My dear family, friends, colleagues and students,
Ashok Gopal is one of my dear and close friends from the old Maharashtra Herald ("old MH") days in Pune, where I used to work during 1983-96.
A professional writer and editor, who has made "free-lance work" a fine art and science as well as livelihood, he is also a great story-teller. He loves to travel, while on writing assignments or simply for pleasure. Here is one of his travel stories.
By Ashok Gopal
GETTING into the AC coach of a Mumbai-bound train at Jhansi on 6 March 2012, I was thrilled to see that it was practically empty. I had the whole place to myself.
Then, I heard familiar voices. Or, rather, a familiar language.
Marathi.
Marathi: as spoken on the street; with lots of not-nice references to mothers and sisters – references made even in everyday conversation (eg, in a hotel, " ****, I will have a wada sambar", " **** this sambar is too sweet").
I drifted towards the voices and asked its owners, a group of six big men, "Kuthe nigale?"
They almost pounced on me – for help!!!
They had got into the train near Gorakhpur the previous night and they learnt only later that the train did not have a pantry car. So, they had spent the whole night hungry and thirsty and now they wanted to know, from me, how they could survive on anything other than samosa and kachori, which seemed to be the only thing available at Jhansi station.
I sat down and gave them a succinct lecture on "How to survive in long-distance trains without pantry cars", having had that experience many times. I told them how in most stations you can buy dry fruit / lassi / banana / bread and butter. They listened intently. I could have been the Buddha speaking and I saw the spark of illumination in their eyes … which didn't help them one bit because, by then, the train had started moving ... and the next halt was four hours away.
Hungrily, they told me another recent sad story of their lives.
*****
THEY TOLD me that they were Mumbai Crime Branch men, in mufti, who had gone to Gorakhpur, to trace two fellows who had committed a "dacoity" at Thane railway station.
I would have loved to hear all the details. But they were more interested in telling me about loose motions, caused by drinking Gorakhpur water, and eating oily food, and maida rotis ... They went on and on, with each one adding details of the number of trips made per day to the toilet ... the lowest number was six, the highest 16.
(They did give me one nugget about their work though: throughout their operation, they had kept the Gorakhpur police in the dark. Why? "They would tip off the suspects!" the senior-most of the men told me. "In UP, police protect criminals, not people!")
Some hours later, they went to sleep, but were rudely woken up at Bhopal railway station by RKs. Not Raj Kapoor fans but “Retired Kothrudians”. A demographically, physically and economically very powerful lot, RKs are known to travel in large numbers, all over India, using their VRS / Pension+DA / Mutual Fund savings, etc.
You can see these hardy, healthy RKs any time and any where in India, from Kashmir to Kanyakumari. Many of the RKs who got into the train at Bhopal were tooth-less. But certainly not tongue-less. So in no time, the coach, which had been like a Vipassana centre, seemed like the Margao fish market.
One of the "crime branch" men complained about this change, loudly, and one of the oldies heard the comment and went into a tizzy. "Tumhi pan Marathi ka?" he exclaimed, as Neil Armstrong would have done, if he had come across ‘the Mallu with the puncture shop on the moon’ (with a telescope you can see him, on New Moon days).
The "crime branch" men smiled thinly, but the oldie, who was soon joined by three others, was not going to give up. He wanted to know everything: where they were coming from, where they were going, what happened, what they saw, what they ate ...
The senior ‘crime branch’ man said sternly: “We are railway officials on an inspection tour. We are travelling on work.”
The man made this statement with enough expression to suggest, "Please vanish!" and the oldies got the hint. They went away mumbling.
*****
OF COURSE I was stumped. The senior "crime branch" man then told me: “Aaho, it was okay telling you we were from crime branch, but if we tell that to a whole train compartment, what is the use of being in mufti?”
A very sensible answer.
But it makes one think: “Were they really crime branch men? What was the proof? (Anyone can get a fake I-card printed). What if they were really railway men? Or what if they were actually dacoits, pretending to be policemen?
These questions raise one mighty question: how can one be 100% sure that people are what they say they are?
However, at least in this case, there was no room for doubt. In the upper berth, above the senior crime branch man, and unseen by the RK oldies, were two young males, almost over each other. At first, I thought they were gays. Then I saw they were handcuffed, and both pairs of handcuffs were tied by a chain, with a lock, which was tied to one of the iron rods above their heads.
Between the 6 to 16 rounds made to the loo, or a nearby field, the crime branch men from Mumbai in mufti had got hold of their two "dacoity" suspects ... in some village near Gorakhpur!
POST-SCRIPT:
AFTER THEY had finished with talk about loose motions (but obviously not finished with doing the motions), the policemen turned to other things. For some time they played rummy. One fellow, the paunchiest of the lot, who was for some reason called "Negro" (he was not black) kept winning and after every victory, he announced, "Satyame Jayate!" (Truth shall prevail).
Then, they kept away the cards and shifted to fiddling with their various phones.
Then, they ate bananas.
Then, they talked about the efforts being made by the youngest among them, to find a husband for his educated and working sister. It seems there was a promising match, but the husband-to-be said that he wanted to see the pay slip of the wife-to-be. To which, the young policeman said, “FO!”. That ended the marriage negotiations. The other policeman agreed that the young policeman had done the right thing; he should have gone further – and landed a kick on a sensitive part of the husband-to-be's backside.
While all this was going on, the two handcuffed suspects sat up and looked down at the policemen. ‘Negro’ told them: Didn't we tell you to keep lying down? The suspects complained: Bore ho raha hain. And it is highly uncomfortable. Negro said: You should have thought about that before committing the crime. Suspects said: We didn't think so much that time ...
Then ‘Negro’ pronounced a quotable quote. (Okay, it's not like something out of Shakespeare, but it still has much meaning)
Negro told suspects: In life, you have to think, you have to think always, especially if policemen are going to be involved. Because, ek baar aadmi police ke jaal mein phas gaya to uska murgi ho jata hai. ("Once in the net of the policemen, a man becomes a hen.")
*****
Thank you, Ashok, for adorning my blog as a guest blogger. I hope you will come back with yet more stories for our reading pleasure.
You may get in touch with Ashok Gopal by email on: ashokcvgopal@gmail(dot)com.
Your support is my strength,
Peace and love,
- Joe.
Pune, India, Tuesday, 3 April 2012.
Showing posts with label ways of seeing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ways of seeing. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 3, 2012
Sunday, June 26, 2011
How parents balance work and family
My dear students, friends and colleagues,
FOR THE LAST two-three years, many of my female (and a few of my male) students, who have got married and have small children, are asking the question most parents face: How does a parent balance work and family?
As a parent, what do you think about balancing work and family?
I am asking some of my female (and male) friends, colleagues and students to share their experiences. This is an exploratory exercise, to test out the waters, hoping not to get my fingers bitten off.
If you are one of my friends or colleagues, what do you think of your solution to balancing work and family? How has it worked out for your children and for yourself? If you are one of my unmarried students, would you like to share how your parents balanced work and family?
To start the ball rolling, I asked one of my closest friends and colleagues, Gita Iyengar (nee Gopalakrishnan), to share her views and experiences.
Gita and I know each other from 1970, when we were National Science Talent scholars and we have been meeting each other, off and on, for the last 41 years. The principal of a school in Hyderabad, she has written 7 books, mostly for children. “Anyone Can Write” (Foundation Press, Hyderabad, 170 pages, Rs.195) written with Cheryl Rao and Meena Murdeshwar, guides children on how to write poems, features and stories.
I admire her simple and direct style, which has an elegant flow. Above all, I value her fiercely frank opinions.
------------------------------------
By Gita Iyengar (nee Gopalakrishnan)
WHEN MY FIRST child came along, I was working, and got the usual three months of maternity leave. I decided to wait and watch for some time how things would work. When I went back to work, my mother-in-law came to look after the baby. But that was strictly during the time I was at work.
I remember getting the cooking for the day done, getting my son bathed and fed before rushing off to work. The moment I entered the house again, I was back looking after the baby and the house again. So the first few months showed me how over-extended I was going to be.
My son also had an umbilical hernia, which needed surgery when he was 10 months old. So at that time, I tendered my resignation. But the management of the organisation took the trouble to talk to me and suggested that I just go on leave and think about it for some time. Six months later, I went back and confirmed that I wanted to let go my job.
*****
AT THE TIME, we were able to manage our expenses without too much of a hassle, as ours was a simple life style. I had plenty to do, so I didn't miss my job on that count either. The occasional question about what I was “doing”' didn't trouble me much. Besides, fewer women were working then, so most people around me accepted my choice. My husband hadn't particularly wanted me to stop working, but he did not at that time make an issue of it.
For myself, I enjoyed being with my first-born, and then with the second one, who came along a couple of years later. I think I was able to be relaxed and look after them, read to them, play with them, take them out to the park, and teach them many things along the way in the first few years. They were active children, and my elder son especially had to be kept out of mischief. I think being around them made it less stressful.
They were both sent to play school when they were about 18 months old. For the elder one, it was in anticipation of the arrival of the second child. Since it worked well in making him happily engaged and less dependent, I did that with the second one as well.
When my elder son was four, and the younger one two, I started on my Master’s degree. About that time, we started running a small dairy farm, and I was taking care of the distribution and billing. I did short-term stints at my children's schools as well. I followed that up by getting my degree in education.
I had also started doing some free-lance writing. I got back to regular work, outside of the home, when my sons were twelve and ten. During some of those years, it was free-lance work. It gave me the advantage of flexibility in timing. However, when assignments came in at the same time, I found I was sometimes working on four different jobs! At such times, I was often at work at different time slots from 6.30 am to 8 pm!
Still, there is a lot to be said for free-lance work. I found it stimulating. It also gave me, over a period of eight to nine years, such a continuing choice of assignments that I really never felt any insecurity about ‘not having a permanent job’. In fact, I did pass up one or two opportunities for full-time work.
Eventually, when this offer to work as principal of a very good school came along, I took time to think it through, and then joined. I had to make the journey back to working in a very structured environment.
*****
I THINK THAT along the way I also sequentially built identities for myself, though that was certainly not the main thing I was trying to do.
During the years when there was loads of work to get through both at home and outside, I think I managed because of some of the following factors :-
a) As a youngster, I had been brought up to do a certain bit of work around the home, and to take pride in getting things done. I had also grown up watching my mother, prioritising jobs aloud. That training, and a positive attitude, helped me.
b) My health and energy levels were pretty good.
c) I am calm, have some commonsense, and believe in net surpluses, which may not be immediately visible!
d) My system of making sure my family had a good breakfast and dinner, nutritious food with some flexibility but not too many frills, seemed to work.
e) I started trusting my children early to manage their personal toilet and baths; to eat; to do their home work and so on; and also to help with setting the table, to put away things; to do a bit of shopping nearby; and to take the bus to school. I supervised some of this activity, some of the time, but didn't believe in fussing.
f) I believed in guiding my children, but letting them make their choices, with the responsibility to work it out.
g) In India, one does get domestic help, most of the time.
*****
I KNOW THAT I have not said anything about my husband or others sharing chores. To be frank, most of the chores were my responsibility. My mother-in-law would help me a bit with getting vegetables cut, or supervising the maid's work, or minding the children. My husband would sometimes keep the boys engaged, or supervise their getting ready for school. On some Sundays, he made breakfast. However, it would not have been possible to extend that to a system of sharing chores on a regular basis.
I think now that, on the whole, it has worked out all right. My two sons are capable and independent individuals, comfortable in their own skin. And I'm doing all right as well.
---------------------------------------------------
Now that Gita has had her say, do you feel comfortable sharing your own experiences and views? Please let me know -- either way.
Gita has written about 1,000 words. If you wish to make a small comment, please do so in the comments section at the end of this post. If you wish to write a longer piece, ie, more than 400 words, please send it to me by email at: sangatizuzay@gmail.com and I will upload it as a separate post.
Your support is my strength.
Peace and love,
- Joe.
Pune, India; Sunday, 26 June 2011.
FOR THE LAST two-three years, many of my female (and a few of my male) students, who have got married and have small children, are asking the question most parents face: How does a parent balance work and family?
As a parent, what do you think about balancing work and family?
I am asking some of my female (and male) friends, colleagues and students to share their experiences. This is an exploratory exercise, to test out the waters, hoping not to get my fingers bitten off.
If you are one of my friends or colleagues, what do you think of your solution to balancing work and family? How has it worked out for your children and for yourself? If you are one of my unmarried students, would you like to share how your parents balanced work and family?
