What the British say and what they actually mean

India on stage and in-yer-face

Yasmin Alibhai Brown in The Independent

In 2007, I went to the Royal Court to see Free Outgoing, a play by Anupama Chandrasekhar, from Chennai. It was directed by the then rising star, Indhu Rubasingham, who has recently replaced Nicolas Kent as artistic director of London's Tricycle theatre.

The central role of a distraught mother was played flawlessly by Lolita Chakrabarti, whose own first play, Red Velvet, is getting rave reviews at the Tricycle. Chandrasekhar sparkled in the constellation of Royal Court emerging playwrights and hers was the first contemporary Indian drama to be staged at a non-fringe venue in Britain. Five years earlier, she had been on the Court's International Residency programme and there she learnt to hone her work, raise her game. And how.

The play's subject was taboo – sex between unmarried, Indian teenagers and the revenge of society, its hypocrisies and repressive customs that push against modernity even in hubs of new technology. Deepa, a "good" girl and bright pupil, has sex with a schoolboy. He records the juicy moments on his mobile and the clips circulate. She, her widowed mum and brother are horribly ostracised. The audience, mostly white that day, seemed discombobulated, I thought. A comprehensive school teacher asked me if the sex was "realistic or believable". She sounded almost as disapproving as the cruel keepers of virtue on stage and miffed that India was not conserving its old self for the Occident to romanticise and to vacation in. In contrast, I and my Asian friends felt the opposite: Indian drama was finally getting away from Bollywood clichés and religious masques, speaking truths, repudiating conformity. Chandrasekhar's works are not generally staged in India, though some do sneak into small, rebellious venues. Other young talent is similarly thwarted by censoriousness, the lack of resources and spaces for inventive and daring work.

This week at the Royal Court five more such writers will have their plays performed as rehearsed readings. I saw them all as full productions in Mumbai in January at the Writers' Bloc Festival of new writing from all over the country. Some were edgy and tragic, others sharp and funny, all profoundly affecting. 

Artistically brilliant, urgent, energetic, authentic and eloquent, they touched nerves in the body of their nation, made it twitch. They were among the most powerful examples of modern theatre I have ever seen.

The Royal Court collaborated with Rage, a Mumbai theatre company, to create this festival. Rage was set up in 1993, by Shernaz Patel, Rajit Kapur who are both esteemed actors, and writer Rahul da Cunha. The multitalented ensemble commissions, directs, produces and constantly stretches the parameters of the possible.

Da Cunha explained why and how it all started. Being in Mumbai, a city that "progresses and regresses at the same time" and in a nation "going forwards and backwards and still holding together and to its democracy" is what kicked the Rage trio into action:

"We were driven, restless, felt it was time for modern India to find its voice, its own stories and put them on stage. We didn't have our own English-language theatre except, of course, for Shakespeare, Pinter, Osborne and so on. We started Indianizing the great Western plays, but what we really wanted, and young urban audiences were hungry for, were Indian dramas in English. In a crazy, haphazard way we thought, we knew, the time had come for that to happen. Some people thought drama in English would be elitist. We didn't – what we wrote and directed would have to be in the English Indians actually speak, their intonation, expressions and articulations."

Just as their ideas were shaping up, the Royal Court's artistic director Dominic Cooke and associate director Elyse Dodgson, turned up in Mumbai for a night after conducting a workshop in Bangalore. Call it karma. Da Cuhna, grabbed them, introduced himself and Rage and using his immense persuasive powers got them to promise workshops in Mumbai. They did, and a partnership was forged, with valued help from the British Council. Dodgson, other Royal court nurturers and Phyllida Lloyd went over and released more pent-up creativity than they could ever have imagined. The incipient dramatists were given tools, taught essential skills. At the first Writers' Bloc festival in 2004, in Da Cunha's view, "The level was pretty stunning. Young people saw the results and were totally engaged." Chandrasekhar's disturbing festival play about an Indian talk-show hostess who has acid thrown at her proved that she was both brave and singularly gifted.

Rage's founders carried on making their own remarkable work too. One gripping play I saw in 2010 was Pune Highway, written by Da Cunha and with Kapur in the lead. It was a pacy buddy thriller exposing India's furious and thoughtless globalisation and its ethically vacant middle class, again cutting edge and unsettling for Indians who prefer PR or patriotic art.

India's theatre tradition began in classical times when religious stories were enacted in Sanskrit or as mimes in villages and communities. Gods, improbable heroes and myths were loved by high and low and kept them god-fearing. They are still performed during festivals and at auspicious times. A parallel tradition was drama in local and regional Indian languages. The works, whether classic, extraordinary, worthy or barren, were and still are loved by millions. Parsi theatre was another popular strand. Parsis are descended from original Zoroastrians who fled Persia when Muslims took over that land. They settled in India and under the Raj, this small, urban and successful community became famous for its well-produced and popular comedies and farces in Gujarati.

