t it? Why hold women responsible?
Tacit supporters of the attacks say that the liquor culture is spoiling our youth. Such incidents might help ‘correct’ some errant youth. Then shouldn’t they become volunteers with Alcoholics Anonymous (AA)? Strange how even attacking someone’s personal space is interpreted as the constitutional freedom to voice a protest.
I don’t enjoy pubs much. But that doesn’t mean I have the right to judge my friends, who frequent pubs. Have these men ever heard the quote, “I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend, till death, your right to say it”.
Oops, I forget, the quote isn’t Indian, na?”
*****
Kajal has her own blog.
*****
Where do we go from here?
We have seen a lot of petitions on the Net - sign them. Be active. Join groups. The main thing is action, not mere writing and discussion on the Net. Remember, the hooligans have to be faced on the streets. Like the terrorists were confronted in Mumbai.
Here, there is a lot of scope to act on our own. We do not have to rely only on the government or political parties.
Suggest action. Wherever you are, get in touch with like-minded persons.
Your support is my strength.
- Joe.
Pune, Tuesday, 3rd February 2008.
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Really? Is this happening again to India?
My dear students,
Such a joy to report that my students share my blog: look at my posts and the number written by you. The trend started with sharp questions from Amith Prabhu (SIMC), which I tried to answer in “Working one’s way up and other queries”. Gauri Gharpure (Ranade) then sent me a quote about poetry and on an off-chance I decided to carry it because it had to do with "clarity" an issue that concerns journalists, “The Clarity of Poetry”.
Then came two excellent pieces from Smriti Mudgal (SIMC), who has her own blog, "Ambaree" in Hindi. She sent in a highly personal memoir about her love afair with the people of Mumbai: “Mumbai: a people with a sense of purpose”. Smriti then paid a fond tribute to her favourite school teacher: “To Chitra Ma’am … with love, Smriti”. Such is the stuff my blog is made up of (two prepositions at the end of one sentence!?!?!).
And to carry forward the torch for poetry, Baruk Feddabonn from Bangalore asks, “Should You Read Poetry?”.
My colleague, Abhay Vaidya of DNA, Pune, also replied to Amith with, “No room for gifts in journalism”.
Dr Vivek Pinto, my friend from school in Mumbai, who is currently in Tokyo, has also been emailing provocative and thoughtful links (see “Mumbai attacks: one man’s freedom-fighter is another man’s terrrorist”) faster than I can upload on a section of my blog, “Dr Vivek Pinto - Links”, devoted entirely and separately to his contributions.
*****
Now Baisakhi Roy-Tandon, a 2003 SIMC alumnus, who describes herself as “a home-maker, new mom and an avid knowledge-seeker” has sent in a poem, “Ennui.” I have touched it up, here and there, as usual.
Previously, a reporter with The Indian Express, Baisakhi is “sitting on the sidelines, reading up voraciously on history, past and present.” Check out her blog: “Kissing Kin” (“Be well, good, nice, old-fashioned”)
Let Baisakhi introduce “Ennui” in her own words:
*****
By Baisakhi Roy
‘Ennui’ was inspired by a feeling of hopelessness when the Mumbai attacks happened. I was far away in Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA, watching my precious city burn, as it had so many times in the past.
I almost laughed, “Really? Is this happening again?” Will we become another conflict zone like the Gaza Strip and Bosnia? Will it take another 50 years, to live in a peaceful India? This is what we have become: a mess of unresolved issues, a mess in which the glorious legacy of India has been lost and forgotten.
ENNUI
This is a time to gloat;
we are such pieces of work.
This is how we go about
our daily ennui.
We bathe in the sun;
We love, eat, and try to gain respect.
We amble,
gnawing into space.
We hate the sound of white noise,
”This is mine. This is yours”.
We croak, until hoarse.
Scratch, until we bleed.
We send our children
into prompt assemblies
to ask for wisdom:
Good thoughts, words and deeds.
We build our castles
and etherise our air.
