Canarese Obstinacy

Because I signed up as research assistant on a government task force on Centre-State relations (yes I’ll do anything for money), I recently had to read the bulk of the Constituent Assembly Debates of India. Plowing through 165 days’ worth of debates could have been a drag, but every now and then, funny passages would crop up to relieve the tedium.

Mr. T. Channiah: (Spoke in Canarese)
Mr. H. V. Kamath: Mr. President, the Honourable Member knows English and I suggest that you request him to speak in English.
Mr. T. Channiah: I have got option to talk in any language. I like (continued to speak in Canarese)
Mr. Shankar Dattatraya Deo: Sir, We must at least be told in what language the Honourable Member is speaking.
Mr. President: My information is that he is speaking in Canarese. (Laughter)
Shri Mohanlal Saksena: How do we find out whether he is talking in Canarese or not?
Diwan Chaman Lall: On a point of order, Sir. Are there any arrangements for a translation to be made into some understandable language of the speech that my honourable friend is making?
Mr. President: There is no arrangement for translation. If an Honourable Member chooses to speak in his own language, I cannot prevent him. The other members miss the speech and the speaker himself is not in a position to influence the bulk of the members present here. So the loss is more on the side of the speaker than on the side of the members who do not follow him. I don’t wish to interrupt any member who wishes to speak in his own language.
Mr. T. Channiah: Thank you, Mr. President. (continued to Speak in Canarese)
Mr. M. S. Aney: Sir, on a point of order. Are you in a position to know whether he is speaking relevantly or not?

I could not proceed beyond this point because I was laughing so hard the tears were streaming down my cheeks.

If you’re an outsider, or a certain kind of pessimist, you might read the extract above and form a low opinion of the Members of the Assembly. “What folly to leave the destiny of a nation in the hands of such buffoons,” you might be thinking. But that wasn’t the point of this post.

The point of the post was this: that it is somehow fitting that the Constitution of India – rambunctious, exuberant, fissured, chaotic India – should have been drafted by a bunch of 299 idiosyncratic, garrulous and argumentative people such as this. India has been described as a functioning anarchy; the phrase is a fitting description of the Constituent Assembly Debates too. In the face of disagreements, tomfoolery and obstinate Canarese gentlemen, they somehow managed to come up with a Constitution that has served us reasonably well for six decades.

Going through the speeches, I found a wealth of self-deprecatory wit and good-humoured badinage. At a session five days after independence, the following exchange occurred.

Mr. H. V. Kamath: Mr. President, I submit that the loud speaker system is not behaving as well as it used to till the 15^th.
Mr. President: It has caught the infection of being independent. We are going to have it checked up and put right.

A short while later on the same day, the President urged the Members to cut down on rhetoric, formalities and points of order “because the deadline is looming, and there is very little time.”

But time enough to crack a joke on loudspeakers, I thought, and the thought was strangely comforting.

At his closing speech during the final session, Shri T.T. Krishnamachari said:

[T]here have been contradictory criticisms, one cancelling the other, and perhaps if the whole lot of criticisms are put together, it might be that we might feel – the Drafting Committee and the Members of this House might feel – that we have not done a bad job after all.

No, gentlemen, for what it is worth, I can answer you today. You did not do a bad job after all. And it looks like you enjoyed every bit of it.

Just Careless

Just Baked is a bakery retail chain launched by Bisk Farm. Their flagship store at Minto Park has the sign pictured on the left. The building next-door, which housed the original store, has the sign pictured on the right.

Evidently, for the ‘just shifted’ sign, they tried to mimic the lettering on ‘just baked’. ‘Just’ of course could be copied directly. But ‘shifted’ is a total eyesore! The ascender-height is different, the ‘d’ has a loop unlike the ‘d’ in ‘baked’, the ascender of the ‘t’ (compare it with the ‘t’ in ‘just’) reaches all the way to the ascender-line, and intersects the cross-stroke right in the middle. Most horrifyingly, the ‘e’ is written in a completely different manner! An ordinary lowercase cursive ‘e’ instead of the epsilon in ‘baked’.

I know lettering can be difficult to reproduce, especially if it was not you who did the original lettering, but you can at least get the simple things right. I hope they are more careful with their cookies and cakes.