To start the ball rolling, I asked one of my closest friends and colleagues, Gita Iyengar (nee Gopalakrishnan), to share her views and experiences.
Gita and I know each other from 1970, when we were National Science Talent scholars and we have been meeting each other, off and on, for the last 41 years. The principal of a school in Hyderabad, she has written 7 books, mostly for children. “Anyone Can Write” (Foundation Press, Hyderabad, 170 pages, Rs.195) written with Cheryl Rao and Meena Murdeshwar, guides children on how to write poems, features and stories.
I admire her simple and direct style, which has an elegant flow. Above all, I value her fiercely frank opinions.
------------------------------------
By Gita Iyengar (nee Gopalakrishnan)
WHEN MY FIRST child came along, I was working, and got the usual three months of maternity leave. I decided to wait and watch for some time how things would work. When I went back to work, my mother-in-law came to look after the baby. But that was strictly during the time I was at work.
I remember getting the cooking for the day done, getting my son bathed and fed before rushing off to work. The moment I entered the house again, I was back looking after the baby and the house again. So the first few months showed me how over-extended I was going to be.
My son also had an umbilical hernia, which needed surgery when he was 10 months old. So at that time, I tendered my resignation. But the management of the organisation took the trouble to talk to me and suggested that I just go on leave and think about it for some time. Six months later, I went back and confirmed that I wanted to let go my job.
*****
AT THE TIME, we were able to manage our expenses without too much of a hassle, as ours was a simple life style. I had plenty to do, so I didn't miss my job on that count either. The occasional question about what I was “doing”' didn't trouble me much. Besides, fewer women were working then, so most people around me accepted my choice. My husband hadn't particularly wanted me to stop working, but he did not at that time make an issue of it.
For myself, I enjoyed being with my first-born, and then with the second one, who came along a couple of years later. I think I was able to be relaxed and look after them, read to them, play with them, take them out to the park, and teach them many things along the way in the first few years. They were active children, and my elder son especially had to be kept out of mischief. I think being around them made it less stressful.
They were both sent to play school when they were about 18 months old. For the elder one, it was in anticipation of the arrival of the second child. Since it worked well in making him happily engaged and less dependent, I did that with the second one as well.
When my elder son was four, and the younger one two, I started on my Master’s degree. About that time, we started running a small dairy farm, and I was taking care of the distribution and billing. I did short-term stints at my children's schools as well. I followed that up by getting my degree in education.
I had also started doing some free-lance writing. I got back to regular work, outside of the home, when my sons were twelve and ten. During some of those years, it was free-lance work. It gave me the advantage of flexibility in timing. However, when assignments came in at the same time, I found I was sometimes working on four different jobs! At such times, I was often at work at different time slots from 6.30 am to 8 pm!
Still, there is a lot to be said for free-lance work. I found it stimulating. It also gave me, over a period of eight to nine years, such a continuing choice of assignments that I really never felt any insecurity about ‘not having a permanent job’. In fact, I did pass up one or two opportunities for full-time work.
Eventually, when this offer to work as principal of a very good school came along, I took time to think it through, and then joined. I had to make the journey back to working in a very structured environment.
*****
I THINK THAT along the way I also sequentially built identities for myself, though that was certainly not the main thing I was trying to do.
During the years when there was loads of work to get through both at home and outside, I think I managed because of some of the following factors :-
a) As a youngster, I had been brought up to do a certain bit of work around the home, and to take pride in getting things done. I had also grown up watching my mother, prioritising jobs aloud. That training, and a positive attitude, helped me.
b) My health and energy levels were pretty good.
c) I am calm, have some commonsense, and believe in net surpluses, which may not be immediately visible!
d) My system of making sure my family had a good breakfast and dinner, nutritious food with some flexibility but not too many frills, seemed to work.
e) I started trusting my children early to manage their personal toilet and baths; to eat; to do their home work and so on; and also to help with setting the table, to put away things; to do a bit of shopping nearby; and to take the bus to school. I supervised some of this activity, some of the time, but didn't believe in fussing.
f) I believed in guiding my children, but letting them make their choices, with the responsibility to work it out.
g) In India, one does get domestic help, most of the time.
*****
I KNOW THAT I have not said anything about my husband or others sharing chores. To be frank, most of the chores were my responsibility. My mother-in-law would help me a bit with getting vegetables cut, or supervising the maid's work, or minding the children. My husband would sometimes keep the boys engaged, or supervise their getting ready for school. On some Sundays, he made breakfast. However, it would not have been possible to extend that to a system of sharing chores on a regular basis.
I think now that, on the whole, it has worked out all right. My two sons are capable and independent individuals, comfortable in their own skin. And I'm doing all right as well.
---------------------------------------------------
Now that Gita has had her say, do you feel comfortable sharing your own experiences and views? Please let me know -- either way.
Gita has written about 1,000 words. If you wish to make a small comment, please do so in the comments section at the end of this post. If you wish to write a longer piece, ie, more than 400 words, please send it to me by email at: sangatizuzay@gmail.com and I will upload it as a separate post.
Your support is my strength.
Peace and love,
- Joe.
Pune, India; Sunday, 26 June 2011.
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Can you see me, waving at railway gate No.60?
My dear students, friends and colleagues,
Trains form my earliest memories, since I was a child of four in 1955. Our mother used to say she felt we were ‘born on railway trains or platforms’! Our father was a railway man, all his working life. So, I spontaneously think of Life itself as a train journey.
Now, I see myself standing at railway gate No.60. Can you see me, waving at you?
This “60” piece has five starting points:
1. My auto-biographical sketch: “Along the line, at railway gate No. 58” on this blog.
2. My catching-up piece, “This is me, Joe Pinto, since 1967”, written as I was preparing for the 11-1-11 re-union of my Class of 1967 school-mates from the St Mary’s (SSC) High School, Mazagaon, Mumbai. (Read this piece on my source-blog, “Journey Unbegun”.)
3. The memoir of my mother, “Lessons my mother learned me”, in five parts on this blog.
(Read all five parts as one piece on “Journey Unbegun”
4. Addressing various issues, raised from time to time, by my students, in posts like “Rules of the Road” and other pieces, on this blog.
5. A birthday gift to one of my sincerest students, Gunjan Chaurasia, “When I was 27”. (Read the original piece here on “Journey Unbegun”.)
*****
"A man's memory is his own private literature." – Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
Looking back at my journey, how do I see myself, as I stand at railway gate No.60? This is how one of my caring gurus, Dr Devendra Agochiya, sums me up: “A journalist by profession, and a trainer by choice.” Also see my 5 Ws and 1 H, on the margins of this blog.
“Along the line, at railway gate No. 58” traces my efforts to reconcile myself with aging and retirement. Today at 60, maybe I will not stop working. But I no longer want to do, what I do not like to do. I am coming to terms with work, in a radically different way.
In my “58” piece, I recalled the seven main streams of influence in my life and paid tribute to my parents, teachers, students, friends and colleagues, who helped me to discover who I am.
Their single-most important contribution was to help me be myself:
- comfortable in my own skin;
- a one-eyed Joe, with my spectacles on my nose from the age of eight;
- with words as my friends and books as my lovers;
- walking ‘the road less travelled’ with a jhola on my shoulder; and
- placing people before profits and man (woman) before markets.
“To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance” – Oscar Wilde.
They learned me to love myself; love all the peoples of the world; make all the children of our world become my own children; love and care for my students passionately; be at peace with myself. They told me that I deserve to be myself; that I am the only beautiful person I fully own; so, I should not want or need to be someone else, no matter how desirable or successful.
*****
I can arrange my 60 years into nine periods:
1. 1951-61 My ‘lost childhood’: roaming like a gypsy, passing through railways
stations: Amla, Jabalpur, Nagpur, Solapur, Manmad.
2. 1961-71 In Mumbai: at school and college.
3. 1971-82 A break from my studies; living out of a jhola, a full-timer with
various NGOs in Village Maharashtra and Mumbai slums.
4. 1982-90 In Pune: married; working with Maharashtra Herald (MH);
start teaching in 1987 at University of Pune; in 1990 at SIMC.
5. 1990-93 Accompanying wife to Leeds, England, to take care of my 3 year-old daughter, while she did her PhD.
6. 1993-96 Working with a much-weakened MH; resign from MH.
7. 1996-2003 Setting up and working with the Corp Comm Dept at a private
company in Pune and editing ‘Mile Sur Mera Tumhara (MSMT)’.
8. 2003-04 Editor of Gomantak Times, Panaji, Goa.
9. 2004 >> In Pune: training at BJS since 2005; teaching at journalism courses.
Of my ‘lost childhood’ days (1951-61), my three years at the railway junction of Manmad (1958-61) were the most wonderful. What would I give for all the money in the world? A chance to meet my lost school-mates … when I was little in Manmad. I shall devote 10-15 posts to these three memorable years.
The first 10 years of my ‘lost childhood’ in the railway towns on the Central Railway and my 13 years, working at the Desk in Maharashtra Herald, Pune, have one word in common: ‘small’.
These two ‘small’ periods of my life have shaped my world-view: of the small as beautiful (but the big as ugly); the slow as steady (but the fast as fatal); the low as good (but the high as vulgar); the hot as Heaven (but the cold as Hell) and so on and so forth.
*****
I recall I left Manmad, for Mumbai, when they were building the bridge across the railway track; and just after Rexy, our beloved dog, had been mistakenly poisoned, despite having a legal dog collar.
Boarding school in St. Stanislaus, Bandra, during 1961-63 in standards VI-VII, was bleak. I have written about those lonely two years in the book, based on the five-part memoir of my mother on this blog.
The saving grace? For the first time, a teacher took over my life and longing and revealed to me the secret and magic world of words and books. This was Ms. Philomena D’Souza (nee Valladares), my English teacher. Where have all my great Goan gurus gone? Remind me to devote an entire future post to how I searched her out over 40 years and found her, and what she means to me -- today.
Boarding was also my initiation into football (as a right-outer) and hockey (as a left-outer, who could reverse-flick the ball to the top of the ‘D’) and to Don Camilo, the Catholic priest during the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s. (Later, I would add George Orwell, Christopher Caudwell and Martha Gellhorn to that red list.) The 1962 war with China appeared as “clippings” on the St Stanislaus notice-board.
Here in the boarding, in a big city school, a boy from ‘small’ places faced the big world of competition – marks and ranks – and came out right on top. (But this topper was not to last out long. By 1970, I had decided that the “rat race” was not for me.)
*****
I joined St Mary’s (SSC), Mazagaon, during 1963-67 in Stds 8 to 11. Here my love for English was nurtured as well as my interest in science and mathematics was aroused. I passed out in 1967, winning the Esso Prize as the best all-rounder.
I got my first pair of long pants to wear at the prize distribution ceremony and Vullu Uncle, one of my father’s cousins, who worked at Riyadh in Saudi Arabia during the 1960s, gave me my first wrist-watch, a Swiss Sowar Prima, as a present.
I finished my B.Sc. with Chemistry from St Xavier's College in October 1971. In December, the war broke out with Pakistan, resulting in the formation of Bangladesh.
By the end of my second period – in Mumbai, at school and college – I had won a National Science Talent scholarship and was on my way to a ‘promising’ career. But I had decided, on ideological grounds, that the competitive “rat race” was NOT for me.
My mother, who had always urged me to compete with myself, died in 1969. Looking back, I feel I took her death seriously and in a sub-conscious way decided to implement what she had been exhorting me to do. I am still coming to terms with my grief at her sudden death.
I have not had a single reason or occasion to regret the decision to drop out of the rat race. On the contrary, seeing the destitution of the poor caused by liberalisation, privatisation and globalization (LPG), I have felt re-assured that I was correct.
Today, I prefer to compete only with myself. So cooperation, team-work and peace pervades my work and teaching. I appeal to my students, friends and colleagues to stand against this tide and shun the greed, which is being encouraged both by government sell-outs and corporate profligacy.
“The world is too much with us.
Getting and spending we lay waste our powers.”
- William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
*****
Then, I took a break from my studies.
From 1973 to 1983, I worked as a full-time volunteer in Maharashtra with:
1. a rural development agency in some drought-prone villages (1973-77)
2. a science popularisation organisation (1978-83)
3. a trade union and a slum-dwellers organisation (1977-83).
