Sauce!

Mud bath

noreply@blogger.com (Rimi) — Tue, 10 Jul 2018 07:31:00 +0000

Is said to be most excellent for the skin. We are here today, however, to discuss quite another kind of mud.

Strange things have been afoot in the land of JUDE. Strange and, unfortunately, extremely unfortunate. JUDE is, as is widely acknowledged, a most wonderful place of intellectual stimulation, uncensored thought processes and, need we even say it, academic excellence. And yet, yet, the one thing that really stands out – indeed, visitors never fail to notice it, often wistfully – is the warm camaraderie between faculty and students. The Peep writes beautifully and with characteristic zest about it. Which is why, at first, some really unfunny things seem like a bad practical joke someone dreamed up. If only.

Now that the matter has been reported in both the print and electronic media, we feel a certain responsibility towards events as we saw them happen, and hence this post. And before we start, I would like to make it very clear that the honorific of the lecturer in question is Mister. Not Doctor.

1. Early last November (it really started in October), a lecturer of the department accused two female undergraduates in their first year (UG I) of sexually harassing him. The matter apparently stemmed from a tutorial essay on the poetry of William Blake: the lecturer believed that a particular quotation from an assigned text, ('Oh rose thou art sick') used to answer a question about that assigned text, was actually an implied slur at him.
A few days later, he said that it wasn't simply the quotation; other students had scribbled messages--in unrecognisable block capitals--in the margins and within the body of their answerscripts. A further few days later, he went on to claim that one of the accused had written a letter to his wife claiming that she (the student, not the wife) was having an affair with him, and that the wife should visit and talk to the head of the department (who is mentioned by name) about it.
When this letter was produced, it turned out to be a text documented that had been printed out, making identification via handwriting impossible. Did it arrive in an envelope? Was it attached to an email? None of it was discussed at all. Instead, the lecturer held up this letter to the TV camera, summarised its contents on a chat show, and disclosed the student's name to the enormous viewing audience. The channel advertised the show as "Sex Scandal at JU!"
We will not detail the reactions of the students in question, who are fresh out of school and were at that point not even one full semester old in the department.

The matter caused a certain amount of complete shock in the department. It came out that the lecturer had forced the girl in question to scribble a note of apology to him, which was now being used as further proof of her actions.
Further, the lecturer extracted a promise from all students in his optional courses:

a. not to contact him outside class, even for academic reasons

b. not to discuss him with anybody.
If any of his students found the second demand arbitary, unreasonable and an imposition on the right to free speech, they did not voice it. So it was doubly galling to later see TV commentators label these students as rebellious, disrespectful, and disruptive.

2. At the beginning of the second semester (which began on the 2nd of January), the concerned lecturer put up a notice on one of the department's notice boards, stating that a large number of answerscripts from the previous semester's end-semester examinations were 'disputed'. Should the students concerned want to know what this meant, they should contact the Registrar. The proper channel of a complaint being always through the head of the department, this baffled students, as did the word 'disputed'. However, the lecturer, after having precipitated the situation, categorically refused to explain the reason behind the 'dispute', or comment further on the matter.

3. The students, upon meeting the Registrar, discovered that the lecturer had complained to the Vice Chancellor about them scribbling explicit messages to him in their answerscripts (the tally was 16 out of 19 students). He had formally complained about being sexually harassed on a mass-scale by the overwhelming majority of his students. The department was abuzz with this allegation, and students began wondering if this was a novel way of victimising young women from someone in a position of power. Within days of this speculation gaining ground, the lecturer delcared that he 'missed' certain scribblings on three more answerscripts. All of these answerscripts turned out to have been written by male students.
This may be irrelevant to those outside the department, for it is our subjective opinion formed over four years of close interaction, but most of the students in question were quiet, introverted individuals--quite the opposite of the Jadavpur Arts stereotype. This will be relevant later.

4. An investigation was carried out by the Registrar, in which the lecturer and all students mentioned were interrogated. The students denied the accusation of harassment. Some of them pointed out that scribbled messages within the body of their answerscripts was the surest way to get into trouble, and maybe even be disqualified. Why would they--all of them with decent grades so far--take such an insane risk?
The lecturer, on the other hand, has refused to hand in the 'disputed' answerscripts to the enquiry commission. The enquiry commission's report has been deferred for almost three weeks now because the evidence of the answerscripts is not accessible to it. All he had furnished the Registrar with are photocopies of a few of them. Although he denied it on TV, the university had in fact asked him to submit the answerscripts, but he didn't responded to that request. Finally, after 5 months of stagnation, the Vice Chancellor has formally written to him on Monday, the 12th of March 2007, asking him to return withheld university property.

In the meanwhile results of nearly 130 postgraduate students have been held up indefinitely, half of whom complete the degree in approximately three months time. Their careers--academically or otherwise--are similiarly indefinitely on hold. Had they been guilty of misconduct, this punishment might have been deserved, but the very person who had levelled allegations against them is the one now blocking the investigation. It's all rather confusing. Also, since the lecturer has been recused from conducting examinations till the investigation is concluded, the course that he has offered this semester are floundering without a coordinator, leaving even more students in a quandry.

This, in a nutshell, is what has been happening at the department for the last five months. Now on the 11th of March, Hindustan Times carried one version of the story (with a glaring error: the Registrar did not direct the Sexual Harassment Cell to start an enquiry. The students were obliged to lodge a complaint themselves), and Tara News, Star Anondo, Zee News and India TV arrived on the campus on Monday the 12th. Tara TV conducted a long live session with the lecturer and his wife in the studio and a team on campus. Here are some comments I would like to make in my personal capacity on the show:

1. Journalistic ethics is a much debated issue and is indeed in a state of flux to accomodate constantly changing situations. However to conceal from those about to be interviewed that the lecturer was present at the studio and would be interacting with the students (the anchor Sayan explictly says this was Tara's aim) and lying outright about beaming disputed answerscripts live is not exactly ethically exalted. And the repeated employment of the term 'sex scandal exclusive' to convince viewers not to change the channel is, for lack of a more exopressive phrase, extremely cheap.

2. The ethics of some of the other people involved can, I think, be freely questioned. I personally feel it is utterly distasteful--if not illegal, for the matter is currently sub-judice--for a lecturer to present photocopies of answerscripts he has been entrusted with and which is confidential university property on live television, and repeatedly ask the crew to zoom in and show the sexually explicit, if inane, messages scribbled on them. I quote the gentleman: "[It] exceeds all limits of decency, I cannot say it... aapnara dekhate parle bhalo hoy (it would be good if you could broadcast this)."
I hope I'm not the only one who gets the irony and hypocrisy in this statement. Besides which he showed no hesistancy at all in naming the student who allegedly wrote his wife an explicit letter, with no regard for the fact that this is merely an allegation unsupported by any proof whatsoever and which has been categorically denied by the student in question. However he is very quick to point out that the charges brought against him by 16 PG students is 'only allegations' and can therefore not be referred to in an argument.

3. Some of the reactions to the show--aptly called a natok (drama) by the anchor, albeit it appeared to be a slip of tongue--were frankly terrifying. One woman took very strong exception to the students occasionally speaking in English (although the lecturer's use of the language were fine by her)--this despite them belonging to an English department--and expressed a deep desire to punish them physically. She also expressed astonishment at the nerve of the students to defend themselves when accused by a faculty member, and blamed their parents for raising 'rebels'. A man derided the Registrar for being 'too lenient'. He heartily approved of the beating the engineering faculty students took from the police sometime back, and recommended that course of action for these students as well.

The general consensus about JU students seemed to be that they are a morally decadent and sexually depraved lot, that corrupt society with their English-speaking elitism. This has been repeated often in the media in these last few days. The point, however, is this: should a group that is perceived as 'elitist' be subjected to hypothetical beatings by the police, or the very real (and illegal) withholding of their answerscripts, and therefore degrees, by an adult in charge of their education? Using prejudice to justify misconduct against a targetted body of people--isn't that what civil society stands against? Slightly tangential to the issue, but the whole 'They deserved it, those drug-addicted English-speaking leftists!' rather reminds me of the 'She asked for it!' rhetoric, so frequently employed against victims of rape and molestation.

4. And finally, we have the SC/ST question once again. All of a sudden, a question of sexual misconduct and breach of trust between a teacher and his or her students becomes overshadowed by the caste issue. Mrs. Lecturer took special pains to point out her husband's status as a 'quota recruit' should be noted for future reference because the sexual harassment he was facing, the legal trouble he was in for not returning the answerscripts, and the travails he shall doubtless face in the future, are all because of his caste. Now, given India's history--and indeed, the current environment--automatically assigning a degree of truth to such accusations seems reasonable, for the probablity of it being true is exceptionally high. Except that in this case, there are studeents in hat class who come from similar social backgrounds. So here's a question for those who wish to align themselves with the lecturer on the basis of his caste alone: now that the caste angle is a level playing field--in that both teacher and student are similarly marginalised, would you continue to support him because of his caste identity? The choice is between a man in the position of power, acting illegally to withhold several careers because his accusations were unfounded; and 130 students whose only demand is that he act according to university rules, and turn in their marks. Choose silently, if you must, for social censure can be corrosive; but choose with your conscience.

******
NOTE: certain details have been left out of this account because undoubtedly important and influential though those details are, we do not as yet have either permission or tangible proof to publish them. These include biographical detail of people concerned. Although a few of these have been mentioned on television already, I would appreciate if those reading and kind enough to leave comments desist from mentioning them, as well as the confidential updates, here. Thank you.

Moving Houses

noreply@blogger.com (Rimi) — Sun, 27 May 2012 14:04:00 +0000

Dear everybody still subscribed to this blog,

You're peaches and cream, fish and rice, and absolute sweethearts dipped in chocolate for sticking with this fossil all these years. It's certainly more than I've done.

Because, you see, while you weren't looking, I sneaked off first to the food blog, and now I've jumped ship entirely, and blog here: http://priyankanandy.com/.

Vile perfidy, I know. But treachery, like misery, loves company, and if you could find time in your busy, busy schedules to hop over to the new blogs and subscribe to them, as you did to this one, I'd love you ten times more.

(Which is a lot of love, believe you me).

See you in newer pastures then, folks! The last one to hit the new blog's it!

Much love,

Rimi

Is god a capital thing?

noreply@blogger.com (Rimi) — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 20:13:00 +0000

Apparently, when gods and goddesses raise waves in one part of the world, reverbrations are felt throughout the globe. They have superpowers like that.

It's hasn't been a full day that the goddess has been sent ceremonially back to her abode via the river (bon voyage, au revoir!), and already there's an email in my inbox from the other hemisphere, enquiring whether the 'right' way to write the divine is with or without a capital 'g'. That is, should it be 'god', or should it be 'God'?

It's a difficult question, unless of course one learns one's religion from the holy books--but let's face it, who does? Silver-tongued men and women with a talent for rabble-rousing and a flair for for-profit organising, who kindly reduce thick, dense tomes into concise little bumper stickers, do just fine for us.

So according to the scriptures, if I remember my lessons right, there is no capitalisation required. All contributors seem to agree that god is indeed a capital thing, democratic dissent not being in fashion yet. In fact, the wonderous awesomeness of god is the entire point of the existence of scriptures, and said point being amply illustrated in vivid, video-gamesque details of strategic wars, smiting, blood, gore, rape, sodomy, incest, earthquakes, floods, tropical romps, non-tropical fornication and drunken orgies, no one saw the need to extract respect by inserting the capitalisation clause. People's who witness the parting of the sea have plenty of respect to spare... and were likely illiterate besides, mass literacy not being in fashion either. Besides, of course, there is the small matter of script to consider. Most scripts do not differentiate between cases, thus rendering the question of capitalisation moot.

However, the evolving mainstream has left the core of the scriptures behind everywhere, except maybe the bloodiest and most populace-inciting bits. After all, there is a reason human beings developed aforementioned video games in aforementione vivid details. This reason is called human nature.

Anyway, the current trend of capitalisation in the western hemisphere, which percolates into the rest of the world by way of cultural imperialism and is now taken as the gospel truth by huge chunks of the populace, is arrived at by this simple associative equation: bigger is always better --> god is bigger and better than us poor mortals (though he did created us in his own image, if word on the street is to be believed) --> upper case is bigger, therefore better than lower case --> god deserves the capital G. There are other theories too: some people, admittedly a small minority, expand on the previous argument and claim that 'god' is a grammatical error, since the word does not visually trigger any awe or wonder or respect that the concept of god should in every human heart (or brain). This, of course, is a believer's argument and a semiotician's delight, and the former's biggest opposition to the lowercase 'g' is that it is a calculated offence mounted against their glowing faith by faithless atheists.

There are two further schools of thought on the subject.

