I love the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda’s poetry. Had he been alive, he would have turned a 106 on the 12th of July this year. If only I knew Spanish I would have enjoyed the flavor of his poems even more. If reading his translations can be so exhilarating, imagine the impact of reading those poems in in the language in which the poet thought of those words. Writing love poems is difficult. It is hard to become mushy or melodramatic. The ability to express this complex human emotion on paper is not easy. Neruda was a respected diplomat who always used green colored ink to write his poems. He felt green was the color of hope. Neruda created songs for children as a hobby. He was 19 when he wrote Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1971. He shared his insight on poets and poetry in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. He said …

“From all this, my friends, there arises an insight which the poet must learn through other people. There is no insurmountable solitude. All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song – but in this dance or in this song there are fulfilled the most ancient rites of our conscience in the awareness of being human and of believing in a common destiny.”

When Neruda returned to Chile after his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, the President Salvador Allende invited him to read at the Estadio Nacional before 70,000 people.

My serendipitous discovery of Neruda was through his poem  If You Forget Me. It is lyrical in the way it sways from one mood to another. I love the way it begins. When I first read this, I was in college. I saw his book of poems while browsing through books of poetry in a bookshop in Delhi.  I picked a page at random and that was this poem.

I opened this page and read the first few words. They had a sense of urgency. ” I want you to know one thing…” it began. It was conversational. How eloquently it summarizes the complexity of love when he says, “you know how this is…” I read the poem again and again. It was visual. I could see the poem flash before me long after I went back home dazed by its impact. I was even tempted to memorize the poem and then resisted that temptation. That is the worst thing to do to a poem.

I never memorize poems. When you memorize a poem, it is like putting a bird in a cage. You can see whenever you want to, but you can never see it fly.

When I wrote my second novel Married But Available, I rediscovered this poem when Keya wrote these lines for Abbey. Just the way she would. On a sheet of blue kite-paper. Who else could have introduced Abbey to this shade of love?

If You Forget Me

I want you to know
one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.

Madonna reads out this poem from her song Frozen

Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines is another gem by Neruda. Watch this version recited beautifully by the Cuban American actor Andy Garcia – most remembered for his role in the film The Godfather Part III

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Pramita Bose of Asian Age newspaper spoke to me about my love for this poem Here is the interview

Also featured in the newspaper Deccan Chronicle dated 18 Aug 2010

Our culture is full of stories the witty person – think Tenalirama, Gopal Bhand, or Birbal. The theater forms have all had the comic as an integral part of the story. Indian cinema – Hindi as well as other Regional language cinema have seen many shades of humor.  As Indians have become more confident, we have learnt to laugh at ourselves. Only someone who is secure within can laugh at himself or herself. Self deprecating humor is reflective of a self assured person. That confidence for some comes because of prosperity. For some even strife leads to its own variety of dark humor. I believe economic prosperity and exposure to a global environment have expanded the variety of jokes we Indians laugh at today. You see more comedy shows on TV than we did a few years back. Youtube and the Net has given us access to more brands and flavors of humor. So as a country we are discovering the joys of a global fare.

Malavika Velayanikal of  DNA newspaper spoke to couple of us on the question “Do Indians Have a Sense of Humor?” Here is the interview reproduced with her permission.

Let’s admit it. As Indians, we aren’t really famous for our sense of humor. It is a rather serious business, which, alas, we haven’t mastered. Not yet, at least. We reserve our peals of laughter for the jokes on ‘them’. And the ‘them’, obviously is Tamilian if you are Punjabi, Sikh if you are Malayali, or Nepali if you are Bengali. The pot of trouble is on high flame if the joke’s on ‘us’. For us Indians, humor is a vexing issue.

It could be because we are a very religious country. At least, Osho thought so: “For centuries sad people have dominated religion. They have expelled laughter – from the churches, from the mosques, from the temples….” To him, seriousness was a disease that has been praised, respected and honored; and Indians, “are serious people” – very religious, very holy.
Forbidden and dangerous territory as it is, a few brave men and women do test the waters. The ambitious ones tread on toes, and are quickly slain. The less smart ones are flayed. The perfect ones, survive.
Comedies are galore on television. Many are ghastly, but the pleasing TRP ratings have ensured more converts. Filmmakers are on to it too. So are stand-up comedians.

Author of bestseller Mediocre But Arrogant, Abhijit Bhaduri, feels we have learned to laugh at ourselves, as Indians have become more confident. “Only someone who is secure within can laugh at himself. Self deprecating humor is reflective of a self-assured person. I believe economic prosperity and exposure to a global environment has expanded the variety of jokes we laugh at today. So as a country we are discovering the joys of a global fare.”

