Those Who Can - Do, Those Who Can’t – Teach

I heard this, years ago, as the opening lines of an impromptu speech by a famous and dedicated teacher - Dr. N. Ratna, who is considered to be the father of Speech and Hearing in India. I was terribly amused by this quote and how he used it to elaborate the point he wanted to make.

I came home and told this to my father who too is a dedicated teacher. (When he was asked to work on the English – Kannada dictionary project of the University of Mysore, he agreed on the condition that he would be allowed to teach two hours per week in the college he was then teaching in.)

He was not offended by this quote and continued to discuss the subject in a calm and collected way.

I remembered all this, when I read an article by Ms. Veni Sukumar in The Hindu. She seems genuinely offended by the quote and has defended her chosen profession. Good. She has gone on to modify the quote, some of which are really good. For example - “Those who can – achieve, those who are blessed – teach!” Sure.

I want to add a simple twist to the original. “Those who can, teach. Those who can’t – achieve!”

Teaching is a vocation that quite often is also an avocation. Teaching is a state of mind, not a skill. Skills can be taught. These could even improve an already good teacher. But, training one in these skills alone will not a good teacher make.

Unlike most Indians who want to give the final stamp of approval to their arguments, she has not quoted something in Sanskrit.

Indian tradition has it right -“aachArya dEvOBava” आचार्य देवोबव

Please note: I am NOT a teacher. Having had the good fortune of coming across some great teachers, I have great respect for teachers in general and enormous respect for good ones.

Celebrating Vasanta in Bengaluru

End of winter heralded by the trees bursting out with flowers.

Dry air, chapped lips, scaly skin. . . .

Suddenly feeling more human because there is moisture in the air.

Celebrating the arrival of Vasanta with pictures from Jayanagar 1st and 4th blocks.

Einstein and Religion - II

Sometime ago I wrote Einstein and Religion.

I then said, the English version is coming....

Here it is!

On Womens Day. . .

In my continuing efforts to improve my German language compreshension, I keep reading articles from Der Spiegel, on line. Some times, I print them so that I can mull over it with a dictionary.

When I printed this article a week ago or so, I had forgotten about the significance of today. Today, I thought that it was appropriate to write something on the article is about.

The title of the article is "A conscious cliche".

It goes on to say that more the scientists and researchers dig to find out the mental and intellectual differences between the sexes, more do the differences fade and the similarities show up.

One scientist found that there were differences between men and women in a fifth of the 124 activities researched. Most of those differences stemmed from physical differences (Larger muscle mass among males) rather than cerebral or mental or intellectual differences.

It goes on to explain that most of the perceived differences are due to social expectations and upbringing and such things. Many of the social expectations turn out to be self fulfilling prophecies.

This, hopefully, will be widespread knowledge soon and help women all over the world and over all strata realise their true potential.

I also read an article that said that India has one of the most powerful womens movements in the world. This must make the Indian wome proud and invigorate them.

It is good to end this small piece with a joke.

If women want equality with men, they are not ambitious enough.

Murphy's Law - Corollary

Murphy's Law, as applied to blogging:

However carefully you edit your post, you detect an error as soon as you post it.

Miracle

I received an SMS. ‘It’ asked me to recite a couple of lines softly that stated that I believed in a certain saint. Further it asked me to forward that SMS to eleven others. If I did so, I would see a miracle by night. For a change it did not threaten with dire consequences if I did not forward it.

Since the sender is a dear friend of mine, I called him up and told him that I was not sending the SMS further. He being what he is, a dear old friend, understood.

Then I told him that if all the recipients of the original forwarded it and the subsequent eleven also further down without a break, the only miracles that would be seen were at the cash registers of the mobile telephone operators and that I was not interested in creating miracles for them. I did not want to send them “laughing all the way to the bank.”

The reason for not naming the saint in this post is that I have a lot of respect for him as a man. Humane. If the SMS had said that if I did not forward it, something unspeakable would happen, it would not have made sense. I am glad. The saint was the farthest a man could be from malevolence.

The Mystery of Palmistry

I was a very thin teenager. Perhaps, “painfully thin”.

I had gone to Bangalore to attend a wedding. After the wedding I visited an aunt of mine. Her husband dabbled in palmistry. He casually ordered me (he was that type of a man) to show him my hand and I meekly thrust my hand out. He brought a powerful lens and studied my hand.

After some time, he asked me, “Do you suffer from constipation?” I was impressed. I did suffer from it frequently. I nodded apologetically. As if it was my fault.

He growled, I will teach you an exercise and if you do them regularly, (the heavy emphasis was on the ‘if’, mind you) “it” will go. He taught me sit-ups.

I surprised myself. I did do them regularly.

I was very bookish. I was so bookish that my father had to drive me out of the house, in the evenings. (Oh, I am ever so grateful to him). Now, I developed some interest in my own body and learnt a few more exercises. Push-ups, pull-ups and many other free hand stuff. As coincidence would have it, “Science Today” published an article called the “daily dozen” which taught a dozen exercises to keep one reasonably fit. I started doing them all except the one with the bar bells. I did not have one.