One patiently explains that God is a proper noun, and don't we all know that proper nouns should be capitalised? To which I say no, it is not. Yahwey is a name, Jesus is a name, Krishna is a name, Brahma is a name. I will even accept the Holy Ghost. I will accept Satan and his entire array of names, even if Satan shares root with the common noun shaitan. But 'god' is not a proper noun (and neither is 'devil', unless one adds a 'the' before it to signify the Abrahamic tradition). It is simply used as such by a culture that, for reasons best known to whoever takes an inerest in these things, have forgotten the name their 'god' chose for himself.
The other school of thought militantly declares that monotheistic deities merit God because they are the one true God, while anything in the plural with similar claims are figments of stupid people's imaginations that can at best scrape up a 'god', usually with a qualifying prefix--like Greek, native, tribal, weather--attached, to emphasise its limited scope. Kinder people of the same group say munificently that even polytheistic orders can use God when they speak of any one specific god.

I have no personal arguments at all against any of these theories. Capitalisation of the divine makes no difference to me. But since the question was asked of me I must confess that I prefer the more militant theories of difference ("our God good, your god lame", "athesists are malicious fools") to the faux-tolerant pseudo-logic of capitalisation by numbers. I don't like patronising theories backed up by zero evidence or blatant lies, which is precisely what the last response to the God-god dilemma is. After all, while the 'g' is always capitalised in 'the Old Testament God' or 'the Islamic God'--and those two can have the G since they are decidedly singular entities--it's passed over completely when one very specific god from a pluralist pantheon is mentioned, for example, 'the Greek god Dionysus'. In fact, those with an Anglophone education have internalised the G-g : Christian-nonChrisian bias to such an extent that just seeing phrase 'the Greek God Dionysus' feels odd and wrong, even if we are self-aware enough to wince at the underlying politics of our reaction.

Unfortunately, even the self-aware demography finds it difficult not to reproduce this paradigm of easy respect and easier taboos when writing Devnagari in the Roman script, thus the goddess almost always becomes Devi Durga or Ma Kaali.

The only person to which this discussion might bring pleasure is probably the above-mentioned hypothetical semiotician. Personally, I feel rather self-conscious discussing spiritual matters in public because of the rich, diverse, and therefore slippery nature of the subcontinental spiritual mosaic. One never knows when one might carelessly nick a quiet, pious soul's space of devotion, or stomp on a closet fundamentalist's tail. But even then I'm compelled to say that this entire debate, and a society that enthusiastically grants such debates legitimacy, are sillier than the silliest sillies. After all, no one demands 'bread' be capitalised when speaking of naan because naan is better than sour dough, or declares that a car in traffic is a car but a sole care cruising along the highway is a Car.

And I am firmly in favour of dismissing all silliness.

After I have spoken my extensive piece on the matter, of cours.

Sees, Smirks, and Quirks a Sardonic Eyebrow

noreply@blogger.com (Rimi) — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 11:36:00 +0000

Which, you must admit, is a commoner reaction than Eats, Shoots, and Leaves, although the latter makes the point much better.

This post is and isn't intended for the Red Marker Blogathon started by Sue over at her blog -- go find the post, I'm too lazy to link. Well, I say "started by Sue", but if you've been a reader here for more than a couple of months, the odd are embarrassingly in favour of you coming across a post where I stamped my foot over the use of language, viciously tore apart bad or merely overlooked grammar, and generally acted all superior while failing to notice the typos that inevitably creep into anything I write. So yes, in a way I consider myself the spiritual parent of this blogathon, and like all spiritual parents, I expect my existence to be hotly debated and finally contemptuously denied and dismissed (very likely by myself, because I'm contrary that way).

I have a lot of peeves with language, and oddly enough they seem to throw themselves at my poor beleaguered eyes most when I read Harry Potter fanfiction (I read fanfiction). It's one of the inevitabilities of reading "happily married mother of three" or "full-time university student, part time writer!" that the stories are less attentive to packaging, and more to getting the brilliant ideas Rowling didn't have out in the world. This frequently results in such easily overlookable* errors such as:

'loose' for 'lose' (as in, "Hermione was afraid that she would loose Professor Snape's love if she underlined his books with a pen/tried to pay his house elves/refused to try BDSM"), 'dare say' for daresay', 'none the less' for 'nonetheless', 'defiantly' for 'definitely'... and so on, and so forth.
innovative new verbs, such as 'drug' for 'dragged' ("Draco drug Hermione to the Forbidden Forest and had his wily wicked way with her").
mangled 'Britishisms' ("And why are you smiling like an idiot in my class, Mr. Weasley?" "Oh bollocks, we only won the Quidditch Cup this year and I shagged a couple of your quidditch-groupie bints, you greasy git, pip pip!").
and a general disregard for such mundane things as subject-verb agreement ("the happy couple went down to the Great Hall and ate his lunch"), tenses ("I tried to tell Draco he is my soulmate, but he is refusing to listen to me!") and the careless disinterest in commas which leads to "there's [there+is]" all too frequently becoming "theres", and the non-apostrophied 'yours' often acquiring a superfluous curly dash before the 's'.

*Easily overlookable, that is, by everyone but me, because I'm the Wicked Witch of Languageville and eat mangled words for breakfast.

But lately, it isn't these so much that have been nagging at the edges of my conscience, like a starchy price-tag poking one in the neck. These days, I don't even flinch at the American attachment to extra prepositions ("Draco has been crushing on Hermione, who was sipping on her tea while visting with the Weasleys, who were hating on the Malfoys"). It's difficult to dislike something as innocuous as an ethnic linguistic style without feeling like a horrible grouch, particularly the linguistic style of an ethnic group as friendly and nice as Americans. They will wear down grouchiness with their smiles and acceptance and non-judgemental friendliness... unless of course you live in Iraq or Afghanistan, but that's neither here or there.

No, what has been bothering me is the sheer downturn in the way Bengali is spoken in Calcutta. When we were little 'uns running about, one frequently heard the sentiment that slangs or swear-words were the refuge of the ill-educated. "They use such language because they *cannot* use proper language, and are therefore to be pitied, not copied", was the message sent across from adult quarters. Of course, this argument fell apart if one then accompanied said adult to the fish market and hear him illustratively dispute the freshness of the fish, and consequently the legitimacy of its price, and eventually, should things get so far, the legitimacy of the fishmonger's birth... but it doesn't hold water even without that practical demo. Swearing in Bengali and English, and I imagine in any other language, had till recently been a smorgasboard of wit, quick repartee, a talent for coining puns and aphorisms, and of course, analogies. Swearing, while admittedly not for all ages, was fun. It was colourful, it showed a sharp mind, it showed a sense of humour (although perhaps not a very charitable one), it reflected pop culture, and more importantly, it showed local colour. As one of our professors once said, if there ever was an enclyopaedia of swearing, College Street of the '60s would have a chapter all to itself, and quite a distinctive one at that.

But all that appears to be firmly in the past. Swearing, and I participate in it with alarcity, seems to be the domain of scatological references, largely involving the human posterior or something violently sexual which, frankly, I'm hard-pressed to find even remotely provocative. To "You fucking jackass/asswipe/piece of shit, I fucked your mother up the ass and shoved my cock down her throat!" [quoting verbatim from a Central Square fight last weekend] and it's Bengali equivalent, I merely yawn. If I'm in the mood, I might toss out a few choice words of my own, but it's more from a sense of social obligation. If someone calls me a fucking bitch, I feel I owe it to the social contract to call him a sodding cunt -- an interesting physical conundrum, by the way -- or put on superior amused face and walk away, but there's no heart in the exchange anymore. And there certainly is no mind.

I just wish people would stop being so blasé about their invectives and start taking it seriously again--which is to say, start taking it not seriously at all. Men and boys sitting on 'rocks' trading barbs used to be a fucking linguistic and humourous subculture, not a prelude to fistfights and escalated tension for the next three months. Even sexual harassment used to be funny, and therefore somehow more easily ignored or taken in one's stride. After all, a bunch of boys who get their rocks off by asking you to turn your jaggery jugs at them somehow send out the signal that they are unlikely to zoom past you in a jeep, pull you in, rape and beat you, and leave you for dead by the highway, or slit your neck in an alley. It somehow didn't go with the spirit.

It's like as a culture and a world, we've forgotten to laugh at ourselves and others around us, and this taking-ourselves-too-seriously business has made our egos that much more fragile and prone to violence. There'll be a few words, suddenly someone will declare themselves offended, mothers will come into the conversation, and next thing you know the police are bottlenecking your street and there are black eyes all around. Since clearly we cannot have a world free of harrassment or fights, by every god there is, can we just please have the (relatively) harmless little resvoirs of local wits back? It might just go a fraction of an inch in restoring my faith in humanity.

Truman's Sixty

noreply@blogger.com (Rimi) — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 22:47:00 +0000

I just had a blazing row with someone about something that I try hard not to discuss in a social setting--'development' as a concept, and how we botch an already botched concept in implementation. And in some ways my disappointment was rooted deeply in the fact that the person is from my city, from sterling universities that might well be faulted by the ostriches for being "too" political, but never for being too little. Or for that dead-in-the-water escapist standpoint, 'apolitical'. I expect certain standards of people from my city, but clearly--it seemed to me on a depressed, grey New England afternoon of cold soup and soggy french fries--in expecting Calcutta to churn out people with a certain level of cultural and political sophistication, I've been holding the city upto standards it doesn't even pretend to embody anymore. And it depressed me more than this sudden cold spell and this sudden, persistent, chilling rain that simply won't go away. I used to think, in my own emulation of the ostrich, that if I don't acknowledge the reality of Calcutta's thoughtscape, perhaps all that is solid ill melt into air and the city as I knew it, the city as I loved it, the city that took out it's conscience and gave it good long look every evening, the city that mocked its own pompousness... that city would magically come back. Clearly, I was a sentimental fool. And a man whom ironically, I would have expected to be the epitome of such a place as I imagined Calcutta to be, put me right.

"We've got our priorities wrong", he said, midway through the tea. "When I go back to Calcutta I shudder these days..."
"The traffic and pollution and lack of public loos, I know", I was going to fill in while he took a sip of the ridiculous pomegranate tea, but he beat me to it.
"Just the poverty of goods, you know?" He tapped his teacup with the tip of his index finger. "Can yo imagine getting pomegranate tea in your local grocery shop? Can you imagine getting three kinds of lettuce, four kinds of potatoes, extra-sweet strawberries, oranges the size of my fist?"
"Well," I said with my previous friendliness, although I was quite appalled to find a development consultant classifying development priorities in terms of largely superfluous consumer choices, "I'm not sure that having potatoes in three different kinds or fruits as large as your fist really indicates anything other than access to unnecessary food technology. I mean, yellow and brown and red potatoes all taste the same to me, even the pricey little delicate ones that are supposedly good for baking. In fact, American produce seldom tastes of anything to me. Given the choice I'd take smaller, misshapen Indian produce any day. At least the cauliflowers taste of cauliflowers, and begunbhaja doesn't taste paanshe."

And I'm justified in this degradation of American supermarket produce, as can be verified by anyone whose just come/returned to the States from South Asia, or just stepped in South Asia and had a good vegetarian meal there. Just the evening before, in fact, my rainy-day dinner of bhuna khichuri and begunbhaja had clocked several notches below expectations because of blandness of local brinjals and cauliflowers, and I was smarting. However, all my friendliness acheived was the curious cocktail of patronising hostility.

"An organic supporter, eh? I thought you had more sense than that", the Irksome Idiot condescended, delicately cutting a sliver off his lamb shank (we were in a Greek place), placing it carefully on top of a large piece of lettuce, using his fork to wrap the lettuce around it and popping it in his mouth.

Irrationaly, it was his action that depressed me even more, because that is exactly how I eat my lamb shank as well (except that I put a piece of tomato or onion and a french fry inside the lettuce wrap, and dip it in the yogurt sauce before eating). Clearly, this was a man who enjoyed his food and knew how to eat, from which it follows that he has superior tastes and therefore a functional brain, from which it follows that the rubbish he was spewing are the conclusions of a brain capable of logical thought, from which it follows that the man is an idiot. And it pains me to classify a fellow gourmet as an idiot, but life is seldom easy.

I won't transcribe the hour-long conversation here, although I would dearly love to, but suffice to say that the gentleman is question, who has worked for UNDP as a consultant and suchlike, thinks the organic food movement is led by "hippe-type folks" completely detached from reality (and I'm not saying a large number of people who go organic as a 'lifestyle choice' are not somewhat vacuous, but then what movement doesn't have it's ill-informed fanatics?), that not just veggies, but seafood should be genetically engineered because it will increase productuon and thus drive down prices, and "isn't that what your great middle-class always wants?" In India, we should go private because "these third-world governments, they will never change" (apparently corruption is a third-world problem, and exists in a vaccum free of poverty, huge populations, crumbling infrastructure, suspect accountability et al), and we should 'develop' the cities more--more highways, shopping malls, better airports because "I feel ashamed when I land in Calcutta from the US or Europe or even East Asia". Not that I don't share his shudder at the state of most Indian airports, but perhaps we have other sectors that need immediate investment. As long as the airports are functional, I don't see any need to make them altars of tech-worship (and no, Calcutta, I classify smooth runways a necessity, not as a fancy addition, so get working on it). He even praised the Rajarhat building projects, all but calling me a fool when I pointed out that some studies show those buildings have led to the disruption of the water tables and the drainage system in the city, leading to much more severe monsoon flooding over the last few years.

