Nehru's Tryst With Destiny

I recently completed reading "Freedom At Midnight" by Dominique La Pierre and Larry Collins. I must say I discovered a lot of things absolutely not mentioned in the history books right from third standard to the tenth. Our history books seem to have been written by people with selective amnesia which goes to show how much our education system has degraded. The book is not totally without flaws since it is written by a Frenchman and an Australian two decades back. They have been more than a bit patronizing in the way they have written the book, but can be forgiven for that, as Europeans and Australians can write only the way they think - as Europeans and Australians. The book tells a lot about what happened during partition and the inner story which finds just a mention in our history books as a line or two. The saddening part is that after nearly 65 years, India is still fighting the maladies that has plagued it for centuries - communal riots, poverty, illiteracy and a newer malady - corruption. Why do Indians deserve this? After being guided through the earlier years by visionaries such as Gandhi, Nehru, Menon and Sardar Patel does it still have to be known to the world as a nation of illiterates, of religious bigots and where literary authors have to sell their books by depicting India's poverty in all its glory? I do agree that Nehru's and Gandhi's ideas might not hold much water in a modern world and Indians have indeed taken mostly wise decisions throughout the years, post independence, but still the old demons remain. India is the world's largest democracy, but are our elections just a token public relations exercise as one wiki leaks cable pointed out? Do Indians really benefit from this independence and has it done them any real good? Why are politicians still elected based on caste, class and religion and not on their individual merit? Is independence and democracy just buzz words that has no meaning to the ordinary man out on the farms, out in rural India? Gandhi had preached that every Indian politician and bureaucrat should first learn the ropes of his  trade in the villages of rural India. This might not sound very realistic in a modern world but it is true that most of our doctors and engineers live in the cities and the farmers in rural India have improved their lifestyle just a tad bit, migrating to cities where they believe their future lies. Rahul Gandhi and few of our politicians have lived with villagers in villages for a day or two in what might be a lesson out of Gandhi's book, but was this nothing more than a PR exercise? Has it really benefited the villagers or Rahul Gandhi? India did have it's white revolution(milk), green revolution(food self sufficiency) and technology revolution in the recent years and it's growth rate is enviable. But why can't we still end our past maladies after 65 years - those of communal riots, rural poverty and corruption? And why are basic infrastructure such as quality education, basic sanitation, quality medical care, human rights and rural jobs still a precious luxury for the vast majority of Indians? Gandhi talked about these seventy years back but sad to say our politicians are involved in their own private games and hobbies and know as much of Indian history as an Italian does. Our politicians are the modern day maharajahs - who Nehru and Patel hated so much in their heydays.

The weirdest elections in Indian History

I am apolitical. In fact I think politics only when I read the newspapers or read news on the internet. But some of the events happening around us have involved almost everyone - including the aam aadmi (common man).
Let me give an anecdote that happened on a busy road in the middle of Bangalore a few days back.
I was returning back from the center of Bangalore city after some personal work on my Activa scooter when I was stopped by some traffic policemen who had set up an ambush along a curve of the road.
My first thought was that I was on a one way road. No. Had I inadvertently jumped a traffic signal? No, that was not the case too.
The policemen seemed to be checking expired vehicle insurances. They had already stopped a dozen motorists and were going through their papers. A brash young traffic policeman pointed out to me that my papers were all right - but my insurance would expire the next day. I nodded sheepishly, mumbling something about getting it done tomorrow.
Then he got interested in my registration plates. My vehicle was a Kerala registered vehicle bearing the tell-tale KL letters. "Aah! Out of state vehicle I see", he said delightedly in broken English for my benefit. "I need to see your Road Tax papers from Karnataka Road Transport Office or the No Objection Certificate from the Karanataka RTO!"
I said I did not since I was planning to be in Karnataka for just a few months, which was a perfectly valid reason. The RTO rules do not mandate an NOC or payment of road tax if the duration of stay is short. How else would one motor to Chennai to Goa on a holiday trip in that case?
When I was in Chennai for a short period of 6 months, I had paid the lifetime road tax for the same Activa to avoid being hounded by Tamilnadu traffic

