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Jack and Jill

Fiction The 6 year-old Jack and 4 year-old Jill had a small, little fight.  Jack felt guilty.  “I’m sorry,” he said hugging his sister very affectionately. During the unexpected hug Jill’s hand touched Jack’s little penis.  “What’s this thing you’ve got here?”  she asked groping Jack’s groin.  “That’s the pipe for carrying urine,” said Jack. “But I don’t have such a pipe,” protested Jill. “You’re a girly, silly.” “So what?” “Stop being stupid.” Jill went to the kitchen where mum was cooking dinner.  “Why don’t I have a pipe for carrying urine?” she asked. “You’re not a boy,” said mum. “So what?” asked Jill. “Only boys have the pipe...” “Why should boys have all the fun?” asked Jill. Mum  looked into the living room.  Pop was sitting there, his legs stretched out on the tea poi and reading Vikram Seth’s Two Lives .  Mum and Pop, both, worked in offices.  Both had to get up early in the morning.  Both had to work their asses out in

Beasts within Us

“Civilization is skin-thin: scratch it and savagery bleeds out.”  [Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Civilizations ] Nobel laureate William Golding’s first novel, Lord of the Flies (1954), tells the story of a group of school boys plane-wrecked on an uninhabited island.  The leadership of the democratic and sensitive Ralph is soon usurped by the savage Jack, and childhood innocence soon gives way to uncanny cruelty on the island.  The novel is the story of evil in the human being and his society. Seeing that there are no adults to restrain them, the children are initially excited.  But Ralph emerges as a leader reminding them of their responsibility to find ways of returning home.  Ralph is a moral character in the novel.  His is a cultivated morality, the product of human civilisation.  Jack, on the other hand, is the uncultivated savage.  He soon wrenches the leadership from Ralph and becomes a dictator who imposes both his will and his savagery on the group.  Most of the ch

Evil

Evil is coeval with mankind.  Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400) said repeatedly in his widely studied Canterbury Tales , “ Love of money is the root of all evil .”  How much can we alter that statement today, six centuries later? When Christopher Marlowe (1564-93) made his unforgettable Doctor Faustus utter the following lines:             Had I as many souls as there be stars,             I’d give them all for Mephistophilis, he created a character who would be perfectly at home in our own time with all its plethora of sensual delights .    Now, how evil are sensual delights? “ Fair is foul, and foul is fair ,” said Shakespeare’s (1564-1616) witches in Macbeth .  They were expressing something much more than an epigram on hypocrisy or political chicanery.  If we want, we can even apply the epigram to many of the contemporary sensual delights. We can apply that witchy epigram, moreover, to a lot of things today.  The law today, for example, protects the foul.

Children - no more childlike?

The above is a real picture of the condition of school education in India.  A front page report in the Delhi edition of The Hindu (13 Nov 2013) carries the photo from a teacher training institute in Dharwad.  The institute (DIET) which trains primary school teachers has only one student, and 6 teachers.  The previous batch had just two students. The Times of India carries another report on the same day: ' Need Parenting Help? Call a Coach .'  More and more parents are turning to experts for advice on how to deal with their children! Why have children become such a problem that parents need expert advice and teachers seem to be terrified of them - so terrified that teacher training institutes are running the danger of shutting down?

Nangeli

Historical Fiction Nangeli was beautiful beyond comparison.  She flowed in the veins of lustful men’s dreams like an intoxication.  Even her marriage to Kandappan did not diminish the number of her admirers. “You are the pride of the Ezhavas,” Kandappan murmured in Nangeli’s ears as he lay fondling the shapely curves of her youthful body.    Kandappan and Nangeli belonged to low caste of Ezhavas.  They were untouchables.  But even the most aristocratic Namboothiri longed to fondle Nangeli’s teasing breasts.  The people of Nangeli’s caste were supposed to stand at a distance of 36 paces from the higher caste people.  But  even the men of His Majesty Sri Moolam Thirunal, King of Travancore, slept with Nangeli in the darkness of their dreams. When Nangeli walked, the wild roses on the wayside blossomed and emitted the fragrance of musk. “Kandappa, Kandappa,” called Neelan through his gasps.  Kandappan stopped ploughing the field and asked Neelan what the matter was