After a few months I went to my tailor to get some new shirts stitched. He enquired, “The last measurements?” I said, “No! New ones!”, proudly. I can imagine him suppressing a smirk as he took out his measuring tape. He took the chest measurement and gawped. He checked his tape to see if he was holding it right. He was. He rummaged through his drawer of his cutting table, fished out his note book and located my earlier measurements. There was a 4 inch difference, in the chest measurements. (Tailors did use inches in Metric India then)

“Ye kyaa baa! Kyaa hogaya there ko” he started off in his “chaste” Mysore Urdu, forgetting that I did not speak or understand that language. I could still divine the gist of it. The wonder in his eyes spoke for him. I had a semblance of a masculine figure now in comparison to my, perhaps, 28-24-30 figure earlier.

Well, a little later I went to Bangalore again and my uncle promptly accosted me and asked me, “how are you and how is your constipation?”. It was then that I realised that I had not had an incident of that in the intervening year or so. I was amazed. (We do tend to take our good health or fortune for granted and crib when we lose it) I told him that I had not had it for a year. He looked me head to toe with a satisfied smile. He was genuinely happy and proud. He was in deed fond of me.

I have often wondered how he knew I was prone to constipation. Was he so ‘good’ a palmist?

I do not think so. He was, in fact, a body builder in his younger days. My father had actually seen him pull a car with a rope as exercise! I had seen him bend fairly formidable looking iron rods with his hands in his workshop. His understanding of the human body must have told him of my state as soon as he saw my palms. It used to be clammy, pale and had red spots.

Then on, I have never suffered that particular ailment again.

After all, it was my fault that I had constipation. I was not taking care of my own self!

So much for the power of palmistry . . .

Sphice of Life

There was this hoarding of Spice Jet Airlines, at the junction of Residency Road and M G Road near Mayo Hall. Perhaps, driven by the fear of incurring the wrath of the self-styled defenders of Kannada the hoarding had the name in Kannada too. It was as shown in the lower line in the picture above. Transliterated, it would be Sphice or Sfice. The line at the top shows the correct way of writing it.

I wrote to the marketing department of the company pointing out the error. I also asked them if the advertising agency's bills had been paid. I also wondered if the bill would have been paid if the same mistake had been made in the English version. I received no answer.

The self-styled defenders of Kannada blacken boards and hoardings in English but never boards which have bad or wrong Kannada. What a pity.

With no Comments

Karma and DNA

I read the obituary of Maharshi Mahesh Yogi with great interest. I too learnt TM popularised by him, in the seventies. I have practiced TM, off and on, and have benefited from it. That would be grist for the mill for another post.

What is of interest at the moment is the report that says "as told to Anubha Sawhney Joshi" by Deepak Chopra, about the passing away of the Maharshi.

It describes the incident of Deepak Chopra giving his blood to the Maharshi. Very interesting! The Maharshi at first refused to accept blood from Deepak Chopra because he did not want Chopra's Karma to flow into him. When Deepak Chopra convinced him that red blood corpuscles do not carry DNA, the Maharshi acceepted the blood.

So we carry our Karma in our DNA! That is news to me and am sure so is it to the thousands of people who work in the field of genetics.

What a load of rubbish!

Pranab and his Award

Padma Vibhushan Pranab Mukherjee said that there should be no room for controversy about is getting that award.

He is absolutley right. No room for controversy. It is WRONG that he was given the award.

To see the contrast, see the conduct of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad here.

Another similar story is that of the First Bharat Ratna awardee Sir M Vishweshwarayya. When the cabinet decided to honour him with that award, no one wanted to inform him! Because of his reputation as a man who did not mince words.

Prime Minister Nehru himself wrote to him and requested him to accept the award. True to form Sir M V wrote back sayaing that he did not want to accept that award if it curtailed his freedom in anyway to criticise Nehru's government if the need arose. Nehru, equally gracefully wrote back that it was for such upstanding ways of his that he was being given that award. It was only then that Sir. M V accepted the award.

Alas, unbelievable, in these days of "moral pygmies"

Measles?

I saw hoardings all over Bangalore proclaiming as above. It says Amma in Bangalore.

When I saw it the first time, I could see just the top part of the hoarding. My immediate reaction was one of consternation. Was there an epidemic of smallpox in Bangalore? Or was it chickenpox or measles? There is already gastroeneritis - cholera. Now this?

Then the bottom part of the hoarding became visible. It was announcing the presence a religious/spiritual person, popularly known as Amma.

Even though amma means mother and I call my mother amma, seen as a banner headline, it could mean what I first thought!

Uffff...

Einstein and Religion

Einstein is once supposed to have said something like, "Religion without science is blind, science without religion is lame". This is often quoted to say something like "See? Even Einstein said that religion is important. Most do not realise that Einstein had his own definition of religion, which was quite different from what most people usually take it to be.

Here is the original article: "Religion and Science" - New York Times Magazine, November 9, 1930

Here is an article in Kannada on the subject by my father, J R Lakshmana Rao, published in the January 25, 2008 edition of Prajavani.

The same article English, is coming soon. . . Here it is!