While some believe humor has just arrived there are many who have been dabbling with it for years.
Of course, we have a sense of humor and a resilient one, argues Mahesh Ramchandani, a freelance writer for television, who has scripted several of the Movers and Shakers episodes. “In spite of all that the politicians have done to us and to this country, we still manage to laugh. I think everyone has a sense of humor, including Suresh Kalmadi, although you won’t see him laughing too much these days,” he says.

Swedish writer Zac O’Yeah, whose latest book, Once Upon a Time in Scandinavistan, an international bestseller, has always peppered his crime thrillers with humor. After living in India for over a decade, he sometimes feels there’s more humor in India than in most other countries in the world. “I think perhaps the unique thing is that we who live in India often straddle multiple cultures at the same time. Somebody can be Bengali by birth, but grow up and live their life in Bangalore, and also be completely fluent in English. My belief is that the more complex your own cultural situation is, with a variety of influences from different sources, the easier it is for you to appreciate the comedy of life.”
We obviously knew how to laugh at ourselves in the past, says Reena I Puri, editor of the Amar Chitra Katha series. “Indian folktales are full of amazing humour. Look at Tenali Raman, Gopal Bhand or Birbal.” She believes that Indian television humour has a long way to go, but “if I think of some of Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s movies with Amol Palekar or Utpal Dutt, they were simply great.”

For O’Yeah, the classic humor exemplified by RK Narayan or the naughty humor in Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s Kamalakanta are the highest ideals – both quite advanced for their time. He enjoys an occasional standup comedy performance “by intelligent comedians like Aporup Acharya, for instance”.

But playing with wit, and escaping unscathed is rather tricky. Shashi Tharoor tweaked Mahabharata – almost as holy as it could get – married it to history, recast it with politics and won worldwide applause. But one stray tweet on holy cows and cattle-class had him reprimanded instantly, and retreating in haste. So writers like Ramchandani are doubly careful. How far one can push the envelope is a tough call.

“One has to weigh one’s words all the time because what is permissible today was offensive yesterday and what is taboo today will become permissible tomorrow,” he says. No television producer wants to lose a TV show and so they keep a close watch on their writers and keep showing us pictures of starving people in poor countries; this motivates us to self-censor, he says, jokingly.

The moral police used to be the only police to watch out for earlier, but now we also have the politically correct (PC) police watching over us, Ramchandani says. “While the moral police gets offended if we take a potshot at their sacred cows such as god, religion, and so on, the PC has their own sacred cows and so, for example, at one time you couldn’t get a pro-gay piece into the media, now you can’t get a non-pro-gay piece in because the ‘liberal’ Taliban is watching. Some will say that is a good thing, which is exactly how the moral police defends itself,” he says.

“My humor is a survival kind of one,” says writer Shinie Antony. “I wanted to be a comedian when I grew up – partly because my report cards were a joke.” All her books and writings are humourous, but her wit, she says is very self deprecatory. “There is a thin line between offending someone and being funny, which I have never crossed,” she says.
So says O’Yeah: “Even if as a novelist I prefer a comic genre, my writing isn’t about having fun at some particular person’s [or a community's] expense.” He enjoys “a fairly gentle type of generic humour and which is mostly actually targeting myself [if it targets anything at all] or my own preconceived notions, or my own stupidity. In fact, I would like to claim that my humour is almost of the philosophical kind, but if I said that probably the community of philosophers would burn my effigy.” That was a joke, by the way, he quickly adds.
Politics seems like the favourite fodder of television humour. There is much entertainment in it, and on live Parliament debates, our politicians perform better than most comedians do. Laloo Yadav, Mayawati, Sonia Gandhi, Manmohan Singh, and Mamata Banerjee top the charts for chiding comedians. But political sensibilities are also quick to hurt, and the ‘party’ often cracks down on the artiste as well as his subjects.

Once, a television show that Ramchandani was working on made some nasty jokes about gangsters. He recalls receiving anonymous calls telling them to take it easy. “We’re particularly careful not to offend the feelings of gangsters and terrorists, because they are very sensitive people and also own guns, certain politicians who will remain unnamed and George Bush – because a channel, which will remain unnamed, that was airing one of our shows had given us clear instructions that we were not to make any jokes about George Bush. No kidding!” he says.

Bhaduri too has ruffled several feathers with his wit. If you are a good humor writer, you would most certainly offend someone who is the butt of the jokes, he says. “One of the Professors of Mathematics at XLRI had told me I had caricatured him unfairly in Mediocre But Arrogant. A short story about the futility of New Year’s resolutions drew the flak of an erstwhile colleague who claimed that the work-shirking, scheming person in the story was modeled on him. At the alumni meet of XLRI last December, a classmate came up and said that the character of Ayesha in Married But Available was modeled on her and that she didn’t quite like that.”

