WRONG PENALTIES AND OTHER FOOTBALL WRONGS

On reading my piece on missed penalties, my friend Professor Mrityunjoy Chakravaorti suggested that I write a similar piece on wrongly awarded penalties that significantly changed the course of the matches concerned. I lack the resources to do some meaningful research on the subject and have not been able to access the wealth of material on the subject that surely exists. So I thought of writing a general note on various football wrongs of significance alleged to have been committed by referees.

The problem is that one can never be sure whether a referee’s wrong decision was a genuine error or was deliberate, because to arrive at a conclusion, one has to figure out the intention of the referee; the stated intention (by the referee himself) or the attributed (by everyone else) intention will simply not do.  But it is well-known that one can at best have a hypothesis about another’s intention, and this is one major source of conspiracy theories. This conspiracy approach to things is important because, whether it leads to the truth or not, it certainly leads to interesting stories. Consider Bjorn Kuiper’s awarding a penalty (the second penalty) to Barcelona when they were playing their Champions League second leg group match against AC Milan last year at Camp Nou stadium for Nesta’s shirt-pulling of Barca’s Sergio in the penalty area – just “shirt-pulling” only on hind sight, and probably after watching those couple of seconds’ replay – at least for most spectators. But let us grant that it was just shirt-pulling. Now pulling the opponent’s shirt is not a legitimate act in a football match. And if the referee saw it as part of an act of stopping the player from a position of advantage in which Sergio was placed and pointed to the spot, was it because he felt pressured to do so? Now if one says no (he could say the referee absolutely right, a bit too harsh perhaps) there is no place for stories. But if one says, he was indeed acting under someone’s instruction, then one opens up the possibilities for stories and more stories: who was that someone, what were his intentions, how exactly the deal was settled, and it goes on. The story would grow as one would start from where the other had left. When Guardiola said two clear penalties were not awarded in their favour in the first leg of the match at San Siro, but he would not make an issue of such things, he was closing the possibilities for stories. On the other hand, there is Mourinho, the quintessential conspiracy theorist of contemporary football, who creates such fertile conditions for story making. From this point of view, Guardiola’s approach is not interesting, Mourinho’s is. “Truth”, if it can really be known, closes the possibilities for stories; conspiracy approach opens up the possibilities. Stories are fascinating to listen to, and since intentions can never be known and are always attributed, we can say that we live by stories and beliefs rather than the truth.

Thus, of the numerous bad decisions, many have no doubt that Maradona’s hand goal against England in World Cup 1984, Henry’s hand goal against Algeria in the qualifiers on World Cup 2006, and Lampard’s disallowed goal in England’s match against Germany in 2010 World Cup, for instance, were all due to referee’s errors and not manipulations. It is difficult to find an example of a wrong decision by a referee which is unquestionably mischievous and partisan at the highest level of football. And for most of the rest, one could keep arguing: Chelsea’s goals against Wigan in the 2011-12 Premier League, both scored from offside positions, Manchester United’s penalty against QPR in the same tournament when Young, already in an offside position was brought down, the sending off of van Persie in the 2010 semi-final match of Arsenal against Barcelona, Ronaldinho’s dismissal in Brazil’s match against England in the 2002 World Cup, among others; a list, which in fact is long. Many great teams have benefited from bad decisions by referees, but this is not the subject of much talk. Quite naturally, one would like to keep quiet about the undue benefits one has received, and scream about one’s victimhood.

As the beneficiary of wrong referee decisions, Mourinho has singled out Barcelona. We do not have comparative data, but for the sake of argument, we accept his assertion. We also do not have the resources to study whether the kinds of conspiracies that the detractors hint at have substance (which teams Platini wanted to play in a Champions League final, which he did not make public, which referee met which manager during the half-time break, and what transpired between them, etc.). So we choose to explore a different approach to answer this question.

