Chicanery – Learn English: Lesson 1

Example 1

Addressing a rally in Kerala yesterday, BJP’s high priest Amit Shah accused Kerala of being a killing field. “More than 120 BJP workers have been martyred,” he declared.

The fact: “Police records with details of every political murder between 2000 and 2017 accessed exclusively by NDTV impugn both the political fronts in Kerala. In the last 17 years, 85 CPM workers, 65 RSS or BJP workers, 11 workers of Congress and IUML each have been killed - mostly by their political rivals including CPM and RSS or BJP.” [Source: NDTV]

Example 2

Today the assistant high priest Yogi Adityanath addressed the same yatra flagged off yesterday by the Supreme High Priest and said that Kerala should learn how to run hospitals from UP.

The fact: Kerala has the best medical care system in the country. It has efficiently run hospitals in every town and health centres in most villages. Almost all the villages except in some tribal areas have primary health centres with a variety of medical streams such as Ayurveda, Homeopathy and Unani. There is an exemplary palliative care system in the state. Kerala has the lowest infant mortality rate in the country and the best child care systems. Who has forgotten the death of numerous children in UP recently due to sheer neglect? Yet this man, a Yogi and a chief minister to boot, dares to utter such blatant lies in no other place than Kerala.

Exercise

Use the word chicanery to make meaningful sentences.

1. BJP’s chicanery has crossed all limits.

2. While colonial America looked upon lawyers as mere traders who earned a questionable living by chicanery, contemporary India makes use of some questionable traders to perpetuate chicanery as the ruling party’s official political tool.

3. “Abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery, of party, faction, and division of society.” John Adams

4. When hundreds of people are being killed in the cow belt India in the name of cow protection, the Jan Raksha Yatra organised in Kerala by the BJP is sheer political chicanery.

Comments

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

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth. He called it ‘preventive system’. The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed. Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...

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...

Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Search This Blog