HERE YESTERDAY, GONE TODAY!
I had posted the following piece yesterday and it had received favourable comments, but cannot find it today. Therefore I post it again, this time with a postscript based on a feedback.
AN OBIT IN TIMES OF SELFIES
I do not know why, but this morning I remembered Mr Easaw, my class-teacher in the Upper Primary. This brilliant master did not just teach us English and Arithmetic - he instilled abiding interest in these subjects in his students. On Fridays, he also had a Moral Science class.
It was in one of those weekly Moral Science classes that he gave us a tip to attain success in life: write an obituary that you would like to be written about yourself on your demise - and try to live up to that. (Going by what they accomplished in later life, I guess not one of his students took him seriously, though.)
The under-teen ignored his advice then, but the idea never left me. Now, rather than leave my obit to the journo, I would write mine myself, for, in my view, the best person to write an obit, after the life - well, most of it - is lived, is oneself. So here goes.
Handicapped by a post-graduate degree in Mathematics, Rajagopalan strayed into banking at the tender age of 21 because that was the most paying profession at that time. The bank bribed him into earning profits for itself by peddling corporate loans and doing sundry jobs like forex and merchant banking for over three decades.
Finally, he realised at 53 that even if you win the rat race, you still remain a rat. Having come to his senses (He called it 'enlightenment' a la the Buddha), he turned his back on the Shylock's profession and focused on other areas that interested him - but paid him a piffle.
His writing has often been described as a random arrangement of ASCII characters, sometimes identifiable as words, often interspersed with marks of punctuation (a fat lot of them superfluous), unnecessary line-breaks (which he considered fashionable) and 'speling misteaks', split into paragraphs of varying length. His early works include major grocery lists, insurance forms, railway reservation slips and the like.
He was keenly interested in stuff and nonsense like puzzles, crosswords, quizzing and number games. Despite being a tippler, one of his two favourite words was 'abstemious' because 'it has all the five vowels, in their natural order'. The other, for the same reason, was 'facetious' a quality he possessed in abundance.
Numbers came easy to him. He found it easy to remember 361529, his fiancee's phone number - there were only landlines in the Calcutta of the early 1970's and they had just six digits - not because it was his fiancee's phone number but it is 'the concatenation of the squares of two consecutive prime numbers: 19 and 23'.
This passion for numbers and words had earned him an odd mixture of accolades on the one hand and C&D (Cease and Desist) orders on the other in a ratio that he never disclosed, maintaining that it was 'classified information'.
He was endowed with the uncanny ability to sleep anywhere and at any time even when the intensity of light and the noise level were at their peak. He is known to have fallen asleep during speeches (including those where he was himself the speaker).
Though one could not call him a cineaste, he loved international film festivals. He would go for movies because he could doze off in the cool air-conditioned ambience, undisturbed by doorbells and phone calls and unseen by others.
If he excelled in any field, it* was in the art of pouring chilled beer without spilling a drop into a schooner, forming no 'head' of froth. He had a preternatural skill to blend the perfect Rusty Nail. He used to say he was meant for better things: he would have become a rock star if only he had an iota of music in him; he would have become a Picasso if only he knew which was the business end of a paint-brush.
His friends, relatives and acquaintances are intrigued more by what his accomplished wife for forty years found in him than how he tricked her into matrimony, the solitary achievement that he can take credit for.
His family (consisting of a freshly-minted grand-daughter, the aforesaid wife, two brilliant sons and two lovely daughters-in-law - all of whom he adores, but not necessarily in that order) is a source of unceasing wonderment to his friends. Ten to one the odds are, they say, it is the maternal genes that have made the sons what they are!
He used to claim that he was a self-made man. His parents, teachers, mentors - and perhaps God almighty himself - would grab at the opportunity and deny any hand in shaping and moulding him because accepting the statement absolves them of an embarrassing responsibility.
To sum it up all, let us paraphrase Mark Antony in Julius Caesar (Act 3, Scene 2) as 'Here was a KTR! When comes such another?'
*POSTSCRIPT
A friend who knows me for forty years has accused that I have been less than honest in the above account because my prowess in Scrabble and the lesser known card game called 'Bluff' have not been commented upon. So here is an addendum which should come before the paragraph beginning 'His friends, relatives and acquaintances are intrigued ...'
He was a great sportsman and did well in games requiring the least number of muscles to be flexed - like Scrabble and Chess. Those who have played the word game with him have been astounded by his skill at coining seven-letter words like 'iformed' and scoring a bingo. If challenged, he would be confidence personified: 'Opposite of "uniformed"; MUST be there in the dictionary,' reiterating his unflinching faith in Merriam-Websters, which would at times oblige.
His ingenuity in creating words that sound authentic Queen's English was matched by his non-chalance when challenged. All that Indu, now on the wrong side of 30, remembers of him is that he had engaged her in a game of Bluff when she was 11 and how baffled she was when five times in a row he put down four cards each face down, every time declaring 'Four aces'. When he did it for the sixth time, she thought, 'Enough is enough' and challenged him. He showed his hand, and, voila, there were four aces!
His rivals at chess have occasionally been baffled by the mysterious disappearance of a piece of theirs in a position critical to their win. It would happen to any piece other than the king, pawn being small game. At the end of the match when the pieces were to be returned the box, the missing piece would rematerialise, just as inexplicably as it had vanished!