But what really got my goat was this insistance that 'we' have it all wrong, except where we've given way to the ancient World Bank model of development, those being our only saving graces. There's no redeemable quality in us whatsoever, and that the American system 'works'. There's no doubt that the American system 'works' (although I was surpised the last two financial years had made no impact on his analysis whatsoever), the destruction wrecked by the Bush era notwithstanding. But this attitude that anything government-owned is destructive, that markets are "largely" self-regulating, that introducing vast consumer choices that makes the populace spend more than they earn is the only way to have a functional economy, and that technology is the new totalitarian religion that brooks no disagreement, are so alien to my ways of thoughts (and the dominant modes back home) that I was shocked not merely at his opinions, but at how completely he had assimilated into an economic ideology that I've always believed is deeply flawed... and always believed--despite my ideological dissociation from the so-called Marxists of my state--will lead to the collapse of the very structures (liberty! equality! lowest prices!) that it pretends to uphold.

If anyone truly answered President Truman's address from the sixties about 'modernising' the rest of the wretched world, it has been the erstwhile third-world elite, and more's the pity. Perhaps, had our lad taken the trouble to know this country beyond it's centrist and right-wing financial politics, he would have discovered the truth of Mencken's words: "doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with anything to sell."

Shubho Noboborsho!

noreply@blogger.com (Rimi) — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 01:19:00 +0000

Antorik ebong lok-dyakhano shubhechha, o preetinomoshkar. Aaj chaar ghonta dhore ranna kore table shajanor por hothat onekdin aager lorry-message mone porlo. "Dekhbi aar jolbi, luchir moto fulbi".

Not that I mean anything by it, of course. Except maybe to Poushali.

Aloo-posto.

Haddocker shorsher jhaal.

Chingrir malaicurry.

Malpoa in rosh.

The feast :-)

P.S: if you want the recipes for these (and other things sporadically cooked and consumed, see this).

Nitpicky Nattering Nut

noreply@blogger.com (Rimi) — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 21:09:00 +0000

Also known as Rimi, she of sloppy fingers and a sharp tongue.

I make typos right, left and centre, but I don't usually speak them (as it were). Because I do know how language--despite its vast diversity of uses--functions. American English, for example, fascinates me precisely because it's so different, and being in a land where it's spoken all the time really brings home this diversity business. I mean, professors drop their 'g's, leaders of the country use compressions freely ('wanna', 'gonna' et al), same words mean different things--it's like a smorgasboard of exotic delights. And also mildly annoying at times, yes, but then difference is famously discomfiting. I particularly dislike using the synonym for a donkey to mean one's posterior, but I accept that they might find my predilections of calling people asses equally strange, so I leave it at that.

There are some things, however, that I simply cannot move past. Some of these are universals in the English-speaking world. "I could care less", for example, when a person really means "I could NOT care less". People these days seem to speak by rote, not stopping to actually think what the words spewing out of their mouths actually mean. I mean, come on, if you could care less, it means you admit that this moment, you do in fact care. You cannot care less unless you already care some. The same goes for the contemptuous "I give a damn!", when the speaker clearly means to convey that she doesn't. And we've become so immune to the act of thinking that when Sue posted about this, one of her commenters said he didn't understand the point of her post.

These little things annoy me, and perhaps they shouldn't. But then I'm a self-confessed nitpicker who can't stop--and indeed quite enjoys--nattering about other people's obvious lack of faculties, so I can't say I see myself stopping any time soon. Especially not when I'm back in India, because the Indian masses sudden capitulation to American English comes across (to me, anyway) as the worst kind of spineless abdication of one's own identity in favour of an abject, puppy-like following-the-biggest-player-in-the-playground approach to self-definition. Which means I'll be back on the subject, and if last summer was anything to go, with considerable more irk than I possess at the moment.

The Cinderella Complex

noreply@blogger.com (Rimi) — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 03:30:00 +0000

There's a woman known to the family, a sort of a friend of a second cousin of an aunt's on the her husband's side, who is uncannily--and I mean uncannily--good at what's commomly understood by 'astrology'. Being a family of unbelievers (to begin with anyway), we were often the focus of her particular brand of brilliance, since she got a quiet, smug kick out of stunning us into speechlessness with an odd sentence or two.

This lady has spoken exactly twice to me in all my life. The first was when she made me a horoscope, and laid out a few stark facts about my purported future. The second was just before I moved away from home. "You watch that Cinderella complex of yours," she said to me sternly, without any pretext. "No one is going to come after you with a glass slipper. You just learn to grease the palms and smile the smile, do you understand?"

I did, because at twenty three I wasn't completely un-selfaware, but just like at twenty three, I pretty much ignored sterling advice.

And she did turn out to be right, once more. The Cinderella complex has proved my undoing, all over again.

It's not the fact that I'm stuck with the grunge-work. Everyone is, and I happen to like mine. It's not even that I am stuck with evil gorgons. I have had more than my fair share of gorgons, true, but to be perfectly honest, I've also had more than my share of absolute peaches, so that evens out. It's not that I'm relatively poor, either. Being a natural penny-pincher, I do quite well on a postgrad's stipend. None of those trip me up. What does trip me is my tendency to actually like being hidden away in the cold cellar--metaphorically speaking--doing the dishes in a dank, dark kitchen. I don't like attending department parties because I spend eight hours a day, five days a week, seeing these people. I don't like attending seminars because I think, what the hell, I've read all the books this person has written. That social events and seminars--particularly the Q&A of the latter--might be a time to impress 'important' people with my intimate knowledge of their work, and thereby to gain a foothold in academia, is not lost to me. I simply don't feel like making the effort. I much preferred to go home early and stay there, snuggled under my cuddly brown blanket with a cup of hot cocoa, the world conveniently close but also reassuringly far away on my laptop (just thinking about it makes me warm and content all over).

This pattern has marked my social life for as long as I can remember, but perhaps it's done the most damage in the last couple of years. I have been at one of the primary epicentres of western learning, littered with illuminaries in my field and beyond, and outside my immediate faculty I've met exactly zero people.

And the crux is not that I am shy. I'm gregarious and a career chatterbox, as nearly anyone will wearily testify. It's just that I was brought up to wait politely till I was noticed or called upon, or introduced to someone by someone else. Particularly if the situation involved elders, for to butt into boroder kotha, or the circle of elders, would be very rude indeed. And given the eminence of most of the people I'd like to meet, or even just their rank as university professors, my instinct to treat them as respectable elders kicks in extra hard. It's very tiresomely Asian of me, but it's also completely organic and hence difficult to get rid of. That I am now in the Best-Shover-Gets-All zone doesn't make me function any differently. If anything, I fall back on an extreme form of my upbringing, perhaps as an unconscious defensive measure, and sit in unspoken condemnation of overt, unsublte attention grabbers. I tell myself that it is much preferable, instead, to sit in quiet intellectual content in a corner, smiling smugly at silly questions and nodding along with the person delivering a lecture (let's say). And if I do this--be the good, unobtrusive, silently efficient child--I will somehow, magically, be rewarded by being noticed. Or, in the rare, rare, rare case that I summon up the courage to write someone an email, expect them to remember my enthusiastic nodding from amongst an audience of several. Expect the glass slipper to chase me, in short.

And of course, it never does. I'm not even the insignficant little flower at the bottom right hand corner of the back cover of a fairy tale book, so why should it? It's just that I didn't realise how easy it was to temporarily fill in the heroine's shoes.

So, word of advice: academia is, amongst other things, a constant PR exercise for yourself. Meet and greet like it's fucking driving you insane. Smile and mouth compliments and 'thoughtful' comments till your bleeding jaw collapses. Grin till the muscles strike. It will serve you well. Or better, at any rate, than will waiting for impractical shoes to be brought to you by people in glossy doublets, riding great white horses (that will likely as not poop at your door).

This Language Bug

noreply@blogger.com (Rimi) — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 06:58:00 +0000

I have recently encountered the thesis--from a very well-read and socially-aware person--that language is an apolitical thing that has no connotations beyond communications. "Language is just something people use to get ideas across, and I really don't understand people can politicse something like language", he complained. I'm always charmed by such naïveté, so I paid for his latte.

I realise I'm obsessed with local forms of languages--in particular of English--and quite frankly I didn't spare it a thought earlier, but I'm beginning to think this obsession is becoming a superobsession and slowly taking over my life. First of all, I notice differences between American and Rest-of-the-world English that international students living here for ages didn't notice, and on occasion that they did, ceased to notice them almost immediately. Example: laying (US) and lying (r-o-t-w). Second, given that I can't forget one system and adapt to another completely, these days I feel slightly queasy when I look at a sentence about healthful foods on colorful plates, and ALSO a sentence about healthy food on colourful plates. When I look at "outside of" and "visited with" and so on, I'm definitely bothered by the unnecessary (to me) prepositions. But then, when I read a book with a marked absence of the superfluous prepositions, there's this nagging feeling that there's something important missing. And the worst are the new spellings that haven't been concretised yet, or older people (professors and old American texts) which use some r-o-t-w spellings. 'Glamour' persisted for a while, and Margaret Meade used 'labour', while members of faculty email us saying they'll be 'travelling' and are therefore 'cancelling' a meeting. Students, on the other hand, write in to say they are affraid they cannot make a deadline because they have a young proffessionals' meeting off campus.

It's all rather confusing. And the automatic comparison feature inside my head is driving me a little insane, I think.

And all this came upon me as an epiphany while I was reading Steig Larsson's Millenium trilogy (in succession). The translation was done in the UK, or so it appeared anyway, from the verbs spelt [another verb-form absent in the US. They have no truck--mostly--with the 't' ending] with an 's' to 'programmes', 'labour', 'colour', the usual deal. And then, suddenly, amongst the many hundred pages, one word jumps out at me. Math. Yeah, that's right. Math, not maths. And I knew in an instant, in a bleeding instant, that the chap translating was American. In a few decades American English will become the lingua-franca (the irony...) and we shall be the tiny minority that uses 'tawdry' to mean cheaply or overtly sexualised, while the majority will mean 'gaudy' or 'sloppy', but mathematics is still shortened with an 's' in most parts of the world that doesn't blindly ape anything American (Ninety percent of Indian internet users, I mean you!). And while I'd been putting off getting a bite to eat and going to the loo for the past hour because the book was rivetting and my bed warm and cuddly, I immediatly hopped off it and went to look up the translator online. The link above was the result. He was American. Elementary, my dear reader.

At the end of the day, though, I have to admit: there's an interest in languages, and then there's unhealthy scab-picking obsessive behaviour. Clearly I lack the wisdom to know the difference. Or the tantric arts to reprogramme my brain.

Why I Love My Friends #2

noreply@blogger.com (Rimi) — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 04:07:00 +0000

or, How to Turn My Silly Insecurities Into Massive Problems:

Friend: Rimi! Ohmygod, I have put on, like, one pound! Do you think my boyfriend will break up with me?
Rimi (sombrely): this is a difficult situation, C. Try lettuce and water for a week, and then see what happens.
F: but Rimi, do I really not deserve happiness because I'm half a kilo heavier?
R: No C, you always deserve happiness! If your boyfriend leaves you, then that's because HE doesn't deserve you. He is not your true love, C! You true love will never leave you no matter how many helpings of desserts. The two of you will stay together forever and ever and have many bonny babies!
F: and so if my boyfriend fights with me again...
R (firmly): you will tell him that he is not your soul mate, and that you know he is doing this only because he thinks you are fat. And then you will dump him.
F: because it is an abusive relationship if he thinks I am fat.
R: of course it is.
F: and I don't have to put up with it.
R: no, you don't. Come, repeat after me: I am special.
F: I am special.
R: I am beautiful.
F: I am beautiful.
R: I am a strong woman.
F: I am a strong woman.
R: I don't need a man to be happy.
F: I don't need a man to be happy.
R: I will find my true love.
F: I will find my true love.
R: and I will never live my life by other people's standards.
F: god, never that! I shall always be a strong, independent woman who knows her own mind!
R: yeah!

Why I love my friends #1

noreply@blogger.com (Rimi) — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 19:36:00 +0000

Dry, and completely practical, humour.

