My Post Graduation Life

I completed my MA programme at Loyola College, Madras. The MA programme wasn’t very different from the BA programme. Our class was smaller. The standard of the students was far better than that of my BA classmates. Most often we didn’t have class after lunch.

After three years of BA, I was longing to work probably as a teacher. But I knew I had to finish my post graduation if I wanted to teach higher classes and if possible in a college. I didn’t want to rely on my dad who had retired. Fortunately I got a part time job in the evening and this helped me finance my studies. BA itself was torturously long. I was getting fed up of classes and the thought of sitting for two more years made me feel frustrated. Also the dismal thought looming over me was the fact that English Literature wasn’t going to give me a job with a lot of money. All this worried me. I wished I could have chosen as many papers as I wanted a term and finish the courses faster and walk out with a degree. I honestly felt I could have finished my BA in two years and MA in one year. My frustrations can be seen in the two poems I wrote during my MA.

Written in Sep 1990

I sit, cursing and furious, resigned

To my fate, chosen by me, or assigned

By society, by human respect, by fear?

Thoughts of many more years of classes sear

Through my body like prolonged agony.

All these hours of warming our asses

As boredom, frustration and confusion masses

Into one dark grey cloud that obscures

Time to come; the course of our lives leer

A leap into nowhere.

A fool am I taking life seriously

Money, men and matter and ever dreamily

Conjuring up my future in wild fancies

That fade and melt away with ease

Leaving me in a void to face my classes.

My Crucifixion (March 1990)

Jesus Christ was crucified once,

Two thousand years ago – it

All lasted about a few hours.

I get crucified a thousand times;

A crucifixion with a difference.

No wooden cross, no nails,

No gushing hot blood, no soldiers,

no wounds on the flesh,

no crown of thorns,

no weeping women

nor the mocking crowd, no thieves

on either side for company.

Yet so great a resemblance to his

Crucified to a wooden chair by nails

Of rules and regulations and fine

The mockery of learned professors;

The heat and dullness inflicting

The body with pain

Blood boiling, sweating all over

Not just two for company but

All around many more like me

Crucified, transfixed to chairs

Restlessly shifting yet pinned tight.

My sin and our sin

Earning a degree,

Becoming someone in society,

Joining the great greedy rat race,

Rushing and jostling - and for all this

A thousand crucifixions.

The professors were no different. Most of them used the lecture method and didn’t welcome new interpretation or ideas during the lecture, especially those which contradicted their opinion. I got into trouble with one of them for expressing my disagreement with what he said. Mr S was a very funny man. He talked and walked like a lady. Many students used to imitate the way he walked. Mr S retorted angrily to my comment. Many told me that he was revengeful and he might fail me. I was quite apprehensive as the last thing I wanted on earth was delay in completing the course. Luckily nothing of that sort happened.

It was during my MA that I got interested in linguistics, especially the language theories. The credit goes to Dr Michael Vivian Joseph. He’s probably the best college teacher I’ve ever had because of two reasons. His teaching methodology was very interesting and he treated students as his equals. He was eccentric though. He could be seen walking deep in thought. You could pass him and greet him  with no response from him.

He would introduce a topic, ask our opinion, give more information and then give us xeroxed sheets for us to read at home with a couple of questions to think about and answer in the next class.

In the next class, he would ask us to give answers for these questions. They weren’t direct questions about the contents of the sheets. They were thought provoking questions asking us to state our views regarding a particular theory, make comparison between one theory and another and our response to the theories. He would jot down our views, give counter arguments, agree and disagree. Sometimes we would feel that the way he went about teaching was haphazard and confusing. But finally all the pieces of information and discussion would fall into place. There was certainly “method in his madness”. Here again, though I enjoyed the classes thoroughly, many of the students weren’t up to the mark. They were accustomed to spoon feeding. He saw my interest in linguistics and gave me the book Language and Thought written by Lev Vygotsky, the Russian linguist. I presented a paper using this book titled “Interrelationship between language, thought and consciousness”. I think I still have the paper with his remarks written in pencil on the margin. He had taken the trouble of going through every single line and writing his remarks. I chose him to be my guide to do the end of the course dissertation. Though he didn’t have much time he was a patient guide and a friend. The last I heard of him was that he was teaching in a university in South Africa.

The lecturer who conducted the viva along with my guide was Mr D. I don’t think he ever understood what I’d written in the dissertation which had to do with looking at Joseph Conrad’s novels Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness from the psycho-mystical perspective. Why I mention Mr D here is due to a particular physical oddity which he possessed that intrigued me. One is not supposed to make fun of the physical features of a person. Pardon me for being so rude but I couldn't get it out of my mind. The oddity was that he lacked a bottom. What I mean is that he had the flattest buttocks I have ever seen in my life. In fact I wondered whether he had one and if sitting was a pain for him in the absence of the cushioning effect. The bottom is a very important though not a significant part of human anatomy that adds subtle beauty to the body and soul of a human being especially the female race. There’s ample evidence in today’s bollywood, hollywood, kollywood and tollywood dance numbers as well as western pop music videos where shaking that part of the human anatomy and zooming in on that area is an integral part of any dance. The older classical and folk dance forms revel equally in this. I’m reminded of the belly dance and the samba. So again I wondered whether Mr D had ever danced and would ever be able to dance. To dance without a bottom is highly unimaginable. The poor man always wore a belt. There wasn’t a bottom to hold his trousers up!

