Cathryn Donaldson is now following your tweets on Twitter,” said an e-mail recently. I racked my brains, but while the first name did ring a bell, the second did not. Cathryn is not an uncommon name in the US, and during my years there I had known a Cathryn or two … maybe the Donaldson was acquired after marriage….

For the uninitiated, tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters. They are displayed on the author’s profile page and delivered to the author’s subscribers who are known as followers.

Even as the brain was abuzz, the eyes were sending sensory data that broke through my reverie: “A little information about Cathryn Donaldson: 0 followers, 1 tweet, following four people. Ah! This was not a blind follower, just another newbie who had clicked blindly.

My exposure to tweets started long before Twitter.com came on the scene. I was a fan of Tweety Bird, a Yellow Canary cartoon character. Like many others, I thought that “tweet” was a typical onomatopoeia for the sounds of birds, but that was before the Internet began changing words and their context.

I must confess that I do not twit. My first and only tweet was on April 17 this year, an embarrassingly inane one-liner, and till date I have just discovered that it netted me 18 followers! Now, I thought that political and religious figures had followers, so it was a pretty heady experience, till I realised that these were my friends who were far from being followers, mine or anyone else’s.

I have steadfastly refused to include people I don’t know into my online orbit, and this works well on Facebook, where people mutually agree to let one another into their electronic lives. Twitter, on the other hand, by default, lets people share updates and links with anyone who wants to read them. Thankfully, it has an option: “You may follow Cathryn Donaldson as well by clicking on the “follow” button on their profile. You may also block Cathryn Donaldson if you don’t want them to follow you.” Since I don’t know her, I would rather not have Cathryn will follow my tweet, or two (another has been added now).

Twitter is ranked as one of the 50 most popular websites worldwide and is used by all — right from the White House to Shashi Tharoor, formerly of the UN and recently of the bovine fame. While some, like Veer Sanghvi, have thousands of followers and interesting tweets like the following: “We like hosting the Games because it gives us a national high for two weeks. Investing in sportsmen would give us a high for decades.” Most of the tweets are, well, just that, chirping notes, exactly what the word has meant since 1768.

Most of the tweets are not even cheerful or lively. Do they even have a meaning? Sometimes, I really wonder, ‘Will I tweet?’ Not unless I have something to say, something of some import. Meaningless words, even those well strung together, are just that — meaningless.

This middle was publiished in The Tribune on September 22, 2009

When you see a little a discrete blue badge with its distinctive cogged wheel and gold bands, you know that you are meeting a representative or an organisation that has as its moto Service above Self.

Rotary International, with more than 32,000 clubs and over 1.2 million members world-wide, needs no introduction and when Man Mohan Singh, the hotelier and a Past President of the Rotary Club of Chandigarh, invited me to meet his fellow Rotarians and talk about Jaswant Singh’s book and the controversy surrounding it, I responded positively with delight.

Rotary Club of Chandigarh, India, RI District 3080, has the distinction of being the home club of Rajendra K. Saboo, who is the second Indian to rise to the high echelons of Rotary International, as President for the year 1991-92. Raja Saboo had joined Rotary in 1961. He also heads a foundation that gives the Tara Chand Saboo Excellence Awards In School Teaching, with which I have been involved since its inception.
Monday August 31st, was my first visit to the Sector 18 Rotary House. I met G.S. Lakhmana, the club President and others, including Neena Singh, who is doing great work as Director, Vocational Service (she has corrected me, that was last year, now she is Director Community Service). My talk presented me with an opportunity to present my point of view to this audience of opinion-makers.

