Sunday, February 12, 2006
Enie Minnie Mynie Mo
Catch an antel by its toe
If it hollers let it go
Enie Minnie Mynie Mo
Initially when I had started this blog (actually the old blog... which is now dead) I had promised to arm you with ways to which you can torment pseudo intellectual bengali university pseudo students... Well I never quite lived up to that promise... Strangely enough today I came across something which reminded me of that promise... and of somethign I had done quite some time ago...
One in a long line of seemingly bizarre decisions was for me to study in Presidency College, Kolkata. Don't exactly know why I did it, but I did. Spent a whole year there. Gave exams and even managed to get a "posthumous" record breaking 88% (but that's another story)...
Anyway... Presidency College... it's a lot like Jadavpur University... except the slight differences ofcourse ( a list of these maybe sometime later)... and nothing like Xavier.
As is often the case, the canteen was the living breathing heart of the college. And the brain. Maybe a bit of the gonads too. The pseudo intellectualism hung so thick in the air you could it with a knife. The floor was literaly littered with circular plans for world domination, other people's dignity and cigarette butts.
Needless to say I stayed away from there. As much as I could. One day out of hunger and desperation bought a chicken roll with an extra helping of diarrhea.
But people kept pulling me back there from time to time... so I went... tried not to say much...
But then I found out about the poetry club...
Mostly headed by English and Benali Hons. students... it was a place for "the meeting minds, free exchange and a genuine appreciation of poetry and the arts". Basically it was a bunch of jobless people sitting together, reading out bits from their favourite poetry and then waiting for somebody to say "that was rubbish" which would be the perfect excuse to launch into a delightful argument. It served one purpose mainly
People who were not in the traditional intellectual discplines of study (namely eng or beng. hons.) could show that they were JUST AS intellectual as the rest of them (if not more) and that they thoroughly deserved the piece of Presidency canteen furniture he was sitting on.
So I was suddenly thrown into this game of organised intellectual one upmanship... at the deep end. Like a pretty boy in a prison I just tried to keep my head down and not draw attention to myself. People would bring verses from the romantics to Ketaki Dyson. Least of all, you could try and bring in a few couplets from an obscure (and deservedly so) Dylan song and tear it to shreds. Then they woudl read it. The unwritten rule was that it would have to be something "different"... something people didn't know.... or your take on it would have to be different... but it could not be something from someone nobody knew... bottomline...it had to be a "find"...
Anyway... after hanging out for a while and trying to make excuses to excuse myself I was finally nudged a couple of times to say something...
And then it hit me...
This was the perfect opportunity for one of my "experiments" (Sphinx once called me a mad scientist... that's proabably the best two word assesement of me I have ever heard). So I took in the poem "The Thorn"...by William Wordsworth.. it was a stupendous hit... wow... a Wordsworth nobody had heard before (except that guy who claims he has read EVERYTHING... there is always a guy like that everywhere isn't it?). People couldn't stop talking about it....wow... just brilliant... the very pinnacle of his romanticism.... the very epitome of his love affair with nature... the brilliant dichotomy of beauty and horror... the pleasures in pain... or is it all metaphorical....
The conversation flowed like the cheap coffee, out of the canteen and into the coffee shop and went on till the wee hours of the afternoon. Only rush hour scared people enough to finally leave.
That's the last Poetry Club meeting I EVER attended.
Well.... the fact of the matter is that "the thorn" is one of the worst poems Wordsworth has ever written. Infact it is one of the worst poems in the entire english literature. It is a shining example of how NOT to write a poem...
Hmmm... interesting isn't it?
So here it is... your weapon... your litmus paper for pretentious pseudo-intellectual poetry phillic bengalis... Wordsworth's ... "The Thorn"
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7:37 AM
