Padma Devkota
Functions of Mediocrity
Fate made the untalented; opportunities made them big. Even as their more talented brethren toil and moil in the fields and cowsheds, these have risen to posts of public responsibilities that they fill without vision, without transcending self and without qualms of conscience. These see none but themselves; these recognize neither talent nor intelligence other than their own. They have risen above hunger in the hills and feel stronger than the ones they have left behind in the mountains.
They feel superior even to those that have actually helped them rise to their present status. They would have been left far behind in their race for success had not a so-and-so helped them, guided them, and even spoken for them in the right places. But now that this very so-and-so shrivels in the winter chill of ingratitude, these untalented butchers of their own conscience rejoice over their success in the public domain. And, they become the norm whereby others fashion their behaviour without the least bit of understanding of how mediocrity, varnished with opportunities, can glitter like imitation jewelry even as real diamonds lie hidden from the eye.
Yet, mediocrity has no innate lustre. It is no sage. It never says anything worth remembering. It only repeats phrases culled from the intelligent and plays these back like a tape recorder to a different audience. This is what gives it the appearance of extraordinary wisdom, which also improves its popular image. Mediocrity, like the moon, draws a smooth surge of sentimentality from the sea of uncritical humanity that is unable either to denounce it or to support its public condemnation for fear of exposing its likeness in their hearts. This helps it illumine the whole world with its ghostly, borrowed light by romanticizing public dreams with the inoffensive softness of lunar effeminacy. To please is to exist.
This is why mediocrity has no face. It wears all faces. Because it cannot afford to be recognized as such in a position of leadership or responsibility, it wears the face of talent. But, unlike talent that recognizes its superiors, mediocrity recognizes itself as the best. Where mediocrity can give no credit to others, talent understands the civilizing powers of modesty, humility and sacrifice. It cannot accept solitary credit for teamwork nor accuse one single person for team failure. Mediocrity can neither recognize failure, nor accept criticism that might otherwise rectify its character. It must forever obstinately and arrogantly justify all its actions since it is supposedly the best of all: "Mirror, mirror, on the wall!"
Mediocrity is envious. It opposes the constructive efforts of talent because it is no match against it and, therefore, it resorts to sheer physical violence, loud mouth, or conniving glibness of the tongue. Like a braying donkey it tramples all over the garden of flowers as an act of vengeance against the gardener's creative and constructive energy, which it has none. Yet, it vainly boasts of how it signed documents to initiate plans that others envisioned or how it launched programmes that took years of team spirit to bring to its ripeness.
And where hard work, too, is lacking, mediocrity backbites the arduous labour of talent. Assuming a posture of superiority, it creates a legend through force of repetition to slander talent. When talent, guided by its own vision, refuses to descend to the level of character mongering through repeated lies and rumours, mediocrity seeks alliance with the like-minded, of which there is no shortage in this world. Thus, while mediocres incredulously bark in groups, talent paces gently along the solitary heights of its own vision.
Talent is a free thinker. It discriminates right from wrong, good from bad. This it does against the backdrop of national and collective interest. Mediocrity is lost in the labyrinths of the self, of day-to-day morsels and immediate goals of personal fame, wealth and luxury. Talent serves the good and rejects the bad. Mediocrity socializes with all because it values cheap popularity.
Mediocrity allies itself with groups and organizations that buttress its weakness and oil its ego. Talent walks confidently in the light of its own guiding vision. It will criticize wrong doings and applaud all good deeds irrespective of ideological or political groups. It will support anyone acting in the interest of the nation, and criticize everyone acting only in the interest of the self. Mediocrity does not understand this attitude because it must be practical. It must not make enemies anywhere.
Mediocrity is servile; talent is imperial. Talent obeys no boss, especially when that boss is self-centered. The mediocre will not obey talent where self-interest is not served. Mediocrity dictates; talent commands respect. The envious that cannot command respect resort to violence with the conviction that they alone in the whole wide world can be right on a particular issue. To prove this, they have the gift of fallacies, which they spontaneously use against all opposition and attempt to suppress the talented.
Mediocrity easily descends to insensitivity. Ignorant of the etiquettes of the sensible world, but cunning enough to understand its own self-interests, it abuses talent in public and apologizes in private. It concocts political truths and slanders talent, hoping thereby to win more mediocres over to its group. Only immediate goals dominate the myopic vision of the mediocre. So, mediocrity burns Rome without playing the music well. Then it lies about the fire and believes in the truth of its own false legends.
One of our major national problems is a tolerance of mediocrity, which is reverentially promoted and generously awarded honours and prizes. It is as if every pursuit of the trivial is an award-winning enterprise in Nepal. The talented never seek a reward as they perform their duties in honest faith, alert and sensitive to the needs of the nation. Mediocrity, sure of everything, is on an eternal quest for self-promotion on a cheap popular scale. As W. B. Yeats put it, "The best lack conviction, as the worst/Are full of passionate intensity."
Whenever mediocrity becomes the norm, nations begin to collapse. Our great nation is no exception to this rule.
Saturday, August 7, 2010
An Encounter with a Dog
Padma Devkota
I have always been proud of my father’s achievements. My admiration for him has only increased with every bit of additional knowledge regarding his life and work. It has also increased with every other story I hear from people who love to improve upon the already existing legends about Mahakavi Devkota. I love to hear these stories about my father because they come from a fandom of imperishable love and admiration, and I listen attentively to any legend about him, especially those that come from his contemporaries.
I relish his works too. Recently, I had just finished discussing one of his autobiographical pieces with students, but retained some doubts about certain names and dates that appeared in the essay. I was familiar, for instance, with the name of “the great Raja of Salyan in Nepal,” and could even recall my mother pointing at a formidable roadside gate near Pipalko Bot in Dillibazaar to identify his residence. There were times when I had seen a horse-drawn carriage enter or leave that immense gate. However, I did not know that the grandson of the great Raja of Salyan was my father’s classmate until I read “Pleasure in Humiliation.”
In this essay, my father recalls the last minute preparations for the I. Sc. examination and tells how he and his friend Phanindra Prasad Lohani went through the English textbooks in just two days. When the results were out, two of his aristocratic classmates, in whose house he used to teach children three hours daily, visited him and told him that their grandpa, the great Raja of Salyan, wanted to see him. Their grandpa, suspecting foul play in the marking of the examination copies, had my father’s English answer book re-examined by the Bengali tutor of the two babu sahebs. He simply could not believe that such well-fed and well brought up lads under the tutelage of the best Bengali teacher of English could fail while my father, despite his lower socio-economic rank, could outdo them. Although the re-examination of the answer book established the competence of the student, it failed to clear the suspicion upon the other Bengali tutor whom the Raja of Salyan had declined to offer the job of tutoring his grandsons. Before taking leave of such a great majesty as the Raja of Salyan, my humiliated father had his last say: “These two bedside products of yours are the greatest germs of genius born under the luckiest star. They must have been born on the day of the Light Festival”—the day when my father himself was born. And, when questioned by his classmates as to how many hours a day he studied, father had sarcastically replied that he was in the habit of keeping his books under his pillow and of reading the lines of print in his dream.
