Sexual Harassment – in Society or at School – Law Alone Is Insufficient

 Sexual Harassment – in Society or at School – Law Alone Is Insufficient

Sexual harassment has no age limits (for the victims), no geographical limits (across the globe), no class or caste limits (if one is hierarchically above, harassment of anyone below is fair game; yes, I am using “game” most advisedly) and if at all has any limits, it can only be in one’s own mind.

The two column-inch news item says that an assistant school teacher in a Government Upper Primary School (meaning, 3rd-5thstandard?) beat a number of students for not giving her the expected respect from the students, get this, by touching her feet. This is harassment, pure and simple. This touching one’s feet as a mark of showing respect has no place in an evolved society and one with aspirations as a global power. I can be cursing even as I am ostensibly showing respect! Oh, that is wrong. I indeed AM cursing.

One human being must show respect to another human being for simply the latter being that, a human being. That is all it must be. I am older to another means no more than the egg and the sperm that fused to make me did so earlier than those of the other person. So, can the sperm-egg pair of the other touch the feet of the similar pair of me? That is a serious question, do not laugh.

OK, let us get a little further, indeed quite a bit, in human life. The teacher became a teacher as their life circumstances (including the fact that it was in a Government Upper Primary School) imposed the situation on them; the student became a student for similar reasons. Is it then one’s life circumstances deserve to receive the feet-touching respect and the other’s to oblige and offer the same? Is there any sense in the above?

Mr. M. Veerapandian, the recently elected Tamil Nadu State Secretary of the Communist Party of India (CPI) said the following (as reported in a newspaper): Laws alone−which automatically expand into laws and punishments−could not eradicate deep rooted caste pride from the minds of the people. Hallelujah to that!

Mr. Veerapandian went further than that. “Law offers protection for those who face suppression and violence.” I am not sure I agree with this. Law, at best and perhaps in a sphere of life that might not be connected to that in which the crime was committed, can provide only succour after the fact. It by itself cannot offer protection to those “who face suppression and violence”.

He says, and I agree totally, “Social science, questioning the superiority based on caste, should be taught in classrooms.” Perhaps, he could have used the moral imperative “ought” instead of the “should”.

The above incidence relates to harassment from a position of authority, to be understood as someone breaching the rules of enforcing obedience, in a primary school. Let your imagination roam. One of the students becomes an IAS officer (Assistant Collector) and exudes power over the teacher who is perhaps the District Education Officer. Will the DEO not complain if the IAS officer smacks the DEO with a stick? Power is at best transitory, and at worst, a mirage.

 Now I come to another form of harassment that most would agree is categorically at a higher plane than the instance described above. Sexual harassment. 

I could discuss sexual harassment in two different ways, with and without the sexual context. In the latter, this is pure harassment, and do not expect me to say, “Nothing but.” 

Such harassment has an unmentionablesociological context that goes beyond power dynamics. The other way of saying this is sexual harassment, though in two words, must be treated as only one, not a category within but indeed distinct from harassment. Sexual harassment cannot even be hyphenated. The sociological context inter-twined with power dynamics makes it heinous. 

 It is very difficult for me to think that a human being could descend so much as to harass anyone. This beggars belief, but I have to believe as this is what is happening. 

I end this post with a point put forth by Mr. Veerapandian: “[O]nly the continuous inculcation of social science, aimed at challenging the sense of superiority based on birth, could bring about meaningful change in society.”

Raghuram Ekambaram  

Education Minus

                                                                                              Education Minus

This is about weekly (I think) waste of space and newsprint in the daily newspaper The Hindu. This half page piece comes under the rubric Education Plus. Now you know where the heading for this post comes from!

Why the change of sign? The word plus indicates something more. Give me credit for figuring out that the word negative indicates something less. In this case, less than what? Less than something called holistic teaching/learning, and the generic yet holistic education. I have been reading seriously the Education Plus segment in the newspaper almost ever since it started, but it struck me hard only about a year ago.

The opinions (they are nothing but opinions though they could be splattered with some numbers, mostly meaningless) for the most part handles not how students should think about their future and possibly who to approach for such guidance, but about how parents should drive their wards in their choices. 