One day, one of my classmates, Rajasekhar, decided that our class should exercise its creative mind and proposed we make a class notice board type magazine. He had his friend Senthil giving him his eager support. We chipped in with our bit. Here’s a poem composed after tragedy struck this whole process.

Elegy on the Death of a Notice board (Sep 1991)

The roly-poly of our class conceived

As he sat on his throne one morning

A bright and brilliant idea of a class notice board

Flashing across his head – a bolt from the blue

And then it grew in his womby head

Limbs, head, trunk, shoulders and chest.

Soon did he deliver the baby – a premature one?

His plump mate promptly acting the mid-wife

They had a tough time pressing and cursing

Gave it a name and wrote its history

Everyone viewed it with curiosity.

The lecturers they smiled and deemed it fair

They smiled and grinned, proud of the robust child

The next day only four patches were left

Signs of the promising notice board sweet

The boss they said did not like a creative child

Deeming it inappropriate and adding to the rubbish.

Oh, when will creativecide be stopped!

To end my ramblings on college life I need to talk about my friends. While doing my BA my best friend was Joe. He was poor in English and I tried to help him. He was grateful to me for that. He belonged to the fisher folk from Rameshwaram. I’ve never seen a courageous fellow like him. He was also a good swimmer. It was a regular habit for both of us to have a bottle of beer after the semester exams, eat egg kothu paratha and go for a movie. I lost touch with him a few years later. Venkateswaran was another friend of mine. I really appreciate the hard work he put in to master English as he wasn’t that good in English when he joined the course. He went on to finish his PG in journalism and mass communication and joined Kalaikatirachagam, Coimbatore as marketing executive. He was sharp enough to learn all the nuances of the workings of a printing press and started one on his own after his marriage. Whenever I came down from Ooty to Coimbatore to attend the BEd contact classes, I used to stay in his room with other bachelors. I used to help him with my short notes in college and he really appreciated that. My short notes were like much sought after panacea for facing the ordeal of exams. I’ve lost touch with him too though I tried hard to contact him using the social networks.

I need to mention two people who were not my college mates but who I became friend with in Madurai.One was Edward Cletus. He is probably the most energetic person I’ve ever known with a knack of organizing things well and getting things done however difficult they were. He had undergone the ‘est’ training of Werner Erhard, the American mystic, in Bangalore. I think that helped to focus on what was there in front of him and get it done. The training is carried on even today by the group called “Landmark”. We got along pretty well and exchanged ideas over pegs of whisky occasionally. Again this is another person, I’ve lost touch with a few years after he moved to Chennai. The other is Susai, a committed social worker who went through a lot of ups and downs in his life. He is at present running a home for orphaned girls and doing commendable work. More about him and the orphanage can be seen at the website I created for his home.
https://sites.google.com/site/anbuillamsamayanallur/welcome


My MA friends consisted of Anand, Romeo and Prem. Anand works in Gandhigram University, Dindigul, Romeo in Chennai and Prem is in the States running his own company. All of them are married. I do stay in touch with them except Prem. One of the things we did as friends and classmates in both BA and MA was go together to the college canteen especially during free periods or when a class was cancelled, put together our money, buy coffee or tea invariably every time and some snacks and talk about everything under the sun – politics, philosophy, films, music, girls and what not. We were unfortunate that the undergraduate programmes in American College were only for boys and in MA there was only one girl in our class. The students who visited the canteen often were the literature students. The science students and the commerce students were busy toiling it out whereas we were the coolest guys on earth except before exams. This made me think about how much we talk over a cup of coffee or tea. A cup which could be drunk in two or three minutes takes ages to finish. Similarly, it also made me think about how a lot of people, including me, spent hours chatting over a glass of whisky or a mug of beer. I wondered what they spoke. This again prompted me to write a poem.

Over a Cup of Tea

Over a cup of tea, 
Or a glass of whisky 
You and me
Make sense and rattle nonsense:
Green-eyed jealousies, lofty ideologies, 
Murky scheming, lousy talk
Music, films, tits and asses
Stuttering into silence
As the cup grows cold and empty
Or the glass runs dry.


A cup of coffee 
Or a peg of brandy
Can make you and me 
Loony with no company
Muttering away unspoken words 
Musing aloud inner discords
Streaming disconnected thought 
Leaving you and me fear fraught
As the cup grows cold and empty
Or the glass runs dry.


Over a cup of coffee or tea
You and me 
Start our vague illusory existence
Waking from the nightmarish swoon
To the delusions of the noon
And as the steaming brown is gulped down
It warms its passage round
Turning cold too soon
Leaving you and me
Lame and lonely.




Finally, I need to say that almost all of what I’ve written is true with a bit of exaggeration. Also, I might have sounded boastful at times. Well, I can’t over the habit common to humans i.e. to be boastful! Do ignore the errors in English that I committed. Hope you enjoyed reading it.