THE NAUKA AND THE PALKI

Ya devi sarbabhuteshshu, Shakti roopena sansthita

 Namasteshwai Namasteshwai Namasteshwai namo namaha."

Even though early, the Puja is surely in.  My wife says that New

Market is chock- a -block filled up with 'shop-till-droppers'. Almost every alternate day she preens around with her collection of saris she has gathered  over the past few months. The Sharadiya Sales banners are splashed across the malls, Gariahat and Hatibagan, Kankurgachhi and Sakher Bazar. I am receiving  requests from friends for booking guest houses for a family getaway. I, too,  have already made a plan for a brief pre-puja trip to Mandarmoni with my family on 28th instant. 

My mad, mad friends are splashing the Facebook with photos of what is Nature's  autumnal or Sharad-ic knock - the kash phool. The white, swaying grass has  grown  luxuriantly all over in  Bengal, on the dried bed of Kangsabati River, the aals or medhs of  the paddy fields in  Belpahari, along nayanjalis in Bagnan and  the divider of NH-6.. The dhakis, who have already announced a noisy presence during the Vishwakarma Puja, will soon start converging at Sealdah Station and Bhowanipore from where the organisers will take them away. The roads are being blocked to make space for the pandals, the Corporation is flexing its muscles to make the organisers pay for the tar-  vandalism,  and the sights of carts  carrying huge loads of bamboos are all too common.

Actually, nothing changes much but I still enjoy the routine. Like  previous years,  I have managed to get myself invited  to a pandal judging panel on the saptami . The ashtami lunch invitation will come, shortly .  At  our old Ballygunje Circular Road pandal , the final visit will  be on Dashami for Sindoor khela and the revelry at night after bhasan at Babu Ghaat. A large number of Bengalis leave for a holiday, many claim they like to stay back for  their para pujo but still the snakes of crowd at the pandals  get longer year after year and the roadside eateries and balloon stalls continue to do good business.

I love to read the newspapers which carry out interesting trivia and stories connected with Durga Puja.

My family awaits the Phulpati procession - 1999

The  other day Hindustan Times brought out a huge page on the

worship of the Devi in Darjeeling - a place where I lived for close to two years in the last years of the previous millennium. The Nepalese celebrate  it as Bara Dasain. Preparations start on Mahalaya with sowing of wheat and barley in mud beds on Jamara Aunsi and placing  copper pitchers in a ritual called Ghat Sthapana.  To  me, the the Dasai celebrations are remembered  for three things- the Phulpati procession of Kanya Devis and the Lakhey dance (  and one of the bigger would also touch  the SP's residence at Campbell Cottage from where it could be moved only after a nudge with gifts of rum bottles), the Maar on the Navami at Dali, the Police lines and for  the huge, colourful tikka ( rice grains, curd and sin door) people sport on their foreheads on  Dasain.

The paper also brought out a feature on the Tribal Durga or Guptamoni, meaning 'secret treasure' but implying' hidden goddess' of Jhargram- also  a guardian deity  of motorists on NH6. In addition to being hidden, her puja is also rendered unique by the fact that it was started by a Lodha woman and the hymns are sung  in Bengali, not Sanskrit. A part of the colourful 'Little India' tradition, the Devi here is worshipped throughout the year and devotees hang up terracotta toy horses and strung on thread to fulfil their wishes.

In the Bengali speaking parts of the country, the Durga Puja is an occasion to release the 'Sharadiya' songs in the form of special albums. Started by the Gramophone Company. Vinyl records collector Susanto Kumar Chatterjee says that 14 vinyl discs were released in 1914, the release preceded by the publication of a "Sharadabali' which announced the release a' 10 inch violet double sided 78 RPM disc ' priced at 3 rupaiya and 12 annals would have six songs by Manodasundari Dasi, Narayan Chandra Mukherjee and K Mullick. Later on this was carried forward by  great teams like  Salil Choudhary and Lata Mangeshkar, RD Burman and Asha Bhonsle and other great artists  like Hemant Kumar, Kishore Kumar and Shyamal Mitra.  

