Mam, What's Your Age, Again?

Mrs Sharma ( name & identifying details changed) was an English Teacher par excellence and the mother of a classmate from school days. Though she taught at another school, she gracefully accepted directing a couple of boys and girls from our class for George Bernard Shaw's classic play, Pygmalion. This was somewhere in the time of my tenth standard.

As we practiced regularly, I got very impressed with Mrs Sharma's repertoire of English accents, inflections and general grasp of the language.

One day during practice - and I cant remember what lead me to do this- I asked Mrs Sharma her age in the presence of all the boys and girls - my classmates- who had come to practice and watch the practice. Suddenly everyone became silent and waited for Mrs Sharma to answer.

In those few silent moments before she spoke, I felt her gaze piercing me. As I waited with a sense of tightness in my chest, every pore in my body was telling me that I was now in big trouble.

Then followed the rebuke of a lifetime. How ill-mannered of me, she said, that I dared to ask a lady her age. We were dismissed for that day.

The rest of the practice sessions thereafter were somber gatherings and the final performance of the play was appreciated at the school. In all fairness to Mrs Sharma, she was gracious in personally appreciating my performance as Professor Higgins. I could not bring myself to look into her eyes and shied away at the earliest.

Later on, in retrospect, I would often criticize myself that I was old enough in the tenth standard to know not to ask this sensitive question of a lady. Just how did I commit this faux pas!

As a few decades rolled by, this embarrassment was forgotten and I happened to get busy professionally.

One evening I received a message from my receptionist that my classmate had come at the appointed time for consultation for her mother. It was Mrs Sharma; and I knew before they walked in that this was the moment of my reckoning!

The consultation session proceeded to its logical end and I had the satisfaction of assuaging Mrs Sharma's anxieties about her orthopaedic condition.

As my classmate and her mother rose to leave my office, I smiled and asked Mrs Sharma,
"Madam, would you mind telling me your age now, especially now that I need to know this as a doctor!"
Indicating with a smile that she recollected that incident well, she extended her hand for a friendly handshake, and, in a soft voice, told me her age.

Obviously, I won't reveal her age for the fear of another rebuke!

Just so that you know, I found her to be as graceful as ever, and, ever young at heart!

A Joker Comes Calling.

                 

One day, when I was in the second standard, the Principal’s office suddenly announced that the school timings were being shortened by two periods. The students were ecstatic and started shouting in joy, while the announcement continued as to why the school was being released early. But from the fragments of announcement that I could manage to hear, I understood that a joker had come to the township and would be there for all to see at the pavilion-grounds. En route to the grounds, I left my school bag at home and told my mother that along with my school friends. I was headed to the pavillion to see a joker perform.
  

We school folks huddled and sat down on the ground just a few feet away from a long table laid down, for what I assumed was a walking platform for the joker’s performance. There were others too, our uncles and aunties from the township. These adults were talking about a film and I could not make any sense of it- I could not reason as to why these adults would talk about a film when we were here to see a joker’s antics. I knew that our outdoor theatre was just next to the pavilion where we were seated and may be these people were talking about some film there. Anyway, who cared when we were expecting to have lots of fun watching a joker come out anytime .

Soon enough, a group of elderly people came out walking from the pavilion accompanied with two or three ladies. There was no joker anywhere. I was quite disappointed. But our uncles and aunties were overwhelmed and behaved as if they were in the presence of some great personalities.

Of the people seated behind the long table, the smartest clad person was a pink-skinned gentleman, wearing a royal blue colored coat and dark goggles. From where I was seated, diagonally across from him, I could see he was sporting a pencil thin moustache and a very cherubic smile. I was interested.

Without any ado, someone handed him the mike and he started speaking in Hindi in a warm friendly voice. At the far end of the long table was seated a bald gentleman, also in a suit. The two, this goggled uncle and this bald man, kept on exchanging friendly smiles even as this Hindi speaking uncle continued addressing the audience.  I could not understand much till I heard him speak that all of them on his side of table were just like the rest of us in the audience and that they too had children like us attending school, saying this pointed in our direction where we school boys and girls were seated.  Now I started listening to him intently.

He further continued, saying that when he sang in the film people generally thought that it was he himself singing when in reality it was his friend at the other end of the table who lent his voice.

Saying so, he asked his friend to sing a few lines from a film so that the audience would believe that what he had just said was true.

The mike was passed on to the uncle seated at the end of the table; he got up, smiled and thanked the pink skinned uncle, and, sang in a mellifluous voice with a slightly nasal twang:

“Kehta Hai Joker, Sara Zamana, Aadhi Hakikat, Aadha Fasana…”

As the song ended, the audience was rapturous and the pink skinned uncle was all smiles. The ladies seated along with them were smiling too.

The audience was shouting, “once more, once more”…

It was later in the day that I realized that the pink skinned uncle whom I had come to adore was the legendary Mr. Raj Kapoor, and that he had come visiting along with the cast and crew of his latest film, ‘Mera Naam Joker’.

While my hopes of seeing a joker were certainly dashed, the memory of that day brightens up my face everytime this scene flashes past in my mind!

Tyranny of Numbers

There is a world of experience and living that is not amenable -will always be that way- to ennumeration. That is where living, the exhilaration and the passion of it all, is available, first hand, without, beyond, and transcending any description it.
The tendency of digitize, to put a number to attributes where it was wisest not to, to count a non-thing that was never meant to be accounted into books but which could always be counted upon, that tendency has now morphed into a large scale epidemic that has robbed us all of peace, sanity and wisdom.
In the name of slicing and splicing to get to the method in a madness that was never mad in the first place  (only we did not understand it en masse, as a gestalt)- that stubborn, assiduous attempt at en-clothing of mathematics over things, experiences and traits beyond the pale of numbers is a perversion of life by people who thought that life could be deciphered through decoding a code that is anything but one. There are things that are best left alone, to be felt, to be lived and experienced as such, without corrupting these with formulae and methods. It is only then, without the corruption with numbers, that these things bestow the gift of their full presence and their 'it-ness' on individuals. After all, why do we go about trying ourselves again and again in travelling, meeting, eating; all the time experiencing rather than counting and putting things in matrices? On the other hand who has not come across the rustic who travels to get destinations done?

There is never any doubt that numbers, statistics, trends and application of mathematics are helpful. After all where would we all be without these?
What is to be entertained is the notion of living at least a portion of daily life and a portion of life as a whole outside the grip of numbers even as we know that life cannot be wholly free

Imagine for a moment, if you can, a day lived without having to deal with numbers of any sort: what all will be left out will depend on your own life situation, but for some of us it could be a day without these:

• getting up at about sunrise without a numbers of an alarm clock shocking one up.
• a bath without the guilt of some indicative kilogram-digits not budging a bit: that would be a real good bath.
• a breakfast without the burden of calories but full of in-the-moment experience of the aroma and taste of it, needless to say the company that comes with the breakfast, 
• a meaningful exchange of ideas and information without the sense of a looming time-deadline
• a car ride - a real ride- without the anxiety of the average of kilometres per litre of petrol
• a peep into the mind of one's child's grasp without the burden of any digits that mark their performance when it is a process really.

For people of my ilk, it would mean:

• seeing into the satisfaction of making a difference to a person rather than to their parametres or one's purse.
• being free of the competitive madness of where one is with reference to one's peers and feel the common ground of healing and caring rather than just the one upmanship of papers published or number of cases treated or amount of 'oh-so-hefty' tax.