The village school those days was great

Dr Jayaprakash Narayan

[Dr Jayaprakash Narayan, a former IAS officer, is the founder of Lok Satta Party, a political party that stands for “new politics for the new generation”.

In India today, when we think of education, we usually think of upmarket business schools, foreign universities operating here, smart classrooms and so on …. This article, copied from the website of the party and slightly abridged, offers a different perspective.]

I studied in a Telugu-medium government school in a village called Godavarru near Vijayawada. There was no electricity, toilet or running water at my old aunt’s house where I lived away from my parents during school years. I left school (after tenth grade) in 1969 at the age of 13. In those days it was not uncommon for kids to enter school at three.

A friend of mine, a brilliant cardiologist now, finished school at 12! Despite the young age and spartan life, my school years had a profound impact on my life and attitudes.

The village school in those days was great. The infrastructure was inadequate; but the community owned the school, and all kids – rich or poor – went to the same school.

The teachers were competent and committed. They inspired and encouraged us. Amazingly, we could question and challenge teachers. The school was a true institution with a sense of purpose and played a vital role in village life. In sports, I was the slowest kid.

We played kho-kho and kabaddi. A few who had bats played ball-badminton. We never saw a shuttle cock. I never heard the names ‘cricket’ and ‘hockey’ until I left school! But we had a Boy Scouts group, and greatly enjoyed the signals, codes and many other pleasures of a boy scout.

My village teachers kindled great interest [and] allowed me to work at my own pace. When I found the text books not challenging enough, I was encouraged to do exercises from Hall & Knight (Math), and Wren & Martin (English grammar). We could point out our teachers’ errors without fear. When I look back, schooling in that village laid superb foundations for our future lives.

There were regular inspections by the DEO. I vividly remember an amusing incident. We had a great Telugu teacher. He was a master of the classics, and taught us with passion. On the day of inspection, we decorated the school with confetti. Our Telugu teacher was in class, and we were waiting for the inspector.

One kid stood up and showed a little finger. The teacher promptly said, “Why are you scared? We (the teachers) should be nervous when the inspector comes, not you!” We all found it hilarious.

My science teacher actually demonstrated experiments in our small lab. He even wanted to show the anatomy of frog by dissecting it. I was entrusted with the task of getting a frog to class. A friend and I, with some difficulty, caught a toad (we thought it was a frog). I then visited a clinic in Kankipadu and borrowed some chloroform in a small bottle. The teacher, to our wonder, had put the toad to sleep by sprinkling a bit of chloroform, and dissected it and showed its digestive system. I wonder how many fancy schools today give such exposure to kids!

One English teacher always scolded me for my refusal to learn essays by rote, and for my insistence on writing in my own words. I refused to comply with his instructions. In exasperation, he said I would never score more than 75% in public examination. I got exactly 75! But I never regretted it.

All in all, our schooling was fun. It gave us a chance to fulfil our potential and make something of our lives. It is a pity; forty three years later, many many kids don’t have the opportunity we had in village India of 1960’s.

18 Jul 2012

The torn letter

[Rabindranath Tagore’s Chhinnapatra (literally, The torn letter) is a collection of letters written by him to a niece when he was between 26 and 34 years of age. Tagore wrote them while he was travelling extensively in East and North Bengal and in Orissa on family business.

A friend has recently given me a book on Rabindranath, Kabir Swadharma (The poet’s own religion) written by a noted scholar, Sourindra Mitra.

Sourindra Mitra, who passed away in 1989, wrote: “There is no dearth of famous and great books in the treasure trove of Bengali literature, but there is only one about which the term intimate can be used.” Mitra felt Chhinnapatra was a book that was intimate in the way Walt Whitman had described one of his own books of poetry: “Who touches this touches a man”.

Being nearly illiterate, I hadn’t read Tagore’s Torn letters earlier. I opened the book this morning, and was fascinated by the first piece that I randomly read. Allow me to share a translation with you.]

Natore[i]

2 December 1892

Went to M’s place yesterday. In the evening, all of us went out for a walk. I quite liked the path flanked by fields on either side. The endless empty fields of Bangladesh, and the sun setting behind the trees on the margin … such profound peace, such quiet compassion! What an affection-laden bonding between our own earth and the faraway sky! There is some humongous eternal sadness about the universe – it reveals itself when a shaft of absent light falls on the forsaken earth of the evening – what an eloquent silence fills the earth and the sky. As one looks at it intently for a long time, one feels if this infinite stillness could not hold itself any longer, if suddenly, its eternal language exploded into audible sound, what deep, sombre, calm, beautiful, gentle music would reverberate from the earth to the stars. It actually happens. If we quietly concentrate and try, we can translate the collective harmony of all the lights and shades of the world into fascinating music. One only has to close one’s eyes and in their mind, listen to the reverberations of the endless stream of visual images of the world. But how many times will I write about sunrise and sunset! I can experience it anew every day, but how can I express it in a new way every day?

Translated on Thursday, 12 July 2012

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[i] In Rajshahi, Bangladesh 

Quaint portraits of an enchanting city

I would say Paul Fernandes is to Bangalore what Desmond Doig is to Calcutta and Mario Miranda to Bombay. Like them, Paul too has drawn intimate pictures of the city he loves. And he's drawn them with some brio. Bangalore is fortunate to have someone like him to record its moods for posterity. Stylistically, Paul is closer to Mario than to Doig and although he hardly enjoys their kind of fame, he too has an artist's insight and a superb grip on his pen.