Then ask for allegiance
to our whimsical gods.
We broker peace,
Sober in solidarity.
But hide our rancor
To light a wayward fire.
*****
Can you see the budding poets lurking among the journalists? Read the journalists who feel and write like poets. Join them. The pages of my blog, “Against the Tide”, shall be open to you, my dear students. For what greater joy is there for a teacher than to see one’s students go ahead, shining bright.
Your support is my strength.
- Joe.
Pune, Wednesday, 28 January 2009.
Such a joy to report that my students share my blog: look at my posts and the number written by you. The trend started with sharp questions from Amith Prabhu (SIMC), which I tried to answer in “Working one’s way up and other queries”. Gauri Gharpure (Ranade) then sent me a quote about poetry and on an off-chance I decided to carry it because it had to do with "clarity" an issue that concerns journalists, “The Clarity of Poetry”.
Then came two excellent pieces from Smriti Mudgal (SIMC), who has her own blog, "Ambaree" in Hindi. She sent in a highly personal memoir about her love afair with the people of Mumbai: “Mumbai: a people with a sense of purpose”. Smriti then paid a fond tribute to her favourite school teacher: “To Chitra Ma’am … with love, Smriti”. Such is the stuff my blog is made up of (two prepositions at the end of one sentence!?!?!).
And to carry forward the torch for poetry, Baruk Feddabonn from Bangalore asks, “Should You Read Poetry?”.
My colleague, Abhay Vaidya of DNA, Pune, also replied to Amith with, “No room for gifts in journalism”.
Dr Vivek Pinto, my friend from school in Mumbai, who is currently in Tokyo, has also been emailing provocative and thoughtful links (see “Mumbai attacks: one man’s freedom-fighter is another man’s terrrorist”) faster than I can upload on a section of my blog, “Dr Vivek Pinto - Links”, devoted entirely and separately to his contributions.
*****
Now Baisakhi Roy-Tandon, a 2003 SIMC alumnus, who describes herself as “a home-maker, new mom and an avid knowledge-seeker” has sent in a poem, “Ennui.” I have touched it up, here and there, as usual.
Previously, a reporter with The Indian Express, Baisakhi is “sitting on the sidelines, reading up voraciously on history, past and present.” Check out her blog: “Kissing Kin” (“Be well, good, nice, old-fashioned”)
Let Baisakhi introduce “Ennui” in her own words:
*****
By Baisakhi Roy
‘Ennui’ was inspired by a feeling of hopelessness when the Mumbai attacks happened. I was far away in Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA, watching my precious city burn, as it had so many times in the past.
I almost laughed, “Really? Is this happening again?” Will we become another conflict zone like the Gaza Strip and Bosnia? Will it take another 50 years, to live in a peaceful India? This is what we have become: a mess of unresolved issues, a mess in which the glorious legacy of India has been lost and forgotten.
ENNUI
This is a time to gloat;
we are such pieces of work.
This is how we go about
our daily ennui.
We bathe in the sun;
We love, eat, and try to gain respect.
We amble,
gnawing into space.
We hate the sound of white noise,
”This is mine. This is yours”.
We croak, until hoarse.
Scratch, until we bleed.
We send our children
into prompt assemblies
to ask for wisdom:
Good thoughts, words and deeds.
We build our castles
and etherise our air.
Then ask for allegiance
to our whimsical gods.
We broker peace,
Sober in solidarity.
But hide our rancor
To light a wayward fire.
*****
Can you see the budding poets lurking among the journalists? Read the journalists who feel and write like poets. Join them. The pages of my blog, “Against the Tide”, shall be open to you, my dear students. For what greater joy is there for a teacher than to see one’s students go ahead, shining bright.
Your support is my strength.
- Joe.
Pune, Wednesday, 28 January 2009.
Friday, January 16, 2009
Should you read poetry?
My dear students,
When a student of mine from Ranade Institute, Gauri Gharpure in Kolkata, sent in a quote on poetry I used it in the post, "The clarity of poetry" because as a journalist I have been obsessed by clarity. I had no idea then that some of my readers were great admirers of poetry.