Rimi: I love your translation of Jellicle Cats. Hee hee. It is the tewkewt!
Rimi's fraand: thunkoo. I'm thinking of translating the whole thing.
R: oooh, do! That will be funn!
F: yeah, I will. Let's first get the wedding over with.
R: to which wedding I had better come or "I'll have your guts for garters, my darling"?
F (placidly): yes, that one.
R: I've wanted someone to translate J. Alfred Prufrock to Bengali for ages. Will you do it?
F: Well...
R (whiny tone): do it do it do it! Do it or I shall whinge and whine and make your life hell.
F: Fine, I'll do that after the wedding.
R: But...
F (firmly): after the wedding. When self-doubt and existential angst will be available close at hand in spades.
Rimi: Awl right!

How we murder Robithakur

noreply@blogger.com (Rimi) — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 00:02:00 +0000

A repost from Facebook, since it briefly disappeared therefrom, rendering me concerned about its well-being. Original comments have been put in the comments section.

***Gurudeb ki chhilen, ki hoiyachhen.

I just heard Brototi Bondopahdyay (I think it is) recite Tagore on the telly. And she was so compellingly awful that I *had* to pop into the television room to see how she looked as she recited.

I don't know how Gurudeb would have reacted to her vocal and visual slaughter of his verses--I imagine he would have smiled tolerantly and tried to make the glimmer in his eyes as obscure as possible--but I can well imagine how another gentleman of advanced years would have reacted to the strident tones. My grandfatherwould have been disgusted.

And it's not just Brototi, it's entire generations of Bengalis who have been trained since their salad days in the fine art of abritti. Except, of course, there is very little that is 'fine' or subtle about the way we are taught to 'elocute'. I remember a girl from my school days--poor thing had rather a high opinion of herself because she took the award for recitation year after year, but when she auditioned for a play in Bombay she was told what I had always felt: her delivery, emoting, body-language et al only screamed "jatra!!!". There was FAR too much nodding and roudding of the eyes and absolutely unforgivable over-emphasis of every single emotion even hinted at in the lines of her piece. And her most painful (to the audience) flaw was that she chose to make her performance a senseless collage of said emotions hinted at or represented by every little word or phrase, instead of taking the tone of the entire poem/piece (or sections thereof) into consideration.

And that is precisely what Brototi did today, much to my utter and complete disappointment. Both in the performance and in my expectations of her intellect. If that is how she chooses to recite, then clearly the woman believes in leaving her brain behind at the greenroom. How else, after all, does she justify in throwing the word "ghor" in a ringing tone and a thunderous voice, when the full sentence is "ghor ghono neel ghuntHon o tobo"? Clearly, "ghor" here does not refer to the threatening quality of extremity (as in, ghor ghonoghota, ghor bipod), but the darkness of the blue in a mysterious woman's veil. The voice of a man describing the attire and adornments of his beloved [or, alternately, of the lord he is devoted to, since, as someone rightly said, "Robi thakurer premer kobita aar bhoktir kobita tofaat kora jaaye na"] is not likely to switch from cooing melodies to a strident, ringing voice, to a low threatening rumble, to a high pitched ear-splitting delivery, and then back to simpering cooing.

It was ridiculously bad, and given Brototi's repuatation and my own love for Tagore, I almost couldn't contain my itching irritation. I wanted to shake the woman, and then lock her up in a cosy little attic room with the suitable selection Sanchaita, and leave her there to actually read the poems as *poems*--and not performance pieces that are memorised and recited one word at a time.

And I cannot gloss over the Bengali audience, either. People actually looked deeply appreciative and were nodding along to this ridiculous showcase of Brototi B's vocal range. One is inclined, in fact, to give up on re-educating Ms. B and merely assert that people deserve the awful 'artistes' they get. And one rather suspects that in this case, at least, one would be rather right. After all, we've never shown an inclination to go for the refined and the subtly nuanced when the loud and bold have offered themselves as alternatives.

After all, Tagore's poetry? Who fucking cares? The bill of show will have Brototi's name on it. Yay!

My neglected childhood, (sniffle)

noreply@blogger.com (Rimi) — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 04:17:00 +0000

I've only recently realised that I was a dreadfully neglected child of selfish, uncaring parents who were far more bothered with putting food on my plate than with my emotional well-being. The evil things.

This realisation came upon me as almost an epiphany, as I wandered about the local pre-school and playground the day after Thanksgiving. A crowd of young mammas and their ickle things had turned the place into a temporary fairground--you could hear the raucous revelry and occasional tinkly mum-laughter from a block away. I was about to park myself on a convenient perch and watch that slice of happiness (because nothing improves a grey mood better than watching a bunch of brightly coloured, shrieking three-footers prancing about... and imagining the hiding you could give 'em if only they'd stray within your grasp), when one of the children suddenly let out a blood curdling howl.

The next few minutes were a bit of a blur, as several mothers ran onto the playground, hauled the nearest child to their chests, and demanded to know what was going on. It turns out--in as much as playground brawls turn out into anything--that one little boy had been challenged to hit another little boy while the latter ran around him in circles. Having nothing on him except a half-eaten peanut butter sandwich, the former took careful aim and managed to hit the latter squarely on the back. The injustice of having his challenge met was a bit too much for the latter, ergo aforementioned b-curd. howl.

Ten minutes later, as I watched the last car drive away, I wondered why we're even surprised that children these days grow up to be... well, not grow up to be sensible, weather-beaten, seasoned young people of tomorrow. If my mother ever heard an evening's play had been broken up because one child hit another with two pieces of stale bread, I'm not sure whether she'd be amused, but she'd certainly be irritated. A great many people from my grandeparents', parents' and even my generation seem slightly bewildered by these new, psychologically-approved methods of parenting, and I can't say I don't see their point. As my friend Lali and I once noted, a large number of contemporary parents seem to give their children a great deal of leeway where discipline and manners are concerned (which, being stern ladies of a certain age in spirit if not in age, we thoroughly disapprove of), while at the same time creating a reality-filter around them such that the harsher aspects of life--which is to say, most of it--passes right under their nose without them noticing it. As an aside, my aunt is certain that this attitude is where the political rhetoric about "protecting" families and children stem from. If you've been following the painfully thin arguments against legalising non-hetersexual unions and sex ed in schools, you'll know what she's talking about.

But the point is, that by throwing in the odd bomp at the back of the head along with the fluffy wuvv, children learn the ropes, learn to deal, and realise that life isn't so much pink cartoon unicorns as general nepotist unfairness. Certainly, in these discriminatory times parents should be careful to interfere in their children's lives to make sure they aren't picking up rabid dogma along their way, but interfering to solve a child's every problem for her hardly seems to be constructive in the long run. In fact, lest I be accused of promoting the beating and starvation approach to child-rearing: the 'uncaring' freedom accorded by old-fashioned parenting is actually far more democratic and attractive than ramming synthetic good cheer down children's throats. It makes totalitarian -- and consequently utterly exhausted -- dictators out of parents, and engenders the kind of deep-seated whiny selfishness in the children that shall provoke people to offer a complimentary punch in the face all their adult lives.

During a picnic many tropical winters ago, one of my peers devised this incredibly fun game where we made (horribly misshapen) balls out of slimy clay from the riverbed and tried to hit each other with it. The moment any one person got hit, everyone else would gang up on him or her, and make a mud-child of a human specimen. The only spoke in this happy wheel was a very distant cousin, considered a relative only because we are Indian. He giggled madly and screamed cheers every time someone else got hit, but when by the law of averages a oozy wet ball of mud landed on his shoulder, he ran off red faced to his mum, wailing that he had MUD on his CLOTHES! His mum, who was busy catching up with her barely-relatives, looked up calmly, observed the other filthy children hovering at a distance, and said, "Isn't that the idea?" And went back to her chat after patting him affectionately on the cheek and giving his clean shoulder a little push towards us.

The little tell-tale stood calculating his odds--which shows that he was an experienced, or at least practical, little tattle-tale. And then, suddenly, he let out a cheerful roar and waved his hands in invitation... and took a running leap into the river (which was really a tiny stream, but then we were barely four feet high). Most of us followed immediately and splashed around for the rest of the afternoon. I was scrubbed red raw under a hot shower after we got home, but it was still a deliriously happy day. However, if we had been broken up in the middle, with wet slimy mud trickling down our faces and bodies, I'd rather not imagine the kind of sulky tantrum we'd have subjected our parents to, how that would have broken up the party, and the kind of animosity we would have borne that little rat for the rest of our childhood.

Which reminds me: when we were young our parents really didn't have to enforce diplomacy on us, or interfere to settle fights. We fought, hit each other, mediated and made up mostly by ourselves. It has, quite honestly, been a very valuable lesson learnt valuably early about getting along with one's peers and making peace after war. When I saw the mothers all smiling determinedly but nonetheless whisking off their own children into the secluded safety of mummy's car and then the secluded safety of home, I wondered whether the next time the kids met, at least some mums wouldn't have to put in extra legwork to make sure their children connected with each other. Rupturing a normal process of socialising only to try and resume it a convenient time later seems to me to make the entire process of childhood friendship synthetic and fake. So if these children grow up thin-skinned and without a great deal of empathy, I really am not sure that I would blame *them* for it.

Standardised testing

noreply@blogger.com (Rimi) — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 02:04:00 +0000

I like complicating things, mostly because it makes me feel smart. The trouble with this--apart from the obvious--is that I often arrive at popular (and therefore 'shallow') notions about certain phenomena after much mental merry-go-rounding. And having thus arrived, I feel that my extra mental legwork gives my shallow ideas more comparative depth than other people's shallow ideas (of course, I never entertain the idea that other people may also have arrived at their shallow 'pop' conclusions after considerable thought), and therefore, while my subscription to those ideas shows a resigned concession to messy reality, other people's subscription clearly demonstrate a general lack of grey cells.

Since the above analytical model puts me inarguably in a position of superior intellect to pretty much the rest of creation, I have great difficulty coming to terms with the idea that *I*, Rimi, can actually be subject to the same shallow and hegemonic normalising phenomena that I actually had to grace to briefly think about before scornfully dismissing. A great deal of practice (especially after I moved to the US) has done nothing to ease the process for me.

However, while usually I snort at this individualistic culture's total obsession with meeting homogenising norms in nearly every other aspect of life (in body images and concepts of beauty, for example), I have a genuine problem with the bell-curve approach to testing merit. And not merely because I am subject to it semester after semester, and frequently yield less than satisfactory results. I also mark students myself, and the idea that my grade distribution must conform to a certain "nice middle-heavy lay out" bothers me no end. The potol-shaped narrow-ended and plump-middled distribution simply does not fit actual grade clusters. Sometimes I have students performing rather well towards the beginning--straight As--and then petering off after they're sure they shall get at least a B in the course no matter what. Others take some time to realise that they *will* be marked down if they don't conform to assignment expectations in both form and content, and buck up towards the end to pull up their grades. The unevenness in this case might "look uncomfortable", but it is reflective of the actual performance of the students. The idea that one should 'adjust' this actual data set to fit an unreal norm--unreal because if every instructor is expected to 'adjust' to an ideal, no one actually ever achieves this distribution 'normally'--seems to me both unfair and silly, and quite preposterous besides. I quite understand, unfortunately, the need to have an abstracted idea of perfection against which actual merits can be measured, but somewhere along the line we seem to have forgotten that this abstracted ideal was chosen precisely because no person can meet it... unless of course he/she makes an effort to play the system (which a great deal of non-native speakers of English do with great felicity to the the GRE, for example).

And lest we forget, these 'actual performances' that I'm championing are already being judged on culturally predetermined parameters. And I'm not talking widely disparate systems, for to even think of comparing them is foolishness, but apparently similiar structures. For instance, the 'western' mode of education in various countries. At my old university, term papers were marked down (almost disqualified, in fact) if one used prescribed texts to write them. The idea was that midterms and finals were for textual testing; term papers were to demonstrate how well students could critique the theory learned in class, and apply it to texts outside the syllbus. In the US, or at my uni at any rate, term papers are nearly disqualified if they do not deal almost exclusively with prescribed texts, perhaps because graduate students do not have take textual exams here. Also, there is something called 'class participation', in which students get a small amount of credit for offering their opinions about the texts. But often the actual content of the contribution isn't taken into consideration, merely the fact of participation. This seems to me quite counter-productive, since students often speak for the sake of registering their presence, and not because they have something valuable to add to the conversation. But that is how America works, and appears to work just fine. Except of course for those who come from outside the system and have to undergo periods of adjustment. But even then, the system is more personalised. Normative parameters must be met, but there are professors and advisers and so on who smile and encourage and hand-hold them through it.