I was naturally curious to learn more about the Raja of Salyan whose name was Shumsher Bahadur Shah. His son, Gehendra Bahadur Shah, had wedded Juddha Shumsher’s daughter. The rich aristocratic tonality of feudal connections was itself historically significant enough to encourage my feeble attempts at research into this family’s history, but the real goading came from the satire in the essay, the deep satisfaction my father felt through humiliation. Who were these chums of his who, despite the best opportunities available to them, had frivolously wasted their time in privileged pleasures instead of seeking academic excellence? Did they sense an economic security for a long line of male descendants powerfully enough to undermine the real merits of education? Or, was it a simple case of inadvertent juvenility relishing life the best it can? Whatever it was, I wanted to listen to the recollections of a member of the family of the great Raja of Salyan of the days when my father used to tutor in their house and to find out more about his affinity with his aristocratic classmates. I therefore obtained an appointment with the octogenarian Birendra Bahadur Shah, one of the five grandsons of the Raja of Salyan, at his residence at 11:00 a.m. on the 9th of January 2008, and presented myself at his gate on the dot. He was a person who had served long as Zonal Commissioner in the Terai region during the Panchyat Era.
Anticipating my arrival, Mr. Shah had approached the gate as he had promised to do so. From the gate to his house at the far end of the field was an unpaved driveway, shaped like the right half of a square bracket, with patches of winter sunlight interspersed with shadows of large trees. He did not invite me into his house as I had expected, but chose to stand on a sunny spot near the gate end of the driveway. A well-fed person, still looking ruddy and robust, his health had nevertheless been recently undermined by the onslaught of age and whatever else accompanies obesity. He spoke to me about his recent hospitalization and I felt sorry for him. I was undecided about how to begin the interview because I had anticipated the comfort of a chair to sit down and jot notes in my copybook as he spoke. Understanding the futility of such an expectation, I pulled out my notebook and started scribbling the faded recollections of a patrician habituated to stand-up meetings with visitors near the main gate, pretty much like the Rana prime ministers of yore used to do.
He was happy to recall my father who had tutored him and others in his ancestral home at Pipalko Bot from 1939-41 as he recalled. This recollection probably missed the mark by a whole decade because my father joined Patna College and passed his I.Sc. in 1928. I, therefore, began doubting the authenticity of an unutilised memory. Nevertheless, I learned from him that Gehendra B. Shah had five sons: Jitendra, Narendra, Surendra, Birendra, and Devendra. Of these, Jitendra and a cousin of theirs, Padam Bahadur, were my father’s classmates—the two “germs of genius”—while Narendra and Bhavadeva were one grade above them. I also know from a different source that another intimate friend of my father, Shankar Dev Panta, taught Surendra all the seven papers of MA English programme offered by Patna University.
Unfortunately, the interview took a different turn at this point. I saw in the distance a sleek, black beauty gallop towards us, not in aggressive haste, not in howling hostility, but in almost leisurely stride as if towards a playground. By the time I could blurt out to Mr. Shah, “Dog! Dog is coming!” it was already half-way through the driveway. Mr. Shah looked at the dog with an octogenarian equanimity and even continued saying something he was saying though I do not remember what it was he said. The sleek, black creature sort of trotted towards the old man, and then it came to sniff at my crotches. I didn’t know how to greet it. By nature, it was better able than I was to respond to a new situation. It held my scrotum in its fangs and looked almost too gently at my face as if to ask if it hurt. Unable to reply to this interview, I crouched more with fear than with pain, for my winter garments were a timely blessing, and wondered why Mr. Shah would not chase my interviewer away. Half amused by my undignified posture and more repulsed by the plebeian chemicals that hurt its sensitive nostrils, the Doberman, or whatever it was, released me and stepped back.
“It’s bitten me!” I said.
“Go away!” said Mr. Shah, shooing with a feeble, leisurely wave of the hand the devil of a dog, which delighted in attacking me from behind. I felt its fangs tear my calf and cried out in pain.
“Don’t worry,” said Mr. Shah. “It has been given the anti-rabies injection. Nothing will happen. Nothing will happen.”
This time, my ballpoint and notebook had fallen to the ground, my leg hurt and I was terribly frightened.
“Chase it away,” I cried. Before anyone could do anything else, the nimble animal had frisked behind me to test the tensile strength of my right thigh immediately below the buttocks—a test with sharp and piercing canine points that made me jump and cry out in agony. I saw it come around to the front and look at me as if to ask, “How do you like this play? I haven’t been really aggressive, have I?”
No! The savage could have torn me to shreds, but it hadn’t. It only seemed to study the fear in my eyes and to say, “You respond well to my message.”
I did. I placed the synthetic leather bag in front of me to protect my crotches as it looked mischievously at my thighs and at my eyes turn by turn. It did not snarl. I did not run away. It bared no teeth. I trusted it none and hoped to parry well in self-defence in case of another frontal attack. Half-crouched in self-defence, I waited for someone to come to my rescue. Mr. Shah finally called for help: “Someone! Come and chase it away with a stick.” For the dog would obey no man, only a stick! From the humble servants’ quarter, a man came walking with a leisurely stride as if nothing uncommon had happened and took an eternity to cover some thirty feet of the drive. “Don’t worry, Sir,” he said. “This dog bites everyone. It has bitten me so many times! It has been injected. Nothing will happen. You don’t have to fear.”
When being bitten is normal, bites don’t count.
But even this devil of a dog did not like to be beaten. No, not with a stick. It was the stick that chased it away, not Mr. Shah, nor his keeper of the gate. It was not obeying these people because it was obeying its own nature. It was unassumingly its own self and nothing else. Nature reigned supreme and pure in this supple, muscular, canine frame. Its only fault, if it was considered a fault by its master, was the habit of biting every stranger that visited the house. I wondered why, knowing the dog so well, Mr. Shah did not leash it properly or lock it up in the kennel before receiving me into his compound. As it galloped away, the dog turned back to look at me a couple of times as if to say that it had enjoyed the pleasure of my company. I almost thanked it for not mangling me up to shreds.
Neither the patrician nor the plebeian asked me if I was bleeding, and I did not want to expose my wounds to them. Mr. Shah could have asked me whether I needed medical attention. He could at least have offered to call a cab for me to go home. However, he simply stood there watching me as if he was used to giving special appointments to visitors who were then unfailingly bitten by his normal and healthy dog. I will not say that this was the equivalent in Nepal of the Roman arena that let loose hungry lions upon culprits against the state for aristocratic entertainment. Yet, I felt like one who had presented himself at a formidable gate to entertain a Lord inside. Humiliated, hurt, but not defeated by such atrocious culture that defied all genuine taste of the civilized world, I picked up my notebook, put it in my bag, limped towards the main gate without a farewell, and stood hailing a taxi to go home.
