01. The physical being in which this writer’s mind is installed

02. Plagiarism

03. A master plagiariser

04. Back to CF

05. Another man, another experience

The physical being in which this writer’s mind is installed

I am a human being with all human cravings. All human limitations of the flesh are there in me. Moreover I am not of a saintly disposition. Moral turpitudes are there in me. Sexual cravings have been there in me. So, there is no way that I can aim to be great. My lifestyle is something that cannot be recommended as exemplary.

I have trained many persons to speak good English. Many persons simply became good in English by just living with me for some time. At times, I may not speak in English to them, but would make them understand the great difference that English can bring in them.

Some of them have gained a lot of information on English classics, English fairy tales, English children’s books (mainly Enid Blyton), English nursery rhymes etc. Many of them have learnt to sing modern American songs through the endeavours of Varuna and Ashwina. I am not good in them, and I must admit that many of those songs, I was not able to understand the words initially. However, during the training programme, the words would be transcribed and the trainees taught to sing them. I also get to understand them. Thus now, I can understand a lot of them.

I do not claim to be able to speak in British or American accent. However, I do not think that it is a great failing in me. For, I have seen many persons who know no English, speaking in that accent after a very brief exposure to English ambience. However, they do not know the real depth of English, and their speech is devoid of grammatical correctness.

Now, when training others in English systems, I have to refrain from promoting myself as a guru. For, there is nothing of the guru in me. For me to don the robe of a saint would be the heights of rascality. I train the trainees to address me with my name with a Mr. prefixed. I insist on the Mr. For, the social climate is Malayalam all round. If my students go around mentioning my mere name, the natural tendency among others would be to use the lower indicant words.

Actually I have had the experience of persons standing near me and speaking loudly ‘’Ona ethu?’ ‘Is this him?’ (Lowest indicant for Him). They want me to hear it. For, it is known that the negative effect multiplies if it can be made to be heard.

If I do not insist on my students to address me by name and Mr. prefixed, quite fast I would become a Saar or a Mash, both suffixed on to my name. However, that would create a social climate not much different from the Malayalam-English version already available here. I have a deep infatuation with pristine English. It is possible that my affection for English systems is way beyond an average Englishman’s love for English and England. For, I stand on another shore and have seen the tremendous difference English has, and makes. This information is not there in an average Englishman.

If I am a Saar or a Mash, it can lend me powerful ‘respect’ among the local individuals. This is a great thing in Indian social system. And it is the powerful ingredient of a great man’s individuality in India. Even Gandhi without his Ji or his Mahatma prefix can look quite weak. Actually persons who had dared to mention the term Mr. Gandhi have had the experience of being the target of physical attacks, by his followers. (Some of these attacks have taken place in the very presence of Gandhi). For they clearly perceive the denuding of the greatness of their leader by this simple sly strategy.

Now there is something that I do promote. I simply tell my wards to learn from, or to imitate the, British (English systems). I tell them that such an endeavour will improve them and their society, tremendously. May be there are other languages and connected systems that can do the same. However, I do not know about them.

So this book is about improving a person, a social system, a nation and many other nations by the simple method of imitating English systems in their most unadulterated form. Yet, though seemingly a very easy to do suggestion, it remains as one of the most difficult to achieve objectives. In the whole of India, I have not found one person who has the mental capacity or dedication to do it. For, every one of them is daunted by the fact that such an aim shall end up in denuding themselves of social ‘respect’. For, the route to this accomplishment is through the removal of ‘respect’ and ‘pejoratives’ from the communication code. If this has to be done effectively, it should commence with themselves moving out of the sphere of ‘respect’ and ‘respectability’. A very, very dangerous proposition! For, without ‘respect’ in feudal languages, one is literally abominable dirt.

Even in areas where such pristine form of English is performed or acted out perfunctorily, the lower staff like the security men, the cleaners etc. have to be necessarily kept apart. For, to allow them to arrive at this level of equality that is there in England can really make a senior man stink.

Even the colonial English could not dare to do it, in its fullness. For, even though they stood removed from the claws of feudal language comprehension, they could feel its negative aspects. They could try it out only to a limited extent.

However, an ‘Indian’ cannot have that attribute. He or she will stand deeply affected by each and every indicant word change that is said, mentioned or alluded to, by others. When inflicted by a negative indicant code, their features would dry up, their facial demeanour would wrinkle and all their rights to dignity would simply stand stamped out. Only a mad ‘Indian’ would try to improve an ‘Indian’.

Yet, from somewhere beyond the realm of the beginning of my life, some spurring had been encoded in me to endure the various facets of this diabolical language codes, to outlive it and to dare to stifle it, if possible. For, the moment I was born, I had a very terrific feeling that there was something quite wrong in Indian language communication codes.

My mental observations were guided by a series of contradictions. I can’t mention everything in detail here, but almost everything in my life stood at extreme opposites. Each and everything could be defined in antonyms.