One of them, Baruk Feddaboon, based in Bangalore, has his own blog called "bottle broke" Click on the pic below to get into "bottle broke"
"The clarity of poetry" got eleven (11) comments. But it was the diversity of the comments that astonished me, considering this was not a blog for poets. One of my readers, Baruk Feddabonn, who is not one of my students from any of the places where I teach in Pune, had early on introduced himself and I kept thinking to myself, "Here is my Eklavya." So I asked him to do this piece on poetry for journalists.
I have touched up the piece here and there, as is the time-worn custom among subs. I hope Baruk will understand.
By Baruk Feddabonn
Should you read poetry? Hell, I don’t know. Can I tell you why or how to read poetry? Hell, I don’t know! What I do have to offer are a few thoughts on what I have, over the years, got from poems.
The following five pieces:
1. What is Real?
2. Hope
3. Perspectives
4. Weirdness
5. Language and Poetry
are based on poems and bits of poems, some well known, and some not so well known. I do hope these poems help in convincing you that poets are not necessarily the useless buggers they are often made out to be!
1. What is real?
“When Prime Minister Gujral
planned a visit to the city
bamboos sprang up from pavements
like a welcoming committee.
But when he came, he was
only the strident sounds of sirens
like warnings in war-time bombings.”
(When the Prime Minister Visits Shillong the Bamboos Watch in Silence; Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih)
I often hear attacks on poetry for not being ‘factual’. Somehow, not being factual is seen as a bad thing. But honestly, what are facts? And how important are they? A lot of poetry deals with the metaphorical and the imagination. Things are alluded to; often not ‘directly’ spoken of. But is that wrong?
In common language, we speak of the sun rising. ‘Factually’, that is untrue – the sun does no such thing. Nor does it set. The ‘rising’ and ‘setting’ of the sun are our human explanations or metaphors for the natural phenomenon of the earth moving around the sun!
So while the Prime Minister was not ‘factually’ the sound of sirens, that line aptly describes the distance the rulers, even in a democracy, keep from the ruled – visually (bamboos on pavements) and aurally (sirens). And that ‘only’ – describes, better than an entire sentence, the alienation, which the poet felt. So while not ‘factual’, the poem is ‘true’.
And now you decide. Will you transcend the facts and opt for the truth instead?
*****
2. Hope
“Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.”
(September 1, 1939; W.H. Auden)
Sometimes, switching on the evening news plunges me into despair. I see war, corporate greed and the non-stop destruction of the natural world. And this is only the news that is reported.
In the not-or-barely-reported news are farmer suicides, Bhopal victims and Binayak Sen. I watch the increasingly self-obsessed lives of the super-rich; the cynical manipulations of politicians and governments; the prostitution of religion to the dictates of power.
It’s easy to get lost in the darkness, at least for me, and I wonder whether it would not be easier, more practical, to pick up a gun. A messy proposition, yes, but maybe a simpler one?
And then I remember this poem.
Written on the eve of the Second World War, the poem by W.H. Auden speaks of the darkness and despair the world is under, trying to understand why. And though that question is never answered, there IS an answer – that what is important, in the end, is to see the “points of light”, and “show an affirming flame.”
I think I can try to do that!
*****
3. Perspectives
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
(The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock; T.S. Eliot)
A close friend and I are currently arguing on facebook. He feels, to quote, that “the Israelis have their heads better screwed on than the Palestinians do.”
I utterly and absolutely disagree.
I see the Israeli state as a creation of terrorist incursion, whether the original Israel of the Bible, where God apparently told the Jews to wipe out the Canaanites, or the Israel created in 1947 on the strength of British guns. This friend, by the way, is a reasonable person (as much as we can pretend to be), and hates war as much as I do. But the argument goes on.
