My Encounters with the Lord of Mumbai…

Last night Lord Ganesha left thousands of homes in Mumbai on his journey towards the sea only to come back next year.  Like last several years my son had gone crazy from morning itself by just thinking about the evening procession in which our local Lord, Khernagarcha Raja, would start his journey. 

Khernagarcha Raja

I can still recall the year 2006, when my son, just of three years, suddenly started yelling that he is really enjoying his life on this earth; while sitting on my shoulder in a similar procession.  The magic of lord has been overwhelming for both of us and this year he participated in street dance in the procession and also says that from next year he would be participating full-fledged in the Ganpati celebrations.

After coming back from the procession of the immersion of the Lord, I'm still feeling the haze and the thrill and my eye gets repeatedly moist by just thinking of the spirit and the happiness Lord has brought to all his devotees.  It is true that Lord comes in each home as a member and while bidding farewell the celebration is for the happy feeling he brought to each of the homes. While pessimists could always think of the inflation, current account deficit, costs of onions and so many other negative things, but tonight was the celebration of hope and whatever good things we have in our lives.  Also it occurred to me, while being in the procession, that it is a true celebration of youth.  Somehow while being there I always felt as if a celebrations of such this massive scale reflected the channelisation of energy of youth and above all the freedom; the freedom from all kinds of bondages.

Thousands of youths, both boys and girls, dancing on the beats of drums, were fully disciplined.  While colours and gulal were flying, crackers were bursting and sparkles of light  were exploding in air, the trance caused by the music and the drum beats was overpowering and many a time while being a part of the procession it occurred to me as if I was ready to bet my life just to enjoy this small moment.  This brings me to another proposition which I keep telling very proudly that Mumbai is the best city in the country for its ladies and girls.  This place has got respect for the female members of our society and it cares for the privacy and individualism of each of its residents.  In the procession tonight I asked my wife specifically to record the dance of girls from our area which would truly reflect the spirit of celebration and also the happiness Lord brought to the city this year like all previous years.

 Celebration Part-I

 Celebration Part-II

Another thing which has been mesmerising me right from the beginning that for being happy in this place one need to just celebrate the life and for this one does not need lots of money rather one has just to come down to street.  Secondly, there is nothing like tomorrow, it is just a hypothesis and celebration is only for tonight; after all they say that no one can take money out of Mumbai.  Are you joining the celebrations?

Bogey of Great Institutions…

Mr Bhar, one of our esteemed retired colleagues from our services, has been an interesting person during his days in the service.  A jovial and easygoing person and he was friend of each one of us right from the junior level to senior level.  His stories and wits always carried a sense of curiosity for all of us and usually lunch session with him always brought a lingering happy feeling.  Years have since passed and I was told that he has settled in Mumbai itself after selling his paternal properties in Patna and also that his children are also working in Mumbai.  I too liked his company, his stories, not only because he was very friendly to all of us younger lot but also because he hailed from my native state of Bihar and above all he was also an alumni of the Science College, Patna my own alma mater.

He was otherwise a very satisfied and fulfilled individual but one pain he grudgingly expressed occasionally that another boy of his own class from the Science College, Patna, who was in the class of Chemistry Honours, which used to be considered for low rankers in those days, got a better rank in the Civil Services Examinations some 40 years ago despite him being in the superior and prestigious Physics Honours class in the same year in the college.  It so happened that the boy from the Chemistry Honours class ended up to be the Chairman of one of the Revenue Boards while he being recruited in Group ‘B’ services in the same department, could retire only in the rank of Director to the Government of India.  I don't intend to tell the stories about Mr Bhar, but I always felt in his company that there was a sense of pride in him being the alumni of the Science College, Patna and a disdain and contempt for all those who never had the opportunity to be in such a great institution.  One of the esteemed retired Chief Commissioners, Mr Tripathi used to say that we live in the comparative world which keeps you unhappy most of the time but sometimes it keeps you happy also by just thinking that Physics Honours is far better than the Chemistry Honours and you are superior to many others. But today I write to tell about something else which is intriguing me from very long time that is about my own time in the Science College, Patna.

It had been my aspiration, like lakhs of other students who appeared for the Secondary School Examination of 1982, conducted by the Bihar School Examination Board, to get admission in Science College, Patna.  The Board had changed from Pre-University and the Matriculation system only a year back and very blissfully we had old question papers for only one year to take cue from.  Somehow after getting a very good percentage in the examination I got admitted to Patna Science College and our classes started around this time of the year in the middle of the September some 31 years ago.  Coming from an organised system of my school, the college appeared to be some sort of animal farm where each of class was having more than hundred students and very ironically each of them were toppers  of the schools from different parts of the then combined the state of Bihar.