policemen; but Bangalore is different; there are vehicle rolling on the roads from all over India - Delhi, UP, AP, HP, Pondicherry, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and the like. And the traffic policemen never bother. And Techies are literate - they usually know their rights.
What surprised me was that the brash traffic policeman suggested that I pay a bribe.
I protested saying that I had already paid Tamilnadu road tax, and I couldn't be expected to pay road tax in every state where I go for short stints.
He was unrelenting. "The only option we have is to confiscate your vehicle. And you will have to appear in court", he said with a smug smile.
"Or", he added, pointing to the elderly traffic inspector casually leaning against his bike."You can pay our respected Sir Rs. 300. Just a small nominal fee for you. Kindly request him".
I thought about the strange existing political situation in the country now. A maverick group called the Aam Aadmi Party was counting on its battle against corruption to win the general elections in just a few weeks and all major political parties were engaged in a debate against corruption. How the hell did these traffic policemen aspire to get away with a corrupt act in such times? The AAP was then actively campaigning against all sorts of corruption bottom up and such an action weeks later would have caused the traffic inspector's summary dismissal and probably a jail term too if the AAP came into power! However Karnataka State was then ruled by the Congress, which was expecting major losses in this general elections.
Was this traffic inspector's last attempt at a bribe before he retired or was he just thumbing his nose at the authorities in power or who planned to come in power? Was this his message to say that AAP or not, I am still the man in charge around here.
For me this was a crisis. I either pay the bribe or have my vehicle towed away. And court appearances was unthinkable.
So I handed over 300 rupees to the elderly traffic inspector, who looked at me carefully and handed 100 rupees back. I had bribed someone for the second time in my life!
Is this the beginning of a new era for corruption? Just as there are loopholes to escape the law so there are loopholes to get trapped. No person would prefer to get his vehicle impounded under some arcane law, than paying a couple of hundred rupees to get away scot-free, for example.
Is the Indian way of corruption only going to meta morph into the sophisticated corruption that exists in Gulf countries called "vaasta"? Or the criminal sophistication of the organized Mafia in countries such as Italy?

On Penpals

Today we have Facebook and a host of social networking sites where we have people whom we know intimately, those who we know well and even those whom we don't know that well. We all come on a common forum and associate digitally. But did you know that long before this happened there were old timers(like me) who had friends called penpals - who had never met each other, who had never talked to each other over the phone, but communicated all the time through ordinary post? Yes, and they trusted each other with full conviction and there was no need for subterfuge like the ones we see on Facebook or Twitter, such as fake profiles, gender and age faking. There was no subterfuge of the kind we saw sometime back on Yahoo chat rooms and Messenger profiles, either. The pen did the talking - hence the name - penpal.
When I was just beginning to read Enid Blyton novels for children of the age group 8-10, I had this deep seated wish to have a penpal, if possible several penpals.
Those days, some magazines had a special page dedicated to penpals - mostly international, but that didn't go very well with me. You might face the same subterfuge we now see on social networking sites.
So I asked my Non Resident uncles and aunts, who were scattered all over the world - Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Oman, Kuwait, et al- all of them science or English teachers, and even two uncles who worked on merchant navy ships, travelling all across the globe- to find a suitable penpal for me. Yes, this was sometime in the early eighties.
One aunt in Nigeria responded that her students even in the teens could not put together an English word. I got the same response from my other relatives working in the other African countries.
My aunt said, "It would be very difficult to find a penpal for you here. We don't want to connect you to an idiot." She did send a short note describing the politics, geography, trade and tribal groups of Nigeria.
I had a cousin of nearly my same age who stayed with his parents in Kuwait at that time, so I asked him if he could be my penpal. We could start by exchanging postal stamps, I said. I had a sizable stamp and coin collection those days, mostly inherited from another uncle also in Kuwait.
My cousin in Kuwait replied to my letter with the customary - how are you? how are your dad and mum?  - the "Dr Livingstone I presume" stuff. That was the first and last mail from him. Either he was not very good at English, or didn't have the patience or time to write letters or found postal communication boring. But he did include a couple of dozen Kuwaiti stamps with that air mail.
And let me add one thing - air mail from the Gulf countries took about one month to reach, unlike the spontaneous email!
My desire for a penpal went unrealized for some years.
I had a series of postal communication with one of my uncles in Oman who worked as an English teacher in a government school there, following a suggestion by my father. My uncle replied to each of my letter diligently.
He became my de facto penpal after that! I must mention that I had at that time never met this uncle in person and neither the cousin in Kuwait I mentioned earlier, for the times they visited Kerala never coincided with our annual migratory visits to Kerala.
Communicating with children is not as easy as some people make it to be. It is not coming down to the child's level, but just the opposite! Successful communication with a child is rather complex, and there is a need to see through the child's eyes. I think that is why we don't see a lot many successful children's books in the market. An adult forgets how it feels to be a child during the growing up period.
But this uncle was special. Whenever he wrote to my dad and mum he would include a short note for me and sometimes he wrote to me with a short note for my parents. I eagerly awaited his letters.
Oman at that time was facing an oil boom and was one of the richest countries in the world. Following modernization by the then Sultan Qaboos, it was a liberal place to be. There were migrant workers from all over Africa, the Middle East - Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Sri Lanka to name a few.
And these migrant workers wrote home, and didn't use the dollar phone cards as they do now.
So when I requested my uncle for stamps he made a public request to the students in his class to gather any stamps they had at home and come to class with them; complete with instructions(which I had given him) on how to tear off the stamps from the cover without damaging them. I got a flood of stamps in each letter from my uncle after that. That made waiting for those letters from Oman all the more exciting notwithstanding the fact that a letter took one or one and a half month to reach either side, though air mail.
The remoteness of the village in Maharashtra where we stayed at that time must have added to the delay.
The process of communicating to and fro was painful but I would never swap that for the modern day social networking that caters to instant gratification and causes the addiction of the likes Facebook users report.