Vocation

 Fiction Sister Angela decided to leave her religious calling and life in the convent. “What makes you feel that you have no vocation?” asked her Mother Superior for the umpteenth time.  ‘Vocation’ in the Catholic parlance meant ‘God’s call to be a nun or a priest.’ Angela understood that she would not be granted dispensation from her religious vows unless she gave her reason for stepping out of the religious habit.  She wanted love, she said candidly.  Not the kind of abstract, spiritual love that Jesus and Mary and the hundreds of saints offered her copiously.  She wanted real, human love.  Mother Superior was shocked.  How could a woman who had been donning the religious habit for about a decade desire such a demeaning thing as human love with all its vulgar passions and filthy acts and filthier body fluids? It was now Angela’s turn to be shocked.  She had not meant sex when she said love.  Why did the Mother’s thoughts go in that direction?  Angela wondered.

Teaching

"I will take you to the court," said the student who was asked to leave the classroom for being "a nuisance". The teacher bent down and touched the feet of the student. "Please, do.  If it can make you a human being."

Bombs

  Fiction “Bombs are the strategies employed by people who reach their level of incompetence,” said Shyamsunder to his son, Manvender. “Why did people explode bombs near where Modi was speaking?” The 14 year-old Manvender had asked. “... and incompetence is reciprocal,” Shyamsunder went on.  “Modi had exploded some bombs about a decade ago.  They are now coming back to him.” Shyamsunder was running a coaching institute for IIT aspirants (“and also for ordinary students,” he would add with a sly smile) in Patna.  He had a been a computer programmer for a while in a private firm in Delhi.  He had to leave when the director of the firm, Mr Ram Kumar, had risen to his level of incompetence.  According to the Peter Principle, the corporate sector gives promotions to the staff until they reach a position whose demands turn out to be beyond their competence.  Incompetence gives birth to manipulations. “Management is not possible without some manipulation,” Mr Ram Kum

Discovery

Short Fiction   Sculptor was frustrated.   He had a theory that every rock contained within it the statue which the artist has only to discover.  Sculpture is the art of dis-covering.  But the rock on which he was working refused to reveal the statue it contained.  Sculptor looked at his semi-finished statue from left and right, front and back, from all angles possible.  No, this isn’t what I had seen in the rock.  Yes, a sudden realisation dawned on him.  I’ve been making a mistake.  I had seen a particular statue in the rock while the rock contained a quite different one.   He took his hammer and chisel again.  In the place of Sita which he had been trying to carve, now emerged Ravana.  With one face containing all the ten faces. 

Narendra Modi and Sardar Patel

If Mr Narendra Modi’s admiration for Sardar Patel is born of a genuine understanding of the latter, his Statue of Unity project merits the nation’s approval.  Modi has decided to spend an estimated sum of Rs 2500 crore to erect Patel’s statue in the Narmada.  Cynics and Modi’s critics will thumb their noses at the expenditure incurred at a time when a large number of people in Modi’s state are labouring under the burden of day-to-day subsistence. But Shahjahan would not have built the Taj Mahal had he applied this kind of logic to his historical aspirations.  India would have missed one of the world’s wonders.  Modi is the contemporary Shahjahan giving us the world’s tallest statue. Is Modi merely a modern day Shahjahan trying to engrave his name indelibly in the annuls of history?  Or is he playing yet another political game to add a new avatar to the already overcrowded pantheon of the Sangh Parivar?  Does Modi know what the Sardar really was, how diametrically op

Rotten Onions

Husband came home jubilantly because he had managed to get a kilogram of onions at half the market price, thanks to Sheila didi. “Rotten,” said Wife in her characteristic laconic way after opening the precious packet of onions. “Really?”  Husband was agitated.  Agitation was his characteristic way.  “How could the government sell onions at half the market price?  It has to be rotten.  No dealer will sell onions at that rate even to the government in these days when governments are dictated to by traders.  The question is why the media didn’t pick it up.” “See this,” said Wife.  She showed him the front page report on his favourite newspaper, The Hindu , which said, “Delhiites say Govt selling ‘rotten’ onions”.  No wonder there was no rush for onions today, mused Husband who would not have bought the onions otherwise.  But he had to justify himself before Wife.  So he said, “I wonder why the media doesn’t pursue the matter beyond the obvious.  For example, where