The classes used to be depressingly boring and all the teachers, all of them, were dead uninspiring, lousy and were lacking in all kinds of social skills.  Most of them appeared me to be losers and I don't remember having spoken to anyone of them during years of my stay in the college.  Recently I was speaking to one of my classmates, an engineer in railways, while remembering our days in the Science College, bitterness was still very perceptible because the teachers were simply unconcerned for the life and future of their students.  For these crooks, taking a lecture was just a pastime and a job to be done.  Most of them used to come into class with written notes and used to simply copy on blackboard before a sleeping class.  I still remember my time on the banks of the River Ganges after bunking classes specifically that of mathematics.

It was an opportunity for the institution to mould lives of so many children of 16 or 17 years of age, coming from the rural backgrounds, mostly from the villages and almost hundred percent of them were from Hindi medium schools.  But what these teachers did only to confuse them and all of them were left to themselves to search their own paths in their respective lives.  For doing these things no one required any institution however great it is known to be.  The culture of coaching institutions had just started and the mode of teaching was just copying something on the blackboard and the students were supposed to copy from there.  They used to prepare notes and memorise them for writing in examinations which used to be primarily descriptive in nature.  There was no concept of career counselling, in fact there was no communication between teachers and the students.  May be I'm expecting too much in the hindsight but there was no interface of any kind which could be thought in terms of future planning for those hapless students.  It was such a depressing feeling to run from class to class for the whole day and coming back to hostel in evening with even disappointing feeling of having learnt nothing.  In initial couple of months many of us were on the verge of nervous breakdown. I still remember poor Satish who started crying one day after coming from the class and was on verge of going insane only because he was unable to follow anything there. He went home as per advice of we friends and because he could spend little time away from the great institution he gained confidence. Satish works in Delhi nowadays; we keep meeting and he often says that he could sail through only on the strength of his contempt for the system and the institution.

The atmosphere in the hostel used to be even more agonising and being in the company of toppers was just a depressing feeling as almost all of them were spending time only on their study tables with books of Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics.  No one used to play any game and occasionally going to watch movies was the only thing which used to break the monotony of life but that also used to be considered as sin. They used to discuss about the Engineering and Medical Entrance tests but most of them used to be worried to clear the hurdle of passing the Intermediate examination itself. I still remember nobody had any clue those days of what to be done even for these entrance tests. It was very clear that the days of these kinds of colleges and their so called prestige were numbered and it was not very long when the coaching institutes not only proliferated but they obliterated not only the prestige but also the existence altogether of these useless behemoths which were simply not in sync with the requirements of time like dodos.

It was not that the city life was boring those days, Patna still used to be the cultural hub and during almost all the festivals, luminaries from various fields used to come to Patna to perform and without any dispute Patna used to be very large hearted host for all such cultural functions, maybe because explosion of TV culture was yet to happen.  At one hand the city used to be bubbling with the cultural activities, on the other hand the Patna Science College always looked like a place of mourning.  Looking back in time somehow reminds me that almost all of the students were lacking social skills and even after spending years in the Science College they were not able to come out of their inherent inhibitions. In hindsight I have no hesitation in accepting that in those years in Science College, I didn't learn anything worthwhile but to discard some of the good habits I had acquired during my school days.  I stopped going to library in search of good books and I almost forgot to read literature and poetry.  The syllabus prescribed and the books recommended had no relationship and reading those books written by foreign writers were a permanent pain in the neck.  I don't have any good memories of my days in Science College, Patna.

Couple of years back I had an opportunity to visit the hostel where I used to stay and somehow I could still feel the same dampness and disappointment in the air and possibly it was still lacking the spirit of learning even after passage of three decades.  Somehow the dread of being in a labour camp was still lingering and it was not before I ran out of patience and came running out of its boundary. The nostalgia has turned into nightmare. The hostel looked equally disgusting even after three decades and the indifference, which was the hallmark of this place, was still looming large.  Still I believe that this place used to be an animal farm or a stable which was somehow converted as hostel naming it after one of the great Indian mathematicians but the spirit of the animal farm was still lingering there.

I simply don't wish to remember any of the teachers from the Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics classes which causes nausea even after several decades, most of them used to wear the same cloths which they wore during their own college days and almost all of them suffered from speech impairment and to me they appeared to be parrots in human body.  Those were the days when your performance used to be measured by just only by your capacity to reproduce the best answers but the most unfortunate feeling still refuses to go away that of helplessness of the young boys who were left to fend themselves to search their own path in life and the indifference on the part of the teachers added to their woes.  I still remember that many of the children of these teachers were as confused as the rest of us.