When the tweets never stopped.

This post is a trip down memory lane. And it might not be very accurate since it reminisces my childhood days and today I am much much older and might miss many of the beautiful things I might have noticed as a child.
The first thing that comes to my mind on my visits to my native Kerala these days is the change in the flora and fauna since my childhood days.
Not drastically but still quite subtle changes.
The weeds that lined the country roads then were some type of fern like plants that folded their leaves on touching them. We used to call them the "touch-me-not"s. I have never come across these plants lately.
The farmlands used to teem with insects and it was not rare to find a couple of scorpions hanging by their venomous tails, the sting being tied with a string to a banana shoot by some naughty schoolchild who didn't want to decimate the poor scorpion but neither let it escape his torment.
There were these huge centipedes that crawled anywhere and everywhere and which would curl into a spiral on physical contact, making them look like bulbous one rupee coins - the "atta". The roads teemed with them during the rainy season and vehicles and pedestrians using the road squashed them pretty hard. The scorpions are no longer to be seen (for the good?!), and neither these centipedes and millipedes.
If you dug the earth it would be impossible to go a few inches deeper into the earth before scooping up these giant earthworms. Earthworms, they say are good to keep the soil fertile - for vermi-compost. Now they use fertilizers in the tonnes. During the rainy season the rivulets sprang from springs that were almost perennial. No longer! Now the water table has sunk deep and to get water the year round you would need a very deep well. The streams are a once in a week affair that dry off soon after the rains.
I remember as a child we used to play a little game. When we visited our uncles and aunts in their houses in the vicinity we first checked the water wells. And since it was in the monsoons that we visited Kerala, the water table being quite high we could touch the water surface in the wells with our small hands. No longer. The water no longer comes to arm level now and the traditional mode of using bucket and rope is now replaced by motor pumps to reach the receding water table.
And the ants. I remember at least three varieties of ants - the big black ants, the small red ones - which you could never avoid getting bitten by if you used the small trails that crisscrossed the farms, and the smaller harmless ones that could be found all over the kitchen and store rooms.
And how cam I miss the sparrows? The chirps of the sparrows is now just a figment of memory - they are nowhere to be seen.
I remember one night, one of us kids had a cold and one electric light in the house was kept on in case of an emergency. I got up that night to a sight I have never seen before. The light in the room had attracted thousands of migratory locusts so thick that you would think there was snowfall. In suicide missions they rammed themselves against the light as their wings fell off and they lay twitching on the floor. Seems my grandfather was accustomed to this sight and he let loose the Alsatian dog we had and the two cats, and all the three pets had a sumptuous feast of butter soft locust meat.
I wonder whether we are actually changing the world around us in a time bracket of just quarter of a century? Traditionally cocoa, pepper, tapioca (kappa) and coffee were grown along with banana plantains in the midst of rubber trees. But now the cash crops are solely rubber, pineapple and vanilla. The rubber trees tend to draw a lot of ground water, the pineapple and vanilla in addition to the coconut trees, are protected by massive sprays of insecticides.
All these chemicals that we inject into the soil, are they changing the face of the earth? A point to ponder.