I heard Fernandes’s name and saw his cartoons only a few days ago, thanks to Yahoo.com.  It was love at first sight for me. Paul has captured the languid spirit of what used to be Bangalore in the 1960s and 70s. His cartoons remind me of a time when I was in college and used to visit Bangalore to spend time with my dad who lived there alone. 

This Coffee House was a favourite joint for my old man. Many a time we had coffee, toast, and an omelette at this place. The present Coffee House in a narrow street parallel to MG Road is an apology of its past. And I am sure there you won’t find a waiter carrying a huge dosa, two chutney bowls, and a pyramid of coffee cups for an off-site customer.

Here is another lovely cartoon by Paul Fernandes.

I think this picture vividly captures Bangalore streets forty or fifty years ago. A snoring potbellied cinema watchman against the backdrop of Clark Gable kissing Vivian Leigh, and a thief rolling tyres with the careless abandon of a frolicking child, with no one around to witness this bizarre crime actually bring alive the loneliness of Bangalore streets of the time. I remember, many a late evening when I walked from Cubbon Park to Shampanghi Tank Road, where dad had his digs, through a steady drizzle – it it used to drizzle all the time – not a soul would be on the road some days. A few cars would occasionally whoosh past only to accentuate the sparseness of the scene. 

To bring out that loneliness through the antics of a comical watchman and an adorable outlaw requires the sensitivity and imagination of a top artist.

The South of India is essentially a conservative place. Those days, it was much more hidebound and so was Bangalore. One would rarely come across women in anything other than the traditional sari. Premarital – no I am not talking about sex – relationships were possibly less common than extra-marital liaisons. Heterosexual interactions were restricted to cousins within families. I guess there was a lot of suppressed libido underneath the genteel veneer of the city. No wonder that Tokyo by Night would run to full houses for three weeks or more in Bangalore, despite the smallish town having as many as seventy movie theatres. I wonder if this carefully-hidden-but-known-to-everyone fact could be expressed more brilliantly than what Paul has done in the cartoon below! And if you click on the picture to get a better view, you won’t miss the disgust writ large on the face of the only lady in the picture. Her husband – who is equally aghast – is holding her head to make sure she doesn't get a glimpse of what happens in Tokyo by night! 

The police constable in bell-bottom half pants with a protruding paunch was a cartoonist’s delight since the beginning of history. Sad was the day when he started wearing trousers. Paul too takes a keen interest in him. In the picture below, the caption reads: Potential guest at Cubbon Park Police Station. I can’t remember if I saw the police station, although I used to walk or jog in the Park almost every day during my short stays there. Looking back, Bangalore in general and Cubbon Park in particular was such a peaceful and tranquil place those days! It does seem the policemen posted there had no more serious business than dealing with delinquent kids. This picture indeed says a lot about the peace and quiet of the city of yore.

It used to rain throughout the year in Bangalore and it was a place where I felt sleepy all the time. The people were exceedingly gentlemanly and rather laid back. Through Paul’s paintings, the quaint past of the city seems to be winking at its feverish present.

Kolkata, Thursday, 31 May 2012

If you are from Bangalore, you can see the pictures at aPaulogy, which is open from 11 am to 7.30 pm on weekdays and Saturdays. The address is: 15 Clarke Road (Opp. Au Bon Pain), Richards Park Entrance, Richards Town, Bangalore - 560 005.


The pictures are courtesy yahoo.com. To see more of Paul Fernandes's pictures on line, please copy-paste this URL: http://in.lifestyle.yahoo.com/photos/apaulogy-where-art-meets-cartoon-slideshow/

Growing young

I’ve been feeling younger since I turned sixty. And this is not another glib sentence I’ve made up as an opening line for a work of fiction. It’s a bare, unadorned fact. But why do I feel young when I ought to feel oldish? I had been pondering over this riddle for some time, and this morning, the answer flashed before me while I was crossing the grey, utterly lonely no-man’s land between sleep and wakefulness.

Turning sixty means you have attained the socially accepted retirement age in our country. Once you have crossed the magic line, even if you don’t have a steady job like yours truly, your friends no longer gives you a miss because you are “unemployed”. No one looks down upon you because your picture never came on Page 3 of any newspaper. Rather, people think that somehow, you have earned your right to sit back and relax under the sun. In other words, the society writes you off as a stick-in-the-mud oldie and stops expecting anything from you. And that, Dear Reader, is the biggest advantage you gain after toiling hard for six decades. I reckon it makes you feel good!

The lack of societal expectancy is reflected in you too. You stop bothering about many things that you worried about earlier. You realise that you didn’t really have to please your boss, if you still had one. Or your spouse, for that matter. If you managed to reach this stage with your wife still being your wife, both of you would be so utterly inter-dependent that you would have realised there was no escape. And you had better accept the truth. Keep fighting, but make merry too, until the winter breeze starts blowing in.

Turning sixty also means you pay less on income tax and for boarding trains. But those are minor benefits. The real thing is that you are spared of the challenges of handling the latest fancy gadget that allows you to kiss someone on the other side of the planet. Even if you had a Facebook account, you wouldn’t really know what to do with it. And you wonder to what use you could put the information where Stefanie Graff or Sreetama Guha partied last night.

Being sixty means you still send those old-fashioned emails and drink your beer from a mug. And you don’t give a damn if it was politically incorrect! If this is not freedom, what is?

  

Monday, 30 April 2012 / Kolkata