Recently I read a book on Patna, written by Amitava Kumar, “A Matter of Rats” and it appears that the writer has seen the same Patna which I saw in my growing years and very ironically I could find that he had mentioned the same characters which truly used to reflect the true spirit of Patna.

http://www.amitavakumar.com

Jagdish Narayan Chaubey has been a hindi professor those days and most of the time he was very concerned with the young children sitting in his class and I can still recall his words which reflected that somehow he had sensed the spirit of an animal farm therein as he used to say that each of the students were horses of Aswamedh who have been sent from different parts of the state and the young Bhrigu Nandan Tripathi, who always used to quote Dusyant Kumar those days. Nobody used to miss these classes which used to reprieve from the heavy doses of science. I found that Amitava Kumar is still referring to Muniba Shami, Indibar Mukherjee, Sushma Mishra and not to forget Dr. Shaileshwar Sati Prasad. It brought tears to my eyes when I was reading about them as the English department of the college was better equipped than most of the regular Post Graduate Colleges and universities those days. They used to publish literary articles even those days and the cultural seminars used to be very popular because of large participation. On the other hand, the constipated faces of the teachers from the science section used to bring only doom and none of them had ever published any paper in their whole life and hardly there was any culture of conducting and attending any seminar. Some of them always looked as if they were suffering from tuberculosis.

Looking back in time I don’t have one good thing to remember which I learnt in the college, that great prestigious Science College, Patna.  Somehow I survived the onslaught because of my own learning in the school from the old-fashioned teachers who were kind enough to teach us the ways and made us robust enough to face the vagaries of life.  Looking back in time one thing I can say with all responsibility that whatever I am today and possibly all of them, who used to be with me in those turbulent years, had been able to achieve despite the Science College, very certainly not because of the Science College, Patna. At best it could be considered to be a place to stay in Patna at nominal rate and for getting subsidised food in its hostel mess and nothing more than that. 

Further the incompetence, aloofness, callousness and indifference of teachers and the administration of such so called prestigious institutions coupled with remaining oblivious of changing requirements of the education system have been the basic reasons because of which various coaching institutes have flourished. I am very happy to see that nowadays many of the IRS probationers have never been to colleges, let alone these decorative prestigious institutions as they have got their education and degrees through correspondence courses and their entry into the civil services had been through the coaching institutes. I really don't know whether it would be proper to say but I can't help to observe that the coaching institutes have now shown these great institutions the place what they always deserved and very strangely I feel very happy about it.  

This has been the burden on my head for decades and I always wanted to throw this bogey and most certainly I'm not as proud as Mr Bhar used to be for his days in Science College, Patna.  I believe that the story of greatness of other similar prestigious colleges would have not been any different and many of such stories are required to be told with honesty. There is another bogey of the Engineering College, another great and prestigious institution, which I would try to get rid of in by next blog post.

The Bartoli Moment and the Underdog in Me...

The news items like Serena Williams has won another US Open Championship or one more Grand Slam title have no sense of newness for us. She had been one of the greatest in the history, but suddenly I started thinking of this year’s winner of Wimbledon's single title for women and suddenly I started thinking of winners who could be easily forgotten and but very certainly they also had not been any less than the greatest in their respective fields.

Marion Bartoli had been very unlikely winner of women's singles title at Wimbledon 2013. Her previous best performance had been some six years ago when she was a finalist here. What a win it was for her, she won the championship without dropping a set on her way to lift the trophy. I'm not much of the tennis enthusiast or an expert but on 6th July 2013, I was watching the women's singles final on television. What immediately struck to me was her unusual serve, very unorthodox as it appeared as if her straight hand was moving in a circle while serving. It appeared even unusual with no ball thumping and execution of the service in one single motion. Her style of play appeared to be intense with double handed forehand and backhand but certainly she didn't appear to be very good mover on the court. Still she was in the finals and won her match against Sabine Lisicki convincingly in straight sets. Incidentally it was her 47th appearance in grand slam tournaments before winning her first; a record of sorts for any grand slam winner.

