It is a fact universally accepted that an act is done much easier if someone else does it for you. Web design and maintenance falls in the same category. How better it would be if a webmaster did not have to worry about mastering the web, if he could be just sitting and adding content! Blogs arose with the same intention, separating content from design and freeing the author from worries of the latter. But lo, in being a good author, the webmaster has stopped being the master. As a necessary corollary to freedom from design, arose the fact that you lost control over design. That font is not quite right! I wish the icon for ’email’ was a little different! I wish I could mend that CSS and that template! Well, with a blog, you just pine if you are not that technically adept. Being a webdesigner, webmaster and writer myself, I traversed all these funny emotions between the blog and the designed-website. Finally, I realize that writing is so much more fun if I leave my designer self behind. And being a webmaster, when you don’t understand half the things, and when all the things go wrong because you don’t know half the things…well, then, you go crazy. I have gone crazy many times. I have fulminated, and then ping-ponged between being a writer once and designer next. So, after more than a year of hibernation that saw much in my personal life, I add something to my blog again. I hope, like the numerous earlier times when I hoped similary but with equally dismal outcomes, that I would write more regularly. Going by my past record, it is hard to believe myself….
Category Archives: Personal
Enjoy? What Enjoy?
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Sometime during my PG years when the semester system had not yet been introduced, a student-teacher session regarding change in syllabi was held at the old location of the departmental library. People sat in various positions. Vociferous pitches were made by many as to why one text should be removed and another introduced. It was a long session and lively one at that. I watched with much interest and amusement as one after another made his or her presentation. At the end the teachers, especially those who were responsible for the UGC mandated syllabi change (or whatever; let’s not get too technical here) made their remarks. And it was here that Swapan da made a little speech that somehow took the cake for me. I don’t recall the verbatim speech, but it went something like this:
For too long I am hearing the complaint that the studies are not enjoyable. This text is not enjoyable. That Austen is so boring and what not. I think you should realize the fact that we are here in the university not for enjoyment, but for studies and instruction. And whoever gave you the idea that studies have to be enjoyable? Studies requires steadfast devotion and hardwork, hardly enjoyable fare. Please make substantive suggestions as to how the syllabi can be changed for the betterment of the coming batches. How it will help you actually….
Not much was spoken after that.
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Understanding Shakespeare by yourself
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Having had my upbringing in Hindi-medium CBSE govt-schools, it was as late as Class XI that I heard of guys like Wordsworth or Keats. Yes, I had even heard of someone called Shakespeare; we had an extract of his from his play As you like it (Seven Ages, probably a speech by Jacques). Point is, I was as dumb about English as you can imagine anyone to be (for that matter, I have maintained the status).
Somehow I went to Jadavpur University English Department. Since I did not have Bengali as a subject during my life, and since there was no provision for Hindi, for morons like us there is a provision for an extra subject called ‘Alternative English’. This Alt Eng had a play by this person called Othello.
We few guys are sitting at the first class of our Alt Eng, when this gentleman walks in briskly, and before banging some book he was holding in his hand (the Arden edition of As you like it, which he insisted all of us buy or acquire), said in all earnestness verging on ferocity:
“I don’t know what the level of your competence is, but now that you are here, you are supposed to read and understand Shakespeare by yourself”.
With an open mouth I thought, “If we are supposed to do so much all by ourselves, what are you here for, sir?”
I took his advice to heart. Henceforth a guy called Ramji Lall became my best friend in college.
Technorati Tags: Shakespeare,second language,Ramji Lall,Jadavpur
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In the buff after football
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Football was rare for us at Jadavpur. There were not many enthusiasts, or there was no ball. There were some champion footballers who did not bother playing with us (rightly so). No girls would watch us meaning their boyfriends would not bother to play, or meaning few would be inspired enough if there was no show-off. But once in a blue moon we did have our games. Sometimes there were the so-called ‘challenge matches’. With our famed rivalry with the Economics Department, we did have a few intensely competitive matches between us. This was one such match in the MA first year, sometime during the monsoon of 2001.
It had been raining, and the whole football ground was a stretch of mud. With Bengalis playing, it was a free-for-all where all are more intent on hitting someone’s leg than the ball. At some point of the time I was on centre-right at midfield, and from there I hit the ball hard, a la Bobby Charlton, and ‘netted’ (no net, sorry) the ball gloriously. Mouths agape. I think two pretty girls from my class on whom I have weaved a few poems, were watching from the other side. Talk of luck. Huh!
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Splattered in mud, we took our dips in the local lake beside the windmill. Light was falling. We did not have any towels with us, so we were having to change our clothes behind the proverbial bush. From far I saw one of these two women coming towards us. Scared I dropped my pants and ran behind the bush, as she came up and met our group. It transpired later that she was coming to ask me to join the Departmental Tour to Sikkim – somehow I had said that if some other woman was not going, I would not come.
So, this young lady comes to meet me to persuade me to go to Sikkim, and I was in my birthday best behind the bush. Of course, I did have some more memories during this Sikkim tour, with this same lady; but let that remain the recipe for another anecdote later.
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Who are you?
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JU has this system called ‘tutorials’ under which a few students are assigned to a teacher, who would seek her out every Wednesday afternoon to slog through two boring hours of a ‘tutorial’ on a topic that the teacher would assign. We were told that the system is a borrowing form Oxbridge . I shall have something more to say about this system at some other place, but for the time being let’s focus on this charming anecdote.
Each year, a new teacher is assigned to a new group of students. During my third year I chanced upon a particularly ferocious specimen and wanted to be reassigned. A fellow colleague also shared the same predicament. So we two went to the ‘co-ordinator’ taking our case. We presented our case, asking to be reassigned to another teacher. She heard us through, and then she asked: “Who are you?”
I could not decide whether it was a commentary on our status or her memory….
Technorati Tags: Jadavpur,identity crisis
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