The late Brazilian legend, Socrates, is said to have told some reporters after one of Brazil’s matches in the group stage during the 1986 World Cup that referee decisions would always favour Brazil because World Cup is about money and (power) and Brazil brings people to the stands. He earned FIFA’s displeasure, and was asked not to speak to the press during the Finals again. But he had spoken enough. More recently, when asked why Guardiola did not rest Messi, he said something similar: people pay money to see him play and he too was always enthusiastic to step on the field. One can be sure the same could be said about other great players as well. Football is no more a recreation, and has become the spectator event par excellence, and a huge commercial enterprise, as Eduardo Galeano has observed, so the interest of stands (and now the television viewers) can simply not be ignored.

People enjoy watching the beautiful game played the beautiful way: open, attacking, attractive play, dazzling dribbling, and successful and creative passes, swift change of positions of players in aesthetic moves, imaginative control of the midfield, variation in attacks, beautiful field goals scored from difficult positions, among others. Quite a few teams traditionally play the game beautifully: at the international level, Brazil, Portugal, Holland, Spain and even Argentina, and at the club level, Barcelona, Real Madrid, Manchester United and Arsenal, to name a few. Winning is important, very important, but winning in style is far more so. Coming after twenty four years of their third, Brazil’s fourth World Cup, which they won on penalties, is not memorable; their fifth is, because it was won with style and authority. May be in some football cultures winning at the cost of grace and elegance is acceptable, but fortunately in many it still is not. All said, beauty triumphs in the end: after that match was over, the talk was about Maradona’s mesmerizing second goal against England, not the disgraceful first one - the one with which he, for all practical purposes, had already won the match!      

ON CAPITAL PUNISHMENT

Albert Camus presented the most persuasive arguments against capital punishment in his remarkable easy “Reflections on Guillotine” decades ago: it fails as a deterrent for murder, it is cynical and cruel, and it dehumanizes not only those directly involved in the execution but also the society too. There have arisen some new situations which provide additional, new arguments against the same. This note draws attention to some of these. Incidentally, by now a number of countries have abolished capital punishment and in some of the countries, where it exists, care is taken so that it is awarded in the “rarest of rare” cases.

One might view it with disbelief, but it has begun to be noted that awarding capital punishment has become a costly affair for the State. Sometimes (in fact, it is fast becoming the norm in many democracies) it takes about two decades or more for the judiciary and the administrative processes to be completed for the execution to take place. Considering the nature of the punishment, the system cannot be pressured to take quick decisions at any stage. The total expenditure (legal, administrative, etc.) on the trial of the convicts charged with various crimes punishable by death is not negligible. This is wasteful expenditure and with capital punishment abolished, this money could be used for improving the living condition of the inmates of a prison.

Some careful research on capital punishment in America has shown that the poor and the deprived tend to be awarded this punishment more often than the rich and the privileged. Sometimes because of sloppy investigation, the wrong person gets executed, and sometimes the condemned person undergoes a painful death because of the unprofessional or careless administration of the lethal injections. At times the execution becomes a cruel affair on account of a complex of factors, not merely the lack of due sensitivity of the prison staff. For instance, the condemned man, Troy Davis, was made to wait, strapped to the gurney, for about three hours for his execution, as the judges were deliberating on his fate, and his family anxiously waiting outside the prison for their verdict.  Davis’s situation is more poignant in view of the fact that his execution had been halted twice already. It is difficult to believe that such painful situations are specific to the US; it is just that some academics and journalists there have done careful research on the subject and published their findings, and the press has given the same adequate coverage.