I had finally learnt a lesson the hard way. What more could I have expected from a dog than a bite? However, I had expected much more from Mr. Shah: genuine hospitality, respect for me as an individual, some human sense and sensibility, and perhaps many more things. I should have known that human beings always disappoint us by their pretensions at superiority. Because I could not trust what was not genuine, I opted for the five required shots of anti-rabies at Himal Nursing Home and delighted in rereading “Pleasure in Humiliation” several more times as I recuperated from this experience.
24 April 2008
I have always been proud of my father’s achievements. My admiration for him has only increased with every bit of additional knowledge regarding his life and work. It has also increased with every other story I hear from people who love to improve upon the already existing legends about Mahakavi Devkota. I love to hear these stories about my father because they come from a fandom of imperishable love and admiration, and I listen attentively to any legend about him, especially those that come from his contemporaries.
I relish his works too. Recently, I had just finished discussing one of his autobiographical pieces with students, but retained some doubts about certain names and dates that appeared in the essay. I was familiar, for instance, with the name of “the great Raja of Salyan in Nepal,” and could even recall my mother pointing at a formidable roadside gate near Pipalko Bot in Dillibazaar to identify his residence. There were times when I had seen a horse-drawn carriage enter or leave that immense gate. However, I did not know that the grandson of the great Raja of Salyan was my father’s classmate until I read “Pleasure in Humiliation.”
In this essay, my father recalls the last minute preparations for the I. Sc. examination and tells how he and his friend Phanindra Prasad Lohani went through the English textbooks in just two days. When the results were out, two of his aristocratic classmates, in whose house he used to teach children three hours daily, visited him and told him that their grandpa, the great Raja of Salyan, wanted to see him. Their grandpa, suspecting foul play in the marking of the examination copies, had my father’s English answer book re-examined by the Bengali tutor of the two babu sahebs. He simply could not believe that such well-fed and well brought up lads under the tutelage of the best Bengali teacher of English could fail while my father, despite his lower socio-economic rank, could outdo them. Although the re-examination of the answer book established the competence of the student, it failed to clear the suspicion upon the other Bengali tutor whom the Raja of Salyan had declined to offer the job of tutoring his grandsons. Before taking leave of such a great majesty as the Raja of Salyan, my humiliated father had his last say: “These two bedside products of yours are the greatest germs of genius born under the luckiest star. They must have been born on the day of the Light Festival”—the day when my father himself was born. And, when questioned by his classmates as to how many hours a day he studied, father had sarcastically replied that he was in the habit of keeping his books under his pillow and of reading the lines of print in his dream.
I was naturally curious to learn more about the Raja of Salyan whose name was Shumsher Bahadur Shah. His son, Gehendra Bahadur Shah, had wedded Juddha Shumsher’s daughter. The rich aristocratic tonality of feudal connections was itself historically significant enough to encourage my feeble attempts at research into this family’s history, but the real goading came from the satire in the essay, the deep satisfaction my father felt through humiliation. Who were these chums of his who, despite the best opportunities available to them, had frivolously wasted their time in privileged pleasures instead of seeking academic excellence? Did they sense an economic security for a long line of male descendants powerfully enough to undermine the real merits of education? Or, was it a simple case of inadvertent juvenility relishing life the best it can? Whatever it was, I wanted to listen to the recollections of a member of the family of the great Raja of Salyan of the days when my father used to tutor in their house and to find out more about his affinity with his aristocratic classmates. I therefore obtained an appointment with the octogenarian Birendra Bahadur Shah, one of the five grandsons of the Raja of Salyan, at his residence at 11:00 a.m. on the 9th of January 2008, and presented myself at his gate on the dot. He was a person who had served long as Zonal Commissioner in the Terai region during the Panchyat Era.
Anticipating my arrival, Mr. Shah had approached the gate as he had promised to do so. From the gate to his house at the far end of the field was an unpaved driveway, shaped like the right half of a square bracket, with patches of winter sunlight interspersed with shadows of large trees. He did not invite me into his house as I had expected, but chose to stand on a sunny spot near the gate end of the driveway. A well-fed person, still looking ruddy and robust, his health had nevertheless been recently undermined by the onslaught of age and whatever else accompanies obesity. He spoke to me about his recent hospitalization and I felt sorry for him. I was undecided about how to begin the interview because I had anticipated the comfort of a chair to sit down and jot notes in my copybook as he spoke. Understanding the futility of such an expectation, I pulled out my notebook and started scribbling the faded recollections of a patrician habituated to stand-up meetings with visitors near the main gate, pretty much like the Rana prime ministers of yore used to do.
He was happy to recall my father who had tutored him and others in his ancestral home at Pipalko Bot from 1939-41 as he recalled. This recollection probably missed the mark by a whole decade because my father joined Patna College and passed his I.Sc. in 1928. I, therefore, began doubting the authenticity of an unutilised memory. Nevertheless, I learned from him that Gehendra B. Shah had five sons: Jitendra, Narendra, Surendra, Birendra, and Devendra. Of these, Jitendra and a cousin of theirs, Padam Bahadur, were my father’s classmates—the two “germs of genius”—while Narendra and Bhavadeva were one grade above them. I also know from a different source that another intimate friend of my father, Shankar Dev Panta, taught Surendra all the seven papers of MA English programme offered by Patna University.
Unfortunately, the interview took a different turn at this point. I saw in the distance a sleek, black beauty gallop towards us, not in aggressive haste, not in howling hostility, but in almost leisurely stride as if towards a playground. By the time I could blurt out to Mr. Shah, “Dog! Dog is coming!” it was already half-way through the driveway. Mr. Shah looked at the dog with an octogenarian equanimity and even continued saying something he was saying though I do not remember what it was he said. The sleek, black creature sort of trotted towards the old man, and then it came to sniff at my crotches. I didn’t know how to greet it. By nature, it was better able than I was to respond to a new situation. It held my scrotum in its fangs and looked almost too gently at my face as if to ask if it hurt. Unable to reply to this interview, I crouched more with fear than with pain, for my winter garments were a timely blessing, and wondered why Mr. Shah would not chase my interviewer away. Half amused by my undignified posture and more repulsed by the plebeian chemicals that hurt its sensitive nostrils, the Doberman, or whatever it was, released me and stepped back.
“It’s bitten me!” I said.
“Go away!” said Mr. Shah, shooing with a feeble, leisurely wave of the hand the devil of a dog, which delighted in attacking me from behind. I felt its fangs tear my calf and cried out in pain.
