My recent piece, on "Self-help in old age" brought out a few responses showing sympathy and consolation presuming that I actually was craving for praise. But after reading the "Middle" by my role model blogger Bikram Vohra in The Times of India, Mumbai edition, ( reproduced below), I now think that I too indeed have been neglected!

Ageist Party

" I said I didn’t want to go but the family insisted so I got into uncomfortable clothes and went to the party. Younger people have absolutely no idea how to handle us older lot. They think if they put you in a comfy chair their job is done. The host walks up and says, oh so nice uncle came, what will he have. Firstly, I am not your flipping uncle and secondly, cut this third-party talk, all six feet of me sitting here, talk to me directly.

Then they get you a drink and, if it is alcohol, they pour such a small one you could serve it in a teaspoon. At which point a young lady to whom you have just been introduced as your daughter’s father is doing that mandatory good manners ‘hanging in there for 90 seconds’ act and to fill in the pointless silence says hope the snacks are not too spicy for you. Darling I could not only out-drink you under the table I can also out-spice you under that same table.

Then they patronise. Hope the music is not too loud, should we tone it down.

Most irritatingly, they also talk loudly and slowly and they see this as stunning good manners. Stop yelling, young man.

You wonder what you are doing there seeing as how they never invited you directly, it is always the kids saying they asked to bring you along, like a stepney and it really bugs you and now you have finished the teaspoon in one sip and no one is refilling it because no one thinks you will have another teaspoon of whisky. You sit and you sog, the big ignore broken occasionally by sundry folks coming to pay their respects. And you are thinking stuff your respect, I came to have a good time.

There is an intriguing, heated discussion among four or five of them and they are using cheerful expletives and looks like fun so you heave yourself out of the chair and you join them, all set with your two penny worth of opinion and because of you entering the fray the debate dies in the water and every one kind of goes into such tedious politeness you want to use expletives.

So you slink back to your chair and wish you were home watching Netflix or reading a book, so much more fun than younger people being nice, nothing is more dreary. Finally the ordeal is over, you have been used as the excuse to leave early, everyone understands (aaaarghhhh) and on the way back you are asked if you enjoyed the evening. No."

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 Self-Help in Old Age

Of late, I feel a certain void in my  life as nobody praises me to my face for all the good qualities I possess and exhibit.  When I was in service in semi-government offices and later as faculty in management training/education institutions, I used to receive,  expectedly of course,   encomiums about my intelligence and oration showered by  my subordinates and  students respectively. Now even the group of senior citizens  I meet in our Cooperative Housing Society  have stopped  praising  my erudition in Hindi despite  being a Tamil.

All the above notwithstanding,  what disappoints me the most is that  my wife too does not appreciate  my astute political analysis vis -a -vis Karnataka elections or my insightful interpretation of the New Education Policy 2020 or NCERT’s rationalization of school syllabi or  my profound musical heritage. The last talent extends to all forms of music ranging from classical Carnatic to Hindustani to film music and  even the  jingles in TV advertisements  like the one on Rajasthan’s march of progress.      

During our morning ritual of sipping coffee  at the dining table when the social distance between us is narrow, the wife sits like Rodin’s statue ”The Thinker”. The invigorating coffee sets me  on my talents exhibiting one or the other of the many things mentioned above. and she sits there as if to prove the old adage that No Man is a hero to his Woman. At the most,  her response on these occasions is confined  to listing my  tasks for the day such as  buying  vegetables and groceries including broomstick and mop cloth or getting the Society electrician to repair the non-functional geyser switch in the bathroom.  As if this was not bad enough, she would ask me to secure  the dhoti tightly with a belt so that I don’t walk like Mammooti and Mohandas in Malayalam films always holding one end of the dhoti.

This sense of deep desperation  has landed me in  a new pastime  during  my sleepless hours on the nights when I compose  in the third person singular what I crave  to hear about myself  from others. I find this a jolly good exercise for semi-insomniacs.  For instance, I would imagine that my wife would tell others that  I am the only person with the gift to appreciate the different beats of the dholak player in film music  while others go for the voice of the singer, the beauty of the lyrics, or the symphony of the instruments.  Similarly, I visualize her admitting to others  that but for me  she would not have  learned the use  of correct prepositions  and other English grammatical niceties. I even would imagine as if she  praises me  for my immaculate and  cultivated dignity, respect, and politeness in my conversations with others, especially with those from her side of the family.  

Now,  tell me, readers,  am I wrong in presenting to  myself those adoring  words of  praise for me but don’t  get them anymore  and therefore choose the  “ Atma Nirbhar “route to compose them myself? 

 Media Reforms

It is the season for reforms now, what with people demanding administrative, electoral, judicial and even constitutional reforms towards betterment of our lives. For me, however, media reforms are the most important for making my daily life happier and less irksome. In spite of the regulatory bodies for the print media like the Press Council of India, my difficulties as a user have not been addressed by their regulations. They only deal with the CONTENT of the news and not from the point of view of user- convenience of the readers.

My newspaper reading started in early 1950s in Delhi as a teenager. The Hindustan Times those days was printed in an unchanging format of pages to facilitate turning to the right page for reading the editorial, the middles, articles, sports news, local crime news, news from abroad and even obituaries. Advertisements were there then also, but mostly notices inviting tenders issued by the government and photographs of missing persons inserted by the Delhi Police. . No advertisements of soaps and detergents, electronic goods, tuition classes, Daily editions were usually in multiples of 4 pages making it easy to hold the paper with both hands in the middle, sitting relaxedly in a chair sipping coffee. My father, myself and my young nephew would rush to grab the paper as the delivery boy threw it at our door. We did not redistribute the pages amongst ourselves as was done in Corporation Public Reading Rooms. Instead, we breathed down the neck of the one who was reading and urging him to read quickly. Yet, it was a pleasure reading the newspaper those days and when the paper did not come on public holidays, we felt that the day has been a waste.

Contrast the above with the travails of the newspaper reader today. A single sheet containing important news and not advertisements is loosely tucked inside. It falls off every now and then. Often a couple pages wider than other pages are added with strips of the extra width jutting out like the sore thumb. These aberrations apart, headlines making news in front page are continued in an inner page, many a time with a different heading.

Full page advertisements occupy first two sheets, which makes the news worthy of first page, appears actually on the 5th page which however is numbered as page 1. Full page advertisements range from Coaching Classes, with photographs of All India Rank-holders with names such as Aggarwals and Bansals , to the e-commerce merchandise seller announcing festival sale with hefty discounts, to builders putting up panoramic view of their forthcoming housing projects in exotic spots with artificial lakes with names like Chateau . Then there are the inserts of fliers of various sizes and shapes containing the menu of the local restaurants or services of the gender-neutral beauty parlor. Last but not the least are the full page announcements of forthcoming Business Conferences organized by either the newspaper or some industry association with names of eminent panelists for selecting the best entrepreneur/ start-up/ life-time achiever etc. of the year and of course the names of speakers from foreign business schools and our own Cabinet Ministers and some spiritual guru followed in the subsequent days photographic coverage of the event occupying even more full pages .These have reduced the importance and the space for Letters To The Editor, the reader’s only column called his own

As an octogenarian addicted to my daily quota of newspaper reading from page one to the last page item “printed and published” as the cliché goes, where do I go to read a paper with ONLY NEWS

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Ramasubban Subramanian

Tenor

 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.)