For your reading pleasure. . . .

Bombay?

There was this Englishman friend of mine, Peter, who visited Mysore frequently. He had fun by going to an autorickshaw and asking the driver "Bombay?". The drivers would melt, fidget and grin. Then he would pat the driver on the shoulder and tell him where he really wanted to go.

One day he met his match.

There was this autowallah, sitting in the drivers seat, with his legs crossed, reading a news paper. Peter goes and asks him: "Bombay?"

The driver unhurriedly uncrosses his legs as he folds his paper, with his eyes still on the job of folding the paper and says calmly, "Yes, Five Thousand Rupees". You should have seen Peter's face!

He recovered, guffawed and shook the driver by the hand and said, "OK, OK, for now, Saraswathipuram will do"!

Auto Wisdom

Autorickshaws in Bangalore are painted on their backs with names of the owners' children, names of movies, "Hi - somebody-or-the-other" and sometime some aphorism. Some of them gross, some are hilarious, some are even wise.

I love looking for them. Here is a gem that I saw today. For those who can not read the Kannada script, here is the transliteration as per the Baraha translitration aplication:

aaDu muTTad soppilla . .
aaTo nuggada galliyilla

It declares with pride that "there is no leaf that a goat does not eat (a famous proverb in Kannada) . . There is no alley that an auto does not elbow its way into!"

That is definitely pride in his work I admire it.

Note on "The Sensation"

My story The Sensation elicited many responses, in person.

In the years gone by, many self styled astrologers and palmists have tried to tell me my future. The common things that they said were that I would never step out of India and that my "Education" was complete and that I would never even acquire another certificate, let alone a degree.

I have been abroad several times and did get an M Tech (Reliability Engineering) from IIT Kharagpur.

So much for the power of these "arts"

Sign of the Times

The most irritating aspect of traffic in India is the incessant honking. I have a host of sticker ideas about it, which I have never executed, though.

I saw a great one the other day on the rear mudguard of a bike: "Honk, If you are an idiot"

I want to put up, "Honk away, I am deaf anyway!"

Dyspixia

At work, I belong to a group of people who read and analyse patent documents. Whenever I see a patent on the screen, the first thing I notice is the drawing on the first page. I identify the document from the picture. Quite often, if I come across the same document at a later date, I recognize it from its picture.

I found at least one colleague to whom the picture does not make any sense. She reads only the words - the title, abstract - on the first page. She says that she does not even register the picture. What a difference! I asked a few other colleagues and they confirmed that they too look at the picture first.

To describe her state or method or inability to "read" a picture, I invented a word - dyspixia - similar to dyslexia.

Before writing this post I put the word into Google and found one site! You put any gobbledygook and you find a hit?

God and the Gregorian calendar

I was listening to a charlatan on a popular Kannada TV Channel this morning. He was telling his audience that the dates of 8, 17 and 28 of the months, whose digits add up to 8 are inauspicious.


What Bunkum, I thought, when he claimed that “all natural disaster or calamities” occur on those days. He even said that the break up of the Reliance Industries was because it was incorporated on the 26th of some month. He also said that unhappy marriages, divorces are the results of weddings that took place on those days.


I did a small test. I looked for a list of natural disasters on Google. I opened the first one that came up and found that out of the ten listed, the numbers of only one added up to 8 – the Chernobyl disaster. The REMANING NINE DID NOT. Of course, this was a listing based on some yardstick chosen by the compiler of the list. But still it should have at least had more than one, don’t you think?


I looked for other lists and MOST of them did not meet this specification.


I wondered:


Why does god/fate follow the Gregorian calendar? Why not any of the innumerable other calendars available and followed for religious purposes? For example: the lunar calendar of some Hindus, the solar calendars of other Hindus, or the Islamic or Jewish or Chinese calendars? Does it mean that the Judeo-Christian god is the true god, perhaps?


Which was a bad day in the days before the Gregorian calendar came to be accepted as the universal calendar? The number of days was changed sometime in the calendars history. What happened to in those days. If disasters then too occurred on such days, did god /fate change to the new calendar along with humans?

When it is 26th here, elsewhere on the globe, it is still 25th or it is already 27th in some other places. Which is the correct date then?


India became a republic on 26, January. Does it qualify as a natural disaster or a political disaster or what?


India lost the Boxing Day test (starting on 26 Dec, 2007). National disaster? But Australia won. What?

Gut Feeling

Some researchers used an unusual (and controversial) method of predicting the impact of human activities on the environment. What he did was to interview scores of scientists in the concerned field, and out of it, for their predictions. The overwhelming opinion was that the impact is visible and unless contained will be disastrous in future.
However, one scientist gave a very guarded answer based on what he already knew and refused to go any further. The interviewer asked him what his ‘gut feeling’ (Bauchgefühl) was.
The scientist’s answer must be carved in stone and displayed in a prominent place, in all academic institutions.
His answer was:
All my life, I have trained myself to think with my head, based on facts. I refuse to start thinking with my guts now.
I have to admit that this is a free translation of what I read in German and that my German is not all that great. Still the message was unmistakable in its clarity and definiteness.
Kudos!