“Don’t worry,” said Mr. Shah. “It has been given the anti-rabies injection. Nothing will happen. Nothing will happen.”
This time, my ballpoint and notebook had fallen to the ground, my leg hurt and I was terribly frightened.
“Chase it away,” I cried. Before anyone could do anything else, the nimble animal had frisked behind me to test the tensile strength of my right thigh immediately below the buttocks—a test with sharp and piercing canine points that made me jump and cry out in agony. I saw it come around to the front and look at me as if to ask, “How do you like this play? I haven’t been really aggressive, have I?”
No! The savage could have torn me to shreds, but it hadn’t. It only seemed to study the fear in my eyes and to say, “You respond well to my message.”
I did. I placed the synthetic leather bag in front of me to protect my crotches as it looked mischievously at my thighs and at my eyes turn by turn. It did not snarl. I did not run away. It bared no teeth. I trusted it none and hoped to parry well in self-defence in case of another frontal attack. Half-crouched in self-defence, I waited for someone to come to my rescue. Mr. Shah finally called for help: “Someone! Come and chase it away with a stick.” For the dog would obey no man, only a stick! From the humble servants’ quarter, a man came walking with a leisurely stride as if nothing uncommon had happened and took an eternity to cover some thirty feet of the drive. “Don’t worry, Sir,” he said. “This dog bites everyone. It has bitten me so many times! It has been injected. Nothing will happen. You don’t have to fear.”
When being bitten is normal, bites don’t count.
But even this devil of a dog did not like to be beaten. No, not with a stick. It was the stick that chased it away, not Mr. Shah, nor his keeper of the gate. It was not obeying these people because it was obeying its own nature. It was unassumingly its own self and nothing else. Nature reigned supreme and pure in this supple, muscular, canine frame. Its only fault, if it was considered a fault by its master, was the habit of biting every stranger that visited the house. I wondered why, knowing the dog so well, Mr. Shah did not leash it properly or lock it up in the kennel before receiving me into his compound. As it galloped away, the dog turned back to look at me a couple of times as if to say that it had enjoyed the pleasure of my company. I almost thanked it for not mangling me up to shreds.
Neither the patrician nor the plebeian asked me if I was bleeding, and I did not want to expose my wounds to them. Mr. Shah could have asked me whether I needed medical attention. He could at least have offered to call a cab for me to go home. However, he simply stood there watching me as if he was used to giving special appointments to visitors who were then unfailingly bitten by his normal and healthy dog. I will not say that this was the equivalent in Nepal of the Roman arena that let loose hungry lions upon culprits against the state for aristocratic entertainment. Yet, I felt like one who had presented himself at a formidable gate to entertain a Lord inside. Humiliated, hurt, but not defeated by such atrocious culture that defied all genuine taste of the civilized world, I picked up my notebook, put it in my bag, limped towards the main gate without a farewell, and stood hailing a taxi to go home.
I had finally learnt a lesson the hard way. What more could I have expected from a dog than a bite? However, I had expected much more from Mr. Shah: genuine hospitality, respect for me as an individual, some human sense and sensibility, and perhaps many more things. I should have known that human beings always disappoint us by their pretensions at superiority. Because I could not trust what was not genuine, I opted for the five required shots of anti-rabies at Himal Nursing Home and delighted in rereading “Pleasure in Humiliation” several more times as I recuperated from this experience.
24 April 2008
Friday, August 6, 2010
The Street We Walk
Padma Devkota
The Street We Walk
The street is important to people who have a destination. Loiterers only obstruct somebody’s progress. Today, the streets of Kathmandu are filled with office hour traffic jams, political traffic jams, bottleneck traffic jams, wrong parking traffic jams, or narrow two-way traffic jams; with loiterers defying the vehicles with a see-if-you-can-hit-me attitude, with constant touch and go of vehicles that strike the pedestrian’s arm or elbow with a side mirror or a handle tip; with the undaunted young that shove or strike anyone with their shoulders and proceed without the slightest qualm; with bicycles that ply against the one-way traffic and knock one down from behind; with motorcycles that assume the right to rush along footpaths or to be parked in such a haphazard manner that pedestrians have to descend to the street below to continue their journey; with vendors who spread loads of vegetables or cheap quality items to sell on the footpath; with children trying their tiny bicycles in the public street; with dogs napping cozily in the sun or an occasional bovine seeking the greenery of its childhood amidst a stinking mound of local garbage against a wall or at the crossroad. Might is right in the streets. The traffic policeman looks on at the utter confusion and takes a break at the corner shop. He knows that should he try to move a wrongly parked cab or attempt to take action against a broken traffic rule, the taxi-driver who has the strength of a union behind him or the owner of the red plate who has special connections or a heavy wallet in his inner coat pocket will chide him instead, if not abuse him. Breaking all rules is the game of the day.
And the streets are like broken rules: here patched with end of the fiscal year budget; there covered with a varnish-coat of tar and road-metal that will yield to a couple of passing trucks to expose their previous self even as they testify to the legally justified heavy national expenditure; pot-holed by nature that derides our national ability to maintain even the sewers and drainage now absent under dirt, stones, bricks, sticks, plastic, polythene, kitchen waste and other solids so that summer may swell the sea inside the ground floor of adjacent houses and winter may simulate the ragged bottom of a sea never tampered by ingenuous human hands; puddled up abundantly during the monsoon to soak and stain fresh-washed clothes of pedestrians with splashes that could have been easily avoided by any decent driver; and broken and jagged at the most unexpected places so that two-wheelers may anytime meet an accident or pedestrians may sprain their ankle or break their legs while walking. Uncovered manholes, or even covered ones that are raised above the normal street level to form humps, have invited many accidents. So have the large rocks and stones left unheeded in the middle of busy streets by trucks that drop them there. The nation does not feel itself responsible for accidents and ensuing physical or financial loss of its citizen (who should look where they are going).
Neither the nation nor the footpath allows us to hold our heads high as we try to walk with confidence towards our destination. The very footpath images the country in terms of a topography of narrow and large contours, of mountains and hills and valleys and plains, so that the unwary pedestrian will stumble against a cement block that is supposed to cover a sewer but is lying elsewhere, or unexpectedly step into a yawning ditch. The missing diamond block of the sidewalk will never be replaced until it promises financial advantages to some people involved in the maintenance of the streets. All of a sudden there will be a one-foot high speed-breaker lying athwart the sidewalk just outside the huge gate of a dealer in iron rods or the individual whims of adjacent houses will have raised the footpath to two and a half feet above its normal level, which pedestrians then have to climb and descend like hillbillies. The once beautiful fin-patterned bricks of the sidewalks having given away to overuse, now broken and neglected, invite the foot to twist along a torturous angle so that the whole body wobbles with the intoxication of a pleasant evening walk if we are not careful enough to cast our humble eyes down on the ground before the power of the street.