The 296-rupee trip

Now that college is over, people have panned out all over the country to return home, start work or pursue higher studies, which means I now have standing invitations to visit and stay in many different cities. Free food and lodging – what more could a traveller ask for? In the soul-stirring words of Toad of Toad Hall,

Here today - in next week tomorrow! Villages skipped, towns and cities jumped - always somebody else’s horizon!

Or in other words, I am in the GAME baby!

My three day trip to Ranchi cost just Rs. 296. To put that in perspective, this is just less than a lunch buffet at Mainland China, and slightly more than the cab fare from my place to the station. What follows is a breakup of the expenses.

Howrah to Ranchi: INR 200
I bought the ticket at Bolepur station, exactly three hours after I first hit upon the idea of going to Ranchi. For some reason they charged me ten rupees more: the return ticket cost Rs. 190, but maybe that’s because it was bought at the station of departure.

Food and beverages: INR 11

I had all my meals at friends’ places. Said friends had fed their parents (possibly exaggerated) legends about my appetite, but prolonged road travel tends to diminish it somewhat, so I was a shadow of my usual self. Instead of being thankful for small mercies, their parents – being parents – constantly complained that I wasn’t eating anything. The eleven rupees were spent on Pepsi.

Transport in and around Ranchi: INR zero

Three of my friends arranged for vehicles for my three days in Ranchi. I usually prefer to take public transport when travelling because it helps me get a better feel of the place, and more importantly because I can never afford the other kind. But everyone I knew in Ranchi steadfastly insisted that there was no public transport available to the places I wanted to visit. I pleaded with them to arrange for a cycle, but they claimed that wasn’t possible either. This I found decidedly suspicious, since they seemed to have no difficulty arranging for cars at a moment’s notice. It was probably all a ploy to keep me in check.

For some reason, houses in this colour are popular in Ranchi

Entry charges: INR 80

We went to see a few dams and a couple of hilltop temples on the first day. (Irrelevant information: Jawaharlal Nehru once said that dams are the temples of modern India.) Dams and temples obviously have no entry charge. I bought tickets for everyone for the rock garden, paid for myself at the zoo, and some more for paddle boating on the lake inside the zoo. This paddle boating somehow holds an irresistible attraction for me. I’ve paid to ride on paddle boats everywhere from Himalayan lakes to artificial ponds; all paddle boats without exception leak slightly and the rudder turns only one way, but I can’t seem to get enough of them.

A spot-billed pelican at Ormanjhi Zoo

Miscellaneous: INR 5
We went to a crocodile farm the day after Sarhul. Some tribals who were beating drums and dancing in the forest stopped our car to tuck a sprig of holy leaves into our windshield wiper, and I gave them five rupees in exchange.

Ranchi to Howrah: INR zero
Aastha’s dad insisted on buying my return ticket. I had an upper berth, which is pretty good, but as the train was leaving Ranchi, I noticed that the corresponding side lower berth was empty. I parked myself on it and prepared to defend it against all comers. In my experience, of all the ways to travel, there is nothing on earth to touch the side lower berth of the sleeper compartment of an Indian train. I was up all night looking out of the window. The wind kept blowing my hair into my eyes. Outside, the night sky was studded with hundreds of stars.

Five Birds and a Reptile

I returned to Calcutta yesterday after a four-hour bus journey that has left me wincing slightly every time I sit down. And this was after two whole days mostly spent travelling in a cramped SUV. Sometimes I think the measure of a trip’s success is the number of stories you have from that trip. A road trip with nine other friends had all the ingredients of a good blog post, but these pictures taken on the Kopai river seem like the only things worth posting. I guess the fault lies with us.

Anyhow, I’m off to Ranchi in a few hours. There will be more pictures and stories (hopefully better ones) from that trip.

*exits to the tune of On the Road Again*

My Hobby - 4

Kindred Spirits

When you’re passionate about something, it’s always nice to discover that you’re not the only one who feels thus. For example, it used to bug me no end that the keyboard doesn’t have a proper apostrophe (or proper open and close quotation marks for that matter). That inverted teardrop prime symbol that passes for an apostrophe simply cannot compare in form and beauty with its curly cousin. On my blog, I painstakingly type ’ every time I want an apostrophe. Not too many bloggers I know do that, but then again, law school is not the best place to find typography enthusiasts. But books on typography are a different story altogether! Look what I found in A Type Primer by John Kane:

This is a good time to point out that a prime ( ' ) is not a single quote or an apostrophe, nor are double primes quotes. […] Because of the limited number of keys, they were used on typewriters as substitutes for single and double quotes and apostrophes, and came to be known as ‘dumb quotes’. When used as quotes in typesetting, they aren’t just ‘dumb’ – they’re criminal.