Point: many people watch sunsets - on beaches, in the mountains, even from the rooftops of urban homes. Some of us photograph the sunsets. I doubt, however, that anyone has made such a grisly and unlikely comparison, as Eliot does. And while I appreciate the comparison – I find it humorous – I know many people who do not.
While no wars have been fought on what sunsets should be compared to, many wars seem to have been fought for, what to me seem, silly reasons such as country and religion. Then again, maybe you don’t think these are silly reasons. Maybe, we can all benefit from understanding each other’s perspective.
*****
4. Weirdness
“Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.”
(Pied beauty; Gerard Manley Hopkins)
My grandfather was hardcore working class; when I say he built his house with his own hands, I mean that literally.
In a society dominated by an increasing desire for more power and status, Apu (Mizo familiar for grandfather) was suspicious of all things ‘big’ and ‘authoritative’, and proud, till the day he died, of working with his hands. Fiercely independent and bluntly outspoken, he made some very powerful enemies who almost succeeded in destroying him.
His name, appropriately, was Rualhleia, which loosely translated from the Mizo means ‘he who is not even’. He definitely had a lot of rough edges!
This poem by Hopkins reminds me of my grandfather, in its celebration of the strange, the common and the uneven.
We let others determine who we are and how we respond to the world. Being ‘acceptable’ is important, whatever the cost! Recently, I was berated by a colleague who thought it shameful that I did not, in my position in the company, drive a car.
I have been receiving a slew of emails telling me to forward them, if I am patriotic. I am constantly told that:
- the only hope for India is in the ‘new’ capitalist economy;
- I should be economically successful;
- I should buy more; from recognised brand names;
- crime is something the lower classes do;
- the army is good;
- beauty means fairness;
- I should want to marry, and have children, and care about what happens to the ‘family name’; and
- I should avoid 'weird' people who disagree with what society thinks of as 'acceptable'.
But I can’t do that. My Apu and I, we’ll stand by all that is “counter, original, spare, strange”.
*****
5. Language and Poetry
“I am a venereal sore in the private part of language”
(Cruelty; Namdeo Dhasal; translated by Dilip Chitre)
“Poetry must be raw, like a side of beef,
should drip blood, remind you of sweat
and dusty slaughter and the epidermal crunch
and the sudden bullet to the head.”
(What Poetry Means to Ernestina in Peril; Mona Zote)
“I’ll go for words,
Words are my forte.
Words stab and jab,
Heal, hurt,
Mask, unmask,
Paint pictures.
Words
Create.”
(Power of Words; Malsawm Hriatzuali Jacob)
Language is fascinating. You know how they say a picture speaks more than a thousand words? Sometimes a sentence speaks more than a thousand pictures!
Language can be used like:
a warm gentle hand; caressing, hugging, loving;
a wall, to separate and segregate;
a whip, to subdue and suppress;
a rock, to retaliate.
Language can be like a scream of horror.
Language can be:
loving, harsh, angry, cold;
questioning, pleading;
full of laughter one moment, solemn the next.
Language can elevate the common; tear down the proud. Language can calm, hurt; goad, encourage; dream.
Language is like a knife – that can chop up food or slit a throat.
*****
People ask me, “Why do I like poetry?”
I tell them, “Because poetry is to language what pottery is to mud.”
You may email Baruk Feddabonn at: baruk@provoke.co.in.
*****
Henceforth, I will sign off, borrowing a phrase by Sushma Nair (nee Menon), a student of mine from 1992 when SIMC used to be called "Symbiosis Institute of Journalism and Communication (SIJC)". She had had coined the phrase for me to use as the editor of Mile Sur Mera Tumhara, the house magazine of Deepak Fertilisers and Petrochemicals Corporation Ltd, Pune, where I worked in PR and Corp Comm (don't be shocked!!) during 1996-2003. Thank you, Sushma.
I hope the New Year 2009 is taking good care of you. Keep in touch by phone, SMS, email or through the evergreen postman.
Your support is my strength,
- Joe.
Pune, 16th January 2009.