Way back in 1975, Nirode Mazumdar created  the idols for  Bakul Bagan community Durga Puja in South Kolkata and it set a trend for famous artists to follow in his footsteps - Rathin Maitra and Paritosh Sen, Ramananda Bandopadhyaya and now Paresh Maity. On Saptami when I visit the pandals, I shall be hearing  a large number of extremely talented artists explain their art and theme of the pandals. Bengal is an artisanal society- this forcefully bursts out  during the pooja. Some old timers may feel  a stab of nostalgia  for the simplicity of old day but in my view,  a puja which actually began as a celebratory tamasha cannot look back and will keep on getting more opulent.

There is an interesting tidbit about idol making.  A few artisans like Mahadeb Pal , to beat the economies of the Kumartuli works , took to painting the eyes for other artisans. Sad, happy, or angry - after all, the eyes of an idol  become the mirror of her mind. Nowadays, Mahadeb  even goes to neighbouring Bihar and Jharkhand.  Just to paint the eyes of Ma.

What I did just  for a lark  day before yesterday turned out to be pretty interesting. I went to the Indian Museum to attend  a workshop on idol making. Even as Mr. Mondol explained to me the wall sculpture his artisans were making had three layers of application of materials- the alluvial soil and straw followed by a coat of loamy soil and husk to be topped by mixture of brick dust before being painted in ochre colour, I was captivated by the enthusiasm of hundreds of school students who had thronged the courtyard of the Jadughar.  The twelve and a half feet pratima  which was being made was an enlarged reproduction of one of the first terracotta figurines of the devi found from Bhita, Bodhgaya,  of 7th CE antiquity.

Shortly thereafter  was  an interesting talk on Durga by Indrajit Chowhdhury of Ananda Bazar Patrika, whose erudite presentation even the rains could not mar as the bunch of young people, mostly NIFT students, relocated to a staircase to listen. He informed  that out of the 70 different idols and terra cotta and wooden figurines of Durga discovered in medieval- early modern Bengal, only ten depicted her vahan as a singha or lion while in large number, the demon mahishasur was depicted only as a  buffalo or mahish and not in its humanised form of a rakhshas. 

But quite inexplicably, when some,like the Sovabazar and Krishnagar zamindars started the Durga Puja in the 18th /19th century, the vahan depicted was not a lion but a stylised horse!! Being prodded,  Indrajit hazarded a guess that it could be due to the local artisans' ignorance of the looks of a lion which was absent in Bengal.  Later on I asked some of my Bengali friends, but even the combined knowledge of two generations could  not throw any light. 

So even as Ma Durga  comes on a boat and departs in a palki, I have decided to do two things I haven't done despite my so many years in Kolkata- go to the Hooghly on Mahalaya to watch the tarpan and also to Tiritti Bazaar at the crack of dawn for a Chinese breakfast. Who wants to join us?

"

HERO NO.1

The magazines  would do it to ramp up the year ending circulation. Later on, the music companies took it up. Celebrity interviewers adopted it as a must ask question. Then the social networking sites introduced the funky and the bizarre in it.  I refer to the business of shortlisting of favourites.

What started as a year ending ritual of  listing ten  most influential public figures  soon came to include naming a specified number of favourite films, songs, comedians, villains and vamps, tourist spots, computer games, whiskies and SUVs, tourist destinations, puja pandals, cricket elevens, mexican dishes, etc.  Niche shortlists could include naming the greatest ever  left handed cricketers XI,   top five Ajit dialogues, best Gulazar- RD Burman-Kishore Kumar song or even the tastiest soy based crabmeat preparation.Celebrities would be asked to name five things they couldn't leave their home without . On Facebook, you could be asked to choose which of the 15 Dumbest Patients that Doctors have encountered you liked most. You could also be asked to list the craziest prank you  played in school or at the workplace or the most unbelievable excuse  you offered while caught over-speeding or cheating on your spouse.

At times one feels a bit  diffident in announcing one's selections. Recently, Facebook went into a Ponzi type tizzy with people being asked to name Ten books which they  enjoyed reading the most. The initial responses stopped me in my tracks. I had not read even half of the clutch of books people were listing. What would I say? That I was influenced by such insignificant stories like Sudarshan's  Haar ki Jeet, a Jatak katha of Buddha and Angulimaal, a few parables  of Jesus taught by the basketball coach of my school, a few school level chapters of  different episodes from  Odyssey- and that  Mahabharat I had not as much as read as had,  in the time tested tradition, heard  from  my mother  on the days there was little homework. I kept quiet. 