The cultural elite of the country, after chuckling through hours of Seinfield, Monty Python and Woody Allen, are now sampling the slew of stand-up comedy shows live in the city. Bangalore, Mumbai and Delhi often get to enjoy live performances by American, British and Australian comedians. The recent Russell Peters’ show in the city was sold out every day. Local comedians like Vir Das and Ruby Chakraborty are popular as well.

We could argue on the cultural divide of humor in India for hours, and get nowhere. A sense of humor is, after all, a very personal thing. “That’s why it’s called ‘a sense’, I suppose,” says O’Yeah. It will differ between different people depending on social class, cultural background and so on, he adds.

Everybody has a sense of humour. Only the degree of it varies, feels Shinie Antony. To her, humour is an essential defence mechanism of the mind. “How you cope with a situation without losing your sanity.” And laughter is addictive. “It is like applause,” she says. “But humorists must learn where to stop with the jokes.”
In their quest for chuckles, comics could get carried away. After all, only blurred lines demarcate the boundaries between humor, flippancy and offence. So, funnymen, beware, when you go searching for that funny bone.

What do you think? Do economically prosperous nations produce more variety of humor? Do people who laugh at themselves make better colleagues?

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Download my cartoon from here and feel free to use it.

We have all grown up in a world that clearly values rationality and rational behavior. Being emotional was frowned upon. Whenever someone displays emotions in public view it makes news (Think of Maradona’s expressions as the team played and lost) and the world turns its cameras to look at the person who just “lost it”. When I studied Science in school, I was told by my teacher that if there was something that cannot be explained by Science it was not worth knowing and that it was obviously irrational. Such was the vehemence with which I was nudged towards being rational. As I grew to develop my own view of the world, I got fascinated by the limitations of rationality. Rational stuff had a logical sequence and clearly activated that part of my brain that I had difficulty accessing. You try this one and you got to do this real quick: A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?
Write down your answer. If you said that the ball costs 10c, then you are part of the majority. That is the good news. The bad news is that the correct answer is 5c. Shane Frederick, Prof at MIT Sloan posed this question to more than 3,000 students at eight different universities. Fewer than half gave the correct answer. The trick is to not go by your instinct which gives the wrong answer, but to take a second more and reflect on it. Shane has developed a 3 question test – that question is one of the three – that can be almost as accurate in predicting characteristics that other tests like the SAT, ACT, or the Wonderlic Personnel Test. He also found that those who do well on the cognitive reflection test tend to be more patient in decisions between smaller sooner rewards and larger later rewards.  Before you pat yourself on the back (your own or anybody else’s for that matter) remember, they are also more willing to gamble in financial domains.

Now let us check the other half of your ability. Try saying the words in the visual. The top line would read red, blue, orange purple. That is easy. . The task is to quickly name not the word itself, but the color of the word. As an example, for the word “green” printed in red ink, the correct verbal answer is “red.” Because of a phenomenon called directed attention, this is hilariously difficult to do. You must actively inhibit the automatic response—reading the word—in order to do something else. This is not the only way in which we can understand the power of the irrational. There are many examples that have been done to show how we all do dumb and irrational things despite taking pride in our rational selves.

Take for instance Stanley Milgram’s famous experiment. How far would you go giving what you thought were electrical shocks to another human being simply for a study about memory? What would you think when the learner went quiet after you apparently administered a shock labeled on the board “Danger: Severe Shock”? How far would you go? The majority, at least 63% of the participants continued right until the end – they administered all the shocks even with the learner screaming in agony, begging to stop and eventually falling silent. These weren’t specially selected sadists, these were ordinary people like you and me who had volunteered for a psychology study.

Magic tricks work in the same way. Rationally speaking you would of course agree that there is no such thing as a color changing card. If you picked one card from a deck of cards, how could a magician change the color of the card while you are watching the trick on camera. The camera never lies, right? Wrong.

My hypothesis is that you need to learn to develop the irrational – also known as the “creative” aspects of you. Writing a story is a good way to develop your irrational self. Stories are boring when they are straightforward and predictable. For instance try this for a rational (aka BORING as hell) opening lines of a short story.