Yes, the street is very powerful! An emblem of the nation’s mind, it faithfully reflects its maker. After all, human physical environment is a product of the human mind. Therefore, the street is the expression of the nation’s mind. And there can be nothing more powerful than the nation’s mind when a sea of humanity surges in a political collectivity no educated responses can withstand. For collectivity is a power that can determine social evolutions into states other than the present one where the present controllers of the power of the street can remain where they are: right at the centre. For, they have nowhere else to go.
It is only the people who have somewhere else to go because they are not at the power-centre of the nation. They need the street to walk; they need the footpath to avoid accidents. They have their individual goals and destinations. These people’s strength lies in their individuality, in their creative expressions, in their willful self-sacrifice for the betterment of other individuals who are willing to excel themselves. This is the embodiment of culture. And, human rights are powerful expressions of the significance of individuality without which democracy is impossible. Yet, the mighty street can also violate all civilized decency and tenets of human rights to merely encage democracy in the written constitution.
That is stagnation. That is a defiance of the street itself as the people need it: to go somewhere. The people want to go away from the miserable wilderness of injustice and impositions to a land of opportunities to bloom into individual human flowers of excellence. The people want to discover the truth about themselves, to discover their potentials, for truth is power in a state of civilization. In a state of savagery this equation does not hold. There is neither civilization nor democracy in the absence of an educated consciousness that guides attitudes and behaviour. But truth becomes a value in the mighty street only when it does not contradict the desire of the controllers of power who pretend that the world can be saved by the light of their consciousness alone.
The controllers of power would like this outgrowth of the collectivity to remain permanently under their own control. The individual wants to walk a street that is smooth, well-paved, maintained and safe. S/he has no choice but to twist and turn the ankles at every step. Throughout the history of Nepal, the power-wielders have preferred it the other way about: let the street educate the public to keep their eyes on the ground they walk. Let them not aspire to a heaven of their dreams lest another Indra feel a mortal speck of deep concern.
It is a clownish cock that wears its caruncle like a crown!
The Street We Walk
The street is important to people who have a destination. Loiterers only obstruct somebody’s progress. Today, the streets of Kathmandu are filled with office hour traffic jams, political traffic jams, bottleneck traffic jams, wrong parking traffic jams, or narrow two-way traffic jams; with loiterers defying the vehicles with a see-if-you-can-hit-me attitude, with constant touch and go of vehicles that strike the pedestrian’s arm or elbow with a side mirror or a handle tip; with the undaunted young that shove or strike anyone with their shoulders and proceed without the slightest qualm; with bicycles that ply against the one-way traffic and knock one down from behind; with motorcycles that assume the right to rush along footpaths or to be parked in such a haphazard manner that pedestrians have to descend to the street below to continue their journey; with vendors who spread loads of vegetables or cheap quality items to sell on the footpath; with children trying their tiny bicycles in the public street; with dogs napping cozily in the sun or an occasional bovine seeking the greenery of its childhood amidst a stinking mound of local garbage against a wall or at the crossroad. Might is right in the streets. The traffic policeman looks on at the utter confusion and takes a break at the corner shop. He knows that should he try to move a wrongly parked cab or attempt to take action against a broken traffic rule, the taxi-driver who has the strength of a union behind him or the owner of the red plate who has special connections or a heavy wallet in his inner coat pocket will chide him instead, if not abuse him. Breaking all rules is the game of the day.
And the streets are like broken rules: here patched with end of the fiscal year budget; there covered with a varnish-coat of tar and road-metal that will yield to a couple of passing trucks to expose their previous self even as they testify to the legally justified heavy national expenditure; pot-holed by nature that derides our national ability to maintain even the sewers and drainage now absent under dirt, stones, bricks, sticks, plastic, polythene, kitchen waste and other solids so that summer may swell the sea inside the ground floor of adjacent houses and winter may simulate the ragged bottom of a sea never tampered by ingenuous human hands; puddled up abundantly during the monsoon to soak and stain fresh-washed clothes of pedestrians with splashes that could have been easily avoided by any decent driver; and broken and jagged at the most unexpected places so that two-wheelers may anytime meet an accident or pedestrians may sprain their ankle or break their legs while walking. Uncovered manholes, or even covered ones that are raised above the normal street level to form humps, have invited many accidents. So have the large rocks and stones left unheeded in the middle of busy streets by trucks that drop them there. The nation does not feel itself responsible for accidents and ensuing physical or financial loss of its citizen (who should look where they are going).
Neither the nation nor the footpath allows us to hold our heads high as we try to walk with confidence towards our destination. The very footpath images the country in terms of a topography of narrow and large contours, of mountains and hills and valleys and plains, so that the unwary pedestrian will stumble against a cement block that is supposed to cover a sewer but is lying elsewhere, or unexpectedly step into a yawning ditch. The missing diamond block of the sidewalk will never be replaced until it promises financial advantages to some people involved in the maintenance of the streets. All of a sudden there will be a one-foot high speed-breaker lying athwart the sidewalk just outside the huge gate of a dealer in iron rods or the individual whims of adjacent houses will have raised the footpath to two and a half feet above its normal level, which pedestrians then have to climb and descend like hillbillies. The once beautiful fin-patterned bricks of the sidewalks having given away to overuse, now broken and neglected, invite the foot to twist along a torturous angle so that the whole body wobbles with the intoxication of a pleasant evening walk if we are not careful enough to cast our humble eyes down on the ground before the power of the street.
Yes, the street is very powerful! An emblem of the nation’s mind, it faithfully reflects its maker. After all, human physical environment is a product of the human mind. Therefore, the street is the expression of the nation’s mind. And there can be nothing more powerful than the nation’s mind when a sea of humanity surges in a political collectivity no educated responses can withstand. For collectivity is a power that can determine social evolutions into states other than the present one where the present controllers of the power of the street can remain where they are: right at the centre. For, they have nowhere else to go.
It is only the people who have somewhere else to go because they are not at the power-centre of the nation. They need the street to walk; they need the footpath to avoid accidents. They have their individual goals and destinations. These people’s strength lies in their individuality, in their creative expressions, in their willful self-sacrifice for the betterment of other individuals who are willing to excel themselves. This is the embodiment of culture. And, human rights are powerful expressions of the significance of individuality without which democracy is impossible. Yet, the mighty street can also violate all civilized decency and tenets of human rights to merely encage democracy in the written constitution.
That is stagnation. That is a defiance of the street itself as the people need it: to go somewhere. The people want to go away from the miserable wilderness of injustice and impositions to a land of opportunities to bloom into individual human flowers of excellence. The people want to discover the truth about themselves, to discover their potentials, for truth is power in a state of civilization. In a state of savagery this equation does not hold. There is neither civilization nor democracy in the absence of an educated consciousness that guides attitudes and behaviour. But truth becomes a value in the mighty street only when it does not contradict the desire of the controllers of power who pretend that the world can be saved by the light of their consciousness alone.
