I publish hereunder a  review of my  Memoirs by Sakuntala Narasimhan, a Bengaluru-based senior journalist, musicologist, a renowned vocalist in both traditions of Indian classical music - Hindustani and Carnatic and consumer activist. It appeared in October-December 2021 issue of Vidura

Book Review

ACCOUNTANT TO ACADEMIC: AN UNMAPPED JOURNEY

Author: A.V. Raman

Publisher: Notion Press, Chennai

Price: Rs 315

Suddenly a lot of former bureaucrats and retired officials seem to be coming out with their memoirs, describing their careers and experiences. Here is one, by one who has had varied experiences as aca­demic, researcher, teacher as well as a management expert. He has chronicled his professional as well as related personal life, weaving the two into a very read­able account of what it is like, to be a bureaucrat who does not merely sign papers and draw a salary but also seeks to contribute ideas to make office procedures more efficient and people-friendly.

Born in 1938 in Tamil Nadu, Raman lived (and schooled) in Delhi, worked in Jamshedpur, Madras, Pune and Bangalore, went abroad on assignments and as a Fulbright Fellow before settling down in Mumbai. His career took him as senior accountant to CSIR (Council of Scientific and Industrial Research); he also served in the Rajya Sabha secretariat, besides teaching financial management and economics and did a stint as associate dean at Bangalore’s XIME.

It has been a very varied professional life of over 50 years, in different capacities (as director, consultancy, educator and mentor). Raman also went on to do a doctorate on transportation management after study­ing the public transport systems in different cities, car­ried out various cost saving initiatives in some of them and became a training officer. Very few bureaucrats can claim such versatility.

As if this were not enough, Raman also plays the mri­dangam, having trained under such stalwarts as the late Ramnad Eswaran (one of the leading artistes of his day, during the second half of the last century) and performed in public. He hails from a family steeped in classical music; his sister was a popular broadcaster from Delhi AIR before she moved south to Bangalore.

Raman weaves all the details into a readable account that is also occasionally humorous. His Fulbright Fel­lowship was for a post-doctoral research which saw his talents used as director of business schools and insti­tutes of management (in Chennai and Pune) before retirement. By a curious coincidence, the day I read about how he refused a bribe of Rs 800 from a contrac­tor, I also heard about a sub-registrar in a government department collecting Rs 70000 as bribe in Bengaluru for facilitating a signature on a routine form. (We have certainly ‘progressed’ from the time Raman was in ser­vice, to today!)

Not all civil service personnel are articulate enough to write their memoirs. Most do not bother, or have had uneventful professional lives that have nothing to showcase or learn from. Some, like this account, provide inspiration as well as insights into how one can contribute to improving public undertakings. Not all government officials are mere ‘cogs in a machine’; those who want to contribute in small or not-so-small ways, can. And do. Like this author. May his tribe increase.

(Reviewed by Sakuntala Narasimhan.)

 

Innovations in Education

We seem to have come a long way reforming the Macaulay’s education system. Examinations are now conducted to test what the students logically know rather than what they remember and reproduce from the text book. They have now a choice of multiple answers to a question to choose the one he/she thinks correct.

Now the next inevitable reform has happened.  In  Maharashtra  HSC Board Exam held  yesterday,   in the poetry section of the English paper, one of the questions, A4,  had the answer printed while the other two,  A3 and A5,   had no question but  only the remark “Accept any reasonable correct answer”!  Is this a sort of reverse engineering adapted in  school education to test a student’s ability to construct a meaningful question to fit a chosen answer!! When perplexed students raised this, some teachers told them to simply write a few lines of the poetry that was printed so that the question   remained attempted. The authorities have accepted that is was due to a printing error and students who have attempted  the particular question will be awarded marks. Here the NOTA choice in our elections will not do.

In UP, Board exams have been boycotted by some 6.5 lakh of students. The reason is the government’s strict action to keep the education mafia in check using a network of CCTV cameras to maintain a close watch on examination centres, superintendents and room invigilators. The students understanding of their stakeholdership in examinations appears weird..

One of my  students in an  MBA examination  chose to occupy the chair close to the wall  in the far end leaving many chairs in the front. When I asked him to come and occupy a chair in the front, he said with a wry smile that he would sit as per the advice of his “vastu” consultant!  Another student was not happy with his low marks and expressed dismay, notwithstanding his access to question paper leaked the previous evening .  He suspected foul play in paper correction!

A Blog on my Blogs

 A Blog on my Blogs

Post my retirement and shifting to Mumbai in 2006, I rambled along without anything to occupy my time.  I became a member of The Fine Arts Society in Chembur and attended their music concerts and drama festivals.  I noticed that the audience was mostly senior citizens like me ‘I observed very interesting traits among such audiences like simple living, unostentatious appearance, religiously inclined, interest in classical music, and a subtle sense of humour.  I decided to write for a hobby about men and matters I was acquainted with.  When I learned that many internet users create virtual Persona while writing stories and Fanfiction as a kind of self-insertion   I created the characters  Chembur Mama and Chembur  Mami and wrote my early pieces with those titles. I used the internet to publish them as Blogs by Rambler Raman.  This was in 2014 and since then I have written around 40 blogs available on www.avramanblogspot.com.rambler raman.  

Before I go further, let me share a few facts about blogs. A blog is a regular record of one’s thoughts, opinions, or experiences put on the internet for others to read. It also can include photos and videos about a particular subject. The blog is different from a podcast, a collection or series of digital audio files downloaded or listened to via the internet. A blogger is a person who writes regularly for an online journal or website. Such a person is different from a writer or a columnist publishing in a newspaper or magazine.   The use of the internet as the media for publication distinguishes the blogger from the columnist or the writer.  There are 600 million active blogs on the internet ranging from online personal diaries to influential sources of information on virtually any topic like food blogs, travel blogs, health blogs,, and fashion & beauty blogs to name a few.  Like any communication medium, the blog should also have a purpose to educate, inform, influence, or entertain/amuse. However, Personal blogs based on one’s personal perception and experience about men and matters have a large following and receive both appreciative and critical comments

Coming back to my creations, I adopted early in my blog writing career to write mostly about my personal experience and opinion. This was easy because no research was involved unlike my Ph. D or post-doctoral dissertations.  I would intersperse my blogs with humor by narrating jokes [1]or piquant situations [2]. These provided the necessary spice to the anecdotes in my blogs. I also wrote some self-deprecating pieces where I projected myself as “kalnayk.[3] Some of my blogs are pure fiction where I described the train journey of a young man which brought a total change in him including his name[4]. Writing about people and places is another genre of some of my pieces. [5] My attempt to use allegory in my blogs was abandoned as a reader identified the person written about.[6] I did not want to get into any libel suits.   I also had a very critical and admonishing comment on my blog containing my perception of the General Knowledge questions in the civil services examination. [7]

I do not claim a big readership but the few who have commented on my blogs have been very generous and appreciated my style of writing and humor. In the end, I must say that I find immense pleasure in writing blogs. My motivation is not to earn money by blogging though many use brands and endorsements of products and services in their blogs and earn well.  I write and derive “atma thripthi”  

 

 

 

 

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[1] Delhi’s  Madrasis

[2] Navarathri in New Delhi                  

[3] The “Auto”graphy of my first car

[4] The Transformational of NKV

[5] Tambrahms: Where to find them

[6] The Angry Husband Part 1,2 and 3

7. The Old Man and GK