When Eve read Manu Smriti

The characters in this description are fictitious. They could have lived anywhere in Renaissance Italy or Inquisition Spain or contemporary Kerala. Resemblance to any person, living or dead or cloistered, is unintentional.

The short priest’s face looked familiar. He belted out commands to the 180 men and women seeking his certificate which would prove them worthy of Christian marriage. “Don’t use your mobile phones for the next three days; don’t read newspapers; don’t talk in the dining hall; don’t talk too much to your partner…” he warned the forcibly assembled flock. Suddenly, it occurred to me. He resembled Napoleon Bonaparte. The general was addressing his prisoners of war.

Marriage Preparation Course, credited to a certain Fr Thomas Thoppil in Kerala at least, is the Catholic Church’s way of getting even with those who bunk Mass. After all, religion comes handy only at birth, wedding and death, when the clergy vengefully enforces their bureaucratic regime on the evading laity. I knew I had no choice but to yawn through the lectures if I had to rise to my family’s expectations. Even my fiancée had vetoed my suggestion of a secular wedding.

So I decided to approach the course journalistically. Instead of admitting that I was wasting three days at the mercy of Fr Bonaparte and Sr Indira Gandhi, I convinced myself that I would resurrect on the third day with a socio-politico-economic analysis of the classes and of course, the certificate. I was more of a Confucian than a Christian when I entered the pastoral centre, which would be my detention centre for the next three days.

From the onset, I realized I was being a bit too prejudiced about the course. I had forgotten the value of marriage. To me it was a socially sanctioned, legally binding pact between a man and a woman to love each other and live together. It was something else too. It was the fifth sacrament, “a visible sign of the invisible grace of god”. No wonder the clergy drew swords when the state government made registration of weddings compulsory to abide by a Supreme Court order. Praise the Lord (thrice)!

Point noted. But the sanctity of marriage had historical roots. A pleasant priest listed out biblical fairy tales to drive home the point. Adam was a good man and Eve was a tempted/tempting wife, who ultimately packed their bags out of the paradise. Abraham was a powerful patriarch and Sara was his nagging wife who got his lover and lovechild exiled to desert. Isaac was a blind father and Rebecca was his cunning wife, who robbed their firstborn of his rights to pay her younger son.

Oh god! These women! I already have second thoughts. I felt endless gratitude towards the mother superior, who tried to keep us men safe from women for three days at least. She proved a worthy commander to Fr Bonaparte when she gave strict gender-specific orders. Men and women were assigned separate stairs, lest the eves teased and tempted the adams. Only after men were led to safety after lunch/dinner, women were allowed in.

So women happily and hungrily waited for their turn at the dining table. The Church was more ‘Indianised’ than its RSS-BJP detractors in this aspect at least. It even quotes from Manu Smriti to remind wannabe brides that they must be a combo of efficient minister and energetic mistress. But confusion remained. Why would the priest ask me on the wedding day to ensure that my wife ate even if I starved? Maybe as a token of acknowledgement to the fair sex, who made up 90 plus percent of the saints of the otherwise male-dominated Catholic Church.

The Pope grants equal status to Sr Alphonsa, a sick nun who rarely left the confines of her convent at Bharananganam, and Mother Teresa, who roamed the streets of Kolkata nursing lepers. If the Mother epitomizes true Christian spirit, the other saint, like St Therese of Lisieux, represents all the paranoia of the institutional Church which can’t come to terms with human body. It eulogises the self-mortification of the blessed women. If Therese persuaded the superiors to admit her in a nunnery before she was 15, Alphonsa disfigured herself to ward off repeated marriage proposals.

For a religion which has been trying to instill a sense of guilt on every child, nothing can be a better virtue than negating the needs of the body. The Church, which extends the good-evil dichotomy to the soul-body debate, goes in endless circles praising Christian virtues, namely suffering, compromising and praying. Can’t blame the Church. It merely echoes the laity’s wishes. When classified ad writers seek/notify “fair, wheatish and god-fearing” girls, the Church exhorts submission to husbands as the supreme goal for any Christian woman, if she doesn’t decide, by any chance, to be the bride of God.