Similar passions were aroused in the breast of American type designer Frederic Goudy (1865-1947) by the practice of letterspacing: the practice of adjusting the amount of space between a group of letters, typically done to correct unsightly typographical flaws. In other words, it is a cheap trick, a short-cut. Here is what the redoubtable Mr. Goudy had to say about the practice:

Any man who would letterspace blackletter would steal sheep.

We use Goudy Stout, a typeface designed by him, for the masthead of our university magazine/newsletter. Substituting our own aesthetic judgment for that of Mr. Goudy, we letterspace it by minus 9 pt.

Ironic, isn’t it?

Attempted Rabbits

One of my optional courses in the final year is Law Teaching, where I get to teach part of a course to a junior class. I chose to teach Jurisprudence to the third years.

One of my classes was on the Economic Analysis of Law. As a cheap gimmick to get the class interested, I divided the lecture into ‘The Rabbit Part’ (so-called because of a tenuous link with the rabbits-in-Australia story) and ‘The Cathedral Part’ (after Guido Calabresi’s article, Property Rules, Liability Rules and Inalienability: One View of the Cathedral). As a further gimmick (I use these gimmicks freely), when outlining the structure of my lecture on the board, I drew a rabbit to signify the first half of the class and a cathedral to signify the second.

Said third years are remarkably generous with compliments. Funnily, there was more praise for my rabbit than for my classes in general. One of them told me that her friend’s exercise book was crowded with attempts to replicate my rabbit.

I didn’t tell her that in the morning before class, I drew fifteen rabbits in my own exercise book to make sure that I got it right on the blackboard.

Good Enough

If I started naming reasons why I like Belle and Sebastian, I’d never stop. Obscure wit, mischievous word-play, profundity, melody. Music so light and fragile that it almost shatters upon listening. The fact that they personally answer fans’ questions on their website. (Most of their fans phrase their questions in grammatically correct and properly punctuated English, which in itself says something.) But to cut to the point, I like their endearing modesty.

“Think of it this way / You could either be successful or be us.” (Get Me Away From Here, I’m Dying)

“Nobody writes them like they used to / So it may as well be me” (same song)

“We’re four boys in our corduroys / We’re not terrific but we’re competent.” (This Is Just a Modern Rock Song)

They are almost deliberately small-time.

* * *

Some of us on the editorial board of our college magazine (myself among them) believed that we should try to be as unassuming as possible; do our best never to come across as being too self-important. In our Society of the Month columns we’ve always refrained from featuring ourselves. We resisted the temptation even when we were voted Society of the Year on Annual Day. (Yes I know I’m bragging here but this is my blog, not the magazine, and the rules are different.) One of our issues had a supplement containing a selection of blog posts by NUJS students. Almost everyone on the editorial board has their own blog, but we didn’t feature any of ours. These are just two examples. All I know is that at least for me this deliberate self-effacement wasn’t always easy. I guess genuine modesty doesn’t quite come naturally to me, and that’s something I’d like to change, but I value modesty in others.

* * *

Roaming around Bloomsbury one day last August, I saw Goodenough College, and it brought a smile to my face. Surrounded by schools and colleges screaming from a thousand websites and newspaper ads that they’re the best ever, Goodenough College was charmingly unpretentious. The sort of college where you go if you’re not gifted, influential or rich like your friends in high school, but still too proud to drop out.

Unfortunately, my romantic ideas were short-lived. Their Wikipedia page says that the college got its name from Frederick Goodenough, one of its founders. But to cap my dismay, the page has this box on top:

This article is written like an advertisement. Please help rewrite this article from a neutral point of view. For blatant advertising that would require a fundamental rewrite to become encyclopedic, use {{db-spam}} to mark for speedy deletion. (April 2008)

Sheesh. Talk about a letdown.