The parents are sharply focused on the job market. They want their RoI in triple digits.Hence, coding and more coding. This is where the problem starts. No, I am not talking about some airy ideas of contributing to society, to humanity, to world peace, being productive in a holistic way (I am going to be throwing ‘holistic’ every time I merely feel like it whether it carries any meaning at all, and if it gets boring, please quit reading)−all dreamy stuff−but the simple everyday stuff like employability, how fat the pay check needs to be to be able to make a mark in the marriage market, how to be hyper-competitive (don’t share anything with anyone), and most important of all, how to be cozy enough to teachers (to get that additional half a mark). No true friends. Not in the university and never outside of it.

The opinions in Education Plus are expressed by someone in the field of education. Are they current teachers toiling away in classrooms and in their homes (grading work) or someone who had been there, done that? Is it and administrator in a university or high school? Is it someone who has some remunerative contacts in a western university seeking to establish a an outreach (I am using this word most advisedly−outreach means downmarket, and India is downmarket for western universities) campus in India.

Is it an entrepreneur looking for a place to park the excess funds he has so that those funds get excesser? (I have had personal experience as an outsider in an interaction between an entrepreneur and a serious academic leading a life of retirement and did not care for making more money for the entrepreneur. The good thing was the meeting was held in a five star hotel, and I gorged myself on lightly fried cashew nuts, sandwich and coffee). By the way, such an entrepreneur goes by the generic name Edupreneur (education entrepreneur). Every funder of a Deemed-to-be university is an edupreneur! If you saw the history of these universities, you would invariably find someone putting a foot in the door, push one’s way through and become a highly respected edupreneur!

It does not matter.

Next, come to what is said in these opinions. Always, I mean always, the phrases “conceptual learning”, “innovative thinking”, “move fast and break things” (thank Mark Zuckerberg for this gem of a thought!). Given all these new fangled ways of how to educate, I wonder how people became achievers in the olden days, and there were more than a few. Even more recently, like my generation was not devoid innovators, inventors and they did break things! You may figure out who did what.

Ask these so-called educationists to give you a solid example of conceptual thinking, and I will bet to one that they cannot. In fact, many a time an empirical thinking drives one towards conceptual thinking. During my decade long teaching stint in a university, there would have been more than a hundred times I would have probed the minds of the students with puzzles. A few of them solved it, and if you were to ask them how they came up with the answers, they would not know. They just kept trying. Concepts do not lay themselves on a silver platter. Concepts EMERGE! From what? Thinking and drawing lines at the water line as waves erase them, all dynamic.

I am going to test my readers: what is your immediate answer for how ocean tides are produced. If you said attraction of the moon, you fail! Try answering the following: what could be an earth bound parallel to ocean tides on earth? When you figure out the answer, you would have figured out what is conceptual thinking, which cannot be taught in a class.

What is nearly parallel between buckling of a column under axial load and motion sickness when being driven on a hilly road with hairpin bends? Both lead to instability. This particular conceptual probing is given in the introduction or the first chapter of the book on Stability of Structures, a beast of a subject in my PG program.

Now, I am going to present the result of innovative conceptualization, only in photos, and that is that for this post and as it comes to Engineering Plus, in my mind.

 

 

     Raghuram Ekambaram

 

I tried Understanding Democracy, but Failed Miserably

I Tried Understanding Democracy, but Failed Miserably

When many countries claim that they practice democracy, I felt that if I could look at them just a wee bit below the surface, I would understand what that vaunted form of government could be, in the details. This post is the result of such mental wanderings amongst democracies, countries that call them so. 

To start with I needed to understand how to define democracy. I got help from today’s (September 13, 2025) newspaper, in particular from a column on the editorial page. In that, I read, “... [D]emocracy, which is defined as ‘rule of the people, by the people, for the people’...” authored by someone who had been rubbing shoulders with people in the highest echelons of democratic power in India. Oh, I was so ignorant that a president of the US has power over language, so much so that he can define a word! That was Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address in 1863.

