A dictionary that never fails to delight

I just can't imagine a world without dictionaries; they have become such an indispensable part of my life.  The other day, I came across, in a printed question paper, the word 'comparative' spelt 'comparitive', and I was confused.  The thought that I might have spelt the word wrong so far in my life disturbed me.  I regained my composure only after looking up the word in a dictionary.

But if you use two dictionaries, as I do, you are apt to be confused.  I use the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary as well as the Collins Cobuild English language Dictionary.  But when there is a disagreement, I refer to the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English only find the confusion deepening.

Let me give an example.  Sometime ago, at home, we had what I would call a family disagreement over the synonym of the word 'egghead'.  I looked up the word in the Advanced Learner's: "very intellectual" was the meaning it gave.  Next, I checked with the Collins which gave what I at first thought to be a slightly different meaning: "An egghead is someone who you disapprove of because you think they are too interested in ideas and theories, and not enough in practical actions."  Actually, they both mean the same because an intellectual is one who is interested in, or able to deal with, things of the mind rather than practical matters.  But the two meanings seemed different at first, and so I looked up the word in the Longman which confounded me more with the following meaning: "a highly educated person, perhaps too highly educated".  This reminded me of what Dr Johnson, who compiled the first good English dictionary, said: "Dictionaries are like watches; the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true." 

When ordinary dictionaries mystify me, I go to The Devil's Dictionary, which hits the nail on the head.  Written by Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), this dictionary is a sheer delight.  You will agree with me as to the merits of this dictionary if only you read some of the definitions it gives.  Here is a sample:

Admiration :   our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves

Friendship  :   a ship big enough to carry two on fair weather but only one in foul

Happiness  :    an agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another

Year           :    a period of 356 disappointments

Women who have dared to be different

Women Who Dared is an inspiring book.  Edited by Ritu Menon, co-founder of Kali for Women, India's first feminist press, and published by the National Book Trust, the book offers brief, cameo autobiographies of 21 Indian women who have dared to be different and thereby made a difference to the socio-cultural landscape of this country over the last 50 years.

In these 282 pages, Vina Mazumdar, a pioneer in the women's studies movement in India and one of the leading lights of the women's movement, tells the story of her tireless campaigning and lobbying with the state and central governments on behalf of women.

Padma Ramachandran, the first woman IAS officer, talks about what she had to contend with in an age which was anything but pro-woman.  The government of Kerala delayed her posting as district collector for the only reason that she was a woman.  Finally, she approached the state governor and got herself posted. 

Kiran Bedi, the first woman IPS officer, who will always be remembered as the police officer who defied convention and used innovative techniques to tackle difficult situations, gives a candid account of herself.  "I do lose my temper -- I do shout.  But it's very targeted, for effect only, not because I've lost control.  It has a reason, it has an effect, and it works!  Sometimes you have to show your anger thus far and no further.  It even works for the other person's benefit."

From this polyphonic text, as the editor, Ritu Menon, describes the book, emanate the voices of several other women (Sheila Sandhu, a legendary figure in Hindi publishing; Ela R Bhat, whose name is synonymous with the Self-Employed Women's Association; India Jaising, who has democratized lawyering; Romila Thapar, a foremost historian; Kalpana Lajmi, a film-maker; Shubha Mudgal, a Hindustani vocalist) whose "transgression" from the norm and sustained hard work and excellence in the face of tremendous odds represent the aspirations, struggles and achievements of the larger community of women.

A single volume cannot do justice to what countless women have achieved in this vast country.  Some of the noteworthy misses are M S Subbulakshmi, Medha Parkar, P T Usha and Aparna Sen. I hope there will be a second volume and several others in a series.

Kids love products -- and use people!

The influence TV advertisements have over children is really astonishing.  An eight-year-old child in my neighborhood knows three or four brands of each product advertised on television.  What is more, he can tell the story of each advertisement.  Needless to say he dedicates a great deal of his time to television.  He tells me TV commercials are much more interesting than a Tom and Jerry cartoon.  The way kids talk!

The child is not just a viewer of TV advertisements; he is a buyer as well.  Not quite a buyer but a decision-maker.  Whether it is toothpaste or a mosquito repellant, it is the brand of his choice that gets bought in his house.  His parents, both of whom are employed, are proud of their child's decision-making ability.  The consumerism of the kid is not just astonishing but disturbing.

