final grades, etc.

My final grades for this last semester were put up yesterday, and I didn't do spectacularly, as expected. Actually I did pretty well in all my courses with the exception of CS 242, which in the end proved the overripe fruit in the basket, robbing everything around it of its vitality with its ethylenated effusions. I got a C in that godforsaken class. I probably ought to take it again, and try to better learn the principles they taught us throughout the semester, but you know what? I won't. I'm glad I'm done with this wretched class; and if I ever see its ugly face peering out from under my bed, I will beat it in with a baseball bat. (Once I've acquired one, of course.) The temerity. Imagine Edmund Hilary reaching the top of Mt. Everest only to discover that some nobody had given him a C for his efforts. His wrath would have descended upon him like an avalanche composed of all the snow in the world. The nerve. The audacity.

Amid the disappointment of not having conquered this most evil of classes it was gratifying to see that the bookstore at The Mall hadn't been downsized or shut down. Too many things in this uppity little city have shut down lately - for instance two coffee places near my house that I enjoyed frequenting. How can we experience the life and freedom that Nehru promised in his clandestine midnight speech, if our cafes keep disappearing? Anyway, I bought a book called Salim Must Die by Mukul Deva that seemed delightful for not being like other books by Indian writers. I think it has something to do with low self-esteem and a fear of not being regarded as serious authors by the community of litterateurs that impels Indian writers to take up the most ponderous subjects, which they then expound in the most solemn, sententious manner that it's possible to affect. The first few pages of Salim Must Die seemed promising, and Mukul Deva has already dispelled any preconceptions I might have had about the book's being a thriller that had been forced to bend over backwards to resemble something like Sea of Poppies. His language already struck me as being better than that of American writers in the same genre.

It's unfortunate how in the hands of Americans the English language has gone from being a dignified Germanic language, sporting scars and bandages from the numerous depredations launched at it throughout history by French and Latin (two languages that could never "keep it in their pants"), which it nevertheless survived and overcame, to something pathetic and self-parodying, like Miley Cyrus. Something less than a pidgin. Potbellied linguists dripping with alcohol continue to undermine English from within with their sneering treatises exposing feature after feature of the English language to be a figment of the less-than-intelligent speaker's imagination. Even Stephen Pinker, normally rational and luculent, becomes incoherent in his defense of the deleterious practices undertaken inadvertently by the careless speaker. At least Indians who have been educated in English, who have taken the pains to master its intricacies, can be counted on not to throw the language away like an umbrella. (See R. K. Narayan's The Lost Umbrella for this reference to America's throwaway culture.) Krishna Menon, an unpleasant man for various reasons, once remarked to a British novelist, "You merely picked [the English language] up; I learnt it". Of course, linguists like Stephen Pinker and that promiscuous alcoholic whose name will not cross my lips can extol endlessly the virtues of watching smugly from the sidelines as this age-old edifice crumbles and collapses under the negligence of its inhabitants, and continue to argue that statements such as I have made here are irrelevant to linguists. But I don't speak as a linguist: I speak as a human being.