Lockdown again, and the corruption of English

Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee declared a sudden lockdown starting Sunday the 15th May after repeatedly saying that she did not want to do it. Perhaps, given the dire Covid situation in the state, her hand was forced, but for once I am really upset with her, because she did it almost as suddenly as the PM had done it countrywide last year, and at that time she and many other opposition leaders had strenuously criticized him for bringing untold hardship and misery quite unnecessarily upon the lives of millions of people, particularly poor migrant workers who were left stranded and near-destitute. Photos on TV and in the papers, showing vast numbers of working people scrambling into buses and trains to go home all through Saturday bore witness to a repetition of the same unnecessary travails visited upon ordinary people again. Why on earth couldn’t they give at least a three-day notice before clamping down? Wouldn’t last-minute crowding in bazaars and transport actually help to accelerate the spread of the contagion? (Actually I have the same question about reducing the number of trains and shopping hours – but neither ‘experts’ nor leaders listen to the voice of common sense any more.)

Pupu says it is raining in Delhi, and the weather has turned pleasant. I am happy for her, and a little jealous too, because it’s sweltering heat in these parts, even while we wait for updates on a probable cyclone coming up from the Bay of Bengal.

I have been musing anew on how we are abusing and mangling the English language, especially in America and in this country (where we combine plain ignorance with awkward Indianisms and a desperation to ape Americans to make a strange ugly caricature of English), to which both the print media and the increasingly influential ‘social’ media contribute mightily. Once upon a time, we have heard our fathers say, people read newspapers like The Statesman or The Hindu to pick up tips on how to write English well: these days I use newspapers in class to give exercises to my pupils, picking out as many mistakes and examples of stilted or unidiomatic usage as they can. Adults develop bad habits, and children, not knowing any better, pick them up. So these days they are all ‘reverting back’ instead of ‘replying’; they write b’day and vacay and prep because they think it makes them sound ‘cool’ (rather than smart or elegant: such words have been forgotten); journos throw around stupid words like ‘Opposition slams government’, ‘Minister flays opposition’ without bothering to know what ‘slam’ and 'flay' mean, just as they write ‘heads will roll’ when they merely mean that some people will be removed from their posts. I was amazed to see someone recently using the expression ‘heart rending’, having long ago accepted with a sigh that everybody keeps writing ‘heart wrenching’ instead, simply because they have never learnt the right word. They are always ‘calling out’ someone or the other these days, simply because Americans no longer know the word ‘criticize’, and 'taking a call' when they could simply 'decide', writing 'to not be' instead of 'not to be' because Americans have forgotten the right syntax. How many non sub-editors know that that species of animal habitually uses stupid abbreviations merely out of laziness, or merely because they are concerned with fitting a headline within a given number of column centimetres? – hence suddenly, in the race to vaccinate all humankind, ‘jab’ has become a synonym for ‘injection’. If only they knew how much a jab with a needle hurts, and how gently some medics or their assistants can give you injections if they know their job! Some people are even saying 'sick' when they mean wonderful!... and I read this gem in my newspaper this very morning, a high government official listing all the steps they are going to take if the situation ‘gets deteriorated’ any further (not ‘deteriorates’, as any literate person would say).

But there is much worse around us. I have said this again and again: I have always despised people who confuse independence of thought and speech with vulgar abuse of language, and now, at my age, I firmly draw the line at the foul-mouthed: I shall NOT give them their time of day. I am convinced that it is a civilisational thing, and spouting dirty words right and left without cause or provocation merely means you have an empty or twisted mind incapable of either good taste or reasoned and informed thought (perhaps you were never taught any better, but that’s bad luck for you); therefore there is nothing human about you other than your looks, and I shall deal with you accordingly. Netflix, in the name of spreading ‘freedom of expression’ (but obviously actually only to increase TRP ratings by pandering to the great unwashed – many of whom drive BMWs these days), has been particularly guilty of encouraging this pandemic of filth, so I was delighted to watch, in three movies currently showing there, two starring Denzel Washington (Roman J. Israel Esq. and Two Guns) and one called The Kingdom about FBI agents carrying out a lightning investigative raid in Saudi Arabia, where lead characters pointedly berated others for using gutter language. Perhaps the worst perpetrators are finally getting sick and tired of their own excesses! I’ll keep my fingers crossed. Are you listening, Ms. J. K. Rowling? I stopped reading you after the first Robert Galbraith book, and this is why. If you want to find out how absorbing adventure-thriller-mystery books can be written in perfectly clean and mellifluous language, books that a lot of educated adults have greatly enjoyed too, you might like to read up the Harry Potter series.

In fact, it is a wonder that there are still a lot of decent, soft spoken, polite people around, and they keep pleasantly surprising me now and then. I have told this story in my class over and over again: a senior police officer (and they are supposed to be especially foul-mouthed, as portrayed by Prosenjit in Baishey Srabon) had come to pick his daughter up from my tuition, and at the end of the class I strolled out to have a word with him. He had been talking into the wireless, but the moment he saw me approaching he hurriedly got out of the car, despite my urging him to stay put, saying ‘ami garite boshe thakbo ar apni mashtarmoshai hoye baire dariye kotha bolben eta ghor obhodrota hoye jabe Sir’ (it would be grossly discourteous for me to talk with you from inside the car while you, a teacher, are standing outside’)! God bless such folks. I hope the children grow up learning from the right kind of parents. This is not elitism, it is a cry from the heart to put the claims of civilization above the primordial slime…

Navigating the stormy waters

Against the backdrop of thousands of high-level experts spouting wisdom and advice on the unfolding Covid scenario, the only reason I dare to open my mouth now and then is the fact that since they are saying so many contradictory things, all of them cannot be simultaneously right, whereas many, or even most, can be simultaneously wrong. In any case, these days I open my mouth (or rather, scribble on my blog) more to raise honest questions than to offer opinions or knowledge of any kind. Maybe they are questions only a simple-minded commoner would ask. For instance:

The Covid numbers (both new infections and deaths) remained very high all through December to early March, in just one state, Maharashtra, when those numbers were low and declining everywhere else – why did nobody notice, and why wasn’t it decided to isolate that one state almost completely from the rest of the country for a while, the way they did with Wuhan province in China, knowing that otherwise the contagion was bound to spread out like wildfire sooner or later across the rest of the country and make it virtually unmanageable?