This was the mass-activist period of my life, when many new things were revealed to me for the first time, bringing me close to the pain and sufferings of the common people, enabling me to look at life the way they did – sharing with compassion.
“Living is easy, with eyes closed.
Misunderstanding, everything you see.” – The Beatles.
During this period I learned the meaning of Gandhi’s talisman, one of the last notes left behind by him in 1948, expressing his deepest social thought:
"I will give you a talisman. Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test. Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man [woman] whom you may have seen, and ask yourself, if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him [her]. Will he [she] gain anything by it? Will it restore him [her] to a control over his [her] own life and destiny? In other words, will it lead to swaraj [freedom] for the hungry and spiritually starving millions? Then you will find your doubts and your self melt away."
- Source: Mahatma Gandhi [Last Phase, Vol. II (1958), P. 65].
The remaining part of this “60” piece is in the present tense, like in a diary or a letter, written as if I am telling my story, till 1978, to one of my sincerest students: “When I was 27 – a report to Gunjan”. I know that writing thus, is an illusion. For, I have the advantage of hindsight. I was not a journalist then; I entered mainstream journalism in 1983.
“We give but little, when we give of our possessions.
It is when we give of ourselves, that we truly give.”
- Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931)
*****************************
I am 27 today, 5 March 1978.
The mynahs and sparrows are chirping under my window. The sun tries to warm me, but my heart is still as cold as the body of my mother, who died nine years ago in 1969.
The Emergency that began in June 1975 ended last year, but even now terrible stories are surfacing of political prisoners, who were brutally tortured by terrorists like Sanjay Gandhi and his goons, under the Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA). Some of them are my dear friends.
We too have suffered our share of miseries. The local leaders in Kasarpimpalgaon (taluka Pathardi, district Ahmednagar, Maharashtra), where we were doing drought relief work since 1973, got emboldened by the terror, unleashed during the Emergency. If it was not for a kind IAS officer, who tipped us off in time, we would have been also arrested.
So our adult literacy work is in a shambles, and abandoned. I can only console myself reading "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" and "Cultural Action for Freedom" by Paolo Friere, whose 'conscientisation' methodology we used in our classes. "Liberation theology" is a new subject for me now.
*****
Let me tell you a little bit about Vistas, the group we formed in 1973, to work in the villages, after we had passed out of St Xavier's College. We were nine or ten young people in our early 20s. As for me, I used to wear flowers in my hair, which I grew to my shoulders, inspired by the protest song, "When you're in San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair."
I failed in explaining to my father and help him to understand why his brilliant son, a first ranker, and a National Science Talent Scholar, one of only 350 from India in 1969, had chosen to drop out after finishing his B.Sc, and did not continue further studies like his classmates, especially his best friend, Spenta Wadia.
The drought of 1970-71 was one of the severest in the history of Maharashtra. Having stayed in a village for four years, I would not hesitate to call it a 'famine'.
Initially, we started with drought relief work, with 'Food for Work' programs, with maize, wheat and milk powder being provided by international funding agencies like Caritas, Casa, Lutheran World Relief, etc. Then we started supplying seeds and fertilisers through Afarm and Afpro. Later we worked with Oxfam on adult literacy and organising youth.
I was mainly inspired by the writings of John Holt, Ivan Illich, Frantz Fanon, Jean Paul Sartre, Will & Ariel Durant, Paolo Friere, etc. I was already influenced by Vatican II and Pope John XXIII, who spoke about Christians standing up for justice and peace as well as the liberation of the poor and the oppressed.
Among the many books that I took with me to the villages was a copy of the Communist Manifesto. But I only remember reading it for its excellent English and vivid description of bourgeois life; the social and revolutionary content having little impact on me.
We read the feminists like Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and Germaine Greer. (Note: none of them burnt bras, a myth of the demonic media machine)
The songs of protest by Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, moved us.
The names of Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd were on our trembling lips. With the Beatles, we believed in: "Can't Buy Me Love." We took the slogan "Make Love, Not War" to our hearts and minds.
I was learning to speak Marathi from the illiterate natives, even as I taught them to read and write their mother-tongue.
When we formed Vistas in 1973, I was 22. The world was young and, for me, anything was possible. Still is, Gunjan. I was not afraid to stop my studies and go to the villages, where the poor lived. By now, I had decided, on ideological grounds, to get out of the rat race. A topper for years, I discarded competition and its connotation of war, welcoming cooperation among humans as the foundation of peace.
*****
The proclamation of the Emergency in June 1975 by Sonia Gandhi's mother-in-law, the dreadful Indira Gandhi, came as a shock to me. (In 1968, my first year of college, I had been thrilled by her nationalisation of banks and challenge to decaying Congress values.)
I remember we had taken the morning train from Bombay to Pune. When we reached Pune and saw the newspapers, some of them had blank patches on the front pages. The courageous editors left the columns blank, when the government censors objected. The name of Jayprakash Narayan was like a magic mantra.
Today in 1978, I am 27 and disillusioned. I went hopeful to the villages in 1973. Our raw idealism collapsed in the face of the brutal assault by Sanjay Gandhi. We realised we were soft boys and girls, pampered and spoiled in the cities. Within 20 months, the Emergency (June 1975 – January 1977) made us men and women.
Now my first taste of direct resistance and protest on the streets is in the form of the Committee for the Protection of Democratic Rights (CPDR). I am working to set up a Centre for Education and Documentation (CED), which will set up a library of clippings for use by activists and journalists.
Three friends become journalists: Ivan Fera, Ayesha Kagal and Chaitanya Kalbag.
Yes, I am disillusioned, Gunjan. But I have not given up and succumbed to the temptations of a comfortable job. I am brave. I struggle and learn.
********************************
“We are all in the gutter.
But some of us are looking
… at the stars.”
- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900).
This first part of my “60” piece brings my story up to 1978, when I am 27. Let me outline the rest of my story, in brief, to be taken up in detail, as and when time permits.
After 1978, I joined trade union work and organising slum dwellers in Bhandup, Mumbai. Then, we formed the Lok Vidnyan Sanghatana for taking science to the people in 1980.
I got married to a Pune girl, Kalpana Joshi, on 26 January 1982. In the ardour of passion, I promised her, not the moon, but that I would stop smoking the day after we got married. She reminded me of my promise, and I stopped smoking. So this, inadvertently, became a wedding present to my wife.
Our only child and lovely daughter of our life, Pallavi, was born on 23 October 1987. Till her arrival, my late mother came first in my life, and my wife came second. Today, my daughter is at No. 1 position.
The mothers of my friends pass away, carrying away my long-lost mother into the history-books she loved so much.
*****
Meanwhile, full-time journalism had started in 1983. I started teaching journalism at the University of Pune in 1987, and at the Symbiosis Institute of Journalism and Communication (SIJC), now SIMC, in 1990.
Since 1983 to 1996, I worked with Maharashtra Herald, the one and only local English daily in Pune. I have begun a 20-part series on “the old MH” as a tribute to that most valiant of Indian local papers, sustained by the blood, sweat, toil and tears of working journalists.
During 1990-93, we were in Leeds, England, where my wife did her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering. I took three years leave without pay, to take care of our daughter, who was three years old then.
After 13 years in Maharashtra Herald, Pune, I left in 1996 and joined to set up the Corporate Communication Dept at Deepak Fertilisers. So, though I disliked it, I did internal PR for seven years. No choice: just a job. My only joyful consolation during those years is “Mile Sur Mera Tumhara (MSMT)”, a unique internal newsletter.
The date 2 September 2006, when I suffered a heart attack, I recall as the day I got a second chance.
Since 2005, I have been also doing some unusual work – designing, developing and delivering training programs – at Bharatiya Jain Sanghatana, founded by the pioneering Shantilal Muttha.
I continue to teach print journalism. But I am winding up my lectures and concentrating on writing: a memoir on my mother; a text-book on editing; survivor drafts of my cold & wet days in Leeds; and other scraps.
*****
When I went off my blog "to restore myself" I thought I would be back in three months. But it has taken me 19 months to come back. Not because it took me 19 months to restore myself, but because only the way, I developed other ways of keeping in touch with my sincerest students.
But the blog kept beckoning. And its charms, like a personal dairy, can only be appreciated by those who have roamed the adventures that Life offers the precious, the gentle and the brave.
I have inserted five appendices, to explain the sources and starting points for this piece. This is only for those who wish to go "inside the mind" of a writer and see how a piece takes shape.
*****
I have hundreds of journalism students since I started to teach in 1987; they are scattered across the world. A few of them (and I tell them so), I cherish as “my sincere and serious students”.
But as I said at railway gate No. 58, I still “await the student, who may exceed me, who may dare to go beyond imagination, against the tide; to whom I may entrust the torch given to me by my ancestors and teachers.”
Dare I say, during the last two years, I may have had fleeting glimpses of some such adventurous students? A hundred others are striving to be my students, just as I struggle, even today, to deserve to be the student of my teachers, some long gone to dream with Hemingway’s lions.
Your support is my strength.
Peace and love,
- Joe.
Pune, India, Wednesday, 19 May 2011.
Trains form my earliest memories, since I was a child of four in 1955. Our mother used to say she felt we were ‘born on railway trains or platforms’! Our father was a railway man, all his working life. So, I spontaneously think of Life itself as a train journey.
Now, I see myself standing at railway gate No.60. Can you see me, waving at you?
This “60” piece has five starting points:
1. My auto-biographical sketch: “Along the line, at railway gate No. 58” on this blog.
2. My catching-up piece, “This is me, Joe Pinto, since 1967”, written as I was preparing for the 11-1-11 re-union of my Class of 1967 school-mates from the St Mary’s (SSC) High School, Mazagaon, Mumbai. (Read this piece on my source-blog, “Journey Unbegun”.)
3. The memoir of my mother, “Lessons my mother learned me”, in five parts on this blog.
(Read all five parts as one piece on “Journey Unbegun”
4. Addressing various issues, raised from time to time, by my students, in posts like “Rules of the Road” and other pieces, on this blog.
5. A birthday gift to one of my sincerest students, Gunjan Chaurasia, “When I was 27”. (Read the original piece here on “Journey Unbegun”.)
*****
"A man's memory is his own private literature." – Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
Looking back at my journey, how do I see myself, as I stand at railway gate No.60? This is how one of my caring gurus, Dr Devendra Agochiya, sums me up: “A journalist by profession, and a trainer by choice.” Also see my 5 Ws and 1 H, on the margins of this blog.
“Along the line, at railway gate No. 58” traces my efforts to reconcile myself with aging and retirement. Today at 60, maybe I will not stop working. But I no longer want to do, what I do not like to do. I am coming to terms with work, in a radically different way.
In my “58” piece, I recalled the seven main streams of influence in my life and paid tribute to my parents, teachers, students, friends and colleagues, who helped me to discover who I am.
Their single-most important contribution was to help me be myself:
- comfortable in my own skin;
- a one-eyed Joe, with my spectacles on my nose from the age of eight;
- with words as my friends and books as my lovers;
- walking ‘the road less travelled’ with a jhola on my shoulder; and
- placing people before profits and man (woman) before markets.
“To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance” – Oscar Wilde.
They learned me to love myself; love all the peoples of the world; make all the children of our world become my own children; love and care for my students passionately; be at peace with myself. They told me that I deserve to be myself; that I am the only beautiful person I fully own; so, I should not want or need to be someone else, no matter how desirable or successful.
*****
I can arrange my 60 years into nine periods:
1. 1951-61 My ‘lost childhood’: roaming like a gypsy, passing through railways
stations: Amla, Jabalpur, Nagpur, Solapur, Manmad.
2. 1961-71 In Mumbai: at school and college.
3. 1971-82 A break from my studies; living out of a jhola, a full-timer with
various NGOs in Village Maharashtra and Mumbai slums.
4. 1982-90 In Pune: married; working with Maharashtra Herald (MH);
start teaching in 1987 at University of Pune; in 1990 at SIMC.
5. 1990-93 Accompanying wife to Leeds, England, to take care of my 3 year-old daughter, while she did her PhD.
6. 1993-96 Working with a much-weakened MH; resign from MH.
7. 1996-2003 Setting up and working with the Corp Comm Dept at a private
company in Pune and editing ‘Mile Sur Mera Tumhara (MSMT)’.
8. 2003-04 Editor of Gomantak Times, Panaji, Goa.
9. 2004 >> In Pune: training at BJS since 2005; teaching at journalism courses.