The controllers of power would like this outgrowth of the collectivity to remain permanently under their own control. The individual wants to walk a street that is smooth, well-paved, maintained and safe. S/he has no choice but to twist and turn the ankles at every step. Throughout the history of Nepal, the power-wielders have preferred it the other way about: let the street educate the public to keep their eyes on the ground they walk. Let them not aspire to a heaven of their dreams lest another Indra feel a mortal speck of deep concern.
It is a clownish cock that wears its caruncle like a crown!
Thursday, August 5, 2010
New Nepalese Rats (Story)
Padma Devkota
New Nepalese Rats
Two rats met outside the drain hole. One rat said to the other, “Ratty, do you know something?”
“What?” asked Ratty.
“People of Nepal have decided to change everything old into something new. Isn’t that wonderful?”
“Why, that’s great!” said Ratty. “I too was getting tired of the same old things to eat and the same old sewage pipes to walk along. Are they changing some of these sewage pipes that are clogged with their pads and condoms?”
“No, silly,” explained the other. “That’s going to be too expensive!”
“Are they going to eat something new, Teethy?”
“Don’t be stupid,” said the other. “I’m not ‘Teethy’ anymore! I have acquired a new name in my New Nepal. My name is spelled Y-h-t-e-e-t. Can you pronounce that?”
“I can’t,” said Ratty. “Can you teach me how to?”
“It’s pronounced tee-thee!”
“But what’s new about that?” asked the confused friend.
“The spelling!” replied Yhteet. “How wonderfully dull some Nepalese are!”
Poor Ratty did not know what to say to this insult. He decided to say nothing as a simple way to avoid conflict with a friend. He played the dullard and asked, “How are they making a New Nepal?”
“They’re making a New Nepal with words and letters! When one man says ‘people’ for example he means everyone who does not disagree with what he says. Since for the Nepalese ‘to disagree’ is a synonym of ‘to be thrashed to death,’ New Nepal has more people than Old Nepal ever had.”
“Yea! That’s great! Now they won’t have to count how many real people are living in the country. What a great idea!”
“You’re not really as dumb as I thought you were,” complimented Yhteet. “However,” he continued, “you are not a toirtap!”
“What’s a toirtap?”
“One who loves his father’s land and kills his mother’s children like unwanted enemies,” said Yhteet.
“’A toirtap is one who loves his father’s land and so kills his mother’s children like unwanted enemies?’ I don’t want to be a toirtap! Never!” said Ratty. “It’s very un-rodent!”
Yhteet took a moment to digest this before he said, “I did not say ‘so.’ Why don’t you try to understand?” After a moment’s consideration, he spoke in a quiet sort of way, “Now, Ratty, I’d like you too to help build a New Nepal. What do you say to we two working together?”
Ratty considered this for a moment. He was unhappy with the way things were. The drains were too thick and clogged. Food was too scarce. People hoarded their grains so well that he was forced to recourse to what was rejected by them as wastage. He had as much right to live as they had. Lord Rat had created all animals equal but had made the rats superior in intelligence. O, if only He had not given men as much brains as He had!
Ratty decided to help Yhteet build a New Nepal where equal distribution of grains was a constitutional right. Considering the population of rats and men and their females too, such a distribution was going to make everyone poor and starving. However, superiority of any sort was against The Law of New Nepal. It would be a blasphemy for a rat to be considered right where the law-makers were claiming to be right because everybody else was wrong.
So, Ratty asked, “Teethy!”
Oops! He shouldn’t have thought of the spelling that way!
Ratty corrected himself and said, “Yhteet! How can I help you build a New Nepal?”
Yhteet almost felt like kissing Ratty! He was proud of this drain rat. He spoke with almost caressing words, “My dear Ratty, while men are becoming more international by adopting another nation’s national language as their own, we too have to go international by changing the map of Nepal. Let us get rid of everything old! If the triangular national flag is old, the triangular Everest peak is also old. Let us go and reshape the tallest peak of the world and make a name in history!”
“That,” said Ratty, “is the most wonderful idea a rat can have in his whole life! You’re a genius!”
“Ideas change the world!” agreed Yhteet. He was elated with his successful rhetoric.
“True,” agreed Ratty. “Now prove that you can gnaw away the highest peak to create a New Nepal. Let frontiers go international. Let language express whatever you want it to express. Let toirtap be the ideal of your life. I feel hungry and must rummage the drains before other rats consume what I might survive upon. Allow me, Sir Yhteet, to live undisturbed by your great ideals and I will cast a vote for you in the next elections.”
Saying this, Ratty disappeared into the sewage pipe.
“He will wake up one day,” said Yhteet. “Poor victim of Old Nepal!”
Friday, 25 September 2009
New Nepalese Rats
Two rats met outside the drain hole. One rat said to the other, “Ratty, do you know something?”
“What?” asked Ratty.
“People of Nepal have decided to change everything old into something new. Isn’t that wonderful?”
“Why, that’s great!” said Ratty. “I too was getting tired of the same old things to eat and the same old sewage pipes to walk along. Are they changing some of these sewage pipes that are clogged with their pads and condoms?”
“No, silly,” explained the other. “That’s going to be too expensive!”
“Are they going to eat something new, Teethy?”
“Don’t be stupid,” said the other. “I’m not ‘Teethy’ anymore! I have acquired a new name in my New Nepal. My name is spelled Y-h-t-e-e-t. Can you pronounce that?”
“I can’t,” said Ratty. “Can you teach me how to?”
“It’s pronounced tee-thee!”
“But what’s new about that?” asked the confused friend.
“The spelling!” replied Yhteet. “How wonderfully dull some Nepalese are!”
Poor Ratty did not know what to say to this insult. He decided to say nothing as a simple way to avoid conflict with a friend. He played the dullard and asked, “How are they making a New Nepal?”
“They’re making a New Nepal with words and letters! When one man says ‘people’ for example he means everyone who does not disagree with what he says. Since for the Nepalese ‘to disagree’ is a synonym of ‘to be thrashed to death,’ New Nepal has more people than Old Nepal ever had.”
“Yea! That’s great! Now they won’t have to count how many real people are living in the country. What a great idea!”
“You’re not really as dumb as I thought you were,” complimented Yhteet. “However,” he continued, “you are not a toirtap!”
“What’s a toirtap?”
“One who loves his father’s land and kills his mother’s children like unwanted enemies,” said Yhteet.
“’A toirtap is one who loves his father’s land and so kills his mother’s children like unwanted enemies?’ I don’t want to be a toirtap! Never!” said Ratty. “It’s very un-rodent!”