But this child is by no means an exception.  In many affluent families as well as middle class ones in which both parents are employed, children are brand ambassadors: they insist that brands of their choice be bought, and parents do oblige.  The brands of the kids' choice are often brands which are appealingly advertised on TV.  In single child nuclear families where both parents are employed, what the kid says goes.  And what he wants and what his parents invariably buy on his "advice" also include things which the family doesn't actually need.

Savvy marketing is the name of the game.  The advertisement industry has done its homework: it knows the prevailing trends in families.  One of those trends is that modern parents can hardly say no to their children.  And they have means of obliging their children, namely, the availability of money – what is called disposable income.  The industry exploits this by targeting children in its advertisements.  A good number of ads have child appeal.  In fact, children themselves are featured in many advertisements.

Krishnaveni, a friend of mine, gave an instance of how this child consumerism operates in her family.  Her son has dandruff.  He insists on shampoo of a particular brand which greatly appealed to him in a catchy TV commercial.  Krishnaveni knows there are better ones on the market.  But she has no option but to buy the brand of the child's choice.  "We end up buying substandard stuff for the simple reason that we don't want to displease our child", she says.

Josephine, a colleague, brought to my notice something more disturbing. "You're slightly old-fashioned in talking about ads luring kids to buy products meant for kids.  Ads have gone beyond that.  They lure kids to insist on adults buying products meant for adults."

There is yet another dimension to consumerism on the part of children, pointed out by a letter-writer in a newspaper: "Once upon a time, children loved people and used products.  Now, they use people and love products."

In the throes of an all-consuming feeling

Rekha is completely starry-eyed about her boy-friend.  She meets him almost every day and talks to him on the telephone, too.  She has gone out with him a few times and given him expensive gifts, to get the money for which she had to cheat her parents.  On a few occasions, she has been noticed in the company of her boy-friend and warned, but that hasn't deterred her.  Her mind seems to be entirely taken over, to the exclusion of most other interests, by thoughts about one person -- her boy-friend.  This may now be a common enough experience in adolescence, thanks to the demystification of sex as a topic.  But there is something uncommon about the "crush" Rekha has for her boy-friend: she is only 16 years old, and he is twice as old.  There is something bizarre, too: the boy-friend is already married.

I have known Rekha for six years now.  She lives not far from my house, and I know all the members of her family.  One day, it so happened that I found myself talking to Rekha about her new relationship.  Now, I am not a counsellor; neither have I handled such situations before.  I only wanted to help.  And I was saying to myself that if I couldn't do it, I shouldn't mess it up at least.

But I found the girl as bold as brass – and very articulate.  From her digressive accounts, this is what I pieced together.  She likes the man because he talks to her "nicely", treats her "kindly" and compliments her often.  Shouldn't she have some concern for her parents' feelings?  "What's wrong with what I'm doing?  They should be a little more understanding."   What about her responsibilities as a student?  "I'll do justice to my studies."  I pointed out that it was not true: she was not doing justice to her studies.  "I know I am not", she said, "but I'll make up for it." 

I hope she does.  I hope she gets out of this all-consuming feeling which is running high now, and makes a safe landing.  I'm sure she will realize her foolishness (which is what infatuation really means, for the word infatuation comes from 'fatuous', which means 'foolish'), and the realization will help her guard against it in future.  I only hope it happens before it becomes late.

Considering that the occurrence of this "universal migraine", as the poet Robert Graves called it, has become rather frequent now, every school and college would do well to have a full-time counsellor to help students get over it.  And girls would do well to remember Rolf's words of caution to Liesel in The Sound of Music:

You are sixteen, going on seventeen,

Fellows will fall in line,

Eager young lads and rogues and cats

Will offer you food and wine.

Is the male sex the weaker sex?

An article in the Reader's Digest has some interesting things to say about the relative mental abilities of boys and girls.  The author of the article, Anna Murline, reports that scientists are exploring very real biological differences that may make boys "more impulsive and less efficient classroom learners -- in sum, the weaker sex, a role typically associated with women".

According to Murline, the vulnerabilities of boys should be traced back to the womb.  By the time a baby boy enters the world, he trails the average girl developmentally.  Males, she says, quoting research evidence, have a lower proportion of grey matter than women, which may mean that female brains have certain advantages in processing information.  She quotes Michael Gurian, co-author of Boys and Girls Learn Differently, who asserts that the female brain is the easier brain to teach. 

This is by no means a revelation.  Year after year, in the CBSE and the SSC examinations, girls fare better than boys.  I have heard people say that, unlike boys, girls are so unoriginal and uncreative that they can painstakingly mug up an entire book and reproduce it in an examination, and that since our examinations are content-based and memory-oriented, it is not surprising that girls outscore boys.