From the 19th century onwards, playwrights wrote questioning and more complex works – the greatest of them Bengal's polymath Rabindranath Tagore, the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913. By that time, Shakespeare and other European masters were being read and performed by Westernised urban Indians. After independence, those cultural bonds remained intact. Felicity Kendal's family were nomadic players who took the Bard to rural areas; the Sixties film Shakespeare Wallah told the story.

Since then prestigious drama and music schools have been established and become centres of excellence. I have seen some of their fine productions too, though these seemed to me to keep assiduously within the boundaries of "acceptable" art – unlike the breakout works produced at the Writers' Bloc festival.

In the week I spent at the festival, I saw how Dodgson and her team and the transformative Rage company interacted with writers and directors, never letting standards slip, never slipping into patronising allowances. Their intensity, honesty and sense of purpose stimulated astonishing creative heat and resolve in the artistes and writers. Dodgson is a force of nature and was described to me as the "godmother" of the creative cohort. One of the youthful actors said to be it was "like being in the fastest car, feeling the breeze and excitement, but never losing control because you are trying to reach somewhere where nobody has gone before. It's about control and real freedom, giving expression to things kept locked up. Escape from the usual. You don't know how the young of India need that."

The five readings selected for London include Mahua by Akash Mohimen, which was originally written in Hindi and has been translated. Incredibly young and gifted, he chose as his theme extreme rural poverty and addiction to hooch. It made audiences weep silently. Ok Tata Bye Bye by Purva Naresh, also a translation from Hindi, is about feisty, smart sex workers selling their bodies to truck drivers. The other three deal with property developers and broken communities, the conflict in Kashmir and ruthless modernisation. None of these plays is maudlin or sanctimonious. They are real and engaging, reveal aspects of a country still barely known by Brits. And best of all, not one of them features a noisy wedding or call-centre story.

Indian students rank 2nd last in global test

15 Jan, 2012, 02.37AM IST, Hemali Chhapia,TNN

MUMBAI: Across the world, India is seen as an education powerhouse - based largely on the reputation of a few islands of academic excellence such as the IITs. But scratch the glossy surface of our education system and the picture turns seriously bleak.

Fifteen-year-old Indians who were put, for the first time, on a global stage stood second to last, only beating Kyrgyzstan when tested on their reading, math and science abilities.

India ranked second last among the 73 countries that participated in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), conducted annually to evaluate education systems worldwide by the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) Secretariat. The survey is based on two-hour tests that half a million students are put through.

China's Shanghai province, which participated in PISA for the first time, scored the highest in reading. It also topped the charts in mathematics and science.

"More than one-quarter of Shanghai's 15 year olds demonstrated advanced mathematical thinking skills to solve complex problems, compared to an OECD average of just 3%," noted the analysis.

The states of Tamil Nadu and Himachal Pradesh, showpieces for education and development, were selected by the central government to participate in PISA, but their test results were damning.

15-yr-old Indians 200 points behind global topper

Tamil Nadu and Himachal, showpieces of India's education and development, fared miserably at the Programme for International Student Asssment, conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Secretariat.

An analysis of the performance of the two states showed:

In math, considered India's strong point, they finished second and third to last, beating only Kyrgyzstan

When the Indian students were asked to read English text, again Tamil Nadu and Himachal Pradesh were better than only Kyrgyzstan. Girls were better than boys

The science results were the worst. Himachal Pradesh stood last, this time behind Kyrgyzstan. Tamil Nadu was slightly better and finished third from the bottom

The average 15-year-old Indian is over 200 points behind the global topper. Comparing scores, experts estimate that an Indian eighth grader is at the level of a South Korean third grader in math abilities or a second-year student from Shanghai when it comes to reading skills.

The report said: "In Himachal, 11% of students are estimated to have a proficiency in reading literacy that is at or above the baseline level needed to participate effectively and productively in life. It follows that 89% of students in Himachal are estimated to be below that baseline level."

Clearly, India will have to ramp up its efforts and get serious about what goes on in its schools. "Better educational outcomes are a strong predictor for future economic growth," OECD secretary-general Angel Gurria told The Times of India.

"While national income and educational achievement are still related, PISA shows that two countries with similar levels of prosperity can produce very different results. This shows that an image of a world divided neatly into rich and well-educated countries and poor and badly-educated countries is now out of date."

In case of scientific literacy levels in TN, students were estimated to have a mean score that was below the means of all OECD countries, but better than Himachal. Experts are unsure if selecting these two states was a good idea.

Shaheen Mistry, CEO of Teach For India programme, said, "I am glad that now there is data that lets people know how far we still have to go."