What now follows is something Camus probably had not even thought of: because of political considerations (external or internal pressure, for example, although the former does not often yield the desired results), sometimes it is difficult to implement capital punishment. Both the party in power and the opposition have opposed the execution of the killers of Rajiv Gandhi. Similarly many groups in Punjab including the ruling party are not in favour of the execution of Balwant Singh Rajona, who had killed a former Chief Minister of that state. Influential political parties in Kashmir have reportedly advised the Central Government against the execution of Afzal Guru connected with the 2001 Parliament attack.  Many of them have spent a number of years in prison; Rajiv Gandhi killers have been in jail close to two decades. Some might consider it unfair to both the convicted and the legal system if the ones condemned to death are executed after being in prison for longer than the effective duration of life imprisonment in India, which is normally about fourteen years; to them it would amount to giving them two punishments which are really alternatives to each other. Incidentally, the social groups or the political parties who have opposed the execution of the persons named above are not against capital punishment as such; they are believed to be concerned about the possible political fallout of the executions. In a democratic country it is quite understandable; social and political systems do not work in vacuum – anywhere, needless to add.

However, on account of the above, there is the apprehension that those who do not have the support of some influential pressure group: social, religious or political – the poor and the marginalized – become vulnerable. The Supreme Court of India is aware of it and seems to have expressed concern. But ultimately to execute or not to execute the condemned man has got to be, willy-nilly, an executive decision. Now, in view of all the above, the only reasonable decision one would arrive at is the following: abolish capital punishment.

I tend to believe that in the contemporary milieu, many in our country would not really be inflexible with regard to the abolition of capital punishment. There is a view that death penalty must be restricted to crimes such as terrorism. But “terrorism” would always be difficult to define, especially for the intended purpose, and then universalistic definitions would always be questioned, and rightly so. And political interventions will most likely be the norm rather than the exception in the case of a terrorist, except when he is a cross border terrorist. But would it be morally justifiable that a country would have the provision of capital punishment only for the foreigner?

The real question is of an adequate substitute for death penalty, a matter that is extremely complex and sensitive and that needs a separate discussion. Just a word or two here: not many consider a fourteen year prison term to be an adequate substitute. “Life imprisonment must be life imprisonment” is an alternative that some consider viable. Similarly, there seems to be a growing feeling that a term of imprisonment need not be restricted to twenty years; it is not, for example, in US. At the same time, prison terms for eighty years or fifty years are not understandable, especially when awarded to an old man. Recently Charles Taylor, former Liberian dictator, sixty four years old, was awarded a jail term of fifty years by an International court for war crimes. All said, doesn’t it seem cruel to have a lifer withering away to death within the prison walls?

ON SOME MISSED PENALTIES

Here I wish to draw attention to just seven of them. Messi missed a penalty in Barca’s semi-final match against Chelsea in the 2011-12 edition of the Champions League, Ronaldo and Kaka of Real Madrid missed their penalties against Bayern Munich during the penalty shootout in the other semi-final, and Robben of Bayern Munich missed a penalty in the first half of extra time in the final match of the same tournament against Chelsea. Barca, Real Madrid and Bayern Munich all lost those crucial matches. These players who broke their supporters’ hearts are the regular penalty takers of their respective teams. They failed when it mattered most. And not to forget that Kaka (2007), Ronaldo (2008) and Messi (2009 – 11) have all been winners of the World Player of the Year award. In the 2007-8 edition of the same tournament, Lampard, again the regular penalty-taker of his team, Chelsea, lost his penalty in the shoot out in the final match, and Chelsea lost to Manchester United.

FIFA World Cup Finals is a far more popular and spectacular event. The quality of football may in general be a shade less exciting than in the Champions League, but here teams represent countries, and the dreams of their countrymen. People forget their daily grind and their miseries and celebrate their team’s success, and plunge into collective grief if it fails. Inspired by a sense of nationalism players in the field and the spectators in the stadium and television viewers and people at home forget their club loyalties for a while. Playing for Portugal, and one may think with his career, Cristiano Ronaldo, in the 2006 World Cup, had a role in the red-carding of his Manchester United club mate Rooney, who was playing for England. And it was a delight to see the people of Spain rising above their fierce club loyalties and celebrating their team’s winning the World Cup in 2010 for the first time. Hardly does any sporting event arouse such strong emotions as does World Cup finals.