The third evening, Fr Bonaparte appeared again, with a bunch of certificates. The general now tried to sound friendly, having won the three-day battle to save souls. I refused the truce and completed writing the feedback form: “The food was fine and timely. Sleep was perfect. Even my mother wouldn’t have cared me so much. But you should be more adept in enforcing discipline. Why don’t you try jammers to prevent the kids (half of them 30 plus) from using mobiles in the bathrooms. It would come handy like the Alsatian watchdog of the convent.”

But the rest of the congregation was unconcerned. Mothers had come to take home their cleansed sons and daughters. They bowed before Bonaparte for moulding their daughters and daughters-in-law into model Christian wives. Together, these women keep the 2000-year-old faith alive. In return, the Church blames them for all the follies of mankind. Even after the Pope endorsed Charles Darwin, it refers to the true guardians of the multinational faith corporate as the proverbial rib yanked off the first man. It’s a thankless world, indeed.

The case of the shapeless bricks

Dedication: To all those classmates who vanished one fine morning

“Gosh…learning disability…for a journalist…don’t tell me…,” buzzed in Anupama’s SMS. All I told her was that Taare Zameen Par was my story too. I didn’t contradict my friend though I was talking about the discipline part rather than the dyslexic theme of the Aamir Khan film. After all, I still see letters dancing and numbers fighting. (Hope my employers – present and potential – don’t read this.)

I was not dyslectic. But printed letters do dance, turn cursive, hide behind the other, transform to an altogether different script while retaining the meaning. Even after so many Hollywood inventions – bodysnatching aliens, falling meteors, rising waters – my most horrifying doomsday scenario is about letters losing its meaning. A day when I was surrounded by mysterious notations of hieroglyphics.

Perhaps even Gabriel Garcia Marquez had a hidden fear of melting letters to write about it in One Hundred Years of Solitude: "Thus they (inhabitants of Macondo fighting loss of memory) went on living in a reality that was slipping away, momentarily captured by words, but which would escape irremediably when they forgot the values of the written letters."

Without letters, mankind may or may not survive, but I would be back to the helpless kindergarten dropout. It took immense patient from my mother and my best teacher, the late Cicily Jose, to befriend me with the letters. Even when I accepted that a certain letter could stand for a certain syllable, I refused to write it the way the learned wrote. An O was an O whether it was drawn clockwise or counterclockwise.

As I was beginning to put spirit into script, came the next teaser. Algebra…a+b led to more complex formations when it should have simply read what it is – ab. ABC and XYZ assumed totally impossible values…in fact they were shamelessly polygamous letters ready to go with any value. For the second time in my academic life, I felt hopeless. Red ruled my mathematics answer sheets.

As soon as I stepped out of the theatre, before I send SMS to select friends recommending the movie (two months after the release), I met another friend Mrinal Sen on the road. Before I could tell him my impressions, he told me: “I had this problem. Letters just flew away.” He even did his math problems the day Ishan Avasti the dyslexic protagonist did.

The most beautiful scene in the movie was the surprise math test in Ishan’s class. The dreamer boy just took the figures (3 and 9, supposed to be multiplied) on his animated journey to space, where he won a game by replacing the planets with given numbers. The answer to the only attempted problem was 3! Scenes later, his drawing teacher reveals to him that the problem is as simple as climbing a stair!

Sen would also let his figures fight among themselves to come to a conclusion and, surprisingly, arrived at the right answer. But his teachers were smarter. They insisted on method. They didn’t care if the answer was right or wrong as long as the student didn’t imagine a space journey or stair flight. No, my boy, don’t be smart. You have only one way of looking at it.

Udayan had a cross-cultural take on the film: “The elder brother (who tops the class and excels in badminton) is British and the younger one (who follows his own brain and finds himself bogged down) is French.” Even the British have reformed their system, but India refuses to grow from Lord Macaulay. Don’t mind the massacre in the classrooms, let’s fit another brick in the wall.

I have often bumped into this sadistic HR question: ‘List a couple of your achievements’. I may not impress the examiner if I said this: 1) I read ‘The Unicorn Expedition’; 2) I wrote 652 words on education. But they are praiseworthy achievements when seen through the eyes of a child bewildered by the ant-like creatures on his textbook.

Ray of hope: Kendriya Vidyalayas make TZP a must-watch

Postscript: Had planned to write about the tyranny of disciplinarians and the end of imagination, but was carried away. Some other time, perhaps.