I had posted the following piece yesterday and it had received favourable comments, but cannot find it today. Therefore I post it again, this time with a postscript based on a feedback.
AN OBIT IN TIMES OF SELFIES
I do not know why, but this morning I remembered Mr Easaw, my class-teacher in the Upper Primary. This brilliant master did not just teach us English and Arithmetic - he instilled abiding interest in these subjects in his students. On Fridays, he also had a Moral Science class.
It was in one of those weekly Moral Science classes that he gave us a tip to attain success in life: write an obituary that you would like to be written about yourself on your demise - and try to live up to that. (Going by what they accomplished in later life, I guess not one of his students took him seriously, though.)
The under-teen ignored his advice then, but the idea never left me. Now, rather than leave my obit to the journo, I would write mine myself, for, in my view, the best person to write an obit, after the life - well, most of it - is lived, is oneself. So here goes.
Handicapped by a post-graduate degree in Mathematics, Rajagopalan strayed into banking at the tender age of 21 because that was the most paying profession at that time. The bank bribed him into earning profits for itself by peddling corporate loans and doing sundry jobs like forex and merchant banking for over three decades.
Finally, he realised at 53 that even if you win the rat race, you still remain a rat. Having come to his senses (He called it 'enlightenment' a la the Buddha), he turned his back on the Shylock's profession and focused on other areas that interested him - but paid him a piffle.
His writing has often been described as a random arrangement of ASCII characters, sometimes identifiable as words, often interspersed with marks of punctuation (a fat lot of them superfluous), unnecessary line-breaks (which he considered fashionable) and 'speling misteaks', split into paragraphs of varying length. His early works include major grocery lists, insurance forms, railway reservation slips and the like.
He was keenly interested in stuff and nonsense like puzzles, crosswords, quizzing and number games. Despite being a tippler, one of his two favourite words was 'abstemious' because 'it has all the five vowels, in their natural order'. The other, for the same reason, was 'facetious' a quality he possessed in abundance.
Numbers came easy to him. He found it easy to remember 361529, his fiancee's phone number - there were only landlines in the Calcutta of the early 1970's and they had just six digits - not because it was his fiancee's phone number but it is 'the concatenation of the squares of two consecutive prime numbers: 19 and 23'.
This passion for numbers and words had earned him an odd mixture of accolades on the one hand and C&D (Cease and Desist) orders on the other in a ratio that he never disclosed, maintaining that it was 'classified information'.
He was endowed with the uncanny ability to sleep anywhere and at any time even when the intensity of light and the noise level were at their peak. He is known to have fallen asleep during speeches (including those where he was himself the speaker).
Though one could not call him a cineaste, he loved international film festivals. He would go for movies because he could doze off in the cool air-conditioned ambience, undisturbed by doorbells and phone calls and unseen by others.
If he excelled in any field, it* was in the art of pouring chilled beer without spilling a drop into a schooner, forming no 'head' of froth. He had a preternatural skill to blend the perfect Rusty Nail. He used to say he was meant for better things: he would have become a rock star if only he had an iota of music in him; he would have become a Picasso if only he knew which was the business end of a paint-brush.
His friends, relatives and acquaintances are intrigued more by what his accomplished wife for forty years found in him than how he tricked her into matrimony, the solitary achievement that he can take credit for.
His family (consisting of a freshly-minted grand-daughter, the aforesaid wife, two brilliant sons and two lovely daughters-in-law - all of whom he adores, but not necessarily in that order) is a source of unceasing wonderment to his friends. Ten to one the odds are, they say, it is the maternal genes that have made the sons what they are!
He used to claim that he was a self-made man. His parents, teachers, mentors - and perhaps God almighty himself - would grab at the opportunity and deny any hand in shaping and moulding him because accepting the statement absolves them of an embarrassing responsibility.
To sum it up all, let us paraphrase Mark Antony in Julius Caesar (Act 3, Scene 2) as 'Here was a KTR! When comes such another?'
*POSTSCRIPT
A friend who knows me for forty years has accused that I have been less than honest in the above account because my prowess in Scrabble and the lesser known card game called 'Bluff' have not been commented upon. So here is an addendum which should come before the paragraph beginning 'His friends, relatives and acquaintances are intrigued ...'
He was a great sportsman and did well in games requiring the least number of muscles to be flexed - like Scrabble and Chess. Those who have played the word game with him have been astounded by his skill at coining seven-letter words like 'iformed' and scoring a bingo. If challenged, he would be confidence personified: 'Opposite of "uniformed"; MUST be there in the dictionary,' reiterating his unflinching faith in Merriam-Websters, which would at times oblige.
His ingenuity in creating words that sound authentic Queen's English was matched by his non-chalance when challenged. All that Indu, now on the wrong side of 30, remembers of him is that he had engaged her in a game of Bluff when she was 11 and how baffled she was when five times in a row he put down four cards each face down, every time declaring 'Four aces'. When he did it for the sixth time, she thought, 'Enough is enough' and challenged him. He showed his hand, and, voila, there were four aces!
His rivals at chess have occasionally been baffled by the mysterious disappearance of a piece of theirs in a position critical to their win. It would happen to any piece other than the king, pawn being small game. At the end of the match when the pieces were to be returned the box, the missing piece would rematerialise, just as inexplicably as it had vanished!