Most of the time, one could be pilloried for  one's selection - like tagging someone in a post on Facebook because tagging was unsportingly taken as tantamount to omission of others. Non -inclusion  of the name of a favourite cricketer in all time elevens could set up a scrum and scuffle, bypassing  a singer could throw up accusations of ignorance, incompetence  and even  insanity while  exclusion of a favourite hunk could lead to break-up  of long lasting friendship built on endless hours of  giggles and gossip. In today's humourless world, the need to  be politically correct or  gender sensitive has  added to the woes of shortlisting. I am sure I shall meet a similar fate when you read about  my choice of  Hero No. 1  for the decade that I grew up in - 1970 to 1979 .

In 1970, as a student of Class I, I became a fan of Rajesh Khanna after watching Kati Patang in Ray Talkies, Dhanbad. I wanted to style my hair and dress  up like him.  When my youngest brother was thwacked rather violently by  my mother after snipping a tuft of his hair to copy the Superstar's half parting style, I gave up  on my twin dreams . This thwack always played upon my mind whenever I thought of growing my hair over my ears like my next hero, Amitabh Bacchan. Besides, those were early days and my parents had not matured enough to allow their children to become movie buffs.The first day - first show craze  had to be deferred to the college days.

The 1971 war had immense potentiality to throw up a hero. But the real heroes were  machines , not men - the famous Gnats from which the pilots shot down the much superior American Sabre jets of the PAF. Besides, I could not bring upon myself to hoot for a Field Marshal  who shared his surname with an unpopular games teacher of my school.

Children in the age bracket of 6-15 are not expected to have political heroes, and I was no exception. This age group is expected to enjoy the fruits of political activities- like forced school closures and catchy slogans. To me, the  high point of political activity was a three months holiday beginning  the 18th of March in 1974 occasioned by Jayprakash Narayan's 'Sampoorna Kranti' call,  and three very memorable slogans- 

" Ghafoor Miyyan ki kya pehchan, Haath mei labni , munh edi paan",

" Yeh dekho Indra ka khel, Chaudah rupiya sarson thel", and

"Beta caar banata hai, Ma bekaar banati hai".

Of course, there was some interest in the Ford- Carter election in 1976 and also in the 1977 General Election, but  while I was attracted to a whole new set of politicians in 1977, and a few favourites were pencilled, no heroes  came up for me as yet.

The school heroes came and went - the handful of five pointers, successive cricket  and football captains, the School Cs-in-C and the cycling champions.  For me friends mattered more than the teachers  who were to be endured, a few to be admired but hardly anyone to be idolised -  even though a few lady teachers did manage to spark some adolescent crush. Yes, the American Jesuits were towering personalities, the Principal Father Hess was a handsome  man, looked dashing in his tennis gear. In those good old days when liking a White Man was not looked upon with xenophobic lenses as a type of servility , I did idolise him. But towards the last two years of school, I thought he was bit too harsh on me and my admiration faded. Finally,  it ended in a  stalemate- in 1979 both of us left the school within months of each other.

There was no Indian footballer who was my favourite- after all, when you do not have  podium finishes in the Asiad or Merdeka Cups, you cannot captivate the imagination of a boy who would settle for nothing less than international excellence, unlike a few of his colleagues who were mad about club level football in Calcutta. The media exposure to international football was quite minimal those days , and admiration for Johan Cryuff and Beckenbaur had not become  maniacal as it became with me for Diego in the subsequent two decades.

But for a well earned victory in the Volvo Open of 1973, quarter final loss in the boycott hit 1973 Wimbledon to the ultimate winner Jan Kodes about whom one never heard later on , a sensational win over a much older Mal Anderson from a 2-5 position in the decider set  in the Indian Grand Prix final, Vijay Amritraj  never came up to the  exacting standards I had set for my  heroes. In badminton, for most of the 1970s, Rudy Hartono and Liem Swie King defeated Prakash Padukone much too often for the latter to be elevated to the status off a full fledged hero- he had to wait till 1980, the year he won the All England. The only  Indian athlete whom I sought out was Sriram Singh, a top class 800 meters runner and a guy with a big heart. But  he lost to the Cuban Alberto Juantorena and five others in Montreal in 1976 - only deceiving after a flattering start when he led the field quite beyond the half way mark.

