VIRAJ DESAI

HELP, HELP SYCOPHANS!

Poor Ramakrishnan! We Indians won’t even let him work. His only crime, he happens to be the seventh Indian (or Indian origin) to win the Nobel Prize. A nation of one billion people, we started sending congratulations, each according to his might that his computer system crashed. And with it is gone all his important documents and research papers. All his life-time achievement seems to be deluged in the sycophancy of the largest sycophantic nation of the world.

Success has many fathers but failure has none. In the temple town of Chidambaram, teachers vie with one another claiming to have taught the Nobel laureate chemistry in schools where he never went. Anecdotes depicting his genius and his singularly profound respect for the teacher are invented by the hour that story-telling has become a cottage industry in this town.

VIRAJ DESAI

VERSATILE NEWTON

The apple did not fall on my head because I was holding it in one hand and munching it. In my other hand was Newton and the Counterfeiter, a well-researched and elegantly written book by Thomas Levenson centered on the genius Sir Isaac Newton.

It was Britain’s worst liquidity crisis; recovering still from the Civil War and the Glorious Revolution that saw the Catholic King James II driven out by Mary Stuart and William of Orange. The antiquated silver coins were melted down and sold as bullion in Holland and France where they fetched a much higher price.

The Royal Mint produced nearly half a million pounds worth of silver currency between 1686 and 1690, but in the next five years it could find no silver to coin, putting the Treasury in a spot.

It was then Newton got an SOS from Chancellor of the Exchequer Charles Montagne. Lord Montagne knew Newton from Cambridge days and was convinced that only a genius like Newton could solve the problem. When Newton took over as warden in May 1696, he found the Royal Mint riddled with corruption and inefficiency. He was rapidly forced to deploy all his wits against a horde of counterfeiters, chief of which was William Chaloner, a wily rogue who clipped shillings.

Newton realized that the problem had to be fought on two fronts – replacing old coins and eliminating clippers and counterfeiters. He pursued Chaloner relentlessly through the back alleys of the crime-ridden London, interviewing more than two hundred accomplices and enemies until he had enough evidence to build an airtight case. Subsequently, Chaloner was hanged in March 1699.

The book brings out the tenacity of character and the sheer intensity of concentration, and the determination not to let a problem go till he extracted all the answers. John Maynard Keynes described Newton as a versatile genius – lawyer, economist, historian, theologian, mathematician and astronomer. The book reads like a spy thriller and is recommended to anyone looking beyond gastronomical delights.

SNEHA SALONI
snh.sngh3@gmail.com

A HEADMASTER AT 16

At 16, Babar Ali probably is the youngest headmaster in the world. A teenager in charge of teaching hundreds of students in his family's backyard, he runs classes for poor children from his village. The saga of this teenager from Murshidabad (West Bengal) kindles the desire to learn amid the direst poverty-stricken.

Ali rises early, does his household chores, takes an auto-rickshaw and finally walks to Raj Govinda school, 10 km from home. The school is the best in this part of West Bengal, where hundreds of boys and girls attend. In class 12, Ali is studious and smart, and a model student. He is the first member of his family ever to get a proper education.

"It's not easy for me to come to school because I live so far away," he says, "but the teachers are good and I love learning. And my parents believe I must get the best education possible that's why I am here."

Chumki Hajra, a pupil at Babar Ali's school, describes her day thus:
Every morning, instead of going to school, she scrubs the dishes and cleans the homes of her neighbours. She's done this ever since she was five. For her work she earns just 200 rupees a month. It's money her family desperately needs.

"My father is handicapped and can't work. We need the money. If I don't work, we can't survive as a family. So I have no choice but to do this job."

Babar Ali has made it his mission to help Chumki and hundreds of other poor children in his village. The minute his lessons are over at Raj Govinda school, Babar Ali doesn't stop to play. At four o'clock every afternoon after Babar Ali gets back to his family home a bell summons children to his house.

Standing on a podium, Babar Ali lectures them about discipline, then study begins. Babar Ali gives lessons just the way he has heard them from his teachers. Some children are seated in the mud, others on rickety benches under a rough, homemade shelter.

"In the beginning I was just play-acting, teaching my friends, but then I realised these children will never learn to read and write if they don't have proper lessons. It's my duty to educate them, to help our country build a better future."
(Courtesy: BBC News)

Aaheli Bagchi

aaheli.bagchi@gmail.com

TO SEX OR TO CELIBATE

Is it right for a celibate Priest to kiss a married woman, especially when she has come for guidance? The answer depends on whether you have an ethical heart or a human heart. It is, of course, ethically wrong for a man, let alone a priest, to look at a woman with lustful eyes. The human heart that knows the frailties of the flesh whispers: to sex is natural but to celibate is unnatural.