Being Thankful For Life's Smaller Mercies...

The average man leads a quiet life of desperation, said Thoreau.
This is but natural, to submit to the lowest common denominator. But need it be? There are three main spheres that concern the average man today.
The first is himself. Every organ in his body is performing its function to make him live a full fledged active life. Every piece of his flesh is coordinating with another to breathe life into him. His whole body functions like a well oiled machine. Should he not be grateful for this? That each passing day, his body has endured the forces of nature, performs its duty well and makes him move on, even as the clock ticks another second, his heart beating muffled drumbeats to the grave - to quote Longfellow?
Should he not be grateful for this? That not one part of the complex structure that he is, has not had a major malfunction, so far?
The other sphere is his interaction with fellow human beings. The average man has a family or at least is known to a certain ring of people around him. That is his social environment. He has good friends, enemies and others who don't care but know that he exists. Should he not be proud of his existence and his contribution to such a complex social structure. Friends may come, friends may go, relatives may turn against him, or he may find neutral companions at his office; considering the complex social politics that make all this happen. All this is his social environment around him, his own little world. Should he not be proud, that come what may this private social world is intact? Minus a friend or foe now, add a fried or foe next, or just plain onlookers who know his name and or where he lives?
The third sphere which is more of a lifeless nature are the machines around him that have so inconspicuously crept into his life that he now takes them for granted. Should not a man be grateful that each passing moment not one electronic, mechanical, electro-mechanical, digital, electrical device - et al, has never ever failed him in a way so as to cripple him, stop him in his tracks where he is helpless or grind his life to a stop. These man made devices that were introduced into human life ever since the stone man started creating tools, have now evolved into machines and devices, has never failed you in a manner so as to drastically reduce your quality of life. Should you not be thankful for this?
Every man should learn not be desperate about the larger forces of life beyond his control, but be thankful for the smaller mercies of life, if he has to appreciate the purpose of his existence.

Hunters And Gatherers

"Some men are born hunters, and some gatherers. This has been inherited from our primitive ancestors who gathered fruits and nuts for survival, or hunted animals to survive."
Albert Figurado was a born tinkerer and a collector of riff-raff. He was a vehicle mechanic and he saw value in everything he stumbled across - a nut-bolt on the road, washers of varying sizes, discarded screw drivers, ink pens without caps or caps without the pen, refill points, electric wires of varying lengths, a broken kaleidoscope, an ancient mariner's compass of no real utility, discarded magnetic compasses, disintegrating rubber tubes, broken plugs, unusable hardware, an old bust Polaroid camera, an ancient radio, a ballot box he had once bought at an auction.
Each of these he collected and stored them in neat little boxes in his garage. He would find use for each of these objects, which to any other person would have been worthless, and constructed odd looking pens ,with parts from three or four discarded pens; created objects of utility from discarded objects which other wise would have found its way to the town dump or lay rusting on the road. If anything in his house needed repair, he never went out shopping to buy the needed stuff, he made use of his collection to fabricate contraptions that served his purpose. He took pride in this activity and anything and everything he came across was recycled to create hybrid odd but usable instruments.
As he grew old, and his five children were scattered across the world in five different continents, his passion evolved to a finer variation. He no longer collected discarded parts, in fact he disposed all of them with the garbage one fine day. He was now interested in a new passion. He asked his sons abroad to send him stuff that he could use to make his life easier.
But the point was he never in fact used any of these. So he became the owner of a dozen Maglite torches of varying models - some that ran on batteries, others on rechargeable batteries, some with LEDs, others with bright fluorescent bulbs. He asked for cameras, and each of his sons sent across cameras of different variations, for what they thought was their duty as obedient sons. Albert was the owner of a microwave, an induction stove, a flat TV.
But one fine day when there was a massive power surge and each of them went kaput, he still kept them. They were beyond repair but he collected them, the born collector he was. His sons as usual came to his rescue, and bought a replacement for each of these. His collection of ceramic pottery was carefully preserved, but never used, hopefully bearing the prospect of some use in the future. He asked his sons for mobiles, and he got five of them, one each from his five sons. But he never used these and they lay charging all day long on the electric sockets.
He became the owner of laptops; but alas he was technology illiterate, so he never used them. He owned three of them at once and each of them disintegrated for want of use. That folks is the story of Albert Figurado, the born collector. His sons waited and waited to see when he would become hunters, like them....