When a student of mine from Ranade Institute, Gauri Gharpure in Kolkata, sent in a quote on poetry I used it in the post, "The clarity of poetry" because as a journalist I have been obsessed by clarity. I had no idea then that some of my readers were great admirers of poetry.
One of them, Baruk Feddaboon, based in Bangalore, has his own blog called "bottle broke" Click on the pic below to get into "bottle broke"
"The clarity of poetry" got eleven (11) comments. But it was the diversity of the comments that astonished me, considering this was not a blog for poets. One of my readers, Baruk Feddabonn, who is not one of my students from any of the places where I teach in Pune, had early on introduced himself and I kept thinking to myself, "Here is my Eklavya." So I asked him to do this piece on poetry for journalists.
I have touched up the piece here and there, as is the time-worn custom among subs. I hope Baruk will understand.
By Baruk Feddabonn
Should you read poetry? Hell, I don’t know. Can I tell you why or how to read poetry? Hell, I don’t know! What I do have to offer are a few thoughts on what I have, over the years, got from poems.
The following five pieces:
1. What is Real?
2. Hope
3. Perspectives
4. Weirdness
5. Language and Poetry
are based on poems and bits of poems, some well known, and some not so well known. I do hope these poems help in convincing you that poets are not necessarily the useless buggers they are often made out to be!
1. What is real?
“When Prime Minister Gujral
planned a visit to the city
bamboos sprang up from pavements
like a welcoming committee.
But when he came, he was
only the strident sounds of sirens
like warnings in war-time bombings.”
(When the Prime Minister Visits Shillong the Bamboos Watch in Silence; Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih)
I often hear attacks on poetry for not being ‘factual’. Somehow, not being factual is seen as a bad thing. But honestly, what are facts? And how important are they? A lot of poetry deals with the metaphorical and the imagination. Things are alluded to; often not ‘directly’ spoken of. But is that wrong?
In common language, we speak of the sun rising. ‘Factually’, that is untrue – the sun does no such thing. Nor does it set. The ‘rising’ and ‘setting’ of the sun are our human explanations or metaphors for the natural phenomenon of the earth moving around the sun!
So while the Prime Minister was not ‘factually’ the sound of sirens, that line aptly describes the distance the rulers, even in a democracy, keep from the ruled – visually (bamboos on pavements) and aurally (sirens). And that ‘only’ – describes, better than an entire sentence, the alienation, which the poet felt. So while not ‘factual’, the poem is ‘true’.
And now you decide. Will you transcend the facts and opt for the truth instead?
*****
2. Hope
“Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.”
(September 1, 1939; W.H. Auden)
Sometimes, switching on the evening news plunges me into despair. I see war, corporate greed and the non-stop destruction of the natural world. And this is only the news that is reported.
In the not-or-barely-reported news are farmer suicides, Bhopal victims and Binayak Sen. I watch the increasingly self-obsessed lives of the super-rich; the cynical manipulations of politicians and governments; the prostitution of religion to the dictates of power.
It’s easy to get lost in the darkness, at least for me, and I wonder whether it would not be easier, more practical, to pick up a gun. A messy proposition, yes, but maybe a simpler one?
And then I remember this poem.
Written on the eve of the Second World War, the poem by W.H. Auden speaks of the darkness and despair the world is under, trying to understand why. And though that question is never answered, there IS an answer – that what is important, in the end, is to see the “points of light”, and “show an affirming flame.”
I think I can try to do that!
*****
3. Perspectives
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
(The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock; T.S. Eliot)
A close friend and I are currently arguing on facebook. He feels, to quote, that “the Israelis have their heads better screwed on than the Palestinians do.”
I utterly and absolutely disagree.
I see the Israeli state as a creation of terrorist incursion, whether the original Israel of the Bible, where God apparently told the Jews to wipe out the Canaanites, or the Israel created in 1947 on the strength of British guns. This friend, by the way, is a reasonable person (as much as we can pretend to be), and hates war as much as I do. But the argument goes on.
