My dear beloved city..

Two news items that just caught my eye. Not really political, but I felt I ought to blog them all the same. First is this news report. Why would this Swiss man want to buy airtickets from the manager's office? I assume that since he's travelled all the way from Switzerland to India, that he's fairly well versed in how international air travel works. I sincerely wonder if in any other airport of the world he's ever bought tickets from the airport manager's room. Failing that, I also wonder if say, at Heathrow, he would have dared to break down the manager's door. I have two grouses against foreigners who come to India. First, please behave here as you would in your own country. Just because we are a poorer Third World nation does not mean that normal rules, laws and procedures don't apply here.

I remember reading this blatantly biased BBC newsreport some months ago about this man, caught for stealing drugs who was then released from an Indian prison. And the news report made him out to be some kind of martyr. What about the fact that the guy was a drugs dealer in the first place? I could think of a few places where he would have been beheaded by now. Next, the article seems to suggest that he was denied the right of appeal in India because he was a foreigner. What rubbish. The entire appeals process happens almost automatically. I cannot see a High Court, or a District Court having the jurisdiction to deny you the right to appeal. Patently absurd stuff, and clearly for whatever reason the BBC had bought it. I wish I could find the link to that article now.

Anyway, to return to what I was saying about our Swiss gentleman above. Clearly he thought that if he smashed down the manager's door at Calcutta (I'm sorry...I like Calcutta to Kolkata...I'm willing to say the latter in Bangla, and I always have, but not in English. Too bad!) that it would help him establish his authority in some way. Weird...I just don't get it.

What I also don't get it is when foreigners roam around the city wearing, what constitutes underwear. Like a vest and a lungi. No one in Britain walks around in a vest and pair of boxers down the main road. These are of course perfectly normal people, but they think that sensible dress codes don't apply when you're in an 'exotic' country. Apart from being hilarious this is also quite offensive. No one's asking you to wear a full sleeved shirt and trousers...you can wear your ubiquitous jeans and T-shirt if you want. But to wear a vest and lungi in public, when very few Calcuttans or even Indians do it (the South Indian mundu or veshti is completely different from the lungis that these people wear..), is quite ridiculous and a fashion statement that hardly constitutes fashion.

Ok, rant over. Let's look at the other issue I was talking about. It's the question of attendance in universities. Take a look at this article from the Telegraph. Now for those attending Western universities, this whole attendance business would be baffling. But there is I think a valid point here. Since our system is so heavily structured around classroom teaching, and since there's a heavy demand for places at universities, if you don't attend classes and merely turn up for exams, that's probably a good indicator that you are taking tuitions. Which is another menace altogether. I'm not one for draconian laws, but in a country where college seats are so limited, and the competition so fierce, I think it's fair that you attend a minimum number of classes throughout the year (also we don't have a process of continuous assessment). Given all of this, it's absurd to raise a hue and cry before exams when you fall short of the requisite attendance. After all, you knew all along what the required percentage was. In my college in Delhi, they were incredibly strict about this and put up lists with names of those who'd fallen short of the attendance criteria every term. Which was a good way of knowing how far behind you actually were. It's stupid to say, as some of the students in the article do: look I attended 65% of the classes last year, so I shouldn't have to attend so many this year. How hard is it to go to 6/10 classes every week? And if you were aware of the rules, why whine when they are imposed? Students in Calcutta are incredibly pampered.....I think a good dose of St. Stephen's discipline will remind them how privileged they really are!