To Sir with love...

The year was 1972. I don't exactly remember the date and the month. It was probably one of the winter months. I was a VIII standard student at what was then called Nazeer Memorial High School at Chikkamagalur. Now the school is known as Mountain View School.

It was a morning Biology class taught by my favorite teacher, Mr M N Shadakshari. A brief intro about MNS, as we use to call him. He was about 25 or 26, smart, very confident looking and always immaculately dressed. That day he was in dark trousers, white shirt and an army style scarf around the neck tucked under the shirt collar.

The class was about to begin. Someone in the class had a different idea and that someone knew that it was MNS's birthday! Suddenly, and rather a little unexpectedly a few students said "Sir, it is your birthday today and we want to hear either a story or a novel, not biology please..". And all the rest of the class joined the others.

What happened next was sheer magic. We closed our books and lent our whole selves as the story (Odessa File, by Frederick Forsyth) of Peter Miller and Eduard Roschmann unfolded. The streams of fiction and history ran sometimes in parallel and sometimes into each other. They merged and separated many a times. We got introduced to the Holocaust in general and the "Butcher of Riga" in particular. We got to know so much about the Nazis and the SS that we were in disgust hearing about what the Jews had to go through. And finally, we were seething with anger as Roschmann makes an escape to Argentina.

It went on for about a week. Each period of chemistry and biology was transformed to an episode or a chapter of Odessa file. One great Kannada novelist has said that - "reading a novel is also as creative an experience as writing one" and I might extend that to say narrating a novel is also equally creative and MNS was just too good at it.

So a precedent was set. I spent three years at NMHS and we got to hear two more narrations of novels. While in class nine, it was Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and in tenth it was The Outsider, by Albert Camus! It was as enthralling as the first one. The character of Raskolnikov and his complex state of mind with the mental anguish and moral dilemma captivated us for a couple of days. The Outsider was a difficult story to understand, as we were too young
for the existential philosophy it deals with. I must say it also put the first seeds of rationality into my mind.

I went on to other things in life. But, thanks to MNS, my interest in reading continued. I read The Plauge, The Idiot and also some of the great works in Kannada such as Samskara, Kaanura Heggadthi and many others. I was so happy the day when my daughter, Hema finished reading Odessa file, I had to call MNS to share my joy.

Hygiene and Health care in our society

It is well known that we have pretty bad hygiene conditions prevailing in our country. You just need to drive through any city to see Indian squalor in all it's glory. It is very common see dogs and cows chewing on the leftover dinners from road side garbage. The streets are littered with plastic bags, cow dung, human excreta, papers, bottles and what not.

Less said the better about our health care system. We have the ignominy of having higher infant mortality rates than third world countries like Haiti, Western Sahara and Bangladesh. And as per
a recent report (http://epaper.timesofindia.com/Default/Scripting/ArticleWin.asp?From=Archive&Source=Page&Skin=pastissues2&BaseHref=TOIBG/2009/08/11&PageLabel=1&EntityId=Ar00102&ViewMode=HTML&GZ=T) we spend even less than some of the sub-Saharan African countries on our health care. We stand at a pathetic 171 out of the 175 countries in the world in public health spending.

The number of deaths due to swine flue across the country should be a sort of 'wake up call' for us to set right our badly broken health care system.

Traffic Madness

My first blog had to be about traffic on Bangalore roads and that might very well apply to traffic on roads of any Indian city as well. It is my very personal feeling, and I am very well entitled to, that there are probably very few places that I so much don't want to be in, as much as I don't want to be on Indian roads. Indian roads are not meant for people who care for others rights and expect others to care for their rights. Over a period of time, the Indian roads have a tendency to break your will to remain a law abiding citizen and in a way dehumanize you without your own knowledge.

It appears that road signs and traffic lights are there just for cosmetic value, as drivers disregard them with impunity. Lane discipline is just not in the pathology of Indians. Have you noticed that there seems to be some serious aversion on the part of Indians to follow queue systems in general. It is as if we strongly believe in getting to our destination by hook or crook and not necessarily by our rightful turn.

Apart from the frustration that it causes to individuals, just look at the average speed. It takes anywhere between 45 minutes to 1 hour to travel a distance of 10 km. It is a colossal waste of time, energy and resources.

When we try to discuss amongst ourselves and try to figure out the reason behind this callous attitude, we get to listen to typical Indian replies such as "traffic jams are common even in western countries" and one enlightened person who has never put his foot on US soil remarked - it is much worse in New York city!

Interestingly, I once had a chat with a BMTC bus driver who was incessantly honking at a car ahead when the traffic light was red and his point - you don't have to stop at red lights on a Sunday and that was a Sunday! I hope he does not extend the same bizarre logic to other laws that prohibit criminal activity, such as murder!

Now for numbers, there are more road accidents and road accidents related deaths in India than in any other country, not by just absolute numbers but also for every hundred thousand registered vehicles. And the biggest killer of men & women of our armed forces during peace time is road accidents, not terrorism. And in our own city, Bangalore, about a 1000 lives are lost every year and should be a serious cause for concern, more than any epidemic.

Finally, one can quote any number of reasons for not following the laws, be it traffic or any other laws, but there should be one over riding reason to follow the laws in letter and spirit. And that should be a matter of principle. We surely have a very lousy attitude for the laws of our own land.

Here are some samples of our madness on road collected over last few weeks.