To find one of the partners guilty and let the other go scot- free is undoubtedly a travesty of justice. Medieval societies considered women as temptress and blamed them for anything that goes wrong. The modern society blames it on sex, instead. The pertinent question is that, had the priest stopped at the passionate kiss, would the hapless woman, or perhaps the fortunate woman, let him go?

Passions kindled had to find their logical end, no matter who the prime mover may be. And out of the unholy wedlock came the boy who called his progenitor, the Reverend father, not his own father. Mysterious are the ways of religion which outsiders will never understand.

News report in TOI Delhi (Oct 17, page 18): Pat Bond, who went for a spiritual conference in Illinois 26 years ago, was passionately kissed by Rev Henry Willenborg, a dynamite, handsome priest, drowning her into a vortex of lust with no holds barred. Out came the inevitable, Nathan Halbach, now 22. Both the mother and son are fighting cancer but raising burning moral issues.

Pallavi Malik

malik.pallavi@gmail.com

COOKING FOR THE RETARDED

“The mentally challenged won’t ask for food or money. They normally sit in the same place the whole day, and they are seen in the same place every day,” says N. Krishnan, who has been feeding these hapless one thrice a day for the past seven years.

It costs him Rs 8000 a day, and the Akshaya Trust of Madurai supports him for 22 days a month; the rest comes from his pocket.
A former chef in a five-star-hotel in Bengaluru, he cooks the food himself and serves the mentally retarded. He also disposes of unclaimed corpses of the destitute.

People wonder why he left his five-star job to feed the mentally handicapped. With a smile, he replies, “I just like it”. A winner of the Real Hero Award and a cash prize of Rs 5 lakh instituted by CNN-IBN in collaboration with Reliance Industries, he remains a bachelor at 28.

Parvathy Gopalakrishnan

parvathy8288@gmail.com

PHILOSOPHER, IMPOSTOR AND GREAT TEACHER

“I am an imposter. I don’t know what journalism is. I want to learn something. 40 years of ignorance has to end somewhere”, said Jug Suraiya, the inimitable humorist and Associate Editor of The Times of India. He was talking to journalism students at TSJ on Thursday.

The session began with an enquiry of what we had learnt so far. In response to several answers, he affirmed, “One of the best ways to recognize whether you have learnt something is to teach someone.”

He raised some very significant questions: “Are journalists disembodied spirits or are they a part of the community? Are they split personalities? Is journalism cramming opinion down the throats of people?” The answer according to him was, “Journos are like triangles with four angles.”

“Everyone looks at things through the prism of their own experiences, prides and prejudices.” Therefore a certain amount of subjectivity is bound to exist even in the most objective and unbiased reports.

Speaking about the freedom of press he said, “There can never be such a thing called freedom of expression. The journalist’s freedom is circumscribed by the establishment he or she works with.”

“A journalist is first and foremost a reader, listener and viewer. These are the ingredients of a good journalist.”

And his parting shot: "I have to go back and pretend to be a journalist."

Karthik H

karthik.h.krishnan@gmail.com

A TONGUE OF THE SLIP!

It was a Freudian slip. Our netas consider people as cattle – the milich cow to be milked during polls and slaughtered thereafter. A fast learner, Shashi Tharoor understood the game right at the outset. Gandhi cap and Gandhian austerity is not his cup of tea. Champaign and sherry, whiskey and vodka keep the spirit of a diplomat high. And a politician can tighten anybody’s belt but his own. After all, the diplomat-turned-politician has fought and won the election with a convincing majority. It would be an irony if the nation has to spend a fortune to keep Shashi Tharoor poor.

If you're looking for trouble, then politics is the right place. As Shashi Tharoor has seen these past few days, his sense of humour is not in the same level as that of the country or of his party. In politics, absurdity is not a handicap. Absurdity gets a new meaning when certain politicians spend crores of rupees on statues of themselves and elephants. India is a land of faulty subsidies and useless politicians who extend sops and rice for One rupee a kilo, That's governmental economics. It's unfortunate that people like Narayanamoorthy, Amartya Sen and Madhavan Nair are not MPs. Presumably because of the axiom, I think, therefore I am not a MP.