Standardised testing, however, is quite another level of absurdity. And yet again I understand it is a useful tool of separating the grain from the chaff without involving the terribly indelicate job of failing or turning down people personally. It would never do, after all, to have unpleasantness about. But I am forced to wonder how much of the grain gets thrown out with the chaff--and consequently how deeply the system becomes populated by mediocre talent--because standardised tests fail to take extenuating circumstances into consideration. It takes into no account illnesses, emotional upheavals, technical failure or alien attacks. When I took my GREs, for instance, I had a fever and a thumping heat-induced headache. Then, the computer I was at swallowed my essay and nearly all of my maths test, and had to be coaxed back while I waited for two hours in a sultry, drowsy, hot little room which nearly put me to sleep. The personnel tried to convince me that my current test was forfeit and that I should pay for a rescheduled test (which I woudn't do and honestly, couldn't afford to), and finally let an exhausted, anxious and very sleepy me take the test, but all over again.

I think I can say with a certain amount of certainty that my scraps from the second exam would not have yielded such mementos as "1129x2=1158" and similar had I been in better shape and been spared the assorted troubles. So if one goes by my GRE score's position on the bell-curve, I'm a right idiot. And I'm forced to say that this 'evidence' is patently false. I am by no means attempting to establish myself as a genius and am well aware that my intelligence is only of the moderate sort, but an idiot I am not. You can take my word for it. And therein lies the trouble, because of course no one *will* take my word for it--to do that would lead to the collapse of the entire concept of emperical evidence. But it's either my flawed initial scores while I was still trying to figure out the American system of grading plus my less than perfect GRE, or my own assurances that I am an intellectually competent human being. I think I can tell which would be treated as an objective evidence of my abilities, and which not. And frankly, now that I am back on the competitive market, it worries the hell out of me.

So much for you, then, Superior Scorn. Don't be a stranger.

See, spot, kill.

noreply@blogger.com (Rimi) — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 22:11:00 +0000

Rimi's friend: and if that wasn't enough, he complains about my cooking *all* the time!
Rimi (incredulously): X complains about other people's cooking?
Rimi's friend: my point exactly.
Rimi: well, this gives me hope. I have been meaning to write a critique of nuclear physics for some time now.

Rimi's friend's annoying flatmate, who had been 'reading' the same page of the newspaper for the last fifteen minutes, decided to give up the pretence and join in.

Annoying flatmate: oh, so you're a physicist?
Rimi: god, no! I wish I were!
Ann. flatmate (shrewdly): so, you want to criticise nuclear physics without actually being a nuclear physics person.
Rimi (complacently): quite right.
Ann. F: and you don't think that is unethical?
Rimi's friend (with an exaggerated sigh): Ann, Rimi was only joking about...
Ann. F: but she isn't a physicist!
Rimi's friend: that's exactly the damn point!
Ann. F (in tones of superior astonishment): you mean to say it is 'the point' for non-scientists to criticise science??? You are going to encourage her to do this?
Rimi: (lets slip involuntary giggle)

My friend set down her enormous cup of latte carefully on top of Ann. F's shiny new copy of a bestselling lifestyle book, and looked at him directly.

Rimi's friend: Ann, I'm sorry. Obviously we haven't been clear enough for a mixed audience... we thought this was a private conversation. Rimi here was suprised that X criticised my cooking, given that he burns water. Her statement about critiquing--not criticising--nuclear physics was an... is allegory right, Rimi? [Rimi indicates she hasn't a clue] Anyway, it was a joke. All right?
Ann. F (getting up to go): anyway, I don't think anyone would have let a non-science person publish a criticism of physics.

A brief pause, while we hear the door open and close.

Rimi's friend (swallowing a hearty sip of coffee): he is moving to Chicago next month. Thank god!
Rimi: new job? Partner? Family?
Rimi's friend: do I care?
Rimi: good point.

Singing praises.

noreply@blogger.com (Rimi) — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 16:16:00 +0000

(Familiarity with Bengali required for some parts)

What does one miss about the vibrant, vivacious, dazzling, crowd-clogged, loud, sumptuous autumn festivities? Well, *I* miss complaining about them. They say in Bengali that one doesn't appreciate one's teeth while one still has them, and this might well apply to the pujas... for some people. But for me, not so much. The first time I got away from them--and I left town a week or so before Mohaloya last year--I had the distinct feeling of a narrow escape. One does not appreciate being woken up by the dhaak at four thirty in the morning after being dragged around town and through an ocean of people on the pretext of 'thakur dekha' till 3AM. And one certainly does not appreciate Reshammiya or Kumar Shanu blaring from the mikes all day.

Actually, I'm being unfair. For the last four or so years, our parar pujo has chosen to play music one wants to hear: Hindi film classics from the sixties and seventies--lots of Asha, Mukhesh, Rafi, Kishore-- in the evenings, and plenty of Hemonto, Shyamol Mitro, Sholil De, Srikanto Acharjo, Orghyo Sen, Konika Bannerjee in the mornings, a nice blend of robindroshongeet and what is still called 'adhunik'. I never quit understand why people leave out Debobroto out of their playlists, incidentally. His renditions of Tagore's songs are often my favourites. In fact, if anyone has .mp3 versions of his robindroshongeets and are willing to share, I would be very grateful. But anyway, so we had these sterling mixed tapes being played for our aural gratification all day, and I would have been pleased... except that:

1. the same songs were repeated ad infinitum on a tedious loop, which, no matter how much one lives listening to Kishore singing Gulzar's lyrics to RD's music, is very, very painful.
2. the next locality had generously strung up two mikes facing our locality, so that Rafi was often superimposed on Alka Yagnik, and Shyamol Mitro on DJ Hot's "KaaNta Lagaa!".

All in all, I was quite happy to fly the nest before the Decibel Assault was launched. But in doing so, I was also withdrawing all claim on the pleasanter sounds of pujo--the call to onjoli on oshtomi mornings, the montropaath interspersed by ghonta bajano during shondhipujo, dhakir naach, dhunuchi naach [tiny video of just the first moves], the broken snatches of private conversations picked up by the microphone, people rushing around overseeing the serving at communal lunches on oshtomi and dinners on nobomi ("Bannerjee kaku ke luchi diyechho toh? Uni kintu chaichhilen.", "Ei ektu dekh toh Uma mashi khete boshlo kina, shokal theke mondope kaaj korchhen. Ei fol-mishtita diye aaye ontoto"). I even like the dhaak at more reasonable hours. In fact, provided I had managed the requisite eight hours, I quite cherished being woken up by the slightly intoxicating rhythm that gets under the skin and whispers to the blood. It gave the peaceful glow of an autumn daybreak a primal undertone of excitement--pujo eshe gaechhe!

There's also perhaps a sensual undertone to the association of the dhaak with the worship of the mother goddess. Feel free to treat this as a pop theory popped out by an amateur (I certainly do), but our goddesses are not pristine submissive vestal virgins in white, spending their days in seclusion. Or, for that matter, virgin goddesses reknowned for their intellect, but lined firmly with patriarchy. Our goddesses are far more sweat-and-blood, far more raw power that smites, far more protective love tempered by firm disciplinarianism. And although we in our psuedo-Victorian way shy away from it, far more powerfully, sensually, playfully sexual. Despite the ridiculously fake blindfold of 'Indian culture' that we wear voluntarily, perhaps this subterranean association seeps into the romantic overtones to pujo celebrations. And not just the sweetly romantic, neither. While the pujo pandals are a favourite first-meeting type place for potential sweethearts in Bengali films and novels, pujos are also the time when, slipping away from the performances like this, lovers go off to... do what lovers are always sneaking off to do. You couldn't ask for a better background score. And if someone raised an eyebrow you could always say you were embodying Shiv and Shakti, and enacting their reunion post-bijoya doshomi :-) (not that I've ever heard anyone use that excuse, but I would love to)

And perhaps that is why the only piece of commercial pujo "music" I'm missing is an ancient Thumbs Up! commercial. It's not on Youtube or Google videos. Does anyone remember it? "Shoptomi te prothom dekha, oshtomi te haashi... nobomi te bolte chaoa, tomaye bhalobashi. Doshomite hothat kaeno aakul holo praan... praan protima tumi ebar jaabe ki bhashan?"

Praan protima, tumi ebar jaabe ki bhashan? Shubho Bijoya.

"Disrespect".

noreply@blogger.com (Rimi) — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 02:25:00 +0000

I hear the word a *lot* around here. It's a novel feeling, because while the society I come from is big on respect, it is a thing that remains largely unarticulated. No one bandies the actual word about. There is little talk about being respectful or feeling disrespected, or even about children being disrespectful--a favourite theme of most grown-ups. On the event that the latter is discussed, the behaviour is usually labelled as rudeness, or more circumspectly, as "a lack of good manners". And I've absolutely never heard anyone say, "I feel disrespected", or any variations thereof. If one has to demand respect, I was always told, that person probably does not deserve it. That respect isn't Halloween sweets. You cannot demand someone give you a fistful of it just because it pleases you to coddle your system with it.

I overheard a conversation on the metro the other day, where an uncle-type was telling off a late teen for disrespecting him... because said late teen refused to buy the brand of tyres uncle recommended. To classify rejection of advice as disrespect seemed ridiculous to me, but to the uncle it seemed perfectly legit. "I have been driving on these roads for more winters than you have been born [sic.]", he emphasised. "I know more about them than you do. I'm trying to share this knowledge with you. But I will not be disrespected in public because your roommate likes a different brand!"
I watched the man closely, and he reminded me of nothing so much as a tiny little frog puffed up with an inflated sense of it's own importance, just at the verge of bursting with a messy wet "PLOP!" He inspired amusement and condescending pity, but never 'respect' (as I understand it).

Therefore I get the feeling this American 'respect' is a different beast from the one we find back at the tropics. It's not the thing we dutifully offer up to our, say, school teachers--the ones that taught us our alphabets and numbers and the ones that screamed us through differential calculus. In fact, I get the feeling school teachers don't command much respect in the US at all. Anyway. The point is that in India there are certain categories of people that command respect by sheer virtue of their categories, and this respect is a sort of public demonstration of "looking up to", even if there is no actual feeling of respect involved. In the US, on the other hand, I think 'respect' has got more to do with protecting one's rights to a certain thing (validating one's ethnic identity, emphasising one's sexual orientation, etc.), and making sure no one points and laughs or gets nasty while said rights are being exercised. Again, such observances of 'respect' do not necessarily demand the observer actually support such rights ideologically, merely that he keeps his toes off other people's territory. Or so I think, anyway. I'm not sure about the 'respect' dynamics here yet. And yet I have already, according to my American acquaintances, experienced this 'respect'--or lack thereof--first hand. This morning, in fact. And at a university office, no less.

So I walk into a campus office for the third time in a row, because I need to put my name down on a list. The first time I went, I was asked for my passport. I went back with my passport, and was asked for my social security number. This was the third time, and I was armed with my passport AND my social. Confident that the matter would be dealt with in a few minutes, I approached the undergraduate student employee behind the counter. She asked to see my I-20. I confessed I wasn't carrying mine, it being a valuable doc. and all, and promised to return (yet again). However, I asked her for a check-list of *all* the things I would need, since I did not wish to carry my passport, I-20 and social security card for a fifth trip. This was when the episode truly began. First, the girl merely repeated herself slowly and clearly, as one does to the deaf or the mentally deficient: "Look. You don't have your I-20. We need your I-20. Just come back with your I-20, and we'll do it."

I should probably have left it at that and left altogether, but one's patience wears thin after three failed trips, especially if they're no fault of one's own. So I asked if my university ID would suffice, since it was issued after my I-20 was scrutinised. At this the girl threw her hands up in exasperation.

Girl: Okay. Do you speak English? Or should I get someone to translate? Because clearly I'm not getting through to you. Before I give you any money [because my father is the University tsar, of course, and all it's money is hidden under my bed], I need to know that you are not here illegally and that you have the legal right to work in America.

At which point I decided I should perhaps seek out an employee actually in possession of her mind, so I gave the girl a friendly nod and started walking carefully away, not turning my back on her.

Girl: uh, excuse me! Yeah, I need to know: Are you already working for the university? Are you getting any money from us?
Rimi (from a safe distance): yes. I draw a regular stipend.
Girl (in a blend of sanctimoniousness and "take that!" manner): you should know that you are doing it illegally. You have no right to do that. If I wanted I could report you.

Unfortunately, I suffer from a secret hero complex. I could have walked away from this without a further word, because the dumb child's crassness rather amused me, but suddenly I pictured another international student who actually doesn't speak English too well, and who doesn't know that stipends are perfectly legal and are paid by a completely different university office. I pictured this person in my place, thoroughly harassed and confused because a minor clog in a major machine was power-tripping by virtue of having access to a daily stamp and a cluster of cheap office supplies. Bullies are my secret button.