Missing a penalty here can be heartbreaking. Brazilian Zico, who, it was said, had scored about 200 goals from penalties by then, failed to score from the spot in his team’s quarter final match against France in the second half. The match went into penalty shoot out. Zico scored, but it did not redeem him since he was seen as responsible for bringing the match to the shootout stage. On the other hand, Socrates failed to score in the shoot out but it did not matter to anyone, as people, it seems, generally to fail to see the penalty shoot out as a condensed version of a match, which it indeed is. Incidentally, what the French captain did when Zico missed the penalty was tender and graceful and brought repute to the game - Platini gave a comforting touch to Zico. One rarely sees such grace on the field.

Roberto Baggio made a huge contribution in Italy’s being in the final in the 1994 World Cup. The match was rather uninteresting, and Brazil was clearly the better team. The match ended goalless and went into penalty shoot out. Baggio’s took the last penalty and shot over the bar and Brazil won the World Cup after twenty four long years.

Baggio, Messi and Ronaldo had contributed greatly to their teams’ going that far in the relevant tournaments. And each had the mortification to see his effort go waste as he failed to score from the spot when it mattered most. After their loss to Bayern Munich, Casilas, the goal keeper-captain of Real Madrid, consoled his team, saying “Penalties are all a lottery.”

Scoring a penalty goal and stopping a penalty kick call for high level skills, practice, mind game tactics and imagination, at least at the highest level of football.   But often a penalty goal is less valued than a “pure goal”, a field goal. If a player scores a creditable number of goals in a tournament, both the connoisseur and the debunker ask the same question as to how many of those goals are from the spot - it is like asking, in the case of a cricketer who has scored, say, twelve thousand runs in Test cricket, how many of these have been scored against the minnows. One gets no credit for scoring from the penalty spot, and gets all the discredit for failure to score. Missing a penalty is news, hitting the net from the spot is not. As for the goal keeper, he is hardly ever blamed if the ball goes in, but his heroic effort in stopping the ball is almost always attributed to his being lucky, so he gets at most a faint word of praise. Does anyone remember Bats who stopped Zico’s shot?  Robben will be remembered for his failure but Cech will be forgotten although he was the cause of it. And to think as a boy Camus played football as the goalkeeper. Thanks to his grandmother!

ON FOOD TALK

About sixty years ago, in my boyhood days I used to read the food related lines in the almanac, which I liked reading, and which, I suspect, were probably the only part of an entry about a day in the almanac that I understood. Born into a family in which the elders were believers in soft astrology and were amateur practitioners of it, I was familiar with the almanac at from early age. These lines about food were always in the nature of restrictions and they were never about cooked food or non-indigenous fruits and vegetables: adya alaabu bhakshaana nishedha (today, eating alaabu, i.e., bottle gourd, is prohibited), adya kusmaanda bhakshana nishedha (today, eating pumkin is prohibited), etc. I used to find the words very funny. Bottle gourd and pumpkin – of any variety – popularly known as laau and kakhaaru were looked upon as the ordinary among the ordinary vegetables, and it was hilarious the way these were distanced by being referred to in the text in Sanskritized terms in Sanskritized sentences. Incidentally these days in the almanac these are referred to in their popular names and the sentences are in colloquial Odia. The almanac never mentioned any particular vegetable or fruit to be consumed on some particular day, such as the following: adya alaabu bhakshana vidheya (today, eating bottle gourd is recommended). This is interesting; generally speaking, the prohibition strategy is the most economical form of stating the characteristics of a good life. “Economical”, because otherwise one ends up giving, for all practical purposes, an endless list!