Point: many people watch sunsets - on beaches, in the mountains, even from the rooftops of urban homes. Some of us photograph the sunsets. I doubt, however, that anyone has made such a grisly and unlikely comparison, as Eliot does. And while I appreciate the comparison – I find it humorous – I know many people who do not.
While no wars have been fought on what sunsets should be compared to, many wars seem to have been fought for, what to me seem, silly reasons such as country and religion. Then again, maybe you don’t think these are silly reasons. Maybe, we can all benefit from understanding each other’s perspective.
*****
4. Weirdness
“Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.”
(Pied beauty; Gerard Manley Hopkins)
My grandfather was hardcore working class; when I say he built his house with his own hands, I mean that literally.
In a society dominated by an increasing desire for more power and status, Apu (Mizo familiar for grandfather) was suspicious of all things ‘big’ and ‘authoritative’, and proud, till the day he died, of working with his hands. Fiercely independent and bluntly outspoken, he made some very powerful enemies who almost succeeded in destroying him.
His name, appropriately, was Rualhleia, which loosely translated from the Mizo means ‘he who is not even’. He definitely had a lot of rough edges!
This poem by Hopkins reminds me of my grandfather, in its celebration of the strange, the common and the uneven.
We let others determine who we are and how we respond to the world. Being ‘acceptable’ is important, whatever the cost! Recently, I was berated by a colleague who thought it shameful that I did not, in my position in the company, drive a car.
I have been receiving a slew of emails telling me to forward them, if I am patriotic. I am constantly told that:
- the only hope for India is in the ‘new’ capitalist economy;
- I should be economically successful;
- I should buy more; from recognised brand names;
- crime is something the lower classes do;
- the army is good;
- beauty means fairness;
- I should want to marry, and have children, and care about what happens to the ‘family name’; and
- I should avoid 'weird' people who disagree with what society thinks of as 'acceptable'.
But I can’t do that. My Apu and I, we’ll stand by all that is “counter, original, spare, strange”.
*****
5. Language and Poetry
“I am a venereal sore in the private part of language”
(Cruelty; Namdeo Dhasal; translated by Dilip Chitre)
“Poetry must be raw, like a side of beef,
should drip blood, remind you of sweat
and dusty slaughter and the epidermal crunch
and the sudden bullet to the head.”
(What Poetry Means to Ernestina in Peril; Mona Zote)
“I’ll go for words,
Words are my forte.
Words stab and jab,
Heal, hurt,
Mask, unmask,
Paint pictures.
Words
Create.”
(Power of Words; Malsawm Hriatzuali Jacob)
Language is fascinating. You know how they say a picture speaks more than a thousand words? Sometimes a sentence speaks more than a thousand pictures!
Language can be used like:
a warm gentle hand; caressing, hugging, loving;
a wall, to separate and segregate;
a whip, to subdue and suppress;
a rock, to retaliate.
Language can be like a scream of horror.
Language can be:
loving, harsh, angry, cold;
questioning, pleading;
full of laughter one moment, solemn the next.
Language can elevate the common; tear down the proud. Language can calm, hurt; goad, encourage; dream.
Language is like a knife – that can chop up food or slit a throat.
*****
People ask me, “Why do I like poetry?”
I tell them, “Because poetry is to language what pottery is to mud.”
You may email Baruk Feddabonn at: baruk@provoke.co.in.
*****
Henceforth, I will sign off, borrowing a phrase by Sushma Nair (nee Menon), a student of mine from 1992 when SIMC used to be called "Symbiosis Institute of Journalism and Communication (SIJC)". She had had coined the phrase for me to use as the editor of Mile Sur Mera Tumhara, the house magazine of Deepak Fertilisers and Petrochemicals Corporation Ltd, Pune, where I worked in PR and Corp Comm (don't be shocked!!) during 1996-2003. Thank you, Sushma.
I hope the New Year 2009 is taking good care of you. Keep in touch by phone, SMS, email or through the evergreen postman.
Your support is my strength,
- Joe.
Pune, 16th January 2009.
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