In the Premier League the endgame of rampant capitalism is being played out

An unsustainable system where the rich win and the poor go to the wall. We see it in English football – and beyond

• 
• • Jonathan Freedland
  • guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 18 October 2011 21.30 BST
  • larger | smaller

Illustration by Belle Mellor
It's a newspaper convention that the front and back pages are a world apart, as if news and sport inhabit two different spheres with little to say to each other. Indeed, it used to be an article of faith that "sport and politics don't mix", with the former no more than a form of escapism from the latter. And yet the Occupy Wall Street and London Stock Exchange protests that led the weekend news bulletins might not be entirely unrelated to the Premier League results that closed them. For the current state of our football sheds a rather revealing light on the current state of both our politics and our economy. Or, as one sage of the sport puts it: "As ever, the national game reflects the nation's times."
What that reflection says is that Britain, or England, has become the home of a turbo-capitalism that leaves even the land of the let-it-rip free market – the United States – for dust. If capitalism is often described metaphorically as a race in which the richest always win, football has turned that metaphor into an all too literal reality.
Let's take as our text a series of reports written by the sage just quoted, namely the Guardian's David Conn, who has carved a unique niche investigating the politics and commercialisation of football. Conn elicited a candid admission from the new American owners of Liverpool Football Club, who confessed that part of the lure of buying a stake in what they called the "EPL" – the English Premier League – was that they get to keep all the money they make, rather than having to share it as they would have to under the – their phrase – "very socialistic" rules that operate in US sport. In other words, England has become a magnet for those drawn to behave in a way they couldn't get away with at home.
Start with first principles. Of course, inequality is built into sport: some people are simply stronger or faster than others. What makes sport compelling is watching closely matched individuals or teams compete to come out on top.
But a different kind of inequality matters too: money. A rich club can buy up all the best players and win every time. That's the story of today's Premier League, as super-flush Manchester United sweep all before them, challenged only by local rivals Manchester City – now endowed by an oil billionaire – and Chelsea, funded to the hilt by a Russian oligarch. This, then, becomes a different kind of competition, a battle not of skill, pace and temperament but of pounds, shillings and pence. The clearest manifestation of that came at the close of the transfer window, when the biggest teams splashed out millions to buy the top talent. It means the half-dozen top sides, already at a different level from the rest, soared even higher towards the stratosphere and out of reach – in just the same way that the super-rich float ever further away from everyone else, the 1% in a different league from the 99%, as the Occupy protesters would put it.
Nothing you can do about that, says dogmatic capitalism. You can no more stop the richest teams dominating football than you can prevent the fastest sprinter winning gold. That's the force of the market, all but a law of nature.
Except along comes American sport to show us another way. First, there are those rules on revenue-sharing that so frustrated Liverpool's new owners. All the money that, say, a baseball team makes – from tickets, TV rights and merchandise – is taxed by the major league that runs the sport and spread around the other clubs, so that the richest cannot dwarf the rest. That isn't because the titans of Major League Baseball have read too much Marx. It's because they understand that their sport is worth nothing if it stops being a real competition, if only a handful of the wealthiest teams ever have a chance of winning. Redistributing the wealth around the league ensures their sport doesn't become boring. It does not level the playing field, but it comes very close.
The proof is in the stats so beloved of sporting obsessives. Over the past 19 seasons, 12 different teams have won baseball's biggest prize. In the 19 seasons since the Premier League was created, only four teams have won; Manchester United alone have won the title 12 of those 19 times.
It's not just revenue-sharing that ensures true competition. In American football and basketball a salary cap applies, limiting how much each club can pay in wages and thereby preventing the richest teams making their domination permanent by snapping up all the best players. (A "luxury tax" performs a similar function in baseball.) In the same spirit, teams in all major US sports submit to a "draft", in which they take turns picking from a pool of newly eligible players, so that the equivalent of Chelsea or Manchester City can't gobble up all the fresh talent, but instead have to let the Blackburns or Wigans have a go.
Put like that, it seems fantastical. Who can imagine Old Trafford voluntarily snaffling less of the pie, so that clubs in smaller cities with smaller grounds, and therefore weaker gate receipts, get a look in? And yet English football used to work just like that. When the founders of the Football League gathered in a Manchester hotel in 1888, they fretted over how they might ensure that a fixture between, say, Derby County and Everton remained a real contest. They agreed the home side should give a proportion of its takings to the visitors, a system that held firm till 1983.
Clubs shared the TV money when it came too, spreading it around all 92 league clubs. But the big teams always resented subsidising the minnows; indeed, the Premier League was formed out of the biggest 20 clubs' express desire to keep Rupert Murdoch's millions for themselves. That TV money is at least partly spread throughout the Premier League, but now there are noises about ending even that small nod towards wealth-sharing, so that the biggest half-dozen teams can keep every penny for themselves.
Not for the first time, it's fallen to Europe to act. Upcoming Uefa "financial fair play" rules will require teams to live within their earnings, which should put an end to the sugar daddy handouts of Man City and Chelsea. But that 2014 change will push clubs to maximise their revenue, which is bound, in turn, to mean even less sharing. Football will still be a game determined by who has most money.
There are three consequences of this strange gulf between our rules and those across the Atlantic. First, football's most storied clubs have become attractive to foreign tycoons who sniff a licence to print money, unrestricted. Second, we've established a model that is inherently unsustainable, involving colossal debts that cripple all those without a billionaire to bail them out. Since 1992, league clubs and one Premier League team – Portsmouth – have fallen insolvent 55 times. Third, we risk killing the golden goose, turning an activity that should be thrilling into a non-contest whose outcome is all but preordained.
Hmm, a system that sees our biggest names falling to leveraged takeovers – think Kraft's buy-up of Cadbury – thereby selling off the crown jewels of our collective culture in the name of a rampant capitalism that is both unsustainable and ultimately joyless. That doesn't just sound like the state of the national game, that sounds like the state of the nation.

