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

Whose Rama?

Book Review Title: Whose Rama? [Malayalam] Author: T S Syamkumar Publisher: D C Books, Kerala Pages: 352 Rama may be an incarnation of God Vishnu, but is he as noble a man [ Maryada Purushottam ] as he is projected to be by certain sections of Hindus? This is the theme of Dr Syamkumar’s book, written in Malayalam. There is no English translation available yet. Rama is a creation of the Brahmins, asserts the author of this book. The Ramayana upholds the unjust caste system created by Brahmins for their own wellbeing. Everyone else exists for the sake of the Brahmin wellbeing. If the Kshatriyas are given the role of rulers, it is only because the Brahmins need such men to fight and die for them. Valmiki’s Rama too upheld that unjust system merely because that was his Kshatriya-dharma, allotted by the Brahmins. One of the many evils that Valmiki’s Rama perpetrates heartlessly is the killing of Shambuka, a boy who belonged to a low caste but chose to become an ascetic. The...
8 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...
19 comments
Read more

In this Wonderland

I didn’t write anything in the last few days. Nor did I feel any urge to write. I don’t know if this lack of interest to write is what’s called writer’s block. Or is it simple disenchantment with whatever is happening around me? We’re living in a time that offers much, too much, to writers. The whole world looks like a complex plot for a gigantic epic. The line between truth and fiction has disappeared. Mass murders have become no-news. Animals get more compassion than fellow human beings. Even their excreta are venerated! Folk tales are presented as scientific truths while scientific truths are sacrificed on the altar of political expediency. When the young generation in Nepal set fire to their Parliament and Supreme Court buildings, they were making an unmistakable statement: that they are sick of their political leaders and their systems. Is there any country whose leaders don’t sicken their citizens? I’m just wondering. Maybe, there are good leaders still left in a few coun...
12 comments
Read more

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...
16 comments
Read more