Of my ‘lost childhood’ days (1951-61), my three years at the railway junction of Manmad (1958-61) were the most wonderful. What would I give for all the money in the world? A chance to meet my lost school-mates … when I was little in Manmad. I shall devote 10-15 posts to these three memorable years.
The first 10 years of my ‘lost childhood’ in the railway towns on the Central Railway and my 13 years, working at the Desk in Maharashtra Herald, Pune, have one word in common: ‘small’.
These two ‘small’ periods of my life have shaped my world-view: of the small as beautiful (but the big as ugly); the slow as steady (but the fast as fatal); the low as good (but the high as vulgar); the hot as Heaven (but the cold as Hell) and so on and so forth.
*****
I recall I left Manmad, for Mumbai, when they were building the bridge across the railway track; and just after Rexy, our beloved dog, had been mistakenly poisoned, despite having a legal dog collar.
Boarding school in St. Stanislaus, Bandra, during 1961-63 in standards VI-VII, was bleak. I have written about those lonely two years in the book, based on the five-part memoir of my mother on this blog.
The saving grace? For the first time, a teacher took over my life and longing and revealed to me the secret and magic world of words and books. This was Ms. Philomena D’Souza (nee Valladares), my English teacher. Where have all my great Goan gurus gone? Remind me to devote an entire future post to how I searched her out over 40 years and found her, and what she means to me -- today.
Boarding was also my initiation into football (as a right-outer) and hockey (as a left-outer, who could reverse-flick the ball to the top of the ‘D’) and to Don Camilo, the Catholic priest during the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s. (Later, I would add George Orwell, Christopher Caudwell and Martha Gellhorn to that red list.) The 1962 war with China appeared as “clippings” on the St Stanislaus notice-board.
Here in the boarding, in a big city school, a boy from ‘small’ places faced the big world of competition – marks and ranks – and came out right on top. (But this topper was not to last out long. By 1970, I had decided that the “rat race” was not for me.)
*****
I joined St Mary’s (SSC), Mazagaon, during 1963-67 in Stds 8 to 11. Here my love for English was nurtured as well as my interest in science and mathematics was aroused. I passed out in 1967, winning the Esso Prize as the best all-rounder.
I got my first pair of long pants to wear at the prize distribution ceremony and Vullu Uncle, one of my father’s cousins, who worked at Riyadh in Saudi Arabia during the 1960s, gave me my first wrist-watch, a Swiss Sowar Prima, as a present.
I finished my B.Sc. with Chemistry from St Xavier's College in October 1971. In December, the war broke out with Pakistan, resulting in the formation of Bangladesh.
By the end of my second period – in Mumbai, at school and college – I had won a National Science Talent scholarship and was on my way to a ‘promising’ career. But I had decided, on ideological grounds, that the competitive “rat race” was NOT for me.
My mother, who had always urged me to compete with myself, died in 1969. Looking back, I feel I took her death seriously and in a sub-conscious way decided to implement what she had been exhorting me to do. I am still coming to terms with my grief at her sudden death.
I have not had a single reason or occasion to regret the decision to drop out of the rat race. On the contrary, seeing the destitution of the poor caused by liberalisation, privatisation and globalization (LPG), I have felt re-assured that I was correct.
Today, I prefer to compete only with myself. So cooperation, team-work and peace pervades my work and teaching. I appeal to my students, friends and colleagues to stand against this tide and shun the greed, which is being encouraged both by government sell-outs and corporate profligacy.
“The world is too much with us.
Getting and spending we lay waste our powers.”
- William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
*****
Then, I took a break from my studies.
From 1973 to 1983, I worked as a full-time volunteer in Maharashtra with:
1. a rural development agency in some drought-prone villages (1973-77)
2. a science popularisation organisation (1978-83)
3. a trade union and a slum-dwellers organisation (1977-83).
This was the mass-activist period of my life, when many new things were revealed to me for the first time, bringing me close to the pain and sufferings of the common people, enabling me to look at life the way they did – sharing with compassion.
“Living is easy, with eyes closed.
Misunderstanding, everything you see.” – The Beatles.
During this period I learned the meaning of Gandhi’s talisman, one of the last notes left behind by him in 1948, expressing his deepest social thought:
"I will give you a talisman. Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test. Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man [woman] whom you may have seen, and ask yourself, if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him [her]. Will he [she] gain anything by it? Will it restore him [her] to a control over his [her] own life and destiny? In other words, will it lead to swaraj [freedom] for the hungry and spiritually starving millions? Then you will find your doubts and your self melt away."
- Source: Mahatma Gandhi [Last Phase, Vol. II (1958), P. 65].
The remaining part of this “60” piece is in the present tense, like in a diary or a letter, written as if I am telling my story, till 1978, to one of my sincerest students: “When I was 27 – a report to Gunjan”. I know that writing thus, is an illusion. For, I have the advantage of hindsight. I was not a journalist then; I entered mainstream journalism in 1983.
“We give but little, when we give of our possessions.
It is when we give of ourselves, that we truly give.”
- Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931)
*****************************
I am 27 today, 5 March 1978.
The mynahs and sparrows are chirping under my window. The sun tries to warm me, but my heart is still as cold as the body of my mother, who died nine years ago in 1969.
The Emergency that began in June 1975 ended last year, but even now terrible stories are surfacing of political prisoners, who were brutally tortured by terrorists like Sanjay Gandhi and his goons, under the Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA). Some of them are my dear friends.
We too have suffered our share of miseries. The local leaders in Kasarpimpalgaon (taluka Pathardi, district Ahmednagar, Maharashtra), where we were doing drought relief work since 1973, got emboldened by the terror, unleashed during the Emergency. If it was not for a kind IAS officer, who tipped us off in time, we would have been also arrested.
So our adult literacy work is in a shambles, and abandoned. I can only console myself reading "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" and "Cultural Action for Freedom" by Paolo Friere, whose 'conscientisation' methodology we used in our classes. "Liberation theology" is a new subject for me now.
*****
Let me tell you a little bit about Vistas, the group we formed in 1973, to work in the villages, after we had passed out of St Xavier's College. We were nine or ten young people in our early 20s. As for me, I used to wear flowers in my hair, which I grew to my shoulders, inspired by the protest song, "When you're in San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair."
I failed in explaining to my father and help him to understand why his brilliant son, a first ranker, and a National Science Talent Scholar, one of only 350 from India in 1969, had chosen to drop out after finishing his B.Sc, and did not continue further studies like his classmates, especially his best friend, Spenta Wadia.
The drought of 1970-71 was one of the severest in the history of Maharashtra. Having stayed in a village for four years, I would not hesitate to call it a 'famine'.
Initially, we started with drought relief work, with 'Food for Work' programs, with maize, wheat and milk powder being provided by international funding agencies like Caritas, Casa, Lutheran World Relief, etc. Then we started supplying seeds and fertilisers through Afarm and Afpro. Later we worked with Oxfam on adult literacy and organising youth.
I was mainly inspired by the writings of John Holt, Ivan Illich, Frantz Fanon, Jean Paul Sartre, Will & Ariel Durant, Paolo Friere, etc. I was already influenced by Vatican II and Pope John XXIII, who spoke about Christians standing up for justice and peace as well as the liberation of the poor and the oppressed.
Among the many books that I took with me to the villages was a copy of the Communist Manifesto. But I only remember reading it for its excellent English and vivid description of bourgeois life; the social and revolutionary content having little impact on me.
We read the feminists like Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and Germaine Greer. (Note: none of them burnt bras, a myth of the demonic media machine)
The songs of protest by Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, moved us.
The names of Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd were on our trembling lips. With the Beatles, we believed in: "Can't Buy Me Love." We took the slogan "Make Love, Not War" to our hearts and minds.
I was learning to speak Marathi from the illiterate natives, even as I taught them to read and write their mother-tongue.
When we formed Vistas in 1973, I was 22. The world was young and, for me, anything was possible. Still is, Gunjan. I was not afraid to stop my studies and go to the villages, where the poor lived. By now, I had decided, on ideological grounds, to get out of the rat race. A topper for years, I discarded competition and its connotation of war, welcoming cooperation among humans as the foundation of peace.
*****
The proclamation of the Emergency in June 1975 by Sonia Gandhi's mother-in-law, the dreadful Indira Gandhi, came as a shock to me. (In 1968, my first year of college, I had been thrilled by her nationalisation of banks and challenge to decaying Congress values.)
I remember we had taken the morning train from Bombay to Pune. When we reached Pune and saw the newspapers, some of them had blank patches on the front pages. The courageous editors left the columns blank, when the government censors objected. The name of Jayprakash Narayan was like a magic mantra.
Today in 1978, I am 27 and disillusioned. I went hopeful to the villages in 1973. Our raw idealism collapsed in the face of the brutal assault by Sanjay Gandhi. We realised we were soft boys and girls, pampered and spoiled in the cities. Within 20 months, the Emergency (June 1975 – January 1977) made us men and women.
Now my first taste of direct resistance and protest on the streets is in the form of the Committee for the Protection of Democratic Rights (CPDR). I am working to set up a Centre for Education and Documentation (CED), which will set up a library of clippings for use by activists and journalists.
Three friends become journalists: Ivan Fera, Ayesha Kagal and Chaitanya Kalbag.
Yes, I am disillusioned, Gunjan. But I have not given up and succumbed to the temptations of a comfortable job. I am brave. I struggle and learn.
********************************
“We are all in the gutter.
But some of us are looking
… at the stars.”
- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900).
This first part of my “60” piece brings my story up to 1978, when I am 27. Let me outline the rest of my story, in brief, to be taken up in detail, as and when time permits.
After 1978, I joined trade union work and organising slum dwellers in Bhandup, Mumbai. Then, we formed the Lok Vidnyan Sanghatana for taking science to the people in 1980.
I got married to a Pune girl, Kalpana Joshi, on 26 January 1982. In the ardour of passion, I promised her, not the moon, but that I would stop smoking the day after we got married. She reminded me of my promise, and I stopped smoking. So this, inadvertently, became a wedding present to my wife.
Our only child and lovely daughter of our life, Pallavi, was born on 23 October 1987. Till her arrival, my late mother came first in my life, and my wife came second. Today, my daughter is at No. 1 position.
The mothers of my friends pass away, carrying away my long-lost mother into the history-books she loved so much.
*****
Meanwhile, full-time journalism had started in 1983. I started teaching journalism at the University of Pune in 1987, and at the Symbiosis Institute of Journalism and Communication (SIJC), now SIMC, in 1990.
Since 1983 to 1996, I worked with Maharashtra Herald, the one and only local English daily in Pune. I have begun a 20-part series on “the old MH” as a tribute to that most valiant of Indian local papers, sustained by the blood, sweat, toil and tears of working journalists.
During 1990-93, we were in Leeds, England, where my wife did her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering. I took three years leave without pay, to take care of our daughter, who was three years old then.
After 13 years in Maharashtra Herald, Pune, I left in 1996 and joined to set up the Corporate Communication Dept at Deepak Fertilisers. So, though I disliked it, I did internal PR for seven years. No choice: just a job. My only joyful consolation during those years is “Mile Sur Mera Tumhara (MSMT)”, a unique internal newsletter.
The date 2 September 2006, when I suffered a heart attack, I recall as the day I got a second chance.
Since 2005, I have been also doing some unusual work – designing, developing and delivering training programs – at Bharatiya Jain Sanghatana, founded by the pioneering Shantilal Muttha.
I continue to teach print journalism. But I am winding up my lectures and concentrating on writing: a memoir on my mother; a text-book on editing; survivor drafts of my cold & wet days in Leeds; and other scraps.
*****
When I went off my blog "to restore myself" I thought I would be back in three months. But it has taken me 19 months to come back. Not because it took me 19 months to restore myself, but because only the way, I developed other ways of keeping in touch with my sincerest students.
But the blog kept beckoning. And its charms, like a personal dairy, can only be appreciated by those who have roamed the adventures that Life offers the precious, the gentle and the brave.
I have inserted five appendices, to explain the sources and starting points for this piece. This is only for those who wish to go "inside the mind" of a writer and see how a piece takes shape.
*****
I have hundreds of journalism students since I started to teach in 1987; they are scattered across the world. A few of them (and I tell them so), I cherish as “my sincere and serious students”.
But as I said at railway gate No. 58, I still “await the student, who may exceed me, who may dare to go beyond imagination, against the tide; to whom I may entrust the torch given to me by my ancestors and teachers.”
