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. 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).

    ReplyDelete
  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
47 comments
Read more

Re-exploring the Past: The Fort Kochi Chapters – 1

Inside St Francis Church, Fort Kochi Moraes Zogoiby (Moor), the narrator-protagonist of Salman Rushdie’s iconic novel The Moor’s Last Sigh , carries in his genes a richly variegated lineage. His mother, Aurora da Gama, belongs to the da Gama family of Kochi, who claim descent from none less than Vasco da Gama, the historical Portuguese Catholic explorer. Abraham Zogoiby, his father, is a Jew whose family originally belonged to Spain from where they were expelled by the Catholic Inquisition. Kochi welcomed all the Jews who arrived there in 1492 from Spain. Vasco da Gama landed on the Malabar coast of Kerala in 1498. Today’s Fort Kochi carries the history of all those arrivals and subsequent mingling of history and miscegenation of races. Kochi’s history is intertwined with that of the Portuguese, the Dutch, the British, the Arbas, the Jews, and the Chinese. No culture is a sacrosanct monolith that can remain untouched by other cultures that keep coming in from all over the world. ...
6 comments
Read more

The Lights of December

The crib of a nearby parish [a few years back] December was the happiest month of my childhood. Christmas was the ostensible reason, though I wasn’t any more religious than the boys of my neighbourhood. Christmas brought an air of festivity to our home which was otherwise as gloomy as an orthodox Catholic household could be in the late 1960s. We lived in a village whose nights were lit up only by kerosene lamps, until electricity arrived in 1972 or so. Darkness suffused the agrarian landscapes for most part of the nights. Frogs would croak in the sprawling paddy fields and crickets would chirp rather eerily in the bushes outside the bedroom which was shared by us four brothers. Owls whistled occasionally, and screeched more frequently, in the darkness that spread endlessly. December lit up the darkness, though infinitesimally, with a star or two outside homes. December was the light of my childhood. Christmas was the happiest festival of the period. As soon as school closed for the...
14 comments
Read more

Re-exploring the Past: The Fort Kochi Chapters – 2

Fort Kochi’s water metro service welcomes you in many languages. Surprisingly, Sanskrit is one of the first. The above photo I took shows only just a few of the many languages which are there on a series of boards. Kochi welcomes everyone. It welcomed the Arabs long before Prophet Muhammad received his divine inspiration and gave the people a single God in the place of the many they worshipped. Those Arabs made their journey to Kerala for trade. There are plenty of Muslims now in Fort Kochi. Trade brought the Chinese too later in the 14 th -15 th centuries. The Chinese fishing nets that welcome you gloriously to Fort Kochi are the lingering signs of the island’s Chinese links. The reason that brought the Portuguese another century later was no different. Then came the Dutch followed by the British. All for trade. It is interesting that when the northern parts of India were overrun by marauders, Kerala was embracing ‘globalisation’ through trades with many countries. Babu...
10 comments
Read more

Schrödinger’s Cat and Carl Sagan’s God

Image by Gemini AI “Suppose a patriotic Indian claims, with the intention of proving the superiority of India, that water boils at 71 degrees Celsius in India, and the listener is a scientist. What will happen?” Grandpa was having his occasional discussion with his Gen Z grandson who was waiting for his admission to IIT Madras, his dream destination. “Scientist, you say?” Gen Z asked. “Hmm.” “Then no quarrel, no fight. There’d be a decent discussion.” Grandpa smiled. If someone makes some similar religious claim, there could be riots. The irony is that religions are meant to bring love among humans but they end up creating rift and fight. Scientists, on the other hand, keep questioning and disproving each other, and they appreciate each other for that. “The scientist might say,” Gen Z continued, “that the claim could be absolutely right on the Kanchenjunga Peak.” Grandpa had expected that answer. He was familiar with this Gen Z’s brain which wasn’t degenerated by Instag...
11 comments
Read more