Yhteet took a moment to digest this before he said, “I did not say ‘so.’ Why don’t you try to understand?” After a moment’s consideration, he spoke in a quiet sort of way, “Now, Ratty, I’d like you too to help build a New Nepal. What do you say to we two working together?”
Ratty considered this for a moment. He was unhappy with the way things were. The drains were too thick and clogged. Food was too scarce. People hoarded their grains so well that he was forced to recourse to what was rejected by them as wastage. He had as much right to live as they had. Lord Rat had created all animals equal but had made the rats superior in intelligence. O, if only He had not given men as much brains as He had!
Ratty decided to help Yhteet build a New Nepal where equal distribution of grains was a constitutional right. Considering the population of rats and men and their females too, such a distribution was going to make everyone poor and starving. However, superiority of any sort was against The Law of New Nepal. It would be a blasphemy for a rat to be considered right where the law-makers were claiming to be right because everybody else was wrong.
So, Ratty asked, “Teethy!”
Oops! He shouldn’t have thought of the spelling that way!
Ratty corrected himself and said, “Yhteet! How can I help you build a New Nepal?”
Yhteet almost felt like kissing Ratty! He was proud of this drain rat. He spoke with almost caressing words, “My dear Ratty, while men are becoming more international by adopting another nation’s national language as their own, we too have to go international by changing the map of Nepal. Let us get rid of everything old! If the triangular national flag is old, the triangular Everest peak is also old. Let us go and reshape the tallest peak of the world and make a name in history!”
“That,” said Ratty, “is the most wonderful idea a rat can have in his whole life! You’re a genius!”
“Ideas change the world!” agreed Yhteet. He was elated with his successful rhetoric.
“True,” agreed Ratty. “Now prove that you can gnaw away the highest peak to create a New Nepal. Let frontiers go international. Let language express whatever you want it to express. Let toirtap be the ideal of your life. I feel hungry and must rummage the drains before other rats consume what I might survive upon. Allow me, Sir Yhteet, to live undisturbed by your great ideals and I will cast a vote for you in the next elections.”
Saying this, Ratty disappeared into the sewage pipe.
“He will wake up one day,” said Yhteet. “Poor victim of Old Nepal!”
Friday, 25 September 2009
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
Celebration of Mediocrity
Padma Devkota
Celebration of Mediocrity
Ajit Baral's "Importance of being critical" (KTM Post October 2, 2005) drives home a bitter truth to which the concerned authorities of Tribhuvan University have permanently closed their eyes. It is a pleasant surprise for me that the general public should begin to notice the "mockery" that English higher education has become today. The only person in the Central Department of English, T.U., Kirtipur, who never ever compromises with mediocrity is Shreedhar Lohani. He is a very unhappy man today because he continues hoping against hope that things will improve.
The blurbs on the back cover of Yubaraj Aryal's A Pageant of Short Stories are highly representative of the writers, with one exception. Chandra Prakash Sharma, the present Head of the Central Department of English (CDE) at Kirtipur needs to take a course on how to write correct English. Ajit Baral made too quick a judgment on the basis of a fragment: "An emerging voice in South Asian literature." I need not comment further on the incomprehensible erudition of my once upon a time colleagues. Their columns in The Kathmandu Post are often as interesting as these blurbs.
These fawning blurbs, in fact, accurately describe certain attitudes. First, fawning promotes peaceful survival in the mob-controlled university campus where individual gains override all healthy institutional promotions. People are happy when they are made to feel superior to what they actually are. If writing blurbs is one approach to making people happy, grading exams and theses is another. The most recent results of MA English First Year and Second Year examinations surprised us all because, as I have been given to understand, no student of the Central Department of English received marks between thirty-five to fifty-five percent. This was nothing more than a survival policy of the academic leadership of the department although he smiled at the Kantipur camera and said that students did well because he told the teachers to teach well and the students to study well. According to him, both obeyed. Let readers infer the accusations he hurled at all his predecessors.
Similarly, the same fawning "blurbs" function in the evaluation of theses produced in the Central Department of English. I am given to understand that these days no thesis writer receives less than distinction marks, which is eighty percent. As the story goes, a student who appeared for the viva refused to answer questions because he said he neither knew nor cared to know the answers to those questions. He said he needed eighty-nine percent for the thesis he wrote. Because the teachers felt sufficiently threatened, he received the marks he demanded. There are many who demand a certain percentage for the thesis they write, which is neither properly supervised nor judiciously evaluated in most cases. Once, the Head sent a colleague to my place to seek my consent to raise the marks given by the evaluation committee comprising of the Head, the Supervisor and the External Examiner because the student had told him that he wanted more marks. I refused to promote academic corruption on moral grounds.
It is natural for students to be happy when they receive very high grades. I too would have been happy. I would have been happier if I actually deserved it. However, where does this malpractice take us in the academic journey of the nation? The ignorant army of Master's degree-holders forecast the lasting darkness of this nation's future.
Second, fawning begets fawning. Our society is a flatterer's paradise. Raise a fool to the status of a sage and the fool will garland you with flowers and flattery. He will also praise your knowledge, kindness, and creamy beard. On the basis of a single story you have written, you will become the Kafka of Nepal. After all, flattery continues to be a paying social practice in Nepal since a very long time ago. A critic used to praise a poet as being greater than Mahakavi Devkota and the poet used to praise him as being the greatest living critic in the whole literary world. Isn't this what we all want? To be happy? To make others happy? If so, fawning is certainly not a malpractice. However, the academia is directly more concerned with the acquisition and increment of knowledge than with personal and individual happiness.
Once a student leader spoke to me with the best of intentions and suggested that I be more practical. "This is the way the university is running, Sir," he said. "Why do you bother about quality? About five or ten percent of the students will do well. As for the rest, let them come and go the way they are. What difference does it make?" I still do not agree with this attitude, which seeks to please certain groups and individuals rather than promote everyone's well-being. The function of a teacher is to teach well, not to be emotionally entangled with students to the extent of fawning them. Tribhuvan University does not hire teachers to "love" students, but to teach them well.
However, fawning is an academic practice among those in Tribhuvan University who, for the sake of cheap popularity, are willing to sacrifice all other goals of learning.
The sycophant is the greatest scholar. The person who does not know the difference between gender and feminism is the greatest feminist. The person who segregates eastern knowledge from western knowledge is the most erudite teacher of Intellectual History. The orator who vomits forth the greatest number of neologism, whether he himself understands them or not, is the most versatile person. The columnist who produces articles for the longest period of time is the greatest writer. And, the writer who wonders whether his story contains postmodernism as its component becomes a royal academician.
