Spell Cheque

I am neither a pedant nor a language Nazi.  For no language is "pure" and spellings change. As an example, early English language texts are often incomprehensible.  So change is inevitable.  And I like language to be inventive. Plus pot, kettle, black - I make plenty of mistakes too. Nevertheless the amount of linguistic confusion in newspapers and blogs and personal communications gives me pause for thought.  Many in fact appear in papers of repute.  Plus it is not a simple case of misspelling but the use of words which mean something else altogether.  Which means a new language is afoot. So I put together a list over a week. Par exemple.:

a. wiles instead of whiles;

b. die instead of dye (more common than one would think, in a century die will indicate dye and the useless e will die to give us the dying of clothes);

c. looser where loser is intended (very popular with the young. Even if it leaves you scratching your head as to what part of the person is now looser and once was tight);

d. The rain was apparently poring. Maybe the u just got washed away;

e. Unfarely, fare is now a multipurpose word. Occasionally though bus fairs go up;

f. Rearing fouls puts one in a fowl mood; and

g. Films have trailors these days.

Sometimes it is a honest mistake.  But people cavalierly persist with it. For e.g. I have been living in Sidney for a long time.  Even though each email of mine offers the polite correction that the city is better known as Sydney. I sometimes fear that I may forget the alphabet "y" too. 

While most of the above examples are not from India (surprise!), my few weeks in India made me realise that proper spelling and grammar have long departed it's shores.  I can excuse the Indian spelling of glamour (it's glammer) on the grounds that its more akin to the way we pronounce the word.  I would rejoice in Indian English too - if it made sense. Alas a phrase like "I was dancing in full abundance in the rain" (attributed to Ms. Rai) only tells me that such rejoicing is premature.  Neither can I excuse the country's shoddy school books,  I would be honest to goodness surprised if anyone emerged fluent in the English language solely on the basis of a school education.   Government-speak and business-speak both exemplify the Indian ability to string obscure words together (a bonus if they are correctly spelled) to emerge with a sentence that means nothing at all.  An immersion in this is so disorienting that you begin to doubt your own grip on the language.

Thankfully some red wine and a curl up with Strunk & White (made more beloved by Maira Kalman's illustrations) offers a small cure for the disorientation.  Never mind that wiki notes that the book  is antiquated and peevish.  Some things just call for these sentiments.

Arranged Marriage

Whilst in India I had a brief chat with one of my nieces, a girl of 18 with a great deal of self-possession. I asked her if she had a boyfriend and she replied that she didn’t and that she is a “one man woman”. I was a little surprised to find this phrase still around but what she meant was that she had no intention of “fooling around” before she got married. As she wanted this marriage to be a happy occasion, she expected to have an arranged marriage. The happiness of this occasion I found could be marred by many things, most of all her father’s old-fashioned attitude to marriage. Girls who were “fooling around” however did not appear to contemplate a future different to hers, most appeared to be like the 20 something I met on a flight to Kolkata who had plenty of boyfriends with whom she engaged in varying degrees of intimacy but was eventually planning on an arranged marriage.

If the statistics are right, at least 95% of marriages in India are still arranged. It persists even amongst the middle classes, where education and employment for women is now common. It is not that Indians are immune to romance; the arranged marriage for example comes with its own romantic mythology. But in “real life”, as Indians are wont to say, tradition often trumps love. In some cases people expect to bypass entanglements and segue straight into adulthood by way of the family approved marriage. In others, a failed love affair is often followed by a retreat into the familiar world of the arranged marriage. And sometimes, the desires of early youth and a liberal upbringing where the ideal of romance is more commonly found in a French movie than a Bollywood flick, give way to the somewhat dispiriting landscape of relationships in India as one grows older. People are left on the cusp, hoping for a romance around the corner and unwillingly submitting to the process of having a marriage arranged. Whichever way it is arrived at, the hold of the institution over the Indian imagination seems far too firm to be dislodged by any of the changes that sweep the country from time to time. One may depart from a traditional upbringing and sometimes move to foreign climes and habits but many return like homing pigeons to the traditional marriage.

Even those of us opposed to the notion of arranged marriages thus grow accepting of it. You cannot after all force a revolution in mating mores.

And yet I couldn’t help thinking that far-fetched as it may seem, the arranged marriage is a continuum of attitudes that prevent people from entering a temple. For the persistence of the arranged marriage is also the persistence of caste. As an example, it appears likely that caste considerations will dictate the arranging of a marriage for the 18 year old niece. Change occurs within castes but intermingling and introducing new modes of living into the family still seems to spark off tension. Last month, for e.g., Chetan Bhagat released a book that is a fictionalised account of his own marriage and the parental opposition that preceded it. In one of his interviews, he touched on its potential to kill the tenderness and sweetness of a love affair. Even accounting for deeply held beliefs it can at times seem that something dark and fearful lies at the heart of the psychological violence (and often physical) directed towards falling in love in India. And whilst other forms of caste discrimination are not as visible these days, with the arranged marriage it is upfront and we are presented with the notion that it is purely parental love and duty directing us to our predetermined futures.

And of course there is the great adventure of love itself. Cristina Nehring bemoaning the anodyne love of our modern age in her book, The Vindication of Love, writes of being “derailed by love, hospitalized by love, flung around five continents, shaken, overjoyed, inspired and unsettled by love”. Her book takes its title from Wollstonecraft who combined her intellectualism with the messiest of love lives. Indeed Nehring’s book is partly a defence of Wollstonecraft’s feminist reputation. And of course the idealization of romantic love, nay passionate, unheeding love of the kind Nehring describes, has a long history in the West. Perhaps Nehring is taking the argument to its extreme and most people’s romantic lives fall between the two poles. Yet - admitting for appearances being deceptive - it’s hard to see the young people I met in India committing themselves to any such passion. And more importantly approaching it with the truth it deserves.