Dare I say, during the last two years, I may have had fleeting glimpses of some such adventurous students? A hundred others are striving to be my students, just as I struggle, even today, to deserve to be the student of my teachers, some long gone to dream with Hemingway’s lions.
Your support is my strength.
Peace and love,
- Joe.
Pune, India, Wednesday, 19 May 2011.
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.
Monday, August 3, 2009
Sakal ‘incites mischief’ against teachers
My dear students, friends and colleagues,
The test of a working journalist and editor is how you care about what appears in your newspaper at times of conflict and confrontation. For I believe that readers are extra-receptive to what their favourite newspaper says – when the atmosphere is charged, for example, during riots or strikes.
That is why I was outraged by the headline and caption of a photograph that appeared in one of Pune’s most highly respected and honourable Marathi newspapers. Currently, more than 30,000 senior college teachers are on strike in Maharashtra, demanding that the recommendations of the Sixth Pay Commission should be also applied to them – without discrimination.
For me, the question is: “Should self-respecting senior college teachers be forced to resort to a strike, in order to compel the Maharashtra Government to give them what the Union Government has decreed is their rightful due?” The simple answer is, “No! The teachers must be given what the Government has promised them.” Framed in this way, the demand of the striking college teachers seems fair and just.
But let us look at how Sakal, one of Maharashtra’s most highly respected newspapers presents the case of the striking teachers. I was advised to rely on Sakal for honest and accurate reporting, ever since I joined Maharashtra Herald as a sub-editor in 1983. Some of my journalist colleagues, whom I respect and admire, belong to this paper. The first and foremost of them was the late Varun Bhide, one of the most fearless and honest journalists I have met and known. The list of the others is long and illustrious. So it is not easy for me to criticise it.
Let me describe the photograph, since I have not been able to download it from the electronic edition of this paper, which is more than 75 years old. The colour photo, is placed in a box in the top left-hand corner, extending across columns 1 to 4 in an 8-column grid on page 3 of the main Pune edition, dated Thursday, 30 July 2009.
The photograph is datelined Solapur, a district town, midway on the railroad between Pune and Hyderabad. It portrays in the left foreground a lone woman labourer breaking stones by the roadside. Beyond the pile of stones, a morcha (procession) of teachers is passing by. The morcha shows a group of female teachers followed by male teachers in the winding distance. One of the women teachers is holding a placard, “We demand salary and allowances according to the Sixth Pay Commission”.
But the five-word headline, in single inverted commas, pulled my eye out of its morning socket, ‘Ahe re ani nahin re’ (‘The haves and have-nots’). If it was not for this provocative headline, I would not have read the caption. But the ‘inequality’ caption stirred me. I must confess my socialist, nay communist, leanings at the outset so that a fair disclosure helps the reader to put my outrage into context.
Let me reproduce the caption in Marathi and then translate it into English: “Solapur: Pach aakdi pagar ghenara; pan tohi pota sathi kami padtoy, ase mhanat Sahavya Vetan Aayoga sathi morcha kadhnara pradhyapak varga ani tyach barobar potachi tich-bhar khalgi bharnya sathi khadi phodat sangharsh karnarya kashtakari vargache pratinidhitva karnari mahila ekach chhaya-chitrat disat aheth. Solapur Vidyapeethachya parisarat tiplele chhaya-chitra. (Photographer: Ramdas Katkar)
My translation cannot capture the raw punch of the original in Marathi: “Getting a five-figure salary; but saying that too is not enough for the stomach, the teaching class takes out a morcha, demanding implementation of the Sixth Pay Commission. On the other hand a woman labourer, representing the struggling working class, breaks stones to fill her tiny hollow stomach. Both can be seen in the same photograph near Solapur University.” (Photo: Ramdas Katkar)
When my eye had subsided into its socket and my outrage had calmed, I rang up a senior journalist (also a close friend) from Sakal, whose name I shall not reveal. I told him that the text of the caption horrified me. I told him that Sakal was telling its readers that the striking teachers were not satisfied with their five-figure salaries and were greedily demanding more. By sharp contrast, here was this poor woman, breaking stones to fill the tiny hollow of her stomach.
Sakal was pitting the class of teachers against the working class, using the photograph as an excuse. I accused Sakal of ‘inciting mischief’ against the striking teachers, with the hidden agenda of depriving teachers from getting any sympathy for their just and fair demands.
The senior journalist from Sakal thought differently. He argued that the photograph merely depicted the inequality (vishamta) existing in society and no other meaning should be attributed to the caption and headline. I told him I would write a letter to the editor spelling out my outrage.
Over the last three days, I have been thinking out the contents of the letter I said I would write to the editor of Sakal. Now I have decided NOT to send that letter and instead express my views on my blog.
What is the point of getting a small letter published on the edit page? Enormous damage has already been done. In one stroke, a five-word headline (in inverted commas) and a three-liner 39-word caption have declared that the teaching community in Maharashtra should be satisfied with what they have and not strike for more.
This is an attempt to sway the public and ensure that the striking teachers do not get the sympathy they deserve for their fair and just demands? Is this the power of the higly respected and honourable Sakal: “power without responsibility”?
I would like to have your free, frank, fearless … and fair comments.
Your support is my strength.
- Joe.
Pune, India, Sunday, 2 August 2009.
The test of a working journalist and editor is how you care about what appears in your newspaper at times of conflict and confrontation. For I believe that readers are extra-receptive to what their favourite newspaper says – when the atmosphere is charged, for example, during riots or strikes.
That is why I was outraged by the headline and caption of a photograph that appeared in one of Pune’s most highly respected and honourable Marathi newspapers. Currently, more than 30,000 senior college teachers are on strike in Maharashtra, demanding that the recommendations of the Sixth Pay Commission should be also applied to them – without discrimination.
For me, the question is: “Should self-respecting senior college teachers be forced to resort to a strike, in order to compel the Maharashtra Government to give them what the Union Government has decreed is their rightful due?” The simple answer is, “No! The teachers must be given what the Government has promised them.” Framed in this way, the demand of the striking college teachers seems fair and just.
But let us look at how Sakal, one of Maharashtra’s most highly respected newspapers presents the case of the striking teachers. I was advised to rely on Sakal for honest and accurate reporting, ever since I joined Maharashtra Herald as a sub-editor in 1983. Some of my journalist colleagues, whom I respect and admire, belong to this paper. The first and foremost of them was the late Varun Bhide, one of the most fearless and honest journalists I have met and known. The list of the others is long and illustrious. So it is not easy for me to criticise it.
Let me describe the photograph, since I have not been able to download it from the electronic edition of this paper, which is more than 75 years old. The colour photo, is placed in a box in the top left-hand corner, extending across columns 1 to 4 in an 8-column grid on page 3 of the main Pune edition, dated Thursday, 30 July 2009.
The photograph is datelined Solapur, a district town, midway on the railroad between Pune and Hyderabad. It portrays in the left foreground a lone woman labourer breaking stones by the roadside. Beyond the pile of stones, a morcha (procession) of teachers is passing by. The morcha shows a group of female teachers followed by male teachers in the winding distance. One of the women teachers is holding a placard, “We demand salary and allowances according to the Sixth Pay Commission”.
But the five-word headline, in single inverted commas, pulled my eye out of its morning socket, ‘Ahe re ani nahin re’ (‘The haves and have-nots’). If it was not for this provocative headline, I would not have read the caption. But the ‘inequality’ caption stirred me. I must confess my socialist, nay communist, leanings at the outset so that a fair disclosure helps the reader to put my outrage into context.
Let me reproduce the caption in Marathi and then translate it into English: “Solapur: Pach aakdi pagar ghenara; pan tohi pota sathi kami padtoy, ase mhanat Sahavya Vetan Aayoga sathi morcha kadhnara pradhyapak varga ani tyach barobar potachi tich-bhar khalgi bharnya sathi khadi phodat sangharsh karnarya kashtakari vargache pratinidhitva karnari mahila ekach chhaya-chitrat disat aheth. Solapur Vidyapeethachya parisarat tiplele chhaya-chitra. (Photographer: Ramdas Katkar)
My translation cannot capture the raw punch of the original in Marathi: “Getting a five-figure salary; but saying that too is not enough for the stomach, the teaching class takes out a morcha, demanding implementation of the Sixth Pay Commission. On the other hand a woman labourer, representing the struggling working class, breaks stones to fill her tiny hollow stomach. Both can be seen in the same photograph near Solapur University.” (Photo: Ramdas Katkar)
When my eye had subsided into its socket and my outrage had calmed, I rang up a senior journalist (also a close friend) from Sakal, whose name I shall not reveal. I told him that the text of the caption horrified me. I told him that Sakal was telling its readers that the striking teachers were not satisfied with their five-figure salaries and were greedily demanding more. By sharp contrast, here was this poor woman, breaking stones to fill the tiny hollow of her stomach.
Sakal was pitting the class of teachers against the working class, using the photograph as an excuse. I accused Sakal of ‘inciting mischief’ against the striking teachers, with the hidden agenda of depriving teachers from getting any sympathy for their just and fair demands.
The senior journalist from Sakal thought differently. He argued that the photograph merely depicted the inequality (vishamta) existing in society and no other meaning should be attributed to the caption and headline. I told him I would write a letter to the editor spelling out my outrage.
Over the last three days, I have been thinking out the contents of the letter I said I would write to the editor of Sakal. Now I have decided NOT to send that letter and instead express my views on my blog.
What is the point of getting a small letter published on the edit page? Enormous damage has already been done. In one stroke, a five-word headline (in inverted commas) and a three-liner 39-word caption have declared that the teaching community in Maharashtra should be satisfied with what they have and not strike for more.
This is an attempt to sway the public and ensure that the striking teachers do not get the sympathy they deserve for their fair and just demands? Is this the power of the higly respected and honourable Sakal: “power without responsibility”?
I would like to have your free, frank, fearless … and fair comments.
Your support is my strength.
- Joe.
Pune, India, Sunday, 2 August 2009.
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Dubai seen in the words of a philosopher
My dear students, friends and colleagues,
A philosopher, whose words are among the most derided today, wrote in 1848, “A spectre is haunting Europe.” More than 160 years later, no such spectre may haunt the world. But for me, he made common sense when I visited Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE) recently.
The visit was strictly personal. I came back refreshed and replenished. But I cannot conceal that it was also political. I recalled a phrase, hanging from the threads of the flower children from the 1960s and 1970s, resisting the Vietnam War: “the personal is the political”, a slogan that was also central to the feminist movement.
The waiter wiped the table with tissue paper
A close relative took me to a family restaurant for breakfast. Outside, it was Dubai in June: hot and humid; cars and concrete. Inside, it could have been any Indian city, any time of the year: dosas and filter coffee; spicy conversation dripping from Indian tongues.
Except, the waiter wiped the table with tissue paper.
I glanced at him. His face reminded me of the waiters who served us at Raj Mahal, an Udipi hotel in Dhobi Talao, Mumbai, when I was studying at St Xavier’s College. I have not seen this happen, anywhere in India. We had our fill of sheera and dosas with chutneys. But as we left by car, our personal meal became my first political insight.
My feelings grew firmer as I rambled for ten days. During a lunch, a student described how she was afraid that Dubai had exploded from a fishing community for a thousand years (dates, pearls) into one of the most modern cities of the world – since the first shipment of oil in 1969, and, more so, within her own memory of barely two decades!
So when I returned to Pune, I dug out and re-read my famous philosopher. This is how I propose to write this post: a sentence or paragraph (in bold italics) from the little book by the famous philosopher; then my observations and reflections. I will try and see Dubai in the words of the philosopher, who dared to change the world.
“The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape (of Good Hope), opened up fresh ground … The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies … gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby … a rapid development. … Modern industry has established the world-market …”
Everywhere in Dubai, you can ‘see’ money shining; and ‘feel’ the naked power of finance capital with “C” in capitals of concrete and steel: in the flashy cars, on the smooth roads, in the magic malls, the Jebel Ali Free Trade Zone; and on people (present on the rich, absent on the poor).
And at the seven-star Atlantis The Palm Hotel, during a fashion show, someone mocked with envy, “Can you see the recession anywhere here, eh?” Merely the air-conditioning had already frozen the marrow of my bones into ice.
“The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. The bourgeoisie … has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals ... ”
Tens of huge cool towers lined up the big, main road like two rows of pillars holding up the hot sky. There is sand where I stand. I pinch myself awe-struck at the lawns in the desert. That Dubai is being erected in the twenty-first century does not detract from it being branded a wonder.