From Website

Jinnah — India, Partition, Independence is the shorter version of the original title: “Structure of Freedom: Mohammad Ali Jinnah from ambassador to Hindu-Muslim unity to Qayadism of Partition.”
The message of Jaswant Singh’s book is hardly earth-shattering, and what it says something that has been said earlier, by many other authors and historians—Jinnah was certainly not the only person who was responsible for the partition of India. There were many currents—British post-imperial strategic interests, role of Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhai Patel many of the other political players of the time. Also, we must remember that often a sequence of events generates its own momentum such that even those who believe that they are shaping events are left as bystanders.
By censoring the book, the Gujarat government virtually granted it huge national sales—over 40,000 copies sold and more going by the day. The Constitution of India guarantees freedom of speech but places “reasonable restrictions”, “in the interests of the sovereignty and integrity of India or public order or morality.” This provision was grossly misused by the Gujarat government, and thus the order banning the book was struck down by the Gujarat High Court.
India has often been quick off the mark in banning books. It was the second country in the world (after Singapore) to ban Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. In 1989, I wrote about how I found it difficult and tedious to read the book, and after the talk some people walked up to me and said they too could not finish the tome.
It is extremely worrying that we are losing our tolerance to debate. Holding a dissenting opinion is taken as a revolt, and attacked vociferously. I have always been attracted by the philosophical triad: thesis—antithesis—synthesis, often attributed to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, though he credited Immanuel Kant, by favourite German philosopher.
We Indians, along with the Greeks, share a rich tradition of literary and philosophical dialogue as the very foundation of enriching and distilling knowledge. Today we have become ignorant to discourse, a very worrying state of affairs indeed.
The Rotarians stood out because of their eagerness to expose themselves to various points of view, and the questions they asked showed interest and inquisitiveness.
As a journalist, I have often been the person through whose eyes people see event. This time, the role was reversed and I am posting a report on the event by Rotary Open Hand magazine. I really don’t know if what I said warranted them saying: “It was a very interesting and enlightening talk put very aptly, which only a seasoned and knowledgeable journalist could handle and that too with such finesse.”
On a personal note, I have known from others for a long time that my friend Mukul Khanna’s father had a prominent role in the club. Perusing the club history, I found that he the late KJ Khosla, then member of Rotary Club of Patiala, was the Governor’s Special Representative, who helped organise the club during its inception. Yesterday, Mukul’s mother called me to say that she had found out that I spoke well at the club. While I am thankful for the complements that I had received, this call was really special!

Nanak Bani: Interpreted in Free Verse
By Harjeet Singh Gill.
Publication Bureau, Punjabi University, Patiala. Volumes I and II.
Pages 1,251. Rs 650 each.

GURU Nanak’s bani is his living legacy, the very core of the religion he founded. Even as we admire Guru Nanak for eschewing the complicated forms of language and embracing not only the common people but also their idiom, we marvel at the sheer poetry of his expression that transports those who read it or listen to it on transcendental level.

Over the years, there have been a number of serious attempts to translate the bani of the Gurus. The early work was done by Ernest Trumpp (1828-85), which raised a lot of hackles, whereas M. A. MacAuliffe (1842-1913) got a positive response from the Sikhs.

Dr Gopal Singh (1917-1990) wrote the first translation of the complete Guru Granth Sahib into English in the 1960s. Another translation by Manmohan Singh, which was published by the SGPC, followed soon. A decade later, Prof Gurbachan Singh Talib brought out a translation under the aegis of Punjabi University, Patiala.

Many people would be excited to know that now Prof Harjeet Singh Gill has applied himself to the task, especially in reference to Guru Nanak’s bani. A distinguished linguist and former professor and chairman, Centre of Linguistics and English, School of Languages, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi, now he is Professor Emeritus at JNU, and has spent the last few years in Patiala.

In the two-volume book on bani, Gill uses the free verse to communicate Guru Nanak’s message. The following is a quotation from Raag Wadhans, Chhant:

The dirt of dirty deeds cannot be washed away

With ritual baths, with superficial ceremonies,

The only true bath is the bath of truth

When the heart vibrates with truth

When the devotee lives in truth

There is purity, there is perception

What Gill writes is clear and lucid and his interpretation of Guru Nanak’s bani introduces modern English-speaking audience to the Guru’s compositions. It marks a welcome break from the ornate compositions written in flowery language that have traditionally been used to translate gurbani. Gill conveys the Guru’s message with simplicity and fluidity and it would, perhaps, be too much to expect this translation to capture the glorious transcendence of gurbani, more so, since he is a scholar of language, not of divinity.

While most of Guru Nanak’s bani used common language, as opposed to the formal Sanskrit, at the same time his vocabulary comprised words from various local dialects and languages, which were used to express complex thoughts and concepts. It is thus imperative to get the meaning of the traditional interpretation, understand it, internalise it and then render it to another language.

Gill’s credentials as a linguist are tremendous. In fact, he is among the tallest scholars in the field internationally. At the same time he is candid in admitting that he has relied on his understanding of the Guru’s bani, rather than traditional research. Sometimes the seeming familiarity leads one astray, thinking of the word ahren as a hammer, rather than as anvil, a common mistake that is also repeated in the book.