In brata kathaas too food is a part of the discourse on moral life. A brata kathaa is a tale that depicts the glory of a god or a goddess, more often a goddess, and more often a local god or goddess. Part of it deals with how to worship the goddess, what benefits come to one who worships her in the proper way and what sufferings await one who offends her by not worshipping her duly. And built into all these are statements about how to lead a moral life. These are a series of prohibitions, many of these women-centric, concerning many domains of day-to-day living, including that of food. A brata kathaaa shares one characteristic with a proverb, which is that it is really concerned more with a comfortable life in this world than progress in the other world.

In Lakshmi Purana (which is indeed a brata kathaa and not a purana), an immensely popular tale throughout Odisha, the following are among the prohibitions listed with respect to food. On a Thursday which is dedicated to goddesss Lakshmi, a woman must not eat curd rice at night, non-vegetarian food, remains of the food from someone’s plate, roasted food, burnt food and non-vegetarian food cooked with bottle gourd. This last one may constitute a bit of careless writing, but popular tales are not free from this blemish. On Thursdays, amaabasyaas and sankraantis, one must not eat at night. There are other food-related restrictions pertaining to the manner of cooking, the mode of eating, etc. For instance, a woman must not fry uncooked rice grains on Thursdays.

Sometimes Puranas and often brata kathaas describe good meals – in fact, define what a good meal is, and a good meal is always a sumptuous meal. What is the point of a good dish if three quarters of the dish is empty? – the meal that goddess Parvati cooked for Lord Shiva or the meal that the guests in Draupadi’s wedding were served, for example. Both these occur in the fifteenth century Odia poet, Sarala Dasa’s Mahabharata. Another example is the meal that goddess Lakshmi cooked for her consort Jagannatha and her elder brother-in-law, Balabhadra in Balarama Dasa’s Lakshmi Purana, a sixteenth century composition. In each case, the items are many: different types of rice preparations, pancakes, vegetable preparations, sweets made of milk, such as khirs and the like. Each has a name. Incidentally, Lakshmi’s meal has a distinct identity from the others’, if not in terms of the dishes, in the manner of her serving them. At the end, she serves poda pithaa, a salted pancake roasted in embers.

Now, what explains this preoccupation with food in these cultural texts? There are well known, traditional explanations for the food-oriented prohibitions in our culture. Broadly speaking, our tradition postulated a connection between food and attitudes, inclinations and mental states; tamasik food was believed to create a negative attitude, satwik food, a positive mindset - this is just one aspect of the impact of food on personality, other aspects involving quantity of intake, etc. need not detain us here. So certain foods which were believed to arouse inappropriate inclinations and desires were forbidden on auspicious days, although it is entirely unclear to us today how bottle gourds, brinjals and pumpkins could matter in the relevant respect.

Such elaborate descriptions of food served in the weddings and other occasions, both festive and auspicious, might have a different explanation. My own understanding is as follows: a food loving people wanted to talk about food. Smelling food is half-eating it, as the saying in Sanskritized Odia goes: aaghraana ardha bhojana. In the same way, talking about a dish is like relishing that dish. It is commonplace to hear utterances like maacha bhajaa kathaa sunile taa paatiru laala gade (if he just hears about fish fry, his mouth salivates”). It suggests the power of talk. The food narratives could also be, partly at least, an expression of longing for some grand dishes that one almost never gets to eat at home or at others’ places even on festive occasions. One indulges in the pleasures of the palate by talking (or even writing) about the dishes of one’s desire.

IITs IN NEWS AGAIN

Recently Mr. N.R.Narayana Murthy is reported to have said that the IITs have "lost their sheen” and are no more the Institutes they were in the sixties and the seventies. Talking about the PhD students in the Electrical Engineering department of IIT Kanpur, he said that their number has gone down rather drastically in the last two or three decades. China produces a much larger number of PhD’s in Computer Science than India does in a year, he said. I have not seen responses to his views in either the print or the electronic media. Incidentally, some members of the faculty of IIT Kanpur do not agree with his observation about the number of PhD students in the Electrical Engineering department some two or three decades ago and now, but it is essentially a minor matter in view of the total context of Narayana Murthy’s observations. The contrast with China in terms of qualified manpower that India has is glaring indeed.