SO YOU Think English is Easy???

Let's face it - English is a crazy language. There is no egg in eggplant, nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple. English muffins weren't invented in England or French fries in France. Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads, which aren't sweet, are meat.

We take English for granted. But if we explore its paradoxes, we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.

And why is it that writers write but fingers don't fing, grocers don't groce and hammers don't ham? If the plural of tooth is teeth, why isn't the plural of booth, beeth? One goose, 2 geese. So one moose, 2 meese? One index, 2 indices?

Doesn't it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend? If you have a bunch of odds and ends and get rid of all but one of them, what do you call it?

If teachers taught, why didn't preachers praught? If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat?

Sometimes I think all the English speakers should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane. In what language do people recite at a play and play at a recital? Ship by truck and send cargo by ship? Have noses that run and feet that smell?

How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites? You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language in which your house can burn up as it burns down, in which you fill in a form by filling it out and in which, an alarm goes off by going on.

English was invented by people, not computers, and it reflects the creativity of the human race, which, of course, is not a race at all.

That is why, when the stars are out, they are visible, but when the lights are out, they are invisible.

PS. - Why doesn't ' Buick' rhyme with 'quick'



Can you read these right the first time?

1) The bandage was wound around the wound.

2) The farm was used to produce produce .

3) The dump was so full that it had to refuse more refuse.

4) We must polish the Polish furniture.

5) He could lead if he would get the lead out.

6) The soldier decided to desert his dessert in the desert.

7) Since there is no time like the present, he thought it was time to present the present .

8) A bass was painted on the head of the bass drum.

9) When shot at, the dove dove into the bushes.

10) I did not object to the object.

11) The insurance was invalid for the invalid.

12) There was a row among the oarsmen about how to row .

13) They were too close to the door to close it.

14) The buck does funny things when the does are present.

15) A seamstress and a sewer fell down into a sewer line.

16) To help with planting, the farmer taught his sow to sow.

17) The wind was too strong to wind the sail.

18) Upon seeing the tear in the painting I shed a tear.

19) I had to subject the subject to a series of tests.

20) How can I intimate this to my most intimate friend?

You lovers of the English language might also enjoy this .

There is an English two-letter word that perhaps has more meanings than any other two-letter word, and that is 'UP.' It's easy to understand UP, meaning toward the sky or at the top of the list, but when we awaken in the morning, why do we wake UP? At a meeting, why does a topic come UP? Why do we speak UP! and why are the officers UP for election and why is it UP to the secretary to write UP a report ? We call UP our friends. And we use it to brighten UP a room, polish UP the silver, we warm UP the leftovers and clean UP the kitchen. We lock UP the house and some guys fix UP the old car. At other times the little word has real special meaning. People stir UP trouble, line UP for tickets, work UP an appetite, and think UP excuses. To be dressed is one thing , but to be dressed UP is
special. And this UP is confusing: A drain must be opened UP because it is stopped UP We open UP a store in the morning but we close it UP at night. We seem to be pretty mixed UP! about UP !

To be knowledgeable about the proper uses of UP, look the word UP in the dictionary. In a desk-sized dictionary, it takes UP almost 1/4th of the page and can add UP to about thirty definitions. If you are UP to it, you might try building UP a list of the many ways UP is used. It will take UP a lot of your time, but if you don't give UP , you may wind UP with a hundred or more. When it threatens to rain, we say it is clouding UP. When the sun comes out we say it is clearing UP .
When it rains, it wets the earth and often messes things UP. When it doesn't rain for awhile, things dry UP.

One could go on and on, but I'll wrap it UP, for now my time is UP,

so... it is time to shut UP!