I gave the brunette a thoughtful once-over. She looked back at me with--and I could be a wrong--a superior glint in her eye.
"Has anyone ever told you," I said in a slow, largely indifferent voice, "that you are a singularly unpleasant young woman?"
The singularly unpleasant young woman did an exaggerated imitation of dropping her jaw in shock, while managing to gasp out a "What???"
"I know you don't need a translator for that," I continued in an indulgently reprimanding tone, "because I speak rather a classy version of your language. Now, I'm going to be back tomorrow, and you will manage to make yourself unavailable when I am here, because if I have to speak to you again, there might be unpleasant consequences."

And I left, this time turning my back on her, confident that I'd uprooted her venom-sack--if temporarily. I heard her say in a shocked voice to her colleague, "Did you hear what she said to me? Oh my god, she was like, so disrespectful! Okay, now I'm officially upset. Did you just hear the things she said?"

"In my country," I wanted to turn around and say, "respect has to be earned, not demanded. And you fail the qualifiers by a couple of thousand miles, cupcake."

But I didn't. It was mean, not quite true, and ethnocentric. Also, this lily, I felt, didn't need that extra guilding.

The Colonial Bloody Hangover

noreply@blogger.com (Rimi) — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 19:07:00 +0000

I wasn't going to write this post (primarily because it's a little whiny and a lot long), but then my Facebook acquaintance (and friend of my friend Swati) wrote this, and since when have I modestly held back my two bits?

It's amazing--or so I thought--the sheer number of people who asked me if I was British right from the second day I landed in the States (the first day I only spoke to a Canadian, who had lived in London and Yorkshire and could easily tell a pseudo-posh English accent from an Indian public school one). I briefly wondered whether it was an American pick-up line for unAmericans that pop culture hadn't seen fit to let the rest of world know, especially since the question served as a conversation-opener on more than one occasion, but since my opinion of my attraction quotient floats an inch above ground level, I abandoned this line of enquiry soon enough.

As days went by, I realised it was less the accent, which waxes and wanes depending on company and my temper (my enunciation sharpens to razorblade finesse when I've been shaken or stirred), and more the kind of English I speak. In subtle ways, it is vastly different from the English of my American peers. Sometimes it provides moments of comic panic. Like on a snowing December morning, when I ran out of my flat to the campus bus stop in jeans, a thin sweater and untied shoes only, because that was all I had on when the driver had called to say the bus would be at the stop "momentarily". You know, for a moment. So if I missed it I was looking at a thirty minute uphill trudge in and through the snow. Another time a friend's flight couldn't get clearance to take off, and looking to soothe the passengers, the stewardess decalred that plane "will take off momentarily". For about two seconds, my friend thought he was going to have a heart attack. Take off momentarily? You mean, take off and crash right back down? Then don't bloody take off, and let me out! It took a while to register that when Americans say 'momentarily', they mean in a moment, like one would say 'immediately'. Or, if 'one' were a stuffy one, 'presently'.

And when words aren't differently meant, they are completely absent. I'm yet to meet an American who exclaims "Rubbish!" when she disbelieves or disapproves of something. There are no bins, only trash cans. Which actually made me a wee bit queasy in the beginning, because ready-to-eat food is also found in cans, not tins. And of course, neither my endearments nor my swearing has quite the desired effect. "You're such a peach!" was once met with a doubtful, "Er, um, can I be an apple instead?"And to be asked to explain what a bugger or a sod "actually means" sort of takes the wind out of one's fulminating sails. And very few people get cricket terminology, of course. Hit for six, back to the pavilion (which I say often enough), batting to the same/other team, calling a tricky question a googly. Even academic parlance is different. People grade exams, not mark (or, may we be forgiven our smug teacheresque superiority, 'correct') answerscripts. The bastards who hawk over exams and make a communal sharing of data impossible are proctors, not invigilators. Heads of departments are usually department chairs. Soccer for football, aid for aide, the explicit 'bathroom' for the more prim 'loo' or 'restroom', the list just goes on.

There are stylistic differences, too. The most annoying instance of crossed wires, f'rsinstance, occured when a irksomely loud and cantankerous housemate of a friend started screaming at me--and I mean literally--because I had unwittingly sat on 'her' chair. "Such duclet tones, my dear", I observed dryly as I lifted myself off the unmarked chair. To which she spat, "I'm not your dear!", and then looked triumphantly at me, as if that was a devastatingly cutting comeback, instead of the pathetically lame knee-jerk response it was. This Brit exchange student once observed, quite acidly, that America is "the country irony overlooked". I know from personal experience this is a blatantly inaccurate generalisation, but either because they're too friendly or too politically correct, the average American does seem to shy away from [what we think of as] the caustic approach to language, in public anyway. Which makes me feel like a right bitch sometimes, I don't mind admitting. Sarcasm has been hardwired into my system (and before I left Cal I frankly didn't realise that 'friendly' and 'sarcastic' were mutually exclusive qualities).

And yet the way I speak hasn't changed a bit during my short stint abroad. If anything, the massive sea of linguistic difference has made me to cling harder to my speech patterns, further reinforcing beliefs about my Britishness. Usually I just brush it off, because after all we speak English on a mass scale because we were a British colony and learned their version of the language. And an American who hasn't lived in India extensively is unlikely to pick up the Indian flavour to the language. However, what bothers me is how the texture of the language spoken in India is changing so completely. I can no longer identify with the speech of people younger to me by less than a decade. Of some of my peers too, in fact, and most certainly of films and the telly. But I can certainly identify them with my recently acquired American acquaintances. Apart from a general tendency to emphasise 'r's (gurrrls, firrst) instead of nearly swallowing them, the two persistant Americanisms I notice are 'apartment' for flat and 'mom' for mum (including in the much-vaunted propah newspapers, which publish tips for "working moms with kids"). To a lesser extent, 'math' for maths. And I suppose if I was a true believer in human freedom to choose it wouldn't have bothered me, but I clearly am not and it does. Particularly 'mom' or 'mommy', when spoken with a non-American or non-Canadian accent, irritates me no end.

An argument I'm perenially offered against my distaste is that I have a colonial hangover, that I still live in an elitist past where the all cultural aspects of the raj was revered and imitated and therefore am intolerant of the natural metamorphosis of language. All of this is rubbish, but of course that is what I am expected to say, so I feel I must elaborate on my contemptuous dismissal. First, to be Indian and say things like "That only, no" and "what to tell, only" regularly and still insist the English we speak is the Received Standard is ridiculous and ridiculously un-self aware. And since we clearly do not speak the British normative speech, our English is our own. A consequence of a colonial past, and not a 'hangover'.

Secondly, all those that argue--and rightly so--that English isn't a foreign language in India, must also accept that if English is an Indian language then it has certain specific parameters that distinguish it from, for instance, Australian English. And while these parameters may have been British in origin, they have shed that association the moment the language in its entirety was accepted as Indian, and we began to modify and add to it in accordance with our respective mother tongues. This addition and modification is part of the process of natural evolution of a language at a certain place. Therefore I'm not bothered by verbs spelled with a 'z' instead of a 's' ('criticize', 'colonize'), although personally I prefer the latter. However, to suddenly start 'visiting with' instead of merely visiting or cooking flavourful healthful foods instead of well-flavoured healthy food--and to avidly accept such spellings as 'proffessional' and 'proffesor' before even the whole of the US have accepted them as the norm--show either a complete ignorance of India's own English and indirectly reinforce the argument that English is not an Indian language at all and we must slavishly follow whatever Caucasian form currently dominates the globe. Or, worse, it shows a wilful lack of respect for--indeed, dismissal of--one's Indian identity, coupled with a pathetic hankering to become a subject of American cultural neocolonialism.

And thirdly, it might well be argued that access to American English is more democratic, since anyone with an internet connection can have it, unlike the expensive and urban 'English-medium' public schools which insist on 'colour' and 'labour' being spelt thusly. But this is rather a simplistic explanation that doesn't hold much water. All one has to do to maintain one's linguistic identity as an English-speaking Indian is to choose Indian English (or, failing which, it's closest cousin, British English) as the system's and browser's default language. To the masses who rise up to wail, "But I don't know how to do that!"--mate, if you can create an Orkut profile, you can bloody well do this little thing. And if you can't, learn how. It takes a great deal less effort than taking to the streets and shouting to protect 'Indian culture'. Or have a thundering argument in favour of using the matribhasha or rashtrabhasha at the local tea shop. In case it slipped your attention, English is also a constitutional language of the Indian Union. Do some actual protecting of 'Indian' culture for a change. It takes six seconds.

And finally, if you must blindly and servilely ape the linguistic parameters of a country, please choose a country other than the US. A nation that has striven over the decades to create an English distinct from the rest of the world's--and reflective exclusively of itself--is the most ironic choice of object for such thoughtless, self-subsuming, servile worship. If I were an American and a thoughtful person, I would be... amused at such antics. And it wouldn't be benevolent amusement.

Previous US-related rants here and here.

Coming to the Party

noreply@blogger.com (Rimi) — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 23:44:00 +0000

When Rahul Dravid was the First Bearer of the national colours, he thoroughly over-used a phrase during the two minute post-match performance analysis that captains were obliged to parrot at presentation ceremonies: "everybody came to the party". Never mind the West Indian and South African sun or the English rain, Dravid's Indian team apparently always had a rollicking time. Fairly soon, just seeing him mumble his way through the initial "Yeah, it was great" was cue for a sudden urge to smack the man on the mouth, keeping the inevit. phrase from escaping yet again. A Bengali hears enough about parties all day without the cricket captain adding his two bits.

There's a certain yearning and aversion attached to the word "party" in my state, referring of course to the political sort. I dare say the situation is similar in other states of the country as well, but lacking (so far, anyway) the diversion of religion- and caste-politics, West Bengal pours heart and soul into the purer sort of politics, whereby only the police records and corruption charges of politicians count. Given this, one's ability to get a job, promotions, one's children into schools, ration cards, passports, encashable 'respect', free lunches, unmarked banknotes, and the very right to exist depends on one's 'party' connections. Especially when one steps out of the urban elite circle. It's a fact of life so deeply entrenched, that every time I meet incompetent members of the public workforce, I automatically file the person away as lucky sod who "knows party people". And this is not knowledge that brings much sweetness and light, of course, particularly to those devoid of such connections. There are certainly people who stridently declare they do not want to live on the party's scraps, but I'm not entirely sure there isn't an element of sour grapes in there somewhere. I, for one, have always existed outside the privileged network, and consequently had to sweat and smile and grease fists and rage and almost punch my way through getting a passport. It took me eight months. And that's just one example.

Which is why yesterday was a first. For the first time in my life, the party smiled on me. I was on a government bus, raining muttered curses on the sour conductor who had rudely refused to give me change for a hundred. I was tempted to choose a new target when the bus slowed to almost a standstill, and then began the torturous crawl past a street meeting of the local branch of the CPI(M). The balding speaker in dhuti-panjabi shook his fist and raged at Mamata Bannerjee as traffic and people flowed around the small island of floodlit red and white, honking, puffing black smoke, weighed down by crackling plastic bags of puja shopping, swarming the local phuchkawala and eggroll stand, dipping in and out of the ATM right behind the temporary podium. Conductors screaming out their routes to potential passengers nearly drowned the speakers furiously self-righteous voice. Taxis cruised along the footpaths, looking for passengers. Rickshawpullers within the range of the hot floodlights fanned themselves with pieces of cloth. More than one person loudly voiced his or her scorn. A cyclist even threw a ball of paper at a framed picture of the late Subhash Chakraborty on the podium. But speaker doggedly went on with his speech. In fact, he appeared entirely oblivious of anything but his tiny audience of barely fifty, who occupied wooden chairs and seemed equally enraptured in him.

And it was so familiar, so very frustrating, so very nostalgic, so very not shopping malls and plastic cafés and Sector V glass-and-chrome, so very Calcutta. Whipping out my camera, I took a quick pic of the meeting, just as our dawdling light abruptly changed colour, and we lumbered past the island of 'party people'. Ever since I have developed a politicial consciousness and especially in the recent months, I have come to hold the state CPI(M) in deepest contempt, but as we crossed at the determined speaker--who, up close, was sweating profusely and had a slightly haunted look--I raised my fist slightly and quietly said, "Laal selam, comrade".

Suddenly, the conductor was beside me. "Din takata", he said gruffly. Give me the damned note. I handed it over, startled. The man soundlessly counted out ten ten rupee notes and thrust the bunch at me. "Ticket kaatben na?" I asked, even more taken aback. Won't you deduct my fare? "Ticket lagbe na" he muttered just as guffly before heading up the aisle between seats. You don't have to pay. That was when I noticed a small newspaper cut-out of Subhash Chakraborty pasted on his battered coin-bag. "Thank you, comrade," I mumbled at his sweaty brown uniformed back, recalling earlier curses. I suppose some of us are still in it for a penny's worth of ideology, after all.