However it is unclear how IITs have lost their sheen. Do students in India prefer other institutes of technology for their undergraduate education? How many who qualify for admission to the IITs go or even prefer to go abroad for their undergraduate education? Don’t the post-graduate students of engineering in our country choose IITs as their first preference, in case they decide to do their post-graduation in India? Are the IIT students doing their post-graduation abroad performing unsatisfactorily there in comparison to students of other nationalities? In the absence of reliable data one can have only intuitive answers to these. What one is relatively sure of is that in terms of research IITs do not figure among the top hundred or even two hundred institutions in the world. However, I do not know where they figure in a list of the institutes or universities of technology alone. As for Bhatnagar (setting aside the familiar scepticism of the relevant academic community about such recognition for the present) and similar awards, more came to the IIT faculty some twenty five or thirty years ago than today, but there are more research institutes now with better research facilities than the IITs have than was the case three decades ago. And then the IITs have never been pure research institutes; they were not intended to be. In any case, the very fact that going abroad, especially to US, for PhD has, always been the preferred choice of the IIT students (there are exceptions, though), shows that the IITs do not have a global reputation as centres of doctoral and post-doctoral research. But is research the “sheen” Narayana Murthy had in mind? Does he believe that the IITs were once the world class research institutes which they are not today?

Educational institutions, like other institutions, flourish and wane, and if nothing is done to arrest the decline, they effectively die - some faster than others. Some might appear to be flourishing, in which case, it might take time for the outsiders to know that they are actually on the decline. It is possible that those on the downward path might include some that one has valued, has cared for and has been committed to. One’s expression of concern is entirely justifiable and understandable.

Bringing one’s concerns to the people at large and making financial contributions to the institute are important, but there is more to do. One has to carefully study the situation and arrive at a sound explanation for the unsatisfactory performance of the relevant institutions - in the present case, the IITs, and place the same in the public domain. In the eighties the duration of the academic programmes including the research programmes was reduced by the government. In those IITs where research programmes had a course work component, like IIT Kanpur, the number of courses the post-graduate students had to do was reduced. Did the reduction of the duration of the research programmes affect the quality of the research output? More recently the student intake at the undergraduate level was considerably increased in order to implement a social justice initiative of the government. But there was the problem of the paucity of faculty. The undergraduate work load of the faculty went up considerably. Did the research programmes suffer as a consequence? How good are the M.Tech programmes at the institutes that work as feeders to the IITs’ doctoral research programmes? Apart from these, why don’t the IIT undergraduates return to do research in appreciable numbers? Many M.Tech students also do not seem to return to the IITs for their PhD. They go for jobs. What is the situation in China in this respect? The Chinese too go abroad for research. But then surely there are a number of students who come to do their doctoral research in Chinese universities. Narayana Murthy mentioned the students of Computer Science. Where do the IIT B.Techs in Computer Science go? Not all, not even the majority of them go abroad for their PhD. Where do the M.Techs of NIITs go? Does a sizable number of all such potential doctoral researchers go for corporate jobs ,for Management studies or non-technical jobs like IAS? How often does it happen in the comparable elsewhere that trained technical manpower is depleted because they migrate to different sectors? In India, it appears that research is not the first option of the Computer Science students. Incidentally, the situation is not very different in other areas of engineering as well.

It is understandable that China enters into this discourse. But it can help if we can have some authentic knowledge of the possible reasons of China’s success. One must try to have an understanding of both the decline and the success stories of the bench mark institutions. It is only then that useful steps can be taken to redeem those on the downward path. From successful, serious-minded, honest intellectuals, who think for the country, one expects a much richer response than the ones under reference, especially when the persons concerned are among the distinguished alumni of their respective institutes.