Education instills Corruption and the Greed of Money at an Early Age

I have had brushes with corruption - both ideological and practical in my years of study. I am going to cut a long story short in this post.
The school where I completed my higher secondary studies was in a remote part of Maharashtra which was practically lawless. I was in the tenth standard and we shared our examination center with a local vernacular language school.
The day of the exam I was aghast seeing exam bound school girls stuffing study-help books into their panties - making them seem to be in advanced stages of pregnancy - one place which certainly no flying squad would dare to explore. The boys were not shy either. With their favorite teachers conducting the exam, they became extremely bold and indulged in mass copying. The other teachers had to turn a blind eye since these teachers had been bribed heavily on the pretext of paying tuition-after-school fees. The tuition never took place, but help during the exams was guaranteed.
At the other exam center in town, which was the vernacular school itself, it was mayhem. But the irony of the whole thing was that in spite of having study guides next to them while giving the exam, the over-all passing score was as low as 18 % while 35% was the pass marks for each subject.
However the very next year that same school had a district topper - perhaps this was one guy who could read the study guides and locate the correct answers very fast. And of course, if you didn't know where to find the answers the friendly supervisor was always ready to help with the page number in the textbook, or hand over a copy of the answer sheet of a good student who had finished earlier. Usually the help was in the form of the hint of the final correct answer. So the question was there, your friendly supervisor gave you the answer and you had to write the gobbledygook in between the question and the answer. The exam paper valuators were so hassled and understaffed that they rarely looked at the whole solution; if the correct answer was there at the last line, that was just fine.
Now to the head hunters of exam paper evaluators. Once on my way to my degree college which was a good eight hours journey from my residence at that time, I came into contact with a guy who was travelling to the same destination as me. When I told him where I was from in Maharashtra, he said, that he knew the place well. In fact he had traveled there to meet a certain "Peter Benedict", to whom the exam papers for a high school from a neighboring district had been allotted.
Benedict Peter was our family friend and a teacher at the same school where I studied and was know for his steadfast credibility. I asked this gentleman whether he got anything out of Mr Peter; that is the tampering the answer papers, but he nodded with a 'No', but added that he got those answer sheets allotted to a more friendly teacher who was more agreeable to him. Probably this guy on the bus had connections at high places. How this system worked was, the student left blank spaces in the answer sheet, which was then submitted to the appropriate evaluator; the evaluator himself filled in the blanks with the correct answers. So lawfully there was no trace of any wrongdoing once the marks were allotted!
My next brush came when I was staying in a hostel while doing my higher secondary. We had a budding doctor who was the son of a vice chancellor in Madhya Pradesh, and studied in a local medical college - after giving capitation fees, of course. I never saw him studying even though medical studies are notorious for their bookish culture. This guy used to be away whole nights at sleazy places and partying with shady friends.. The night before the medical studies I found him not sitting with his books, as the rest of his brethren would be doing at that moment. He confided in me that he had accurate information that the medicine question papers had leaked and he would be away all night trying to find places where they could be located.
In the twelfth standard the education system just broke down in most schools. Physics, Chemistry, Biology and Math teachers were in high demand in the college where I studied because some of these teachers were actually on the board who set the papers. So the second year of high school, there were no classes, just students queuing up for tutions at these teacher's residences, joining the rat race at an early stage in the true sense. I for once. balked at tuition; it just didn't fit my study style. I wanted to understand what I learnt and not be spoon fed by an automaton PhD in Math(I feel most PhDs are misfits and not fit for any kind of teaching job; but of course there are huge exceptions!).
So we had no classes at college, attendance was nil, and I was burning the midnight oil at the hostel, equipped with a table lamp and books sitting late into the night on the hostel terrace. We had a certain English teacher I will call AZM whose classes ran full houses in the preparatory previous year. That was because of his huge grasp of the English language, love for literature and English and a witty disposition.