In 1972, the year Bobby Fischer captivated the chess aficionados, and Mark Spitz' seven golds set ablaze the pools, I was sucked into the world of hockey by  one  Mukhbain Singh. He had slammed a hat trick against our old colonial masters Britain in a 4-0 victory in first round robin match of Munich Olympics. To a boy freshly soaked in nationalistic spirit  following the   Silver Jubilee celebrations of our Independence in school held a few weeks ago, Mukhbain became a post Independence freedom fighter sort of a hero.However,  he was not very consistent after that. Other players like Ashok Kumar, Ajit Pal Singh, Michael Kindo, Aslam Sher Khan and Govinda competed for my attention.  I followed the team's fortunes  through Jasdev Singh's commentary. But India's podium finishes were few and far in between, and after the demoralizing seventh finish in Montreal in 1976, it was clear that hockey could not throw up my hero no. 1. 

I probably  first read about Sunil Gavaskar in an issue of Junior Statesman.  Referring to a record shattering 774 Test runs in 4 matches in Sunil's debut series against Gary Sobers' team, my father explained that nothing like this had ever happened in the history of Indian sport, that this man could be even better than Bradman who, he explained with a simple analogy, was the Dhyan Chand of cricket. He also said that Sunil was a great player of pace bowling and brooked no nonsense from the White Establishment of world cricket - which could not be said of most of the Indians.He also cocked a snook at the BCCI.  He was pragmatic and practical, though a tad defensive. But he played for the team, not for the stands.

So even though he was not as gifted or stylish like Vishwanath, I chose Sunil as my Hero No. 1. He has remained my No. 1 till today - he did not grovel to stay back in the team to break a world bowling record nor influence  our cricket itinerary to pickup  on a weak team to score a century as a swan song. His records don't speak half as much as  the pride and self esteem he gave to a cricket crazy country. I literally stalked Gavaskar- heard almost every ball commentated, read everything in print I could lay my eyes on in Indian Nation, Sportsweek, Sportstar, Wisden and Illustrated Weekly of India. There were many controversies which always surrounded Gavaskar - a pythonic 36 not out in 60 overs in 1975 World Cup, of crony team selection, confabulating with Kerry Packer,  but  I took no note. As long as Gavaskar was at the crease, one felt mahfooz, like a child sleeping in its mother's lap - and the Nation was left  free to do any other work. 

LISTEN TO THE SILENT

English is basically a simple language - one can go wrong in  only a few places - either pronunciation  or punctuation or spelling. Mark Twain, the celebrated American writer said that ' a gifted person ought to learn English ( barring spelling and pronouncing ) in thirty hours, French in thirty days, and German in thirty years.'

In a previous blog, under a Bernard Shawesque header GHOTI, dated 9/6/14, I had dwelt upon the oddities of English pronunciation - and desperate folks can check up in the archives at www. viveksahay.com. I have not touched in detail the problems of punctuation in English except as  a passing reference in my blog 'The Long and Short of It' dated 05/01/2014, but suffice to say, a  punctuation  error can turn a sentence on its head: Woman, without her man, is nothing' and 'Woman! Without her man , man is nothing.' or even cost a life as in " Let's eat Grandma instead of "Let's eat, Grandma." 

It was probably in a tone of utter repulsion and helplessness which one normally associates with the effect of a taxman's knock on an indigent's door that had made the Nobel Laureate   Gabriel Garcia Marquez exclaim," Spelling should be pensioned off, it terrorizes human beings from birth." One of the main reasons, of course, is due to the  quirkiness of the  pronunciation of  English language.

But a major contributory factor is the googly in the form of the silent letters which  slalom, snake and sneak their way into almost every sentence, triggering  teasing taunts  and sometimes sniggers  from snobbish  stiff upper lips when someone spells or speaks the word incorrectly. Inability to spell diarrhoea correctly in front of a teeth gnashing teacher could even induce symptoms the medical condition which answers to that word.  Interestingly, out of 26 English alphabets,  all have been used as silent one time or the other- from a in bread to d in Wednesday to i in maize and on to v in revving,  w in whooping cough  and upto to z in rendezvous.