Fun

noreply@blogger.com (Rimi) — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 16:00:00 +0000

I'm tired of being asked if I'm having fun, and I want to address the question once and for all: no, I am not having "fun". I have never in my life had "fun", and have no wish to have it in the immediate future. I'm quite content to be content, happy, or occasionally joyful. But "fun", I want no truck with.

I'm either terribly old-fashioned or horribly repressed, or maybe just a plain old bore, but I can't get my mind around how activities usually labelled "fun" can actually be pleasureable. Every time I've been called a stick in the mud and been prodded to "come out with us and have some fun!", the plans for the evening involved going pubbing or clubbing, or peferably both, with a hasty meal thrown in somewhere--usually at 3 AM at a roadside dhaba. Depending on the crowd, it also tended to end in drunken hook-ups.

And I've always been at a loss to understand how braving equally determined crowds to get an overpriced drink, or shimmying to ear-splitting nerve-jangling music with loudly dressed (if one's in Calcutta, anyway) terrible dancers out for a grope--most of whom didn't bother to change or at least spray on fresh perfume after work--or making do with cold butter chicken and stiff naans can be considered time well spent. Or in any way relaxing. If you ask me--and I realise you don't--"having fun" seems like an aggressive advertisment of one's ability to pay for the privilege of sharing an illusion of a good time, possibly to bury one's head deeper into the sands of denial about the the messy, overstressed, routined misery that one's life likely is.

Aggression and a showy loudness. Those are the things that puts me off "fun". Actually, agression, a showy loudness, and a certain herd mentality are the things that put me off "fun". Well, aggression, a showy loudness, a certain herd mentality, and a boring predictability are the things that put me off "fun". And the same goes for "playing hard". I've often been advised to play hard, or indeed, play harder. The bloody thing is such an oxymoron that I entirely fail to grasp the idea. Working hard I get (or wish I did), but what on earth is playing hard? Making a checklist of all currently approved ways and places of having fun and sweeping through them in a determined fashion?

Now, I would hardly want nightclubs to close shop. To each his own, and besides, that would let loose an alarming number of shallow fools on the broader social scene. I merely wish people would stop trying to drag me off to rub shoulders with suchlike. Contrary to popular belief, I do have several ways in which I enjoy myself, and quite thoroughly too. I merely have simpler requirements. On hard day's nights, I usually order a sumptuous meal from a favourite restaurant, buy myself a favourite dessert, and have either a good friend or a good book to keep me company during dinner. Then I have a hot, soaking bath (no bubbles, they leave oily scum on my skin) and usually set up the laptop so I can watch a film while in the bath. Finally I make myself a cup of hot chocolate, have a quick chat with my parents, and crawl between the soft sheets.

I have quite a lot of fun on weekends too. Sometimes I do it by staying in to sleep, shower, eat, and read on a cushy sofa all day (a pot of hot sweet tea always works its way into this scenario). At other times I do it by hosting or going to a cooking-in or a potluck with family or friends (never family and friends). Sometimes, on my days off when everyone else is busy, I pack myself a couple of different kinds of sandwiches, a bottle of lebur shorbot or orange juice, a bottle of water, and a bag of grapes. Then I go to the Boston Public Library to read. If in Calcutta, I go on food-and-photo strolls, breakfasting on piping hot kochuri-torkari and jilipi, taking pictures of the morning flower markets, lunching at small roadshide eateries, capturing the first drop of rain falling in a glass tumbler of tea, snacking on bagfuls of jamrul or a guava, or phuchka. At evenings I make myself a basic sweet cocktail of gin or vodka (not for me the exotic liqueurs with silly names) and invite over a couple of friends who can talk up a blue streak and do not shy away from a caustic joke or two.

Happiness, and this is my piece of weekly wisdom, cannot be grasped at by hanging out at all the happening places (unless, of course, it can). In fact, I'm deeply suspicious of any mass-prescribed recipe for relaxation and joy, from alcohol to spas. However, if one must offer an easy path, I'd say, go for good food, good conversation, and good sex. Neon lights will soon cease to be necessary.

How NOT to write a "Victorian" Romance, Part I

noreply@blogger.com (Rimi) — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 01:29:00 +0000

Or, Why Sunny is a Brat.

[UPDATE: please, please read aneelirh's comment on this post. It's the best piece of summarisation I've read on the subject.]

Dear readers, be not irked. This is a re-post from a Facebook note, because snooty little (or snooty tall) Sunayana Roy--Sue to you and Sunny to me--evidently considers writing on social networking sites beneath her, and what with one thing another (namely, that I shall see her soon and therefore wish to keep her in good humour) I have decided to give that note pride of place on my blog.

There are certain books people read for the sheer smug pleasure of deriding them, and most stereotypical romance novels fall firmly in this category. As a friend and I agreed, the narrative usually is about " a little twit who is pointlessly stubborn, idiotically aroused by a boorish hero, tries furiously to repress it, and spinelessly forgives everything he or anyone does to her". However, when this mess is compounded such basic lack of research as chronicled below, it's very hard not to want to hunt the authors down and make them write "I shall consult at least Wikipedia before I put pen to paper again" a hundred times. In their best handwriting.

And while we're at it, can we also please sign a petition to stop all romance novel heroes from being millionaires? Money is not particularly attractive, and such ostentations as private jets and private islands are quite repulsive. I had once read a rather nice Mills&Boon about salvaging the failing marriage of an architect and his photographer wife in a receeding economy, their three children and his extramarital affair included. Would writing stories about people who hover a leetle bit closer to our own reality kill these author-women?

***

1. The younger brother and elder son of Lord ABC cannot also be Lord ABC. A title is not a surname. Please get this imprinted on the inside of your doubtless thick skulls. I shall cheerfully volunteer my assistance to the endeavour.

2. A young debutante is unlikely to wear gowns "in flaming red silk with jewelled fronts". The preferred colour for demure young virgins on the market was white, and while they certainly were deviations, I rather suspect bright red jewelled silk would advertise quite a... different... sort of social function.

3. It is quite unecessary to describe how the legs of the table gleamed in the late spring sunlight and reflected the glow on the heroine's cheek, because only a lady very careless of her reputation would leave the legs of her furniture uncovered.

4. The entire point of the female emancipation movement was that it was absent in earlier times. A heroine described as shy and demure is VERY unlikely to "quietly creep out of her house" to meet the "darkly" and "dangerously" attractive stranger who had slipped her a note that evening at a ball. Besides, a young lady's apartment in a house full of servants is not very easy to creep out of. And finally, I am certain "Victorian" young ladies did not creep.

5. Only a woman born to a titled family is Lady [First name]. The peasant girl who marries a nobleman shall not, no matter how virtuous, ever be called "Lady Mary" by her domestic staff. Her son's nursemaid, however, would call him Master [first name], not Mr. [surname]. She isn't a schoolmistress from a later period. Do pay attention to your cultural history.

I wish to god people would stop writing period romances just because it tickles them to have their virtuous heroine address her romantic tormentor as "My lord". A little learning is a most annoying thing.

Only Words

noreply@blogger.com (Rimi) — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 01:50:00 +0000

[Long post alert]

As nearly everyone knows by now, The Telegraph published an image on the 22nd of July that many found distasteful and contemptuous of women. I will admit I wasn't exactly delighted by the piece myself, but more than offended, I was surprised and a little bit pleased. I had thought The Telegraph smarter than setting themselves up in such obvious fashion--after all, no one with half a toe in contemporary reality could have failed to forsee the backlash. In fact, so obviously did the newspaper make a sitting duck of themselves that I wondered whether this could have been a publicity stunt (not that The Telegraph needs it). After all, no long-term or even short-term regular reader of the newspaper could seriously accuse them of being a misogynistic or sexist publication.

Of course, this contextual analysis does not in any way diminish the disappoinment, distaste or anger the image may have inspired in the article's female--and, one hopes, male--readers. Their concerns are perfectly valid. However, their reaction to the image hauls to the spotlight, I think, a linguistic and cultural tension that I have personally felt for some years now.

Language is inherently biased towards the location and culture of its origin. In other words, language--particularly idioms and folk sayings--is inherently ethnocentric. And in so being, it nourishes and sustains certain aspects of a cultural identity as a norm, even when in actual practice the ethnic group's lifestyle has become more flexible. For example, the Bengali baagdhara or idiom "Kaw-awkkhor gomangsho" indicates illiteracy by identifying the first letter of the [Bengali] alphabet with beef. That the origin of this idiom is Hindu is immediately obvious, because only in Hinduism is beef a forbidden meat. Thus for as long as this saying is in circulation, one--quite possibly unconsciously--affirms the socio-religious prohibition on beef, and in so doing also affirms a Bengali Hindu society as the source of this particular saying. An acquaintance suggested Buddhism as a possible source, which again goes to show how our own cultural beliefs influence the way we think. After all, to a Bengali, giving up 'non-veg' is a great gastronomic sacrifice--and what greater sacrifice than a gastronomic one? So naturally, a religion preaching non-violence and sacrifice of personal pleasures must advise vegetarianism, no?

And therein lies the trouble, I think. Being, on the one hand, a... 'non-western', shall we say?... participant in an economy, education system, and workplace that originated in western Europe and the US has made us accept and internalise certain western ethical parameters to a very large extent. Undoubtedly this is largely an excellent things (although that would be a 'westernised' urban Indian's opinion) . But this immersion in a western--or now, 'global'--way of life has also recently given us an extra push towards establishing our 'ethnic' identities firmly, lest we only exist as half-baked second-best westerners. There is a great deal of talk of cultural revival and going back to one's roots--the pipe-smoking pucca shaheb has gone entirely out of fashion.

To be fair, of course, one should add here that being thusly 'ethnic' has currency only amongst those who have already established their global credentials--there is no element of 'close to my roots' when our cook makes us payesh, but when a neighbour's AB[C]D son-in-law made the dessert for her, the lady nearly wept with the double exotic pleasure of a America-born man preparing such a "perfectly Bengali" dish for her. I know for a fact that Indrani Sen's voice held special appeal for a friend of mine from the day she discovered the lady is a professor of Economics at one of the better known--and British-sounding--city colleges. And I think it was Dipta who once said vernacular swear words achieved a certain ethnic coolth once the urbane urban female population started using them. He was rather floored by LMG women calling someone a gandu, if I recall right.

On the other hand, returning to one's roots implies returning to the decided datedness, the pre-PC quality to our mother tongues. It is especially complicated in cases like India, where the same language is spoken by a cross-section of religions and sometimes even ethnicties. I've been so well 'sensitised' by my more global persona that I bite my tongue when idioms such as "tate ki Mohabharot oshuddho hoye jaabe?" ("Will it render the Mahabharata impure?"; roughly, a caustic "doing this little thing will have earth-shattering bloody consequences, eh?") present themselves, opting instead for the safer, "tate ki peter bhaat hojom hobe na?" (will it stop you from digesting the rice in your tummy?). Because unlike pork and beef, rice has been left alone by the scriptures and is therefore unlikely to offend. Unless, of course, one belongs to the Cult of Tortured Thinness.

And so every time I feel indignant when a man booms, "come on then, I haven't worn bangles on my wrists have I!", indicating his undilulated masculinity, I cannot help but recall having used the same trope to vent my disgust at fellow commuters a few years back. An emptyish bus, mostly full of men, had an excellent view as a frisky drunk tried to paw me, then collapsed on me, and finally grabbed me by the shoulders and tried to shake me when I managed to push him off. After I'd commanded (I can be quite effectively imperious for brief periods) the conductor to stop the bus and throw the man off it, I turned my fury towards the men (the only women on the bus were three old ladies). "You lot should wrap your precious selves in a sari and stay locked up at home", I had snarled, and had never for a second felt disempowered for saying it.

For the bangles and the sari insults, at least to me, convey a certain rights-deprived, economically dependent and socially powerless idea of the female that was a historical fact (and often a contemporary one, behind closed doors), which contemporary language recorded and preserved as a collective cultural memory. Therefore when I advise a makeover to a group of ineffectual fellow citizens, I am not suggesting that their spinelessness makes them prime candidates for contemporary womanhood; I'm implying that they embody that state of existence that women experienced for centuries on end, and were socially conditioned to accept as 'natural' to them. After all, I could easily have called those men bleeding cunts or colossal pricks [which, as an insult, falls completely on its face], and I doubt I would have been accused of misogyny or misandry.

Again, this does not excuse The Telegraph's visual for those that found it offensive. But it does indicate the delicate jugglings we do every day in an effort just to keep off people's toes, and such effort deserves a mention.

Vunce more, mit feelink

noreply@blogger.com (Rimi) — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 21:50:00 +0000

[Enormous post alert]

JUDE BA admissions, ladies and gentlemen. The Greatest Show on earth, if only because it managed to sneak to the top for a few seconds while the list-makers weren't looking.

And a complete washout this year, the monsoon no-show notwithstanding.