Another question: The number of new infections has been surging in Kerala throughout this last month, but the (reported-) death rate has been very, very low (yesterday’s figures were new infections 37290 and 79 deaths, which works out to less than a fourth of one per cent, while they are respectively just around half a per cent in West Bengal and around three per cent in Delhi). How have they managed to keep the mortality rate so low, or have they just been very lucky?

Third question: why are they not building safe houses/quarantine centres in all hotspots on a war footing (literally, with army help if need be) to take off the pressure on hospitals? And why are the central and state governments still shamelessly bickering over the urgency and procedurality of rapid expansion of vaccine production facilities when so many lives are so obviously at stake? Indeed, why isn’t there rapidly mounting public anger over this issue?

To turn my mind to less morbid things – since I cannot move about at will, I am enjoying vicarious travelling via the internet as much as possible. One series on Amazon Prime, called Highway on my plate, took me around many beautiful familiar places in Uttarakhand and Himachal. It’s a series that focuses on eateries on the way, from tucked away resorts serving exotic delicacies to roadside dhabas dishing up tried and tested, plain but cheap and mouth-watering fare, something sure to gladden a foodie’s heart. I am no trencherman myself, but I love watching people eating to their heart’s content.

Locked up at home, my daughter, who has been coaching youngsters since she was a child herself, has started teaching online in a small way and enjoying it. Who knows but a career is in the making? I didn’t know in the early eighties that this would become a lifetime’s work! Another way we are trying to make the ongoing nightmare bearable is dreaming dreams of doing things we like together someday, one of which is, if we can, setting up one of those little resorts in unspoilt remote locations in the mountains, places that would attract only the sort of committed traveler who is gladly willing to forgo sundry urban conveniences, from electricity to piped hot water to internet connection in the rooms for the sake of communing with nature far from the madding crowds… a subsidized dispensary, a primary school and a local women’s self-help group perhaps tagged along. If we can find a generous sponsor with deep pockets, maybe.

After the six-month dry spell, we have been getting a lot of rain, even heavy rain, over the last ten days or so, and I am really, really thrilled, because this is very out of season. The garden looks very lush again, at least for now, and for a brief spell it is comfortable to go for walks. I hope we get a little more of this good thing before the monsoon arrives. The heavy spell is of course more than a month and a half away.

My dear old boy Swarnava Mitra the budding physicist-cum-mystery story writer, bored to tears with enforced idleness just like old Sir, has taken it upon himself to brush up my trigonometry and coordinate geometry preliminary to taking on the calculus, which I loved and handled with ease once upon a time long ago. It is all coming back very quickly, but how soon before I get tired of working out problems and throw in the towel, I don’t know. It will be a test of my teacher’s patience, cunning and skill, too, so wish him luck. And I have decided to get my grasp of French back. There too I am making swift progress – I covered nineteen lessons in two days, which I hear is longer than the beginner’s course that Alliance Française is offering these days, and it has been child’s play, but it makes me sad that I am not living among native Frenchmen, because in that ambience I’d have been fluently swearing and joking and singing and philosophizing in French again within three months at the most.

So that’s an update, just to reassure my best readers that I am neither dead nor brain-dead, yet. Fingers crossed till we can see light at the end of this long tunnel again.

Movies to watch

Since the best thing I can do to while away the endless dreary hours these days is to watch as many movies as I can, I have been watching a lot of trash, interspersed with a few gems that make it all worthwhile. One I watched recently, which gave me a fresh perspective on people I thought I knew a lot about, was The Butler – based on the life of Cecil Gaines, who escaped from a Georgia plantation in 1926, the days when white owners could still rape and murder black employees (though not nominally slaves) with impunity, got a few lucky breaks and learnt to wait at tables in posh hotels, then became butler – and eventually head butler – at the White House, the highest 99% of blacks could rise during their working lives, serving under Presidents from Eisenhower to Reagan, living through momentous changes brought about by Kennedy and Johnson, suffering (though not entirely lying down) through Reagan’s terms, witnessing great improvements in American law and society and mores, becoming estranged from and later reunited with his elder son who joined first the Civil Rights movement and then went into politics, losing the younger in Vietnam and his beloved wife in old age, and living long enough to be felicitated by the first Black President. Anybody interested in history from an uncommon angle should not miss it, regardless of what you feel about the acting, the cinematography, the screenplay and the liberties taken with recorded facts. In many ways, stories well told teach far better history than textbooks, I have always held.

The other, Blind Side, also based on a true story, about the life of Michael Oher the star black American football player and the few lucky breaks that made him, nearly brought tears to my eyes while making me feel good, and that’s saying a lot in these dark, troubled and jaded times. His adopted dad and mama (played by Sandra Bullock, whom, even at her age, I cannot take my eyes off!) seem almost too good to be true, but they are apparently real people, still living in Memphis. Thank God there are still folks like that in this world. How I wish I could have made that kind of difference to even one human being who had an unfortunate start in life!

Both movies are now available on Netflix. The one I am going to watch next is based on the life of the legendary Black lawyer Thurgood Marshall, who became one of the iconic judges of the US Supreme Court.