IN THESE TIMES OF FIGHT AGAINST CORRUPTION

It may be worthwhile to consider the significance of some of our proverbs and words which have proverbial status. The reason is that proverbs often express significant social attitudes. There is a proverb in Odia (earlier spelling, “Oriya”) which indirectly relates to corruption: caakiri kariba pulisi, maacha khaaiba ilisi a rather literal and rough translation of which is the following: join the police service; eat ilisi (also called hilsa) fish. It means the best service to join is the police service and the best fish to eat is the hilsa fish. ‘Service” here is government service; at the time of the “origin” of this proverb a government job was the best. The proverb is not really about the hilsa fish; it is about what makes a job attractive – an attractive job is the one in which one always has the opportunity to make a little extra money. If there is no upuri (extra money), it is not an attractive job. From the point of view of this proverb, a job that involves frequent tours is better than the one which has no provision for tours because one could always make a little money from one’s travelling allowances – there is nothing terribly wrong if one travels in the sleeper class and charges first class fare. One must not get caught: nei aani thoi jaanile cori bidyaa bhala – if one can manage things, a bit of stealing is good. One is considered a bit dull if one can’t manage a little extra money. More than forty five years ago, when I got my first job, perfectly well meaning and affectionate elderly people in my village asked me whether my job had upuri. When I said I had a teaching job at a college, they almost consoled me saying I could offer tuition and earn something. There are equivalents of upuri in Odia: di paisaa (two-pice) and antaa gunjaa (money tied at the waist in the dhoti one is wearing), to name two. These occur in informal speech and writing and are not negative terms; these are neutral, even slightly positive in certain contexts of use. Of course no proverb or wise saying openly advocates bribery, but proverbs are not part of niti shastras; they only mirror social realities. Now upuri which legitimizes bribery is not about amassing millions but about just a little to make the day-to-day life of oneself and one’s family a little comfortable. The word can be qualified by bhala (good) - bhala upuri - but it is still not about millions and crores; it is about a few hundreds. Collecting big money is theft, a crime. The term upuri is self-oriented, in the sense that there is nothing like upuri for one’s institution or political party or business.

The “pulis” proverb is less than two hundred years old, but the “cori vidya” one is much older. In fact, there are some folktales that embody this latter idea. Now it is common knowledge that proverbs express the accumulated experience of a linguistic community and that they are about day-to-day life, telling us about how to live a trouble free life, not how to live a virtuous life. In fact one who tries to help others at the cost of self is looked down upon in the world of proverbs as a simpleton. For example, consider this one: aapanaa kapadaa paraku dei, siba paleile langalaa hoi (giving away his own clothes to the other, Lord Shiva went away naked). Here Lord Shiva’s generosity is not celebrated, his naivety is frowned upon. One who lives a virtuous life and suffers privations or discomfort in the process is not taken seriously and is generally called a bicaraa (poor fellow). Cleverness is admired. The linguist Aditi Ghosh assures me that Odia is not the only Indian language which has such words, proverbs or wise sayings that in a way endorse a pragmatic attitude towards life and a bit of dishonesty as a consequence.

This attitude of ignoring, in fact condoning, a bit of bribery may be the primary reason for the rampant corruption at the grass root level that we notice in our society. A decent and well-intentioned friend of mine once described bribing as service charge for getting work done and with that euphemism legitimized bribing. Some years ago, the bearer of the income tax refunds document sometimes demanded a tip for doing his job and got paid too. One cursed the fellow but parted with a little money, consoling oneself that one had the evidence, delivered at the door step, that the tax had been paid. The telephone workers often ask for and are given a tip at the time of the installation of the landline phone at one’s residence. All these are in the spirit of the expressions mentioned above. It is this kind of societal corruption that is difficult to fight. Therefore there seems to be a point in legitimizing bribing, at least of a certain sort, namely, upuri.

The only problem is that a bribery-oriented society is very unfair to its poor. They do not have anything to offer as bribe, and as a result get excluded from everything: medical facilities, educational opportunities, access to basic amenities for a dignified living, etc. It is for their sake that the fight against corruption must be directed not just against money stored in some foreign banks, but also against this upuri-culture.