That evening while seeing her lifting the shining trophy, on the television, I had a peculiar sense of happiness and a feeling of relief of not seeing all those regular champions lifting the trophy. Was it for an underdog within me who was feeling happy for another underdog or maybe I was thinking on behalf of all those underdogs who never got an opportunity to be recognised for anything they keep doing with all passion and dedication all their lives? This feeling lingered within me for quite some time thereafter also and I kept wondering as to what is the next for this new Wimbledon champion and mostly I was seriously worried every single day thereafter whenever I used to open the sports page of the morning newspaper. I could feel the dread of the defeat of the champion against anyone. By the time one month had passed and one fine morning I was feeling the same dread while opening the sports page and then suddenly I took a decision on her behalf that she should retire from the game immediately. By the time I could reach on the sports page I saw this news item that Bartoli has announced her immediate retirement from the professional tennis on 14th August 2013. Again there was a feeling of peculiar sense of relief within me.

In this peculiar world there are peculiar parameters for judging champions and winners but again we fail to understand that the life is not always about being champion and winners only. What we call passion or dedication remains unnoticed most of the times for most of us who know that they are certainly not the best if judged on the basis of the established parameters but still they keep chasing their passions. After starting her carrier in 2002, Bartoli had been able to win her maiden Grand Slam in 2013 and the feeling of being arrived in life for her could only be guessed which might have come with its profound side-effects. In the real life, championships will keep coming and those having relatively better skills will keep winning these championships and titles. Incidentally, most of the time winners remain the same because they are supposedly the best and most of the sports are dominated by a few stars whom we know to be the greatest. While thinking of those less than the great, the underdogs, who had the opportunity to make it big only occasionally; what is a real life situation and particularly for those who always knew in their heart that they are not certainly the best in the field but there had been occasions when they had been on top. For this kind of underdogs being on top is a different ball game and on thinking about this situation repeatedly brought me to the same conclusion, rather same painful and sad conclusion that once on top gracefully come out with the feeling of being at top for all the times to come in life.

I have had been a school topper but I always knew that possibly I was not the rightful person for the decoration because I was lacking all those qualities required for this purpose and also I knew all along that the future tournaments were not meant for persons like me so far these kind of laurels are concerned. People like us keep getting our Bartoli moments and my understanding is that they should gracefully come out of the race immediately thereafter so that the feeling of being at top could linger on throughout your life bringing happiness all along. We have examples of cricketers who have been compelled to retire long after their prime was over but still they were continuing for some unsporting reasons. I started looking around then I found that most of the British prime ministers have simply faded into oblivion very gracefully after completing their terms or after losing elections or being replaced by someone else. Recently I found Julia Gillard, the Australian Prime Minister, has simply retired from active politics after her party failed to win the election, she is just 51 years of age. People are calling themselves to be youth leader in this country. Mr. L.K. Advani still thinks of taking a shot at Prime ministership despite the fact that his party lost 2009 general election in his leadership.

I was thinking of Ashwini Nachappa, the girl who outran the great P.T. Usha and she was not around for very long time in athletics thereafter and slowly she graduated into a movie star and then into a social worker and educationists. I keep thinking of the great Pulela Gopichand who announced his retirement after winning all England Championship in Badminton.

There is a curious case of Theodore Roosevelt, 26th president of United States who was pushed to the post of vice president in1900 only primarily to control his style of working. As the destiny had its way and the incumbent president Meckinley was assassinated and he was sworn in as the youngest ever president of United States in 1901. What a term he had thereafter, he won next presidential election in 1904 but somehow he declared not to run for the second term. He is still considered to be one of the greatest presidents of America. After demitting his officers in 1908, he was supposed to fade into oblivion but in next presidential election in 1912 he ran as independent once he failed to get Republican nomination and he lost to the Democrat Woodrow Wilson, then to compulsorily fade into oblivion. Time and tide waits for none and it is always advisable to count your pennies and blessings both for what you already have in life. The pride and glory, like any other thing have its own expiry date and trying to cling to it makes it rancid and very ungraceful.

Continuously being on top certainly requires some divine intervention besides your own skills, capabilities, qualities, passion and dedication coupled with numerous factors affecting your performance in that particular field at particular period of time. Having arrived at top has got its own side-effects and particularly for those who know in their hearts that possibly they might have not been the best person to stand there continuously. I can only sympathise with Abhinav Bindra, our own Olympic gold medallist in shooting, has not been able to repeat his performance afterwards. It has been a great feeling to accept that I had been an average person who had been lucky enough to receive always more than his expectations and also to say that I too had my own Bartoli moments in my life to keep me happy for all the times to come and before signing off I have to repeat again emphatically that I have retired from all the tournaments long back.This morning I opened the sports page of today’s newspaper and found that Rafael Nadal has won another US Open Championship and his 13th grand slam, it was a no new to me.