Abe, as honest as he was supposed to have been, might not have known the antecedents of democracy. Athens is considered the cradle of democracy, at least by Eurocentric people. I am no expert to vouch on the legitimacy and the correctness of the claim that in what is now the plains of the Indus River, people followed procedures of democracy and valued institutions of the same. The period may not have been too far ahead or too far behind Athenian democracy. Yet, given people’s penchant for revanchist revisions, it is not too difficult go down that slippery slope without exit ramps.

Democracy, I came to understand soon after I started thinking about it, is not one thing. That is OK, as it leaves me room to locate a base for comparisons among the various competing as well as conforming forms of it. The simplest example, I believe, comes from Germany. We have Christian Democrats and Social Democrats. I could maybe understand the first of the two: Christian Democrats. To be practised among Christians. It is, then, quite easy to see what Social Democrats stand for: nothing Christian!

What is the understanding of democracy that most people harbour under? Whatever it may be, it does not go beyond voting in an election. The politicians too understand it in a similar fashion, “More people vote for me and my party in an election than for the other party and its candidate. Therefore, I am more democratic than my opponent. So also my party.” That is one more category of democracy − Majoritarian democracy. This may also be called nominal democracy, “nominal” defined numerically.

This idea has been taken to the extremes, like if you desist from voting, you must have had a reason and that reason shall not go beyond disapproving all the candidates in an election. Hence came the no-brainer, NOTA – None Of The Above, a phrase (duly abbreviated) made for filling in the ballot paper. How is NOTA different than not voting at all? Don’t answer that as you cannot convince me. To come clean: I have not yet voted in any election anywhere, not because of NOTA.

The United Kingdom is a democracy, and has been one since the Magna Carta, they say. The United States does not agree. It says the US is the first modern democracy (effectively sidelining Athens). I do not see a whole lot of things common between these two so-called democracies. How can there be, when the US was merely a colony of the UK when it began?Even when the US got its independence, it did not know whether to adopt the UK model without the king or design a new model for itself. It ended up being neither, like changing horses in midstream. To buttress my point, its National Anthem was penned by a Scot! That is how the claims of being a democracy by both the US and UK become irreconcilable.

France is a democracy. Its president is not titular; has real powers in the international arena and also on domestic, through the power to appoint the prime minister who handles them.Now, there is also the European Commission. We come to the curious case of Japan. It is a monarchical democracy, not much unlike the UK. The funny thing, though, is its constitution was imposed on them by the US!

South Korea? No matter who wrote it, the constitution of South Korea is a capitalist constitution. It allows financial power to control national economic policies. It is a democracy of untrammelled financial powers. Chaebols, have you heard? If you want something softer, it is a capitalist democracy. Does that make any sense to you?

Australia and Canada are two peas in a pod. They are democracies, yes, but beheaded! Their Head of State lives in London!

We can go to South America and Mexico and explore the various forms of governments available there. I suspect they would all be in some measure and form of mix-n-match of the governance structures mentioned thus far. Many nations of Africa keep playing whack-a-mole; a democracy props up here; try giving it a whack and it disappears, only to appear elsewhere. It could be a dictatorship or a monarchy and keep playing this for long and one would never get bored.

I come to one nation, the process of the writing the constitution of which is something truly consultative, not only among its own people, but among many nations around the globe. South Africa.

It was guided by one of the best statesman of our times, Nelson Mandela. Man, do I have a boatful of appreciation for him. He followed his concern for humanity and remained its standard bearer in the apartheid-free South Africa. Yet, the constitution that was developed has not survived in its pristine form, what with the successors of Mandel being Mbeki, Zumaand the mining magnate Cyril Ramaphosa (I left out the insignificant one who held the post for just one year right after Mandela). I would not be surprised if the next president of South Africa is, drum roll please, Elon Musk! 

Coming to my own neighbourhood, South Asia, it is a model of nations that are democratic only in name; I include India in it. There are some basket cases and I would not name them. If you considered Singapore, coughing without covering your mouth could put you in jail. Some democracy that.

Come to India. The alliance named National Democratic Alliance surely is democratic! The other major grouping of parties named United Progressive Alliance (UPA) is truly progressive! Yeah, I own the sprawling Sri Ranganathar Temple in Sri Rangam, and we could negotiate a price if you wished to buy it! All the other parties that appear to represent various slivers of people have all been localized, even the grandiose sounding All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK).