ENGLISH IN INDIA

The story of English in India is interesting. It is the only foreign language against the continuance of which there have been agitations from time to time in post-independence India, till at least the nineteen nineties. Yet its continuance has never really been threatened in the least. In fact, ways have been found to explain and justify, although only indirectly, its place in India. In Nehru’s words, it is a language “of importance to India”. It is the Associate Official language of the Indian State. Because it was not an Indian language, it was not included in the Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution but was not excluded from the Sahitya Akademi list of languages. In 1958, Central Institute of English (CIE) was set up – interestingly, Central Institute of Hindi and Central Institute of Indian Languages were set up in 1961 and 1969 respectively - to improve the quality of the teaching of English in India. Pandit Nehru is said to have specified even the model to be promoted at CIE, and by implication, in the country: British English. In the early sixties, English was accorded the status of a “library language” in India. Probably because linking English with education directly was to be avoided in public discourse on the subject, this rather curious phrase was coined and thereby a terminological contribution to educational linguistics made by the UGC, although this sub-discipline of linguistics does not seem to have been thankful for it. Among the academicians, whereas some called English the language of opportunity in India, some others called it the language of the elite in the country. In fact, most of them were indeed of the elite class, a fact they preferred to forget in their public utterances. By the nineties, such discourses on the status of English in India had become more or less a thing of the past. In the meantime, the so-called English medium schools had come up like mushrooms, to use a really stale, but apt metaphor, in the by-lanes of the cities, and in small towns, where more often than not, bad English was taught.

There are some interesting contradictions concerning English. The most popular one is that most of those who opposed English sent their children to the English medium schools. Then many of our scholars who talk most loudly and write with much conviction and a good deal of jargon about the decolonization of our attitudes and modes of thinking use English, not an Indian language, to articulate this idea. For the modernization of the Indian languages, resources of Sanskrit and of the Indian languages themselves are to be used, according to a directive of the Constitution of India. The implicit message here is to avoid English for the purpose. But in reality, both the lexical repertoire and the forms and the styles of discourse of our languages have been enriched through interaction with English, which brings out the hollowness of the argument that English has adversely affected the growth of our languages. The Constitutional directive has been generally followed in the preparation of the glossaries of technical terms, but these glossaries have largely remained confined to the libraries. Despite a rather apologetic attitude towards English by the government, the language education policy of the Union Government has made Indians multilingual, one of the languages of their multilingualism being English. Today the English-knowing population in India is said to be quite large, their number exceeded by only the Hindi-knowing population. Thus English has emerged as one of the two link languages in urban India. One of the familiar arguments against English has been that it is the language of exploitation; now the deprived and the marginalized population of our country are demanding that they be taught English, the language that has been effectively denied to them by the hypocrisy of the privileged population, who, they say, have earned their privilege because of their knowledge of this language.

Now with this has effectively ended the rhetoric about English being the colonizer’s language. The generation of the nineties, who read from their text books about India being under the British rule for about two hundred years seems to have noted that this so-called foreign language had become probably the most important language of opportunity for the Indians. Globalization might have contributed to this understanding but is certainly is not its main cause.

In India English has been Indianized as the Indian languages have been Englishized. Our pronunciation of English is pretty Indianized. A bit of the syntax is Indianized too. We use expressions like “where are you coming from”, “I am having three houses in this very city”, unaware that these are Indianisms. We don’t care, even when told that these are Indianisms. Many say, if these are un-English or are errors, they are so only in our English teacher’s English. Four O’clock is not evening for us, it is “afternoon”. Two A.M. is not wee hours in the morning for us, it is “night”. The school name is the “good name” for us. But the ultimate Indianization of English is its transformation into an icon, a goddess, for whom a temple has been built in Uttar Pradesh.