(Written by Ganesh-ji with his elephantine pen on commentary by Pushpen Sarkar from Caculo Mall)
[However, any member, finding resemblance of the characters with some of our real members, may guess anything at his/her own risk and will – Kalam’chi (a Member).]
Lord Curzon, Akbar (not the emperor but the footballer of maidan of Kolkata), Khana(of Khanar Bachan fame) and Ritwik Ghatak are discussing in a shopping mall food court over cups of fuming cappuccino. Their timelines are overlapped to make them meet. Their topic of discussion was how to teach Esperanto to Hindi speaking people.
Khana is the wise person among them who spent her lifetime in teaching. She had in-depth knowledge of teaching methods and students’ adaptability. And she was very dear to her intended goal – that once such learning is over, the students should be able to read the Signboards in the new language and can also do some conversation. She had some primers of Esperanto in her library. ‘You see, the main difference of teaching Esperanto from teaching other common Devanagari-script language is that here students have to learn the letters first, then learn to write the letters and then words and small sentences. These will be pre-requisites when we teach them some sentences of day to day use.’ She looked solemn and sought for reciprocity.
Akbar was brother of maidan legend Habib. He was famous for roaming in opponent’s penalty box all the time (hardly doing toiling for collecting the ball) and wait for the ball to come to him when he will do its last mile travel to goal and get recorded himself as the goal scorer. In Khana’s line, he sensed a lot of useless mid-field play. Why the ball will remain in centerline for so long? When it will come to opponent’s box and I will score ? Other than this game of Esperanto, I have also other games where I wish my name as the scorer. So Akbar, in pursuance to his play style, came down to the centerline to hijack the initiative from Khana. Madam, the gallery is not wanting to see your midfield artistry. You jettison your idea of first teaching the script. Go straight to teach few everyday sentences. Go for the goal. They will rut it and clap you.
Ritwik Ghatak was honing his non-conformist scimitar. Now he took that out from the scabbard and jumped in the arena. ‘ If students are only to rote an Esperanto word or sentence against its Hindi equivalent, he will misquote. If he does not get a written back up for the rotted lines. For example, when to mean ‘today is very hot’ in Esperanto, he may say the equivalent of ‘I am feeling cold’. Because, during his learning/rotting, these two sentences came one after other and he missed their order in memory.
Lord Curzon has his expertise in colonial bullying which he can pass it as administration. He raised his fingers to tweak his trade-mark moustache but found that he had shaved them off already, long ago. Under plan B to prop up his image, he spewed an air of despise about the people around and the futilities of their deliberations, winged out his hands to silence others to give his oracle and roared as an quintessentially East India Company administrator “ How about giving out an Advertisement in newspaper? What is the deadline for completion? What are financial requirements ?
(At this point, Pushpen Sarkar left in anger, cribbing that he was given only 2 bottles of coca cola to blurt out such a long commentary. He quipped that those two bottles can run up till this time only).