I went around the world, but in about a few hours. This is neither too long nor too short. Like Goldilocks porridge (did you notice the bias for blonde hair?). So, I conclude that democracy cannot be defined, and it is too varied. The exceptions to any definition with reference to any nation would make all other nations that claim to be a democracy blush! No democratic nation can be freed from the influences of selfish demagogues, or capital.

The situation has never been any different all through history. Therefore, no country can be stopped from calling itself a democracy. 

Let thousand flowers bloom!

Raghuram Ekambaram

"We are not fighting! Just head butting for fun!”

"We are not fighting! Just head butting for fun!”

This post has two pictures: one, a photo I waited to take for long to get the opportunity; two, I scanned from a magazine that I am almost a regular reader of. Each of these pictures tells me a story that, in my opinion, goes towards establishing in my mind more firmly the truth of Evolution by Natural Selection.

Some background. I am an unabashed votary of Evolution by Natural Selection, not necessarily as propounded by Charles Darwin. My introduction to it was through Richard Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker, the author’s second book. Then, I went to his first book, The Selfish Gene, and there has not been a single moment since of my looking back. Books by Stephen Gould, Daniel Dennett, and others set me ever more firmly on that terrain.  Afterall, Darwin would not mind his theory (if theory is what it is) go through evolutionary changes! There are a number of biologists, zoologists, statisticians who have added to and/or subtracted from what Darwin saw as the reasons for variations in the kingdom of life.

The photo−one of four I clicked as it shows the fight-dance clearly against the backdrop of the white of the rear legs of the goat−shows two young male goats(kids, they are called, and kids they will be in this post) butting heads, neither too seriously nor too playfully (my judgement). The two kids are likely to have the same mother and our servant maid agreed, despite the difference in the pigments in the ears, and in the lower legs. How can I say they are not too seriously engaged in a direct duel? The eyes of the kid on the left do not indicate an aggressive mood. Additionally, the maid said that in a fight, the horns of the two would be against each other, and not sideways shifted as it appears to be. I came to my unjustifiable position that this was a practice session for the two kids for future real life combats. Let that be.  

The mother goat was around foraging for food and did not seem to care about siblings’ fight. Is this the way the mother allows the kids to learn about, yes, I am going to say it, survival, and consequently one of them being victorious in the gene-stakes? Let Richard Dawkins answer the question.

Now, I come to the next instance, again a picture shown above), scanned from a magazine that shows a tiger cub being in a playful mood(my judgement) and the mother tiger slurping water from a pond. Anyone who has seen at least a few episodes of Wild Animals would note how, after taking down its prey (be it a large wild boar, a fighting bison or a hapless deer), the dead animal’s back is where the hunter digs its teeth; the ribs you know, the thing you order in a restaurant! To my mind’s eye this is precisely cub is seeking. It is learning its art of survival and the mother offers its own back to its offspring as the latter’s classroom! How the mother would teach the cubs to stalk their preys, I haven’t the foggiest. But, there must be some way. 

I have been to the Kaziranga National Park and did not realize that an elephant was close enough to our fortified van, so skilfully hiding among the elephant grass, to scare the driver. He knew what to do and we all fell silent and escaped. I have seen the movie Hatari ages ago not to be scared.

Darwin’s big idea is so simple and one should wonder why it needed a Darwin and his sailing to the Galapagos Islands. That is science for you. Now, we are going billions of years backwards to find out how a star started to shine and how long ago it started.

Astrophysics has its own Darwins. And, just like Darwin, these too face religious resistance.

That is a pity, isn’t it? I am not sure. Think of the resistance as something that one needs to bring clarity to one’s own theses, their own anti-theses to settle on syntheses! I am prone to look for the silver lines in the cloud.

Raghuram Ekambaram

I Travel by Cattle Class

I Travel by Cattle Class

It could be by bus, by train or by plane, I travel by what a particular politician, perhaps about a decade ago, called “Cattle Class”. In his case, it was the Economy Class in an airplane. Perhaps he had a point. Perhaps not. Dive in to find out.