But ask any school teacher, and he or she will tell you that this is not the case.  In general, girls' classroom work involving mental abilities is qualitatively better than those of boys.  By and large, boys don't seem to be so motivated as girls, and they have difficulty concentrating.  I am aware that it is politically incorrect on the part of a teacher to talk about these differences; what prompted me to do so was the Reader's Digest article referred to above.

Raising Boys, a book written by Steve Biddulph, a psychologist, makes an insightful study of this phenomenon.  According to Biddulph, boys have slower brain development than girls and so they find it difficult to do the things expected of them at that stage.  Until about the age of 17, they don't catch up with girls.  His finding that boys are "just on a different learning time-table" appears to strengthen the belief in Western educational circles that many boys should start school a year later than girls.

Women in comics based on Indian classics

Sometime ago, while clearing my bookcase of unwanted books to make room for new ones, I came upon an entire series of comics based on Indian classics, bought for my son over fifteen years ago.  For want of anything better, I opened one of those books and started reading it.  Then I picked up another and yet another until I finished reading the entire series.  It was not just the engrossing texts and the alluring illustrations that made me read through the entire series at a single sitting but the "values" that emerged from the stories, in particular, the negative image of women that was unwittingly projected through them.

The women characters in the comics are little more than willing instruments of man's pleasure.  In Abhimanyu, there is a debate among several men about whether Uttara should be married to an elderly man or his son.  Uttara, predictably, abides by the men's decision.  In Chandralalat, when the girl who was expected to bear twins for the king fails to do so, the latter drives her out of the palace.  In Gandhari, you have yet another paragon of female virtue in the eponymous heroine, a well-known character from the Mahabharata.

Abduction of women seems to be a praiseworthy act on the part of valiant men.  In Arjuna's 12-Year Exile, the much-married Arjuna kidnaps Subhadra.  Lord Krishna asserts that the kidnapping was right.  "Which valiant man", he asks, "would wait for a maiden to be donated like an animal?"

When a woman loses either her husband or his favour, suicide seems to be the only course open to her.  Thus, in Ranak Devi, the heroine burns herself to death when her husband dies.  In Purandara Dasa, Saraswati is alarmed when she finds her nose-ring missing.  Lacking the nerve to face her husband's wrath, she rushes to her chamber to commit suicide.

I don't know whether these comics are still on the market.  If they are, and if they are read, imagine the values our young readers must be deriving from them at an impressionable age!  We ban Salmon Rushdie, but we allow books like this to be widely read by our young people.  Either there should be modern versions of these stories, or stories of this kind should be avoided in books meant for children.

Newspaper English: Ignorance or Indianization?

In countries where English is used as a second or foreign language, English newspapers are looked upon as a resource in the learning of English.  While teachers of English insist that their students read at least one English newspaper regularly, even non-English-educated parents buy an English language newspaper hoping that reading the newspaper will help their children improve their English.  The average educated Indian assumes that newspaper English is a standard variety of English and even relies on it as an authority in matters of correctness.  To what extent is this assumption valid?

Not to a great extent, I should think.  By using – and overusing – several Indianisms which violate the basic rules of English grammar, our newspapers have given them the force of a standard.  Using postpositive adjectives in the attributive position is a common practice in Indian newspapers: instead of writing "authorities concerned" (which is what they actually mean), they write "concerned authorities".  When a news report talks about a "reputed" college or company, it means one with a good reputation, in which case "reputable" is the right word.  "Unique", an absolute adjective, is often misused in the sense of "rare" or "unusual".  The word "police", as in the sentence, "The police have not made any arrests", takes a plural verb and is preceded by "the", but newspapers often use a singular verb with it and omit the definite article.  "Have a soft corner", "avail an opportunity", "in the premises" and "in the campus" are a few other Indianisms which came to be 'fixed', thanks to our newspapers.

Indianization was at work even in my own newspaper writings -- in a weekly column I was writing for an English language newspaper: some of my own standard forms were Indianized by the editorial staff.  Thus, my "reputable college" became reputed college, "etched on my memory" became etched in my memory, "on the market" (in the sense of 'on sale') became in the market, " a university" became an university, and "an HRD consultant" became a HRD consultant.

"If you can't beat them, join them!" said my facetious husband, a professor of English, when I told him about the Indianization of my English in the column.  "And promote Indianisms", he added.  "Next time you can write about the most unique crime that has been committed by a famous celebrity of the town in the premises of one of the reputed colleges of an university, what the concerned authorities say about it, and how police is investigating the case."