The Casual Vacancy

Book Review Barry Fairbrother dies giving rise to a vacancy in the Parish council.  There are many aspirants for the vacant post.  J K Rowling’s novel, The Casual Vacancy , is partly about the struggles of the aspirants to materialise their dream.  The novel is more about such social issues as juvenile aberration, pornography, drug addiction, and child abuse.  The novel presents a terribly bleak and partly frivolous world.  Linguistic obscenity hangs heavily on the reader’s mind as he/she turns pages hoping to see some light at the end of the tunnel.  But all that you will get is more and more darkness.  Rowling is writing about a society that shrugs at revelations of evil.  A character in the novel, the adolescent Stuart “Fats” Wall, tries to defeat his father in the Parish council election by hacking into the council’s website and posting a report that his father was a thief, only to realise that “the world, it seemed, had merely shrugged.  Evil is a natural concomitant

My School – a fantasy

“We have all learned most of what we know outside school.  Pupils do most of their learning without, and often despite, their teachers.” I don’t know how many people will agree with the statements above.  Ivan Illich wrote that 4 decades ago in his deservedly celebrated book, Deschooling Society .  He argued that “Everyone learns how to live outside school.  We learn to speak, to think, to love, to feel, to play, to curse, to politick and to work without interference from a teacher.  Even children who are under a teacher’s care day and night are no exception to the rule.” I am a teacher who has been working in an exclusively residential school for over a decade.  I won’t disagree with Illich. Of late, my mind which is normally logical is flooded with fantasies.  The fantasies are all about a dream school that I would like to open.  A school where children will be free to bloom without constraints imposed by systems.  Play, sleep, eat, and let children do what

Leader makes the difference

“Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things,” said Management guru, Peter Drucker.  Many institutions as well as nations have gone down the tunnel of damnation merely due to lack of good leadership, though their management was good.  Doing things right is not a guarantee that one is doing the right things.  When the Jews wanted to stone the adulteress to death, they were doing things right.  When Jesus told them, “Let him who has not sinned cast the first stone,” he was doing the right thing.  [John 8:1-11] The Hindu newspaper today [22 Oct] carries a review of Maya Tudor’s book, The Promise of Power: The Origins of Democracy in India and Autocracy in Pakistan.   Both India and Pakistan had the same origins: a British colony.  Yet India became a democracy that empowered the people and Pakistan became a theocracy which enervated its citizens.   Why did it happen? The answer lies in the difference between the Congress Party and the Musl

Barbed Wires and Tall Walls

Fiction “Imagine a future, 10 years from now or 20 years from now, when the United States of America is still holding people who have been charged with no crime, on a piece of land that is not part of our country.  Is that who we are?  Is that something that our founders foresaw?” Saleem Syed’s ears stood up.  Could the President of America have really said that?  The TV was broadcasting Barack Obama’s speech on national security.  Saleem’s hand moved impulsively to his mobile phone.  “Can you arrange for me a visit to Guantanamo Bay?” “Tough, boy, but I can try.  What gives you the idea, however?”  It was the editor-publisher of the weekly for which Saleem had been working as a journalist for years.   In a couple of days’ time his editor-publisher got him the permission to visit Gitmo, as Guantanamo is known among people closely associated with it.  T&C applied, of course. Surrounded by the sea where the steep hills did not reach, the prison camp stoo

BMW

Fiction Sheila could not sleep.  She turned this way and that in bed.  Her husband was working on his computer as usual to meet yet another deadline.  Life is about meeting deadlines these days, she thought as she turned yet again letting the bed sheet fall off her body.  She could never sleep without a bed sheet on her body, however hot the weather might be. Has little Robin’s angst entered my body like a ghost?  Sheila wondered.  Robin was a student of hers in class 4.  Sheila was a teacher in a residential school.  Robin, one of her students, had lost his usual cheer and grace in the last few days. “What happened to you, young man?”  Sheila confronted Robin in the hostel before his bedtime.  The little boy wouldn’t speak.  He began to sob instead.  “Come on, tell me, what’s the problem.  I assure you of a solution whatever the problem.” It took much cajoling and more tenderness to get words through Robin’s sobs.  “They not believe, Ma’m... Dad has a BMW, I