As a young man I had read ‘The City of the Yellow Devil’ by the Soviet writer Maxim Gorky (1868-1936). Moving around Dubai in 2009, I knew how Gorky must have despaired when he visited New York in 1906 and published his essay in Appleton’s Magazine, an American publication in August of that year.
Dubai is an ever-changing tribute to world-class quality. The far-sighted and liberal rulers of Dubai have an unparalleled vision that is transforming the emirate into a niche of excellence. The city is shooting up like an adolescent teenager attached to a jet engine.
Like 24x7 ants, thousands of construction workers, from all corners of the world (from India: Kerala, coastal Karnataka, Goa, Bihar, U.P., A.P., Bangladesh), fabricate entire floors of skyscrapers in days. Just the car parks in the basement are three stories tall.
“The bourgeoisie has put an end to … idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the … ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors’, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment.’
Here I should only update my philosopher with the latest touch-screen ATMs and swiping credit cards.
“(The bourgeosie) has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value. And it has set up that single, un-conscionable freedom -- Free Trade.”
Like Ibn-Batuta, I scoured the ‘free trade’ malls. Like Diogenes of Athens, I walked through the ‘Mall of the Emirates’ window-shopping for the countless things I did NOT need. The two books I bought: for me, The Elements of Journalism by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosentiel (second edition, 2007, Three Rivers Press); for my close relative, Maverick by Ricardo Semler. Leaving, at the airport, I was shaken by the last-moment scramble in duty-free Dubai; the key-words here being “free to buy”.
“The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society … Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch … All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
Since our summer vacations with our grand-parents, I had known that generations of my native brothers and sisters had abandoned the comfort of red mud, coconut villages, scattered along the Canara coast, around Mangalore, and migrated to the Gulf in search of the good life.
Serving as an editor in the land of my ancestors, where Konkani is the official language, I had heard of ‘Goan Gulfies’, men who came back with finger-thick gold chains dangling from their necks.
In 1967, when I passed Class 11, a close relative of my father had gifted me a Sovar Prima watch – made in Switzerland, bought in Saudi Arabia, worn in Mumbai. On formal occasions, I still wear it as a precious heirloom.
On our journey back from Dubai, we bought a gift for a baby, newly born into our extended family. The baby dress: made in China, bought in Dubai, was given to the baby’s father in Pune, to be worn by the baby in California, USA.
But a wise NRI shopkeeper in Meena Bazar, Dubai, saved me from the embarrassment of buying an expensive Italian shirt made of Egyptian cotton. He advised me that the finest cotton was Indian, made by Century and Arvind, and available along Pune’s very own Laxmi Road. (“All that is solid (cotton) melts in the (Dubai) air.”)
I have returned from Dubai – humbled and chastened.
Sitting here at my Fujitsu-Siemens laptop (“All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.”), I dwell in my mind’s eye upon my beautiful, special and different nephew, Adrian Terence D’Souza.
"With sober senses", I visualise the 26 year-old singing Konkani cantara, playing the drums, kicking a football, drawing his blue ‘Time is running out! … Save water!’ picture and laying out the table at the hotel, where he welcomes his honoured guests.
And hot tears roll down my cheek. I hope in international solidarity for my brave brothers and sisters, who toil in Dubai. Peace and love to you, mates.
This then is my Dubai, seen in the words of a philosopher.
Your support is my strength,
- Joe.
Pune, India, Sunday, 19th July 2009.
A philosopher, whose words are among the most derided today, wrote in 1848, “A spectre is haunting Europe.” More than 160 years later, no such spectre may haunt the world. But for me, he made common sense when I visited Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE) recently.
The visit was strictly personal. I came back refreshed and replenished. But I cannot conceal that it was also political. I recalled a phrase, hanging from the threads of the flower children from the 1960s and 1970s, resisting the Vietnam War: “the personal is the political”, a slogan that was also central to the feminist movement.
The waiter wiped the table with tissue paper
A close relative took me to a family restaurant for breakfast. Outside, it was Dubai in June: hot and humid; cars and concrete. Inside, it could have been any Indian city, any time of the year: dosas and filter coffee; spicy conversation dripping from Indian tongues.
Except, the waiter wiped the table with tissue paper.
I glanced at him. His face reminded me of the waiters who served us at Raj Mahal, an Udipi hotel in Dhobi Talao, Mumbai, when I was studying at St Xavier’s College. I have not seen this happen, anywhere in India. We had our fill of sheera and dosas with chutneys. But as we left by car, our personal meal became my first political insight.
My feelings grew firmer as I rambled for ten days. During a lunch, a student described how she was afraid that Dubai had exploded from a fishing community for a thousand years (dates, pearls) into one of the most modern cities of the world – since the first shipment of oil in 1969, and, more so, within her own memory of barely two decades!
So when I returned to Pune, I dug out and re-read my famous philosopher. This is how I propose to write this post: a sentence or paragraph (in bold italics) from the little book by the famous philosopher; then my observations and reflections. I will try and see Dubai in the words of the philosopher, who dared to change the world.
“The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape (of Good Hope), opened up fresh ground … The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies … gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby … a rapid development. … Modern industry has established the world-market …”
Everywhere in Dubai, you can ‘see’ money shining; and ‘feel’ the naked power of finance capital with “C” in capitals of concrete and steel: in the flashy cars, on the smooth roads, in the magic malls, the Jebel Ali Free Trade Zone; and on people (present on the rich, absent on the poor).
And at the seven-star Atlantis The Palm Hotel, during a fashion show, someone mocked with envy, “Can you see the recession anywhere here, eh?” Merely the air-conditioning had already frozen the marrow of my bones into ice.
“The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. The bourgeoisie … has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals ... ”
Tens of huge cool towers lined up the big, main road like two rows of pillars holding up the hot sky. There is sand where I stand. I pinch myself awe-struck at the lawns in the desert. That Dubai is being erected in the twenty-first century does not detract from it being branded a wonder.
As a young man I had read ‘The City of the Yellow Devil’ by the Soviet writer Maxim Gorky (1868-1936). Moving around Dubai in 2009, I knew how Gorky must have despaired when he visited New York in 1906 and published his essay in Appleton’s Magazine, an American publication in August of that year.
Dubai is an ever-changing tribute to world-class quality. The far-sighted and liberal rulers of Dubai have an unparalleled vision that is transforming the emirate into a niche of excellence. The city is shooting up like an adolescent teenager attached to a jet engine.
Like 24x7 ants, thousands of construction workers, from all corners of the world (from India: Kerala, coastal Karnataka, Goa, Bihar, U.P., A.P., Bangladesh), fabricate entire floors of skyscrapers in days. Just the car parks in the basement are three stories tall.
“The bourgeoisie has put an end to … idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the … ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors’, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment.’
Here I should only update my philosopher with the latest touch-screen ATMs and swiping credit cards.
“(The bourgeosie) has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value. And it has set up that single, un-conscionable freedom -- Free Trade.”
Like Ibn-Batuta, I scoured the ‘free trade’ malls. Like Diogenes of Athens, I walked through the ‘Mall of the Emirates’ window-shopping for the countless things I did NOT need. The two books I bought: for me, The Elements of Journalism by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosentiel (second edition, 2007, Three Rivers Press); for my close relative, Maverick by Ricardo Semler. Leaving, at the airport, I was shaken by the last-moment scramble in duty-free Dubai; the key-words here being “free to buy”.
“The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society … Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch … All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
Since our summer vacations with our grand-parents, I had known that generations of my native brothers and sisters had abandoned the comfort of red mud, coconut villages, scattered along the Canara coast, around Mangalore, and migrated to the Gulf in search of the good life.
Serving as an editor in the land of my ancestors, where Konkani is the official language, I had heard of ‘Goan Gulfies’, men who came back with finger-thick gold chains dangling from their necks.
In 1967, when I passed Class 11, a close relative of my father had gifted me a Sovar Prima watch – made in Switzerland, bought in Saudi Arabia, worn in Mumbai. On formal occasions, I still wear it as a precious heirloom.
On our journey back from Dubai, we bought a gift for a baby, newly born into our extended family. The baby dress: made in China, bought in Dubai, was given to the baby’s father in Pune, to be worn by the baby in California, USA.
But a wise NRI shopkeeper in Meena Bazar, Dubai, saved me from the embarrassment of buying an expensive Italian shirt made of Egyptian cotton. He advised me that the finest cotton was Indian, made by Century and Arvind, and available along Pune’s very own Laxmi Road. (“All that is solid (cotton) melts in the (Dubai) air.”)
I have returned from Dubai – humbled and chastened.
Sitting here at my Fujitsu-Siemens laptop (“All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.”), I dwell in my mind’s eye upon my beautiful, special and different nephew, Adrian Terence D’Souza.
"With sober senses", I visualise the 26 year-old singing Konkani cantara, playing the drums, kicking a football, drawing his blue ‘Time is running out! … Save water!’ picture and laying out the table at the hotel, where he welcomes his honoured guests.
And hot tears roll down my cheek. I hope in international solidarity for my brave brothers and sisters, who toil in Dubai. Peace and love to you, mates.
This then is my Dubai, seen in the words of a philosopher.
Your support is my strength,
- Joe.
Pune, India, Sunday, 19th July 2009.
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.
Stand up and be counted ...
A judgement of the Delhi High Court thrilled me -- no end.
I remembered with love and affection my dear friend from the 1970s, Askok Row Kavi of Mumbai, a bold journalist and daring editor for his pioneering magazine, Bombay Dost. I have supported the struggle Bombay Dost put up "against the tide" for all humans with a different sexuality.
In my classes, since 1987 in Pune, my students have learned to respect, promote and support various "minority" issues: the beautiful, special and different peoples and causes of our world. One of the reasons why I gave my blog the title, "Against the Tide" is to highlight "minority" issues and the resistance put up by minority groups and peoples.
For example, I have been asking some of my best students, who care deeply about stray dogs, to write about the persecution these street animals face from otherwise sane and respectable citizens.
Though we had pet dogs at home when we were children in Solapur and Manmad, my mother cared deeply about strays. In a quiet moment she would take me aside and warn me that, if I did not care deeply for and sustain my mother tongue, Konkani, this beautiful and ancient language could be annihilated like the stray dogs of this world.
Other issues are strictly not minority issues, but need to be taken up "as if" they affected a minority. For example in Pune, can you imagine that citizens have to campaign for pavements to walk upon? The rights of pedestrians are being neglected in Pune, while civic authorities are creating a city that is friendly for two-wheelers and cars.
Most citizens have to walk at some time or the other; so apparently pedestrian rights seem to concern the majority. But since the "right to walk safely" is being trampled upon, protecting pedestrian rights becomes a minority issue.
Lovers of trees, open spaces, gardens, the hill slopes, small water bodies, rivers, also have to be constantly vigilant. Trees, gardens and open spaces, that cannot protect themselves, are under threat.
My friend, Vinita Deshmukh, who edits the small but courageous weekly newspaper, Intelligent Pune, would say the Right to Information (RTI) law is also a key minority issue that needs to be stoutly defended, considering how even Prime Minister Manmohan Singh wants to scuttle this pro-people legislation by making “notings” by bureaucrats exempt from its purview.
We each can and ought to pick our own minority issue to campaign for. This is what makes us a democratic society, where citizens participate in governance and not merely vote in elections.
Your support is my strength,
- Joe.
Pune, India, Sunday, 12th July 2009.
I remembered with love and affection my dear friend from the 1970s, Askok Row Kavi of Mumbai, a bold journalist and daring editor for his pioneering magazine, Bombay Dost. I have supported the struggle Bombay Dost put up "against the tide" for all humans with a different sexuality.
In my classes, since 1987 in Pune, my students have learned to respect, promote and support various "minority" issues: the beautiful, special and different peoples and causes of our world. One of the reasons why I gave my blog the title, "Against the Tide" is to highlight "minority" issues and the resistance put up by minority groups and peoples.
For example, I have been asking some of my best students, who care deeply about stray dogs, to write about the persecution these street animals face from otherwise sane and respectable citizens.
Though we had pet dogs at home when we were children in Solapur and Manmad, my mother cared deeply about strays. In a quiet moment she would take me aside and warn me that, if I did not care deeply for and sustain my mother tongue, Konkani, this beautiful and ancient language could be annihilated like the stray dogs of this world.