The photo above shows the area in which passengers wait till Security Check has been announced. If that is how cattle wait before being driven to the abattoir in a truck, and put on a conveyor belt, well, I do not remember ever being in such a situation. Ain’t I alive?

As an aside, let me ask why the airport waiting halls have such high roofs? Is that for mere differentiation between plane and train passengers? Perhaps so. You cannot smell the sweat of others, till you are on the plane! On a railway station, the stench is all pervasive, even in the IR canteens and beyond the precincts of the station. I am coming to railway stations in just a bit.

By the way, people who enjoy the luxury of Business Class travel wait in the lounge reserved for Business Class travellers. Have you ever wondered why the Business and Economy classes are separated by a thick cloth curtain? 

It is to prevent the warmer (and possibly saltier) air from the latter sort of “leak” into the place of privilege. This is how travelling economy class becomes, if not equivalent to, at least parallel to the infamous Cattle Class. Cattle breathe and sweat their own bodily emanations,not to mention that of the others, on their way to Heaven.

The people with their backpacks or trolleys in the picture above are not anywhere crowded like they are on railway platforms of Indian Railways. The picture below (copied from a newspaper report and for no idea to profit from it). 

Were some cattle to see both the photos they would have realized how spaced out (not in the sense of being under the influence) they would have been in flying (at least as they wait), and been immensely comfortable in waiting to travel by air in “Cattle Class”, even to be on the conveyor belt in the luggage retrieval belt leading to their being cut up!

The politician who used the phrase “Cattle Class” to point out the commotion at the flight gate is right in one sense, I admit. At check-in, the passenger is given the seat number, accommodating her request−window/aisle/middle (who would choose the middle seat? I am merely accommodating all possibilities, no matter near zero probability; on the wings (for the curious, to watch the wing flaps go up and down, during take-off and landing; your humble writer many years earlier!), next to the emergency exits (concerned about her survival)−as much as possible. Then, why the rush to the boarding gates when the announcement to board is made?

Don’t you know, she is tugging along two large size strolleys, when she knows very well that though the allowance is utmost only one (of limiting dimensions), she would be allowed to take both into the cabin (the airline would offend the likely repeat offender). It is to be able to store them in the luggage space above before others, just like her, occupy the space, again with two strolleys, that she rushes to the boarding gate! Isn’t this encroachment, in the air?

The rush to the boarding gate is reminiscent of the bulls rushing in a Tom Cruise movie of about a couple of decades ago, Knight and Day!

Again, the metaphor, “Cattle Class” is justified! Politicians travelling in Business Class (at the expense of the taxpaying public) do not see any such bull runs! The bemoaning politician just saw how unjustly his privileges were being withdrawn. Tut, tut... 

I am coming towards the end of the post and weighing the right or wrong of the “Cattle Class” comment by the politician, I say that the case has not been made for either position definitively. The ayes neither have it nor not have it! This is precisely every politician’s position on any issue!

The person generically anchored this post is a true politician, after all! What did he mean by “Cattle Class”? He himself may not now!

Raghuram Ekambaram

Religion and Superstition Act against Develoment of Mental faculties

                                      Religion and Superstition Act against Development of Mental Faculties

Let the readers be warned. This is going to be a long post. It has been in the making in my mind for long and only a recent event in the skies made me venture into start writing this.When I would finish and post it? Ram jaane!

Over the last week (Sept. 1st to 7th, 2025) I scoured the newspaper daily to locate a particular news item that I did not find. This made me happy. Wasn’t that strange, looking for something, not finding it and feeling happy? I am not good at keeping secrets; then it is time for me to let the cat out of the bag!

Whenever a solar eclipse is in the offing, the local planetarium puts forth advisories about how, when and in what direction one should look at the solar disk in its phases, each phase offers a distinctly different yet truly wondrous sight. Of course, the planetarium also issues the most critical warning−which the President of the US, Mr. Donald J. Trump in his first term blithely ignored and seems to have escaped without even the proverbial slap on the wrist−is not to look at the sun without appropriate filters. Such a warning was what I was searching for.

Silly me. Did I not know that during the lunar eclipse that occurred during the intervening Sunday night-Monday morning, we are looking at the lunar disk that does not self-illuminate? No Diamond Ring effect, of course. Perhaps an innocuous red tinged lunar surface. It is only reflected light. Maybe that is why animals don’t go crazy and birds don’t do strange things (Though I heard that even cave dwelling bats are not immune to solar eclipses).