Gill himself is acutely conscious of his limitations, and this is obvious from his preface where he says: “Being conscious of the fact that even the best interpretation/translation is only an approximation … I crave for the Guru’s indulgence, and above all, for his forgiveness, for the Guru alone can articulate his discourse in its multiple aspects of formal and conceptual constitutions … . In any case, no interpretation/translation can ever replace the sacred Guru Bani or the Guru Shabad with its cosmological reverberations in rhythm and resonance … .”

Gill’s earlier work, Baba Nanak, a revised edition of which has been brought out now, won him high praise for the free verse rendering of the life and times of Guru Nanak. Darshan Singh Maini and W. H. McLeod both liked it and indeed, it is a very interesting form, well carried out. Here he captures the essence of Guru Nanak’s life as well as his bani.

The covers of the three books take one back to his Phulkari from Bathinda, a classic he published while on the faculty at Punjabi University, Patiala, the same institution that has published these books. After exploring the world, he has returned to his roots, geographically, intellectually, and dare we say spiritually too. And we Punjabis are richer because of it.

This review of Prof H S Gill’s book by Roopinder Singh was published in The Tribune on September 6, 2006.

From Website

During an evening walk, a strange emptiness compelled me to look towards my right, behind the wall covered with a green hedge—nothing. A battered almirah jutted out from a demolished house, once home to one of the architects who built Chandigarh.
Urmila Eulie Chowdhury was an extraordinary phenomenon—a pioneering architect, teacher and designer who contributed so much to the making of Chandigarh, right from planning the bricks and mortars to laying the foundation of cultural activities along with her friends Champa Mangat Rai and N.C. Thakur. She also established Alliance Françoise de Chandigarh in 1983. The dapper author, N. Iqbal Singh, was a neighbour and a frequent companion.
“Why I hate Children,” came by mail soon after I joined The Tribune. It was a witty, perceptive article and before long Eulie was a regular contributor to the Saturday Plus supplement. She wrote a well-informed piece about Male Cooks of Chandigarh, and once admiringly about a woman who could “drink any man under the table”. The lady did protest too much, but when Eulie retorted that she had much more to say, and the tirade became a simper.
What a woman Eulie was! Petite, fiery and totally cosmopolitan. She was born in Shahjehanpur in UP in 1923 where her uncle worked in the railways; got her Cambridge School Certificate from Kobe, Japan; studied architecture and music in Sydney, and got a diploma in Ceramics from Englewood, New Jersey, USA. That her father was in the diplomatic service explains the globe trotting.
I had just returned from New York, and was familiar with Englewood. In time we became friends, and I would walk down to her house to meet her.
Eulie had come to India in 1951 to work with Le Corbusier. Her husband, Jugal Kishore Chowdhary, was a consulting architect with the Punjab Government.  Eulie would narrate many anecdotes about the time when the city was taking shape and of Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanerette, Jane Drew and Piloo Modi with his dogs.

A photograph of Eulie published in The Tribune on July 29, 1990

From Website

Eulie was awarded a gold medal by the President for design of low-cost furniture in 1954. A 1996  article by Sumit Kaur, who is now Chief Architect, Chandigarh, says: “All the furniture in the buildings of the Capitol complex and the Panjab University’s Gandhi Bhavan, library building and the Guest House had been designed by her,” says the article.

The International Archive of Women in Architecture says she was the first woman to qualify as an architect in Asia. Eulie was Chief Architect Chandigarh (1971-76); Punjab (1976-81); and Harayana (1970-71).  She was Principal of the Delhi School of Architecture and Planning (1963 to 1965). The main block of the Polytechnic for Women and the Hostel Block for the Home Science College were designed by her.

She contributed Sinners and Winners, a column in The Tribune that pointed out mistakes that had crept in the paper. She also wrote for a variety of architectural journals. Till the very end, she was active, and cause-driven. She joined hands with Mac Sarin in advocating euthanasia.
Eulie, who died on September 20, 1995 , entertained with poise and grace. She would greet her guests as they walked over the black concrete floor that always had a mirror-like finish. What a home it was—witness to history in the making, soaring intellectual discussions, petty party squabbles and delicious gossip. It was also a living example of Corbusier’s design. Seeing this lovely home reduced to rubble left me with a heavy heart—I found it difficult to come to terms with what the home of one of those who built Chandigarh had been reduced to.

A photograph of Eulie published in The Tribune on October 12, 1996

From Website

A slightly shorter version of this article by Roopinder Singh was published as a “middle” in The Tribune on September 1, 2009