Three years ago, I remember saying, "at JU, come admission test season, we have sheer, uncontrollable entertainment of the nerve-wrecking kind". We moaned and groaned about it, and justifiably so. Apart from the rush of sorting three thousand nervous prospective examinees--each armed with at least a Mummy or a Daddy--into their right buildings and right rooms, there were the 'human-interest' cases that provided fodder for addas weeks afterwards. Like this examinee who had been caught lurking in the men's loo in the Bangla department just before the exam began, and had to be dragged out of there loudly protesting. Yet he couldn't--or wouldn't--tell us what possible benefit his exam could derive from this little loo-retreat. There was that examphobic girl, who, when asked her name, forgot it in panic and had a complete breakdown, screaming her head off at Supchau and ADG. We've also had our fair share of imposters, fine moustachioed specimens of masculinity trying to pass themselves off as the delicate young flowers smiling up at us from the 4x4 picture box of the exam form (and vice versa).

My ever-memorable was the girl who was convinced we were trying to trick her out of sitting for the English entrance by sending her off to the Economics department.
"We simply cannot seat all of you in the English department," I tried to explain, but she waved it away like so much concocted excuse. After several minutes of struggle, I suddenly remembered the girl was from the West Bengal Higher Secondary board, and had what I thought was a stroke of genius.
"When you took your HS, did you take it in your own school?" I asked triumphantly.
"Oh no," said she, "I had to go to this school, you know, far away. It took a half an hour bus ride and then a rickshaw ride that took ten rupees--although the first day the man asked for fifteen, can you imagine, he thought I didn't know..."
"This is the same exact concept", I cut in hastily. "You want to get into the English department, so you must take your exam in the Economics department. All right?"
Her face lit up in comprehension, and I started walking away, totally patting myself on the back for this piece of absolute brilliance. Which was when I heard a sudden shocked gasp behind me.
"Yes?" I asked tersely, wondering what she could possibly have left to ask.
"So, if this is like the HS, and I should sit in a different department... then shouldn't I also be sitting in a different university? What university should I be at? What university? Tell me!"
At which point I ran away.

And then there were the parents. Always, always, there were the parents. For reasons we never fathomed, they were convinced that within the privacy of the exam-rooms, we were either ceremonially sacrificing their children, or extracting their entrails to dance upon. Or cunningly convincing them to snort cocaine. Or forcing them to perform the Kamasutra ("Performance as Text", eh?). Or inciting them to join the Sicilian mafia. Or encouraging them to become vegetarians and forswear biriyani. They were forever trying to break into the buildings, demanding to be "shown" that their children were all right. Most tried to strongarm their way in first (heh. We had five-people strong bouncer teams at every entrance for exactly such circs). That failing, they skulked in the building's shadows, trying to peek through the dirt-encrusted windows. Since the uni buildings are 'maintained' by government employees, the dirt has had fifty years to accumulate, making this an entirley pointless enterprise; but that's yet to deter determined parents, who enthusiastically make incomprehensible sign-language gestures in front of opaque sheets of glass. A smarter few actually manage to enter the building on the pretext of using the loo, and hide beneath ground-floor staircases waiting for the opportune moment when they can dash out and scramble up the stairs to where the exam rooms are. At least one examinee broke down into huge racking sobs when we firmly escorted her father down the stairs.

There was a reason BA admish. was called the annual disaster-management and damage-control day.

Then came Exam '09. Scorched in every previous year, we brought out the big guns. Entry had been divided up between three different gates. Crowd management teams were swarming all entry points. A large poster had been put up, warning stentoriously, "Abandon All Guardians, Ye Who Enter Here" [link=pic]. What we completely did not expect was that people would actually listen. A mild reproof was all it took for most mummy-daddy grandpa-grandmum pairs to back off, pushing the offspring forward with muttered blessings. The only case of slight resistance was handled masterfully (mistressfully?) by Supriyadi, when she insisted that a gentleman standing in queue for his daughter had to take the exam in her stead. "No no no!" said the nervous gentleman, backing away and waving his hands like windmills.
"Line e jokhon dariyechhen tokhon porikkha ditei hobe", said a firm Supriyadi, advancing. If you were found standing in the examinee's queue, you have to take the exam.

It's little wonder, then, that thusly disappointed by the crowd no-show, volunteers would read over the examinees' shoulders avidly to enrich the JUDE oral tradition of exam howlers. That was the only exam-pleasure left for the day. The first started making it's way 'round the campus within a few minutes of the exam commencing. "In place of 'Mother tongue: ___', someone wrote 'pink'!" ran the scandalised whispers. Names came next. "There's a girl called Sonali Mayur on my list... but she didn't turn up", said someone dejectedly. "There's a Samudra Gupta in my class!" said someone else. "Jude Judhajit!" chirped yet another. I walked into a class to say hello to my friend Hrileena, and found the invigilator asking 'Akshay Kumar' to sign the attendance sheet, please.

But the real hell broke loose after the answerscripts were collected, signed, and turned in to be coded at the end of the exam. The corridors were replete with "What did you see? What did you hear?" From the noise, it was clear that we had all heard plenty. Some of the credit certainly goes to the paper, which was delightfully clever. For instance, there was a section where the examinee had to pick the phrase in closest association with a given word, from a list of three or four phrases/words. For the given word 'barrack', one of the options was 'run for President'. And it had several victims from every room. The other killer was 'swine', which had the options 'influenza' and 'contagious'. A clever lad who had got it right was a little disproportionately gleeful about it. "I got it right, I got it right!", he sang. When people looked at him quizzically, he said that that particular question gave him great pleasure to answer. Just a few days back, he had been called a swine by a classmate, and not knowing the word, he had looked it up in the dictionary. And now he couldn't wait to meet said classmate. Called him swine, did he? Did he? Hah! The surprise hitword, I think we all agree, was 'kindling'. As astonishing number of examinees seem to believe it means 'baby human'.
My personal favourite of the lot, however, was 'cogent', and its wickedly misleading option, 'male accomplice'. I wonder who contributed that.

Then came the short notes.
Calvin and Hobbes. "Calvin was a great photographer and philosophist [sic.] which were his Hobbes".
Omkara. "Omkara is a story stoled from great poet Shakespeare who read original is not getting enjoy from the film which has many bad word and desi gaalis always".
Eliot. "Eliot was great poet who wrote a church in a country yard" (after such achievement, what need of architects?)
Lewis Carroll. "Lewis Carroll was a wonderful writer who wrote Alice in Wonderland. She wrote it for her little daughter". (I think this boy has a Barbie hangover)

Correct the following sentences:
"Blind by 1648, Fortune did not favour Milton" -- "Blinded by the number '1648', Fortune did not favour Milton'.
"Our cricket team batted poorly in the first inning" -- "Our cricket team batted poorly in all the innings". Can't say I disagree, unfortunately.
"I knocked up on the door..." -- this gets a mention simply because it exists.

Make idiomatic sentences by completing the following sentences (filled-in words in italics):
"Take yourself in the hand, and the pleasure the better".
"Better the girl you know than the girl you don't."
And the absolute gem from this category: "Workers of the world dream! You have nothing to lose but your souls!"

If only Marx had thought of that one.

All in all, though, I'd like the unruly mob back. A few torn hairs and clutched collars makes the Entrance stew taste just right. In fact, if we run another deficit next year, I'm perfectly prepared to round up a few of my batchmates and start a loud fistfight in front of the main gate. Or we could intercept the lunch packets coming in from Milonda's and sell it to the starved parents milling about. Anything for a rousing chaos. Just say the word.

More Quotes

noreply@blogger.com (Rimi) — Sat, 04 Nov 2006 18:01:00 +0000

O'Toole's corollary to Murphy's Law: Murphy was an optimist. See also this.

On a slightly happier note:

The reason the Earl of Southampton escaped with his life was because his aunt had some influence with the Queen. Apparantly she went to her everyday and cried.

The Don, class on Nash, Renaissance Core.

A water conduit, for example, would be speaking to the Mayor about what a wonderful thing it was for a water conduit to speak to the Mayor.

The Don, on scripts for masques.

There seems to be this propensity for young people to see young unshaven people as genius. Possibly because unshaven people have a flair for destroying themselves and language.

The Don, on the curious habit of radicles seeking to change society not shaving too often.

Yeah, we had an excellent first class on Nash. Regular stand-up.

Brief magic

noreply@blogger.com (Rimi) — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 00:15:00 +0000

Looking at her over the rim of warm teacup in the liquid darkness of the room, a sense of the present suddenly connects with an imagined essence of an unseen past.

I'm deeply averse to the moments of bright sunlight breaking through the soft, soothing darkness, but this dawn is beautiful. Cloudy, greyblue, a slight pre-winter chill. The rooms, even with curtains drawn severely back, give the impression of a swimming pale blueness -- not really dark, but not quite light either. And Chonu's right cheek glows dimly in the magical light, set off by strands of greying hair escaped from the bedtime braid. She used to be very pretty, my mother. I've seen pictures. But she's faded with the years, somewhat. In part, I like to think, because most of them have not been easy. And also because she's singularly contemptuous of I-must-stay-pretty-ness.

Still, you should see her in the rare moments when she pulls her stern bun down.

“Dalpuri kemon hoyechhe re?” she asks in a voice slightly husky with sleep, lowering her cup between sips of sugarless tea. The puris stuffed with seasoned dal had had a trial run the night before. “Veyee niee”, I say with a mouthful of tea-softened biscuit. “Like the other day?” she asks, mildly anxiouscurious. I nod, now swirling a sip of hot tea inside my mouth. “Aar bhaja guromoshla debo?” I shake my head. Any more of the rich seasoning and at least two of the intended tastebuds will be affronted. The Workings of the Mind of a Hostess and Cook. “The alu'r dom?” she persists, checking all frontiers, while setting her cup down after the final sip and stretching herself a little. “Perfect” say I, taking a far-from-final sip, “dhone pata debe toh?” “Ah yes” says she, getting up. Then she smiles a little. “Imagine you asking for coriander seasoning.” I smile back. Coriander is an acquired taste. “Ami aschhi”, I say to her now-departing back. Be with you in a bit.

The family pujas stopped about seven years before I was born. And my family is not given to ruminating about past delights except for an odd sentence here and there between people who Were There. “Tarpor ek pujoye T hariye gelo, mone achhe?” my mother might ask my aunt over lunch one day, recalling the day their kid sister--my youngest aunt--lost her way while out on a stroll and nobody noticed because they were busy with the puja. Then there would be a brief debate about whether it was on Saptami or Nabami, a few more cryptic anecdotes will be fished out to be compared (“No no, that was the day X arrived with the huge tumbler of sweets, remeber?” “No, are you sure? I thought it was the day R insisted we sing 'Shohag chand bodoni dhoni' and wouldn't stop dancing... no?”). And that would be it.

So it's not even like I have received memories, sights sounds or smells, of the autumn celebrations.

Still, and I don't know why. Knowing there was a busy morning and a long day ahead of us featuring almost all of the family, that it started with a heap of pasted and flavoured dal and soft dough waiting to be made into puris in the kitchen, and listening to Chonu take out utensils and the rolling board and pin, grunting as she pulled the heavy vegetable-tray out to rummage for coriander, this cheerfully grey sunless dawn in our quiet apartment brought back memories I've never had a chance to have.

A much younger, plumper and sterner Jhu going about checking and rechecking everything required for the morning puja, calling for prodips (brass diyas) and ghee and incense. The hired help giving the prodips a quick surreptitious final polish with the edge of their dhotis or sarees before submitting it for her approval. My significantly less religious grandmother and great-grandmother smiling secretly at each other at her whizzing around as they sorted the mountains of flowers that had been picked and bought earlier in the first hours of dawn. And yet more women -- greataunts and aunts who're almost all just a name to me-- dicing fruit, setting out sweets on large brass plates, raising their voices to ask for the various exotic things offered in little heaps on heavy brass thalas to the goddess. A male voice anxiously asking after the priest and checking the time. A local woman serenely sweeping the floor with a wet cloth and a bucket of water, paying not the least attention to sporadic calls from several quarters to hurry up and make herself useful elsewhere, there's so much to do and it's almost time!

****
It's five thirty. I've just finished my tea. Briefly, I marvel at how much Jhu changed after my grandmother died. They were sisters, see. It's not a bad thing either that my aunt forgot to place the order for bhaiphonta breakfast so Chonu has to make everything at home with a little help from Daddy, Shobhadi (our domestic help) and me. It's been a bit of a domestic adventure since late last evening -- running out to buy flour, more ghee, more oil, Chonu rushing to collect the roshomalai before grabbing crowds of sisters bought the sweet-shops out.

And now I can smell the coriander infusing with the simmering potato curry. And the sound of the first puri hitting the hot, bubbling golden oil. It's not light yet.