For most Indians, exposed to languages in which the basic written symbols or graphemes are quite consistent with the basic sounds or phonemes ( like r in ring or a in ago), the main function of the written word  or orthography was to reduce in print how and what  we speak . But the English  had other designs for their orthography - it was to tell about the history of the word, its origin and evolution. In the process, if it helped  pronunciation  it was  incidental , if it did not, well, it was collateral damage. One can go a step forward and say that it was more of a canvas to paint the many facets of their personality and to depict their history. 

One may be at  one's wit's end to fathom why accommodate has an extra c and m and misspell an extra s  and l, why a single letter f represents gh or ph,  guess what   n and m  are doing in damn and phlegm respectively, and wonder how does w assist us to pronounce answer, s  island, h Sarah, and t ballet. These silent letters do  look like fiendish traps  set all over to confound pronunciation. 

But having said that  it must not be forgotten that silent letters bear silent testimony to the British trait of being an extremely caring people.  They  help to distinguish between homophones, e.gin/inn; be/bee/ lent;leant;wright/right/write/rite. They give an insight into the meaning or origin of the word (vineyard and not vinyard), provide useful information about pronunciation of other letters - the letter e in cottage and bane tells how g and a will be uttered respectively.  They assist in improved diction by  putting a weight on a certain syllable - the final [fe] in giraffe signals the second syllable stress whereas only giraf could suggest the initial stress on r.

The English have been very particular  to indicate the etymological roots of the words borrowed- especially from Latin and Greek. A problem in this was that the phonotactics of English language did not allow borrowing without some modification. Okay, you are stuck up with what is phonotactics. Well, phonotactics (from Ancient Greek phōnḗ "voice, sound" and taktikós "having to do with arranging")^[1] is a branch of phonology which defines permissible syllable structure, consonant clusters, and vowel sequences by means of phonotactical constraints. It is the phonotactical contour of some languages that allow words like fwost and zpink and abtholve but  not in English. 

So when borrowing in their English words which belonged to a different phonotactical lineage, the English did a deft tweak by resorting to the use of silent letters to make their pronunciation possible. Silent letters simplify clusters of consonants, largely due to in situ adoption of loanwords, like the silent th in asthma, t in Christmas, p in psychology, m in mnemonic, and ph in phthalate - which is as soothing as a glass of chilled water after you have bit into a  pungent Bhut Jolokia. 

Silent letters also complete the minimum letter requirement of three alphabets of content words ( the nouns, most verbs, adjectives, and adverb that  refer to some object , action, or characteristic) , especially the ones containing fewer than three phonemes by adding phonetically redundant letters , such as ebb/add/inn/be/buy,owe,etc.

Of course the English  overdid the silent letter stuff later in their passion for the classical languages Latin and Greek during 16/17th century English Renaissance  period . They unnecessarily added b's to make det  debt ( to link to Latin debitum), and dout doubt ( to link to Latin dubitare), c's to make scissors scissors and site scythe , h's to make anchor, school and herb, a c and an a to victuals, and due to misguided scholasticism an s to island ( which someone incorrectly thought came  from Latin insula)

But let us be a bit charitable about that. People do try to show off - and the English were no exception to the rule. And anyway, this confusion created by adding a few silent letters is  much less than than  he verbosity the Latin zealots, derogatorily dubbed as 'inkhorns' had inflicted- devaluate, ingent, attemptate, deruncinate, nidulate, abstergify.

Silent letters are also emblematic of the British love for non utilitarian heritage- like their  London cabs and even their monarchy as some uncharitably mock. So within the folds of silent letters, they have enveloped many phonological museums- retaining sounds which they no more make but had done so previously . So knight is a hark back to  the days when  both,  the k and the digraph gh  which had a throat clearing sound, were pronounced ( the word itself being derived from cneht in Old English). G in gnaw and gnome, w in write, when, where and wrap, the final b in lamb, the median t in thistle and listen - all these  had ceased to be pronounced but were lovingly retained in the spellings. 

So which is your favourite silent letter word- mnemonic or haemorrhage,phthisis, pthonic, chthonic or pterosaur? Is it gnome or is it racquet? Or are you still psyched out and commit a faux pas to misspell knife and marijuana? Say your prayers because there  are no kind teachers left in the schools.