Finally, fawning does not create dislikes that may lead to enmities. Some of these writers of blurbs are also advisors of "The Philosophical Journal"—another monstrosity they are promoting at the department—published by Yubaraj Aryal and his friends. When I recall all this and more, my mind returns to Dr. Beerendra Pandey's "Message" published on the twelfth page of the Prospectus of Kathmandu Model College, Bagbazar. Dr. Pandey, a permanent staff of the Central Department of English, T.U., Kirtipur, writes here as a Coordinator of the MA Programme in English at Kathmandu Model College: "Kathmandu Model College recognizes that English functions not only as a vehicle for international communication but also as a window on the rapid progress of science and technology, and that if Nepal has to keep pace with the rest of he [sic] world, high quality teaching of English is a must. However, in recent years the teaching of English, especially at the apex level—at the Central of [sic] Department of English, T.U., Kirtipur—has reached its nadir mainly due to the jumbo class-size and the vast disparity in the student-teacher ratio. At the present time, it seems unrealistic to pretend that the Central Department of English is turning out students whom an institution can hire with confidence. KMC has stepped in with a view to arresting the slide in the teaching of English at the post-graduate level."
Let readers infer the honesty with which teachers of T.U. uphold the institution. As for me, I will only say that teachers like Dr. Pandey have the choice of either making enemies or of celebrating mediocrity.
Sunday, October 02, 2005
Celebration of Mediocrity
Ajit Baral's "Importance of being critical" (KTM Post October 2, 2005) drives home a bitter truth to which the concerned authorities of Tribhuvan University have permanently closed their eyes. It is a pleasant surprise for me that the general public should begin to notice the "mockery" that English higher education has become today. The only person in the Central Department of English, T.U., Kirtipur, who never ever compromises with mediocrity is Shreedhar Lohani. He is a very unhappy man today because he continues hoping against hope that things will improve.
The blurbs on the back cover of Yubaraj Aryal's A Pageant of Short Stories are highly representative of the writers, with one exception. Chandra Prakash Sharma, the present Head of the Central Department of English (CDE) at Kirtipur needs to take a course on how to write correct English. Ajit Baral made too quick a judgment on the basis of a fragment: "An emerging voice in South Asian literature." I need not comment further on the incomprehensible erudition of my once upon a time colleagues. Their columns in The Kathmandu Post are often as interesting as these blurbs.
These fawning blurbs, in fact, accurately describe certain attitudes. First, fawning promotes peaceful survival in the mob-controlled university campus where individual gains override all healthy institutional promotions. People are happy when they are made to feel superior to what they actually are. If writing blurbs is one approach to making people happy, grading exams and theses is another. The most recent results of MA English First Year and Second Year examinations surprised us all because, as I have been given to understand, no student of the Central Department of English received marks between thirty-five to fifty-five percent. This was nothing more than a survival policy of the academic leadership of the department although he smiled at the Kantipur camera and said that students did well because he told the teachers to teach well and the students to study well. According to him, both obeyed. Let readers infer the accusations he hurled at all his predecessors.
Similarly, the same fawning "blurbs" function in the evaluation of theses produced in the Central Department of English. I am given to understand that these days no thesis writer receives less than distinction marks, which is eighty percent. As the story goes, a student who appeared for the viva refused to answer questions because he said he neither knew nor cared to know the answers to those questions. He said he needed eighty-nine percent for the thesis he wrote. Because the teachers felt sufficiently threatened, he received the marks he demanded. There are many who demand a certain percentage for the thesis they write, which is neither properly supervised nor judiciously evaluated in most cases. Once, the Head sent a colleague to my place to seek my consent to raise the marks given by the evaluation committee comprising of the Head, the Supervisor and the External Examiner because the student had told him that he wanted more marks. I refused to promote academic corruption on moral grounds.
It is natural for students to be happy when they receive very high grades. I too would have been happy. I would have been happier if I actually deserved it. However, where does this malpractice take us in the academic journey of the nation? The ignorant army of Master's degree-holders forecast the lasting darkness of this nation's future.
Second, fawning begets fawning. Our society is a flatterer's paradise. Raise a fool to the status of a sage and the fool will garland you with flowers and flattery. He will also praise your knowledge, kindness, and creamy beard. On the basis of a single story you have written, you will become the Kafka of Nepal. After all, flattery continues to be a paying social practice in Nepal since a very long time ago. A critic used to praise a poet as being greater than Mahakavi Devkota and the poet used to praise him as being the greatest living critic in the whole literary world. Isn't this what we all want? To be happy? To make others happy? If so, fawning is certainly not a malpractice. However, the academia is directly more concerned with the acquisition and increment of knowledge than with personal and individual happiness.
Once a student leader spoke to me with the best of intentions and suggested that I be more practical. "This is the way the university is running, Sir," he said. "Why do you bother about quality? About five or ten percent of the students will do well. As for the rest, let them come and go the way they are. What difference does it make?" I still do not agree with this attitude, which seeks to please certain groups and individuals rather than promote everyone's well-being. The function of a teacher is to teach well, not to be emotionally entangled with students to the extent of fawning them. Tribhuvan University does not hire teachers to "love" students, but to teach them well.
However, fawning is an academic practice among those in Tribhuvan University who, for the sake of cheap popularity, are willing to sacrifice all other goals of learning.
The sycophant is the greatest scholar. The person who does not know the difference between gender and feminism is the greatest feminist. The person who segregates eastern knowledge from western knowledge is the most erudite teacher of Intellectual History. The orator who vomits forth the greatest number of neologism, whether he himself understands them or not, is the most versatile person. The columnist who produces articles for the longest period of time is the greatest writer. And, the writer who wonders whether his story contains postmodernism as its component becomes a royal academician.
Finally, fawning does not create dislikes that may lead to enmities. Some of these writers of blurbs are also advisors of "The Philosophical Journal"—another monstrosity they are promoting at the department—published by Yubaraj Aryal and his friends. When I recall all this and more, my mind returns to Dr. Beerendra Pandey's "Message" published on the twelfth page of the Prospectus of Kathmandu Model College, Bagbazar. Dr. Pandey, a permanent staff of the Central Department of English, T.U., Kirtipur, writes here as a Coordinator of the MA Programme in English at Kathmandu Model College: "Kathmandu Model College recognizes that English functions not only as a vehicle for international communication but also as a window on the rapid progress of science and technology, and that if Nepal has to keep pace with the rest of he [sic] world, high quality teaching of English is a must. However, in recent years the teaching of English, especially at the apex level—at the Central of [sic] Department of English, T.U., Kirtipur—has reached its nadir mainly due to the jumbo class-size and the vast disparity in the student-teacher ratio. At the present time, it seems unrealistic to pretend that the Central Department of English is turning out students whom an institution can hire with confidence. KMC has stepped in with a view to arresting the slide in the teaching of English at the post-graduate level."
Let readers infer the honesty with which teachers of T.U. uphold the institution. As for me, I will only say that teachers like Dr. Pandey have the choice of either making enemies or of celebrating mediocrity.
Sunday, October 02, 2005
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