Before I get into the thesis of this post, let me offer a primer on astrological (South Indian, particularly Tamil Brahmins, shortened to TamBrahms) astronomy.

The natal charts of a South Indian and a North Indian are easily distinguishable. The one on the left is a North Indian’s and, on the right we have that of a South Indian’s.

I will concern myself here with the South Indian chart with the understanding that stupidity knows nothing of the differences between north and south!

Zooming in on the South Indian, I make a particular note of Tamil Brahmins, the very constricting subset I unfortunately belong to. TamBrahm has 12 small squares around an empty large square. Each small square is a “house”. I did know the small boxes are numbered clockwise, starting with the top left non-diagonal box aligned horizontally. While the abbreviations such as “Merc”, “Ve”, “Mar”, “Jup” and “Sat” are easy enough to be associated with the planets, and Sun and Moon are written down in full, what are “Ra” and “Ke”?

These are the dreaded “Rahu” and “Ketu”, points at which the celestial equator (Earth’s equator projected onto the celestial sphere) intersects the projection of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun onto the celestial sphere. “Rahu” and “Ketu” have no material existence.

People have asked me, in the tone the victor speaks to the bleeding and dying vanquished in a duel, if the Moon can cause tides on the earth, why can’t the planets influence the neurons in the brain. Well, I have answered it in some other post and would not repeat it here. But, I will tell you that “Rahu” and “Ketu” are not even specks in the universe; there are mere points, two in an ocean of infinite points in space! Answer the implied question in that! For the denizens of the northern sphere, the figure shows the occurrence of the Autumnal (Fall) and Spring equinoxes. You choose which one is “Rahu” and which one is “Ketu” and see if I care.

In school I was told that it was only because the axis of the Earth is tilted to the plane in which it goes around the Sun, we have seasons. I am not sure I understood it then, but now I do. And, so did those who created horoscopes!

There are 27 named stars and a TamBrahm’s fate is fixed at the time of birth (I know the names of all the twenty seven stars in the twelve Zodiac signs, but were I to try to recite them, I invariably skip one!).

Given the above, how likely is it that where a planet is marked off in the natal chart would influence a human being? If the natal star of the infant is Aldebaran, the male baby’s maternal uncle beware! Lord Krishna, you see, born under the natal star Aldebaran, killed His maternal uncle (Kansa). 

On September 7th and 8th, 2025, lunar eclipse occurred under two stars (one during the setting phase, and the other under the leaving phase) in the middle of the night, and someone close to me had one of them as her natal star. I wonder how she was affected. I would ask.

I cannot read the paragraphs above bar the first without a smug smile crossing my lips. The approximately 5% population of Tamil Nadu showed off their ignorance for everyone to see (whether anyone saw or not, I haven’t the foggiest). They prayed and prayed to all their ancestors as they do every New Moon Day that they be spared of all the ill effects, if any. That is, they were scared without even knowing why they were scared!

Also, all TamBrahms become impure in the event of an eclipse and they have to take a bath after the event. Chennai is the capital city of the state of Tamil Nadu, and it is severely water-deficient. Yet, they took an additional bath. That is how much they care about their fellowcitizens!

Now, I would split the TamBrahms into two divisions: Vaishnavites and Smartha. Vaisnavites are the uppitier lot of the two (of course, myself being a Smartha, I would think that, wouldn’t I?).

To hear someone, who I suppose is well versed in most of the Vaishnavite scriptures and also perhaps Saivite ones, say that the reason Vaishnavite (in Tamil Nadu) temples do not have a sannidhi (where the stone idols are placed on a pedestal) for the nine astral (limited to solar system) planets (actually only five planets: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn)whereas Saivite ones do (in Tamil Nadu) is that the planets are all accommodated in the feet of Lord Vishnu!

Now marry astrology and astronomy with a sprinkle of star dust and religion too. “Rahu” must be in the left feet of Lord Vishnu and “Ketu”, on the right; symmetric about the axis of symmetry (vertical)!  