But the very next year his classes were empty, save for a few girls. His class was almost always the first class on the timetable and I made it a point not to miss the English classes, while the others were busy attending tuition classes and giving mock tests in IIT style. The word spread that AZM was actually taking classes, and some of the students realized that they were not going to learn any English in tuitions from Science teachers who stumbled with basics of the language. So the numbers swelled till they ran up to two dozen - mostly them planning to go for higher studies in the US of A.
But only till the mid of that year. Exams were fast approaching and the science tuition masters, who were raking as much as a thousand rupees per course- a huge sum in the late 1980s - upped their ante and went into war mode with their mock exams and hints for the oncoming exam. Of course they had to do it; their reputation would depend on the number of students appearing in the merit list that year, which of course would pay rich dividends the next year too - to continue the vicious cycle. I for once, never saw the inside of these tuition classes.
The day of my Chemistry practical exams I was to experience the cost of not adhering to the tuition culture. The chemistry teacher who had among his tuition candidates my close competitor student in Chemistry who was just a fraction of marks behind me in ranking, pointed out to the visiting external supervisor that I was the brightest student on campus and that he must test my knowledge. The usual ploy is to wine and dine the visiting supervisors so that they didn't create any problems during the practical exams for the favored candidates, but gave full marks blindly - depending on the quality of the wine and dine of course. Pointing me out as exceptional meant that I was about to face some "gotcha" questions that the others would not, since the supervisor would then definitely take up the challenge and try to match his wits with mine. Fortunately the question - answer results were positive but I can never forgive this particular scheming S*o*B.
The event of the actual higher secondary exam capped it all. A week before the exam, I was approached by a friend who was also training with one of the high profile tutors. He wanted to make a deal with me. There was a certain Bihari guy who he knew who had access to the leaked papers for the oncoming exams. My friend told me that if I could afford to shell out a couple of five hundred rupees per paper, I too could have access to the leaks. I didn't believe him; but a few minutes before the exam the next day, he handed over a sheaf of papers. "These are the leaked papers, he told me, mark my words, this is just a sample of what I can provide you."
I didn't give a second thought to the papers, for two reasons. I didn't believe they were genuine, and secondly I was afraid I would get nervous hunting the answers to the papers and forget what I had already prepared. When I returned from the exam hall I compared the leaks with the original question paper. They were almost identical, save for a few questions. However I didn't proceed with any of this monkey business - and that was good, because the third day all the question papers were replaced by new ones, from what I heard from my friend. The board keeps about six sets of question papers and in case of a leak, one of these sets of question papers replaces the original.
But I had the last laugh. When the results came out, I got higher marks in all subjects than this friend, who had attended Physics, Maths, Chemistry and Biology tuition in addition to the steroid of leaked question papers. I was just getting to realize how complicated and warped the education system was becoming. During my graduation I had another brush with corruption in education. The system was thus: you gave the exams, but you were usually made to fail by a few marks and then a week after the results were announced, you usually filed for re-evaluation.
The concept of re-evaluation was just incredulous to me. How on earth could another evaluator re-judge the evaluated answers by the first examiner? The trick was re-evaluators were paid handsomely for the re-evaluation process, since the board found it hard to get examiners  for the re-evaluation process. The the re-examiners were also contacted by the examinees and bribed to get the extra 7 - 10 marks required to get through.
So after every exam you found a huge number of borderline cases all crying out for re-evaluation. That was the whole intention of failing the students; border line at the first attempt; and giving them a second chance through re-evaluation to pump in the few extra marks required to get through. And the teachers made some quick bucks too.
I guess the situation is worse in states like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh which are practically lawless. Well I have rambled enough, but gives some food for thought.
Engineers and Doctors with worthless degrees and feeble brains? - would you allow nation-building by such lame ducks. Reforms are necessary - but the Government almost always seem to move in the wrong direction, and hiccups later. Thank god for small mercies!
Before the the ilk of Anna Hazare and Kiran Bedi confront the government machinery like David did before Goliath, they must sit and ponder how the very concept originates at the grass roots.