Other issues are strictly not minority issues, but need to be taken up "as if" they affected a minority. For example in Pune, can you imagine that citizens have to campaign for pavements to walk upon? The rights of pedestrians are being neglected in Pune, while civic authorities are creating a city that is friendly for two-wheelers and cars.
Most citizens have to walk at some time or the other; so apparently pedestrian rights seem to concern the majority. But since the "right to walk safely" is being trampled upon, protecting pedestrian rights becomes a minority issue.
Lovers of trees, open spaces, gardens, the hill slopes, small water bodies, rivers, also have to be constantly vigilant. Trees, gardens and open spaces, that cannot protect themselves, are under threat.
My friend, Vinita Deshmukh, who edits the small but courageous weekly newspaper, Intelligent Pune, would say the Right to Information (RTI) law is also a key minority issue that needs to be stoutly defended, considering how even Prime Minister Manmohan Singh wants to scuttle this pro-people legislation by making “notings” by bureaucrats exempt from its purview.
We each can and ought to pick our own minority issue to campaign for. This is what makes us a democratic society, where citizens participate in governance and not merely vote in elections.
Your support is my strength,
- Joe.
Pune, India, Sunday, 12th July 2009.
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.
From Dubai, with my mother's song-book
We returned from Dubai on 29 June. That is one reason I missed my post last Sunday. Along with precious memories of :-
- a great holiday in the home of my only dearest sister Flavia;
- early morning walks and the smoothest of car drives with my brother-in-law Michael (more like a brother, actually);
- heart-to-heart chats with my two sprightly nieces, Rochelle (& Pradeep) and Nisha (& Roshan), and playing with their five wonderful kids;
- getting in touch with our umpteen relatives;
- breakfast with Reuven Proenca and lunch with Mansi Shah and Gunjan Chaurasia, three of my best students;
- and, above all, getting to re-know my beautiful, special and different nephew, Adrian Terence D'Souza, (click here to vote)
I have come home with a photo-copy of -- my mother's songbook!
More about Dubai, culled from this 12-day visit, in a later post. And more, gloriously much more, about my mother's 70-year-old song-book, when I can see again through the tears of the 40 years gone by, without her lovely smile.
*****
Look up the links of the "Blogs I Care About" displayed on the right, alongside this post. Most of the blogs are by my students, friends and colleagues. If you are the proud author of a blog, but it's not here on my list, please let me know in the comments section or email me at: sangatizuzay(at)gmail(dot)com.
Another year of learning beckons -- for you and for me. For some of us, learning will ignite in busy work places; for others learning will crackle within the four quiet walls of our homes. For me, a fresh batch of moist home-sick eyes and clean student ears will be eager to listen at SIMC, Ranade, Garware and the other places in Pune, where I learn. And what of learning for you, my dear students, friends, and colleagues?
At every desk, we weigh our words; walk the slack of balancing editorial policy with our conscience; shun the limelight; hold our heads high; censor the celebrity; protect the poor with compassion; "give peace a chance"; swim against the rich tide; lest we forget the children; leap at the scoop; and sleep the hard peace -- knowing we have done an honest job, fairly.
Your support is my strength,
- Joe.
Pune, India, Sunday, 5th July 2009.
- a great holiday in the home of my only dearest sister Flavia;
- early morning walks and the smoothest of car drives with my brother-in-law Michael (more like a brother, actually);
- heart-to-heart chats with my two sprightly nieces, Rochelle (& Pradeep) and Nisha (& Roshan), and playing with their five wonderful kids;
- getting in touch with our umpteen relatives;
- breakfast with Reuven Proenca and lunch with Mansi Shah and Gunjan Chaurasia, three of my best students;
- and, above all, getting to re-know my beautiful, special and different nephew, Adrian Terence D'Souza, (click here to vote)
I have come home with a photo-copy of -- my mother's songbook!
More about Dubai, culled from this 12-day visit, in a later post. And more, gloriously much more, about my mother's 70-year-old song-book, when I can see again through the tears of the 40 years gone by, without her lovely smile.
*****
Look up the links of the "Blogs I Care About" displayed on the right, alongside this post. Most of the blogs are by my students, friends and colleagues. If you are the proud author of a blog, but it's not here on my list, please let me know in the comments section or email me at: sangatizuzay(at)gmail(dot)com.
Another year of learning beckons -- for you and for me. For some of us, learning will ignite in busy work places; for others learning will crackle within the four quiet walls of our homes. For me, a fresh batch of moist home-sick eyes and clean student ears will be eager to listen at SIMC, Ranade, Garware and the other places in Pune, where I learn. And what of learning for you, my dear students, friends, and colleagues?
At every desk, we weigh our words; walk the slack of balancing editorial policy with our conscience; shun the limelight; hold our heads high; censor the celebrity; protect the poor with compassion; "give peace a chance"; swim against the rich tide; lest we forget the children; leap at the scoop; and sleep the hard peace -- knowing we have done an honest job, fairly.
Your support is my strength,
- Joe.
Pune, India, Sunday, 5th July 2009.
Monday, March 30, 2009
The difference between writing and editing
In his classic, “How to write” (reprinted by Jaico), the Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock says most people confuse writing with putting words on paper. When you have not thought hard enough and have little to say, no wonder the writing is difficult and you ramble. Writing, he says, is mostly thinking and only a tiny part is actually spent putting pen to paper or typing at a keyboard.
Being able to write implies wanting to think. So is it surprising that those who have interesting thoughts are also likely to be the ones who write well. But while thinking up racy plots or an argument may be a necessary condition to writing, it is not sufficient. For you have to have the correct technique and skills to describe your thoughts or narrate what happens to your characters.
If writing has got so much to do with thinking, then what about editing? Because editing comes after writing, editing also means re-thinking or re-writing. Some gifted writers may revise by themselves. But most are so washed out after expressing ourselves or gathering the facts of a story, that we prefer having another to do the cleaning up, the tightening and tidying up, touching up or boiling down that includes the job of editing – before the piece is served up to the reader.
Editing, as communication, is different from writing, which concerns expression. The complete and exclusive focus on the reader is what distinguishes the editor from the writer. Not that the writer is self-indulgent and ignores the reader. But the editor allows the reader to constantly breathe down her neck, as she sits to edit or re-write.
Just one example of a guide to good writing and editing: the classic “UPI Stylebook”, the authoritative handbook for writers, editors and news directors, says United Press International (UPI) journalists have, since 1942, perfected the craft of writing news “for the ear”. Billy Ferguson, former managing director of UPI, who compiled the UPI stylebook of 1992, is acknowledged as the creator of the broadcast writing style and a master of writing “for the ear.” Learn anything by him and you have a treasure.
I shall return often to the theme of writing and editing. I included a piece by Baruk Feddabonn, “Should you read poetry?” because I wanted journalists to be as sensitive as poets.
Comment, before you proceed to the next post of this column.
Being able to write implies wanting to think. So is it surprising that those who have interesting thoughts are also likely to be the ones who write well. But while thinking up racy plots or an argument may be a necessary condition to writing, it is not sufficient. For you have to have the correct technique and skills to describe your thoughts or narrate what happens to your characters.
If writing has got so much to do with thinking, then what about editing? Because editing comes after writing, editing also means re-thinking or re-writing. Some gifted writers may revise by themselves. But most are so washed out after expressing ourselves or gathering the facts of a story, that we prefer having another to do the cleaning up, the tightening and tidying up, touching up or boiling down that includes the job of editing – before the piece is served up to the reader.
Editing, as communication, is different from writing, which concerns expression. The complete and exclusive focus on the reader is what distinguishes the editor from the writer. Not that the writer is self-indulgent and ignores the reader. But the editor allows the reader to constantly breathe down her neck, as she sits to edit or re-write.
Just one example of a guide to good writing and editing: the classic “UPI Stylebook”, the authoritative handbook for writers, editors and news directors, says United Press International (UPI) journalists have, since 1942, perfected the craft of writing news “for the ear”. Billy Ferguson, former managing director of UPI, who compiled the UPI stylebook of 1992, is acknowledged as the creator of the broadcast writing style and a master of writing “for the ear.” Learn anything by him and you have a treasure.
I shall return often to the theme of writing and editing. I included a piece by Baruk Feddabonn, “Should you read poetry?” because I wanted journalists to be as sensitive as poets.
Comment, before you proceed to the next post of this column.
Saturday, March 21, 2009
"Shun the fashionable; always be in style."
My dear students,
Thank you for the overall response to my blog so far. Besides your usual praise that never fails to draw out gratitude from deep inside me, as an affectionate teacher or loving friend and colleague, I am happy to notice the points each of you have singled out for mention in your comments.
Most of you have, however, chosen to comment to me directly on my personal account. And so have, deliberately or unknowingly, deprived the others of listening to your voices! Where-ever possible, I have taken the liberty to cut and paste the relevant portions and posted them as your comments to my post, but under my name.
Henceforth, I have decided to post a regular column every week. I shall post it on Sunday, so that you may read it "araam-se" during the week.
Here is an outline of the contents that I propose to cover:
1. An element of editing. (This post has the long-delayed piece on cliches).
2. Comments in passing about what I have been reading and thinking.
3. Elaborating upon the title of the blog - Against the Tide.
4. Bits about books or blogs I've read or you ought to read.
5. A think-piece - listening to the blowing wind or falling rain.
6. A tail-piece, in the style of the old-fashioned column.
Why am I adopting this format? Because I have tired of having to alert you about my posts. I shall, however, persist in alerting each of you who are so kind to comment on my blog or email me.
So here goes.
*****
Cliches: "Shun the fashionable; always be in style."
Cliches are over-used or stereo-typed or stock-in-trade fragments, expressions, phrases, idioms, or sometimes even entire sentences. Lately, examples of entire intros and paragraphs have also emerged as clichés. Video journalists, desperate to create an identity for themselves that is distinct from plain ordinary journalists, are particularly susceptible to cliches.
Five months ago, on 23 October 2008, Gauri Gharpure from the batch of 2007, Department of Journalism and Communication, University of Pune, was the first to ask me about “over-used cliches that can be done away with”.
To say over-used cliches is a redundancy, Gauri, like free gift or brutal murder. I’ll take up redundancy, another media affliction, in a later post. But here I will address the unrecognised need to avoid clichés “like the plague” (itself a cliché).
By the way, read Gauri in her thoughtful blog called “Life Rules”. I was inspired to start “Against the Tide” after I read her blog. I said to myself, “If Gauri can do it, why can’t I?” (cliché) So here I am blogging away “to glory” (cliché).
“At the outset” (cliché), I have unearthed the evergreen Eric Partridge for you, my dear students, because his book, “A Dictionary of Cliches” (first published by Routledge & Kegan Paul in 1940, the fifth edition came out in 1978) is a classic in the field of writing clearly.
Most of the authority with which we claim to speak on clichés can be traced to Eric Partridge (1894-1979), the New Zealand lexicographer who settled in England. I have also picked samples of cliches from my own careful reading of how we (journalists and readers) write daily in India.
By slipping or “sinning gracelessly” into a cliché, like Eric Partridge confesses, we mindlessly repeat the evidence that we are “slack and lazy” in our attitude to speech and writing and that we do not care to speak or write in a “fresh and vigorous” way.
This is THE crime writers and reporters commit when they use a cliché or sub-editors commit when they let a cliché escape their scrutiny as gate-keepers.
*****
Some examples follow that I have culled from books and the papers.
“Generally speaking” (cliché) may be dropped from the start of a sentence, without loss. And “last but not the least” (cliché) may be omitted, as we reach the end of our say. Try it.
The ISRO journey of Chandrayaan-1 to the Moon had its “fair share” (cliché) of tired expressions. Each exploit of the moon spacecraft became the “defining moment”(cliche) in the Indian space programme. Where has the serviceable “milestone” gone?
The corporate world has borrowed “milestone” from the surveying, mapping and road engineers and used it to hype company profiles. But we, journalists, have abandoned “milestone” which is used and understood by ordinary people. Reclaim the milestone – like the pink chaddis are out to reclaim the night from male bullies.
The adverb “most arguably” (cliché) in its superlative form is one of the most abused. An expression like “the mother of all …” (cliché) has become the mother of all clichés. Widely used by western journalists to describe the war against Saddam’s Iraq: “the mother of all battles”, this mother cliché has caught on. All you have to do is fill in the blanks and, unlike the "motherless child" of Stevie Wonder, "lo and behold" (cliche) we have another still-born cliche.