Let us take a more detailed look. What are the nine items (yes, items they are, to me)? Sun, Moon, the five planets listed above and, get this, the two points of intersection of the apparent path of the Sun in the sky and the celestial equator. These are the two points without which no horoscope can be charted. Absolutely.

If you have any doubts, ask your family astrologer. These are the all powerful “Rahu” and “Ketu” that we have visited many times so far! Only when the Sun, the earth, the moon and the two points Rahu and Ketu align in the sky we get eclipses. In your horoscope, indeed anyone’s horoscope, “Rahu” and “Ketu” have to be precisely at 180o to each other. This is inviolable.

Even given that these points in space have an effect on any individual, science tells that they would be pulling in opposite directions at the same time! No net effect! So, why all these scare tactics?

Oh, now I understand. Religion, which parallels astrology in one crucial aspect, too is a highly developed, esoteric knowledge the sole purpose of which is to scare people to the benefit of the priestly class. What does a TamBrahm do, besides propitiating one’s ancestors under the guidance of the family priest on the day after the eclipse? Propitiate the priest. And, that being not enough, go to temple and offer more to the temple priests. 

Propitiation all round!  Leave your mental acuities at the gate.

Raghuram Ekambaram

Chastisement, Upgradation, Retrofitment...

                                                                     Chastisement, Upgradation, Retrofitment...

A peculiar propensity of writers in newspaper or magazines is to avoid using gerunds.Detesting gerunds−check that, detestation of gerunds−appears to be their birthright. Why is it so? I haven’t the foggiest.

“The retrofitment of the 787s is expected to conclude by 2027,” is a part of the sentence in a newspaper article I read recently. It is an article about AIR INDIA’s woes, pertaining particularly to its large fleet of Boeing aircrafts. The other words in the heading are also words I found in English language newspaper or magazine articles, and I am not lying.

My MS Word fits a red squiggly line underneath the word “retrofitment”, and that is as well.

I did not expect such an aversion to gerunds, present participles taking on the role of a noun.OK, language mavens might nitpick on my understanding of gerunds. In my defence, this is how I was taught.

Here, to be honest, I must admit I did read, “[C]reating guidelines”, “[D]efining global benchmarks”, “...ensuring diverse traditions ... can coexist” in another article about WHO,along with India, drafting global benchmarks on Yoga. My shout-out goes to Bindu Shajan Perappadan who appears in the by-line of this article. Yes, there are some clear thinking people too among newspaper writers!

Perappadan, had she wished, could have written, “[Creation] of guidelines”, “[D]efinition of global benchmarks”, and last but not least, “...ensurance/ensurement... can coexist.” The last item is merely to show the absurdity of this trend of/obsession with avoiding gerunds, or more appropriately but absurdly, gerund avoidance! But she did not. Good for the readers.

Just for fun. Had the assignment been, “Designing the Tower for Diving Competition in Dr. Shyama Prasad Mukherjee Swimming Pool Complex”, and someone pathologically opposed to the use of –ing altered it to, “Designment of the Tower for Divement Competition in Dr. Shyama Prasad Mukherjee Swimmtion Pool Complex”! Chew the cud on that!

When I was working in an engineering consultancy company, I had written/compiled a number of proposals for “Upgradation” (typically widening) of a two-lane road to a four-lane road (this was the time of Mr. Atal Bihari Vajpayee in 7, Race Course Road who promotedthe East-West and the North-South Corridors; I thank him from the bottom of my heart as he helped me feed my family!). But, it was also the time of “Retrofitting” as the projects involved retrofitting and upgrading as much as possible the then existing national highways, and not, “Retrofitment”. By the way, for those who are not sure what retrofitting is, I offer the following: You take what exists and make it fit to suit the demands not merely of today but setting the horizon a few decades further into the future. Retrofitting, if properly done is a process of building-in effectiveness that makes the past blend seamlessly into the future. Economy is achieved through thinking into the future.

The above paragraph is an excusable diversion from the topic of this rant. Coming back, a gerund untangles a knotted sentence. Gerund lets one travel towards common sense. Avoiding it is a descending stairway to linguistic hell, no halfway landing.

Raghuram Ekambaram