A boy and a girl sat on the same bench in the Physics class. The Professor was teaching (what else) Physics. The boy and the girl were trying to think of what the possible question paper would be like…

Now try this one on

A boy and a girl sat on the same bench in the Physics class.While the Professor was teaching Physics, the girl’s mind wandered. She was thinking of options. What protection should she use when the boy would meet her that evening. Would it be better to carry a small revolver or should she just use the sharp kitchen knife, she wondered. The boy was telling himself, “If only I had known that she was vegetarian, I would not have poisoned the fish…

The best storytellers are magicians who use the same principles of psychology to lead the reader to a path that is perfectly rational and logical, but wrong. The purpose of every story is to coax the reader into suspending their disbelief. Good cinema does the same. See how much more interesting a life you would lead if you stopped resisting the irrational aspects of human beings. For instance, if you knew that groups fail to share information with each other that is known only to themselves and simply repeated what others already knew, you would put less faith in decisions made by the group. People are seen as more capable when they talk about shared rather than unshared information. To be on the safe side people prefer to stick to repeating things that everyone knows and, bizarrely, others like them better for it. Heck!! I am not suggesting that you drop all opportunities to be rational. Merely suggesting that the next time you do something irrational, maybe there is an opportunity for you to learn about stuff most people have learnt to ignore. For instance, by knowing about the 7 Psychological Principles of Scams you can protect yourself from scams that makes 3.2 million people each year in the UK into handing over £3.5 billion to scamsters.

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If you like to try more tests that check for cognitive skills, try a logic and reasoning skill test here

Or this interesting piece on Ten Social Psychology Studies

The weight of the school bag has been the subject of much debate and speculation. Last January the Central Board of Secondary Education in India issued a circular to all heads of institutions, to lighten the weight of school bags, especially at the primary level. (see the video here). Sometimes schools have come up with ideas to alleviate this weighty issue. Apart from limiting the number of books that children need to study, schools have also been asked to make arrangements so that students up to Class II can deposit their books in the school itself. Diverse studies on school bag weights conducted by different NGOs across the country have found the average weight carried by a student to a school to range between 6kg and 10kg. Internationally, most countries observe norms that limit the weight of school bags to less than one-seventh of the weight of the student. The BBC quotes a study that shows that more than a third of Italian pupils carry bags which weigh more than 30% of their body weight at least once a week.
The studies advise limiting the weight of backpacks in accordance with labor law standards. “Rate of low back pain in children are approaching those seen in adults. Although the economic importance of the problem is small at this age, the lack of certified limits for backpack carrying is short-sighted.”

While India’s largest public school system – The Kendriya Vidyalayas actually prescribed a formula for the weight of the school bag. As per the norms, the bag for children in Class-I and II should not be more than two kg, while it should be less than 3 kg for students of Class-III and IV. The prescribed weight is less than four kg for children in Class V-VIII, while the upper limit is six kg for students in Class VIII-XI. What the norms miss out is that the school bags do not carry just books. There are story books, Music, DVD, make up, games, the occasional pets, iPods… the list goes on. Check out this video and educate yourself.

WHAT IF…

What if we give each child a Kindle (or equivalent eBook reader) on the first day they step into school. We could then load all the readings, supplementary reading and perhaps even the school library on to the reader. We could put the entire set of readings (class 1-12) along with the Wikipedia made available to them. The content could updated once the children go to the school or to a cybercafe. The weight of all the books and notebooks could be replaced by this device that weighs approximately 300 gms or about 10 oz.

ADVANTAGES

1. Latest content available and corrections incorporated easily. Think of the freeware that is available today (MIT has 1900 courses available for free as on date)
2. Children can read at their own pace. Visually challenged readers can use audio features to listen to the text. There are lots of text to speech converters available.
3. Possible to submit homework also online. Projects etc will be better researched
4. Cheaper than buying textbooks and notebooks every year and for each subject
5. One time cost of the Kindle can be paid back over the 12 years.

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS

1. How do we make Wi-fi connectivity available in rural areas?
2. Who will bear the cost of the e-Book readers – esp for those who cannot afford it?

The answer to both can be in Corporations stepping forth to put money gifting readers in schools they adopt. The content can be pre-loaded before giving it to the student. Once a quarter the content can be updated. Mass scale adoption will dramatically bring down the cost of the reader. Maybe we can experiment by doing a pilot in a hundred schools to begin with.

No more back breaking school bags. Now the children could simply carry their lunch box, water bottle, the iPod,Makeup box and their pets (see the Video again if you don’t believe me) to school. How much easier would that be

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Acknowledgement: My friend Kaushik Chakraborty first suggested this idea. He recommended we give a Kindle to each employee when they come to for a Leadership Development program. So go ahead and ask your employers to do that. Meanwhile I must write to Kindle for my sales commission.

Long after you are gone
I can still taste your kiss
The room still has those traces
Of the moments that we caught
Your hair still snakes on my pillow
The creases on the sheet
Tell me that it was for real

I smell our togetherness
I hear your words in my ear
The moments when I read
Untold stories in your silence
When you looked in my eyes
The creases on the sheet
Tell me that it was for real