Skip to main content

Spelling Mistakes

Fantasy

“Then again, you may pick up just enough education to hate people who say, ‘It’s a secret between he and I.’ Or you may end up in some business office, throwing paper clips at the nearest stenographer.  I just don’t know.  But do you know what I’m driving at, at all?”

That’s what a teacher tells a student, the protagonist of J D Salinger’s celebrated novel, The Catcher in the Rye.  Holden, the student, was critical of everything around him.  He was confused by the hypocrisy of the adults around him.  The ability of his companions to adjust to that hypocrisy confounded him further.  In short, life confounded him.

Holden ended up in a lunatic asylum.  He couldn’t cope with the confounding life.  

But the novel ended when Holden was only 16 years old.  What if Holden continued to live beyond the novel, outside the asylum, liberated from his neurotic obsessions with hypocrisy, and ready to accept the world as it really is?

He becomes a teacher in a public school, let us imagine.  He becomes an English teacher.  After all, literature was not alien to him.  He loved telling stories. 

What does he see in his school? 

His principal shrieks in the assembly every morning about the spelling mistakes made by the students in their applications.  “You don’t even know the difference between principle and principal.”  Don’t know spellings.  Don’t know grammar.  Basic grammar!  What are you learning here?  What are your teachers teaching here?  What are the teachers doing here?

The Principal becomes so engrossed with spelling mistakes that he forgets that there are students waiting to deliver their routine news readings and poem recitations.

Holden, one of the teachers, sits demurely in the assembly hall listening to the tirade on spelling mistakes.  And grammar mistakes.  And umpteen other mistakes.  Made by everyone, obviously.

And he wonders how this man became the Principal (or is it principle?) when he is so obsessed with spelling mistakes far, far beyond the age of 15.

But who is he, Holden the reclaimed neurotic, to ask such questions?



Spelling mistakes are in the mind.  Of people who ascend to positions they don’t deserve, he thought.  Then he corrected himself.  No, my counsellor had told me to laugh when I saw spelling mistakes.  Can I laugh, Principal?  He did not ask the question loud.  The asylum had made him too sane. 
Labels:

Comments

  1. Ankur AnandAugust 22, 2013 at 8:22 PM

    nicely sad oops spelling mistake :P .. nicely said :) i guess he will get the answer now :D

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalAugust 22, 2013 at 10:26 PM

      Well, Ankur, who will get the answer is determined by Shakespeare's fool :)

      Delete
    2. Ankur AnandAugust 23, 2013 at 8:06 PM

      hahaha.. loved this reply .. :)

      Delete
  2. UnknownAugust 23, 2013 at 10:21 AM

    Life is confounding. I think Holden was sane and everybody else insane. But alas, a wise can't speak among fools. He spoke and landed in an asylum. Result: Holden turned partially insane.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalAugust 23, 2013 at 1:53 PM

      I wouldn't disagree much with you, Pankti. It was Jean-Paul Sartre who said that the mad man's raving is meaningless to people who claim sanity but is very meaningful to the man himself. Holden was saner than most people who claim to be normal...

      Delete
  3. AditiAugust 23, 2013 at 2:06 PM

    'Spelling mistakes are in the mind. Of people who ascend to positions they don’t deserve'. True of all situations and all offices, Matheikal. Most of the time in the weekly meeting in our office is routinely taken up by sanctimonious monologue by the chair on slip ups on part of the relatively junior officers about things like ignoring to number pages in files etc.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalAugust 23, 2013 at 3:25 PM

      Thanks for the consoling generalisation, Aditi. Anyway, laughter is the best medicine, I've discovered, in such situations.

      Delete
  4. GurujiAugust 23, 2013 at 7:58 PM

    Agree with the conclusion. Spelling mistakes are also in the society that elevate people to positions that they don't deserve.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalAugust 24, 2013 at 6:03 AM

      Yes, Santhosh, the society has a peculiar predilection for the mediocre.

      Delete
  5. The Freudian CouchAugust 24, 2013 at 3:02 PM

    Interesting imagination.. I wonder if one can extend this line of thought and imagine Holden taking up different careers. Will be fun.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalAugust 24, 2013 at 6:38 PM

      That's a great idea that you've given me, Adarsh. Interestingly, Aditi above mentions that similar things happen in her profession too (and she belongs to a very elite profession).

      Delete
  6. UnknownAugust 24, 2013 at 9:41 PM

    Life is the asylum we all go through :)
    And at the end of the day an empty vase makes a lot of noise. The ranting of principal looks the same of course ;)

    ReplyDelete
  7. AbhishekAugust 25, 2013 at 10:58 AM

    yes sir, that's true your imagination resembles me of some thing. I guess you can understand "spelling mistake"

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalAugust 25, 2013 at 11:39 AM

      But, Abhishek, I must hasten to add that students have a duty to improve their spellings and grammar :)

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
44 comments
Read more

Ashwatthama is still alive

Fiction Image from Pinterest “I met Ashwatthama.” When Doctor Prabhakar told me this, I thought he was talking figuratively. Metaphors were his weaknesses. “The real virus is in the human heart, Jai,” he had told me when the pandemic named Covid-19 started holding the country hostage. I thought his Ashwatthama was similarly figurative. Ashwatthama was Dronacharya’s son in the Mahabharata. He was blessed with immortality by Shiva. But the blessing became a horrible curse when Krishna punished him for killing the Pandava kids deceptively after Kurukshetra was brought to peace, however fragile that peace was, using all the frauds that a god could possibly use. Krishna of the Kurukshetra was no less a fraud than a run-of-the-mill politician in my imagination. He could get an innocent elephant named Ashwatthama killed and then convert that killing into a blatant lie to demoralise Drona. He could ask Bhima to hit Duryodhana below the belt without feeling any moral qualms in what
7 comments
Read more

Do I Dare?

Alfred Prufrock was sitting in a dimly lit café when a young boy, who was yet to reach adolescence, walked in. The boy looked as inquisitive as Prufrock looked flurried. ‘Hello,’ the boy said. ‘You look so… lonely. And sad too.’ ‘Sad? No, not sad. Just… contemplating. I am, as they say, measuring out my life with coffee spoons.’ ‘Aw! That’s strange. On my planet, I measure things by sunsets. I love sunsets. How can you measure life with something so small as a coffee spoon?’ ‘Did you say “my planet”?’ ‘Well, yes. I come from another planet. I’ve been travelling for quite some time, you know. Went to numerous planets and asteroids and met many strange creatures. Quite a lot of them are cranky.’ The boy laughed gently, almost like an adult. Prufrock looked at the boy with some scepticism and suspicion. He was already having too many worries of his own like whether he should part his hair in the middle and roll up the bottoms of his trousers. ‘They call me Little Prince,’
16 comments
Read more

Live Life Fully

Alexis Zorba, the protagonist of Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel Zorba the Greek , lives life to its fullness. He embraces human experience with his whole heart. He is not interested in rational explanations and intellectual isms. His philosophy, if you can call it that at all, is earthy, spontaneous and passionate. He loves life passionately. He celebrates it. Happiness is a simple affair for him. “I felt once more how simple and frugal a thing happiness is,” he tells us. “A glass of wine, a roast chestnut, a wretched little brazier, the sound of the sea. Nothing else.” You don’t need a lot of things to be happy. Your possessions don’t bring you happiness. All that money you spent on your big house, big car, big everything… It helps to show off. But happiness? No way, happiness doesn’t come that way at all. Zorba loves to play his musical instrument, santouri. He loves to sing. To dance. But don’t get me wrong. He works too. He works hard. There’s no fullness of life without that hard w
10 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart
15 comments
Read more