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I must admit to a sense of perverse happiness when a book like Outliers is trashed. I haven't read Malcolm Gladwell but any one who writes a book, nay a title like Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking deserves not to be read. So one's eye is immediately drawn to criticism in the hope that it corks the Gladwell genie so its never seen again. Alas, in the real world, the genie is out and about and prospering.

I can imagine Outliers being popular in India. I once worked for a corporate organisation in India and I can see it's young managers lugging it from airport to airport. The book will likely appear in those banal courses thought up by HR (leadership skills, creavitivity for middle managers, finance for dummies). Just like the cheese book, the seven habits book, the monk who once owned a Ferrari book, the de Bono books and anything Tom Friedman writes. Americans seem particularly adept at writing this kind of book and Indians particularly good at consuming them.

I can't entirely define why it is that I dislike motivational books aimed at the corporate world and books that propose some grand unifying theory and are quasi scientific but in reality lack any kind of rigour (Gladwell, Friedman) given that I can ignore them. In part my dislike stems from the depressing courses tailored around these books that one was forced to attend. Depressing not just in content but depressing in how seriously these courses are taken (or at least appeared to be taken, it cannot be said that organisations appreciate anarchists and dissenters). The odd innocent also believed that the books and the courses lit the path to senior management and unimaginable wealth. It was all enough to sedate oneself with alcohol to wipe out the awfulness of the whole thing.

Even people you knew as students who aimlessly lounged around discussing philosophy or feminism or a novel late into the night morphed into terrifyingly focussed individuals who made busy, incomprehensible power point charts. In this they dropped in whatever it was that Erica, Tom or Malcolm had opined and continued to think themselves well-read.

When people realise that corporate life is not all that it is cracked up to be or just reach a mid-career slump, its time for an altogether different genre of books. These stress the "positive life" and at no point is melancholia and cynicism ever allowed even if experience suggests otherwise. These quasi-philosophical offerings are so pervasive that at least in India anyone over 35 appears to automatically attach themselves to some spurious spiritual enterprise.

In all cases, self improvement is the goal. In a way, there's something vaguely disturbing about all that sweating and striving to get to an ideal which does not exist. There is no greater testament to idiocy than those performance appraisals which rely on increasingly absurd indicators to map your progress, nothing more stupid than the belief that constant striving is achievement, nothing more delusional than 24/7 happiness and bliss. Existence with its eddies, whorls, its going nowhere is simply not allowed. In reality, there is no greater improvement to life than lying back and watching the world sweat and hurry by, preferably mint tea and someone else's labours (a book) in hand. Somehow I can't see myself being invited by anyone to give a powerpoint lecture on it.

Austen Inc.

Jane Austen has much to answer for. Her novels, collectively, seem to have set the template for everything from Mills & Boon to the Date Movie to everything in between. Bad enough. But now its an industry, the unceasing juggernaut of which appears to have taken off sometime when Colin Firth, playing a one note Mr. Darcy, emerged from a lake to the collective excitement of Ms. Bennett and a few million other women. A scene, one may note in passing, that does not exist in the novel, Pride and Prejudice. Since then we have been subjected to one remake after the other of her six novels and Austen’s life is also increasingly the subject matter for some very dubious films. Predictably a new Austen film has just been announced.

I don't dislike Austen, it is hard to dislike one of the most beloved novelists writing in the English language. And it is not her fault that its the romantic template that has carried over into much subsequent fiction (and not her satire and irony, for example). But the persistence of this template well into a century in which women are no longer living a "little piece of ivory" life is inexplicable. Given the varied nature of women's lives today, its surprising that audiences repeatedly consume the same banal romance. It is not even that women's literature of the past wasn't rich and varied. In fact, one can reach right back in time and find that even writers as famous as the Eliots and Brontes are unlikely to find themselves the centre of so much current female adoration. Eliot has almost dropped off the radar given that she is drawn to the great moral and political themes of her age. The Brontes are far too untrammelled to properly fall within the genteel conventions of romantic literature. Women, it would appear, don't like weighty issues or unreasonable passion. Only Jane Eyre, a reworked Cinderella story, is any competition to the Austen industry.

So women obviously recognise themselves in Austen's novels. Even those who are old enough to not buy into the romance myth. But I am uncertain if any modern man recognises himself in the typical Austen hero. Even though Austen was read by both sexes in her time, a few centuries later it would appear that no man reads or watches adaptations of her work except under duress. No one after all can be Mr. Darcy because he is a mythical creature. And the heirs to Austen, chick-lit and chick flicks have become pejorative terms with half the population because its men are about as real as Lara Croft or the Bond girls.

Still, women like this template, no matter how unrealistic it is. Two feisty women I once met, both studying to be doctors, simply loved Austen and Darcy, in no particular order. P&P is not exactly my favourite novel partly because of its house pornography (Ms. Bennett in fact appears to fall in love with house and man). Also let's face it, Austen's world, though not her prose, is limited. So I pointed them to A Room with a View. They fell about laughing. Its true that no romantic novel with any credentials, would make a depressed railway clerk with a direct manner and lofty ideas a romantic hero. Women trade up, not down. Women like to be wooed. And A Room with a View, with its critique of class and its emphasis on the authentic emotion (which precludes societal conventions like wooing), is really a homosexual love story in disguise. My mistake.

Its not a mistake I will make again. I stay silent while all around me otherwise sensible women are watching whatever it is that is the new romantic fiction (even Sex and the City is really an Austen template updated to a specific locale in the 20th century). And feel a silent sense of vindication when others concur - witness why dudes don't read (Austen in Vampireland!) and Dowd's bemusement.