Another all-time cliche from Partridge: “In this day and age” or “at this point in time” becomes simply “at present” or “nowadays” or “now”. A company has the catch-line, “Know. Now.” below their logo and another says, “Make the most of now”.
Cliches from Associated Press Guide to News Writing have also been collected by Rene J. Cappon. Click here. From this list pick out the cliches that you are most likely to abuse as youwrite. And then, "Avoid them, like the plague".
*****
Robert M. Knight in his masterly “The Craft of Clarity: A Journalistic Approach to Good Writing” (Blackwell, U.K.; Surjeet Publications, First Indian Reprint, 2003, Rs. 150/-) calls an entire chapter, “On Being Original”. Fifteen pages with lots of examples, all from American English, but useful; and some exercises with suggested rewrites; also a list of seven reference books. Add Partridge to that list.
I reproduce a warning from Roscoe Born taken from “The Suspended Sentence: A Guide for Writers” (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1986):
“The cliché factory works around the clock. A writer with any pride – and there are no real writers without it – will brace himself constantly against some other writer’s trick phrase or odd use of a familiar word. A phrase that a writer admires may, indeed, be worthy, but he must resist the temptation to adopt it as his own, first because it would be a shameless theft, and second because a thousand other imitative writers are sure to do the same. That is the way to avoid clichés. And the writer who shuns the fashionable will always be in style."
Knight recommends a test to check if your words or phrases are tired: ask yourself if they have “potential comic value”. He cites an example from “When Words Collide” (see the twist in the title of the book taken from the clichéd “when worlds collide”) by Lauren Kessler and Duncan McDonald, who end their section on clichés thus:
“So, as the sun sinks slowly in the Western Sky, be your own best friend and bid a fond farewell to the tried and true expressions that seem to creep into writing like a thief in the night, robbing it blind of its force.”
I hope this piece meets your expectations, Gauri. Cliches are tired, thread-bare, worn-out words -- better left unsaid.
*****
Restore the editing desk
The description of the title of my blog "Against the Tide" does not and can not adequately express, in such summary jargon, what I mean. In these columns, therefore, I shall take up some aspect of my struggle - against the tide.
Let us discuss how sub-editing is currently being devalued.
Since publishers forcibly eloped with computers, (for it is an unholy alliance), I have chronicled how sub-editing is being devalued. Some big newspapers In India started stealthily by discontinuing the standard practice of having a separate desk that edited copy after the reporters had typed their stories: a chief sub at the head of the U-shaped horseshoe desk is today an endangered species.
The owners of daily newspapers cut the desk, NOT because they wanted to devalue editing but because, like mean Scrooges, they wanted an excuse to save money by reducing the number of subs and "encouraging" reporters to sub their own copy!
(Reporters, in any case, have this "war" going with subs. Because reporters have always felt they know how to write and resent the well-meaning efforts of subs to rewrite their copy, they jumped at this chance of getting their creations into print -- without submitting to the mid-wifery of the sub.)
The result is the suffocation of the desk. Clear writing is dying. Readers have begun to notice spelling errors and grammatical mistakes. This is happening not only because the quality of writing has deteriorated in general, but also because owners, owner-editors (a new breed) and managing editors (as opposed to working or writing editors) have conspired to lay down such un-professional rules in printed commodities that are brands, having ceased to be newspapers.
That is why I stand, and I urge my students, colleagues, friends and well-wishers to speak out and stand up "against the tide" that devalues editing. The best reporters and feature-writers will also stand hand-in-hand with the best subs in this struggle to restore the editing desk.
TAIL-PIECE:
My last post referred indirectly to "retirement". Could I have known that a passionate lover of books had actually retired? Please refer to the column "Past and Present" in the Hindu Sunday Magazine dated 15 March 2009, where Ramchandra Guha writes about the decision of Mr. T.S. Shanbhag, "How to retire" to close the Premier Bookshop after four decades of serving the book-lovers of Bangalore.
*****
The first of these weekly columns has become over-long. I promise to stick to my self-imposed 800-word limit in the next column. Would you like to suggest a name for this weekly column? And maybe design a logo for me? Or suggest topics for the think piece? And questions for me to cogitate?
Please comment here itself on the post, so that all can see what you have to say. Remember: I shall alert only those of you to my posts, who comment here. Even a word or a line will suffice to be eligible.
Your support is my strength.
- Joe.
Pune, Sunday, 22 March 2009.
Thank you for the overall response to my blog so far. Besides your usual praise that never fails to draw out gratitude from deep inside me, as an affectionate teacher or loving friend and colleague, I am happy to notice the points each of you have singled out for mention in your comments.
Most of you have, however, chosen to comment to me directly on my personal
Henceforth, I have decided to post a regular column every week. I shall post it on Sunday, so that you may read it "araam-se" during the week.
Here is an outline of the contents that I propose to cover:
1. An element of editing. (This post has the long-delayed piece on cliches).
2. Comments in passing about what I have been reading and thinking.
3. Elaborating upon the title of the blog - Against the Tide.
4. Bits about books or blogs I've read or you ought to read.
5. A think-piece - listening to the blowing wind or falling rain.
6. A tail-piece, in the style of the old-fashioned column.
Why am I adopting this format? Because I have tired of having to alert you about my posts. I shall, however, persist in alerting each of you who are so kind to comment on my blog or email me.
So here goes.
*****
Cliches: "Shun the fashionable; always be in style."
Cliches are over-used or stereo-typed or stock-in-trade fragments, expressions, phrases, idioms, or sometimes even entire sentences. Lately, examples of entire intros and paragraphs have also emerged as clichés. Video journalists, desperate to create an identity for themselves that is distinct from plain ordinary journalists, are particularly susceptible to cliches.
Five months ago, on 23 October 2008, Gauri Gharpure from the batch of 2007, Department of Journalism and Communication, University of Pune, was the first to ask me about “over-used cliches that can be done away with”.
To say over-used cliches is a redundancy, Gauri, like free gift or brutal murder. I’ll take up redundancy, another media affliction, in a later post. But here I will address the unrecognised need to avoid clichés “like the plague” (itself a cliché).
By the way, read Gauri in her thoughtful blog called “Life Rules”. I was inspired to start “Against the Tide” after I read her blog. I said to myself, “If Gauri can do it, why can’t I?” (cliché) So here I am blogging away “to glory” (cliché).
“At the outset” (cliché), I have unearthed the evergreen Eric Partridge for you, my dear students, because his book, “A Dictionary of Cliches” (first published by Routledge & Kegan Paul in 1940, the fifth edition came out in 1978) is a classic in the field of writing clearly.
Most of the authority with which we claim to speak on clichés can be traced to Eric Partridge (1894-1979), the New Zealand lexicographer who settled in England. I have also picked samples of cliches from my own careful reading of how we (journalists and readers) write daily in India.
By slipping or “sinning gracelessly” into a cliché, like Eric Partridge confesses, we mindlessly repeat the evidence that we are “slack and lazy” in our attitude to speech and writing and that we do not care to speak or write in a “fresh and vigorous” way.
This is THE crime writers and reporters commit when they use a cliché or sub-editors commit when they let a cliché escape their scrutiny as gate-keepers.
*****
Some examples follow that I have culled from books and the papers.
“Generally speaking” (cliché) may be dropped from the start of a sentence, without loss. And “last but not the least” (cliché) may be omitted, as we reach the end of our say. Try it.
The ISRO journey of Chandrayaan-1 to the Moon had its “fair share” (cliché) of tired expressions. Each exploit of the moon spacecraft became the “defining moment”(cliche) in the Indian space programme. Where has the serviceable “milestone” gone?
The corporate world has borrowed “milestone” from the surveying, mapping and road engineers and used it to hype company profiles. But we, journalists, have abandoned “milestone” which is used and understood by ordinary people. Reclaim the milestone – like the pink chaddis are out to reclaim the night from male bullies.
The adverb “most arguably” (cliché) in its superlative form is one of the most abused. An expression like “the mother of all …” (cliché) has become the mother of all clichés. Widely used by western journalists to describe the war against Saddam’s Iraq: “the mother of all battles”, this mother cliché has caught on. All you have to do is fill in the blanks and, unlike the "motherless child" of Stevie Wonder, "lo and behold" (cliche) we have another still-born cliche.
Another all-time cliche from Partridge: “In this day and age” or “at this point in time” becomes simply “at present” or “nowadays” or “now”. A company has the catch-line, “Know. Now.” below their logo and another says, “Make the most of now”.
Cliches from Associated Press Guide to News Writing have also been collected by Rene J. Cappon. Click here. From this list pick out the cliches that you are most likely to abuse as youwrite. And then, "Avoid them, like the plague".
*****
Robert M. Knight in his masterly “The Craft of Clarity: A Journalistic Approach to Good Writing” (Blackwell, U.K.; Surjeet Publications, First Indian Reprint, 2003, Rs. 150/-) calls an entire chapter, “On Being Original”. Fifteen pages with lots of examples, all from American English, but useful; and some exercises with suggested rewrites; also a list of seven reference books. Add Partridge to that list.
I reproduce a warning from Roscoe Born taken from “The Suspended Sentence: A Guide for Writers” (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1986):
“The cliché factory works around the clock. A writer with any pride – and there are no real writers without it – will brace himself constantly against some other writer’s trick phrase or odd use of a familiar word. A phrase that a writer admires may, indeed, be worthy, but he must resist the temptation to adopt it as his own, first because it would be a shameless theft, and second because a thousand other imitative writers are sure to do the same. That is the way to avoid clichés. And the writer who shuns the fashionable will always be in style."
Knight recommends a test to check if your words or phrases are tired: ask yourself if they have “potential comic value”. He cites an example from “When Words Collide” (see the twist in the title of the book taken from the clichéd “when worlds collide”) by Lauren Kessler and Duncan McDonald, who end their section on clichés thus:
“So, as the sun sinks slowly in the Western Sky, be your own best friend and bid a fond farewell to the tried and true expressions that seem to creep into writing like a thief in the night, robbing it blind of its force.”
I hope this piece meets your expectations, Gauri. Cliches are tired, thread-bare, worn-out words -- better left unsaid.
*****
Restore the editing desk
The description of the title of my blog "Against the Tide" does not and can not adequately express, in such summary jargon, what I mean. In these columns, therefore, I shall take up some aspect of my struggle - against the tide.
Let us discuss how sub-editing is currently being devalued.
Since publishers forcibly eloped with computers, (for it is an unholy alliance), I have chronicled how sub-editing is being devalued. Some big newspapers In India started stealthily by discontinuing the standard practice of having a separate desk that edited copy after the reporters had typed their stories: a chief sub at the head of the U-shaped horseshoe desk is today an endangered species.
The owners of daily newspapers cut the desk, NOT because they wanted to devalue editing but because, like mean Scrooges, they wanted an excuse to save money by reducing the number of subs and "encouraging" reporters to sub their own copy!
(Reporters, in any case, have this "war" going with subs. Because reporters have always felt they know how to write and resent the well-meaning efforts of subs to rewrite their copy, they jumped at this chance of getting their creations into print -- without submitting to the mid-wifery of the sub.)
The result is the suffocation of the desk. Clear writing is dying. Readers have begun to notice spelling errors and grammatical mistakes. This is happening not only because the quality of writing has deteriorated in general, but also because owners, owner-editors (a new breed) and managing editors (as opposed to working or writing editors) have conspired to lay down such un-professional rules in printed commodities that are brands, having ceased to be newspapers.
That is why I stand, and I urge my students, colleagues, friends and well-wishers to speak out and stand up "against the tide" that devalues editing. The best reporters and feature-writers will also stand hand-in-hand with the best subs in this struggle to restore the editing desk.
TAIL-PIECE:
My last post referred indirectly to "retirement". Could I have known that a passionate lover of books had actually retired? Please refer to the column "Past and Present" in the Hindu Sunday Magazine dated 15 March 2009, where Ramchandra Guha writes about the decision of Mr. T.S. Shanbhag, "How to retire" to close the Premier Bookshop after four decades of serving the book-lovers of Bangalore.
*****
The first of these weekly columns has become over-long. I promise to stick to my self-imposed 800-word limit in the next column. Would you like to suggest a name for this weekly column? And maybe design a logo for me? Or suggest topics for the think piece? And questions for me to cogitate?
Please comment here itself on the post, so that all can see what you have to say. Remember: I shall alert only those of you to my posts, who comment here. Even a word or a line will suffice to be eligible.
Your support is my strength.
- Joe.
Pune, Sunday, 22 March 2009.
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