With regard to the same feature, one could say extremely positive things as well as extremely negative things. Good, bad; beautiful, ugly; right, wrong; left, right; tall, short; learned, unlearned; well-read, not well-read; bookish, adventurous; strong, weak; composed, quarrelsome; extremely communicative, very secretive; outgoing, sleepy; high energy, low energy; able, incompetent; bright, dull; good family background, low quality family background; good quality relatives, low quality relatives; ethical uprightness, moral ineptitude. Well, it may seem that I am just enumerating what many other persons can also claim about themselves. However my claims may go way beyond. I can’t explain more here, for explaining them here may take me to the core sensitive areas of my life. Which I can’t!

To simply give a sample, I can give just one or two examples: There was a time in my life when one side of my face was quite soft and good looking, and the other side quite ugly. I could see the different manner in which persons who viewed me from either side of my face evaluated me and my words in totally different ways.

When I spoke to others with my softer facial side in their view, they took me as gullible. When it was my rougher side that was presented, they took me as tough, and possibly a ruffian.

My face had a strange propensity to become quite fair and then switch to quite dark. I am not sure what triggered this machinery. The way the colour difference affected my looks was quite apparent in the way others evaluated me and reacted to me.

I have observed that when my mind is on fire with deep animosities, the face turned dark or black. At times, the presence of certain persons did make my facial complexion go black.

As to looks, I could switch from extreme good looks to extreme ugliness. Involuntarily.

I cannot give more inputs of this kind. Even though there are others. May be there are many others who have similar physical features or ambivalences.

Another life experience was the viewing of my parents’ life. Even though this did give me a lot of inputs, I can’t go into that here. However, the fact that my father was extremely intelligent, but a person who opted out of government service, and that my mother was a person who rose to be the head of government department with a very strange official name of Inspector General, but much below in official status to a police Inspector General was to give me a lot of contradictory experiences for observation.

Beyond that due to this unique background, I was to be quite aware about the fact that Malabar had been a part of the Madras Presidency (one of the three presidencies of British-India). This was to give me more ideas about the way the British-created-bureaucracy was different from the bureaucracies the later to replaced it.

I used to speak about the diabolic nature of Indian languages from a very early age in my life. However, it took me a long time to arrange my thoughts coherently. When I spoke about this at a young age, it had the effect of a caged bird speaking on the theme of freedom. It only provoked a feeling that it was due to some personal weakness that I was talking thus.

However, wherever I lived I used to strive to spread the idea that English could change the nation and its citizens. Yet, at the earlier years, there was a general impression that my ideas were more or less a frank expression for my infatuation with the British. It was very much identified as an apologetic stance to the White skin. I had not much information on the theme to express my stand that Britain cannot be identified with White skin. For White skin is a huge domain consisting of the whole of Europe and many others in the American continent. English is only a minor percentage of this huge domain. Majority of white folks do not know English.

I should not go into more details here. For, I am digressing heavily from my route.

I remember I used to come to our house in a Malabar village, where I have rarely lived, during some holiday seasons. I was young, yet quite well-read in English. However, when the working class persons were inside the compound I used to climb up some tree and look down upon them. At that time, I really couldn’t understand what spurred me to climb trees and not to come down. Many years later I did read about some man who climbed up a tree and refused to come down. I think he was reported as having some mental problem for seeming to avoid social contact.

Now, that statement makes me look backwards. Was I trying to avoid social contact at that time? Well, the answer is that at that time I did not purposefully avoid social contact. Yet, there was something that made me desire to be above the social links of the working class people who were in the compound. The underlying reasons came clear to me only when I had worked on my book: CODES of REALITY! WHAT is LANGUAGE?

The workers were linked to the higher sections of the society by indicant word links which were directed upwards. And the upper sections of the society were linked to them by indicant word links which were directed downwards. The workers on their part formed a web of persons who were all placed in a lower plane. Now, they themselves were linked to each other with a variety of links, some of which pointed upwards and some downwards. This direction component depended on such things as age, gender, physical prowess etc.

If I were to mingle with them without maintaining some aura of superiority, I would also be placed amongst these links. This would more or less make me placed in a lower plane in the social section. Some of my family members used to work with seeming vengeance to remove any prop of social elevation I could be assigned in the presence of these workers. For, there was something of a false superiority complex that they sensed in me that needed crushing.

Now, to any other youngster of my age in that vicinity these things would not matter much. For, he or she would be used to these things. And there would be wormholes through which a lower placed person could place himself at a higher plane at any appropriate time. This was by alluding to some superior attributes in terms of social contacts and such things.

However, my issue was that I was not used to these placing done by the Malabar language codes, wherein pejorative placing of youngsters was quite common. Somewhere inside my brain software a spontaneous code for escape from this placing was getting triggered. I simply couldn’t get myself placed thus. For, I saw myself as quite well-informed and quite different in mental calibre from the common worker class of an interior village in Malabar in the year 1978.

I do not know why I wrote the last paragraph here. Maybe it would serve some purpose. I am desperately trying to route my writings towards what I want to say. The issue at hand is that the writing is increasingly going to a section that could be too personal, pertaining to personal experiences.

I remember one young boy (I will refer to him as CD) who used to visit me at around that time and also some five years before that year, when I used to visit this remote village. First I met him when he could have been in his high school classes. I used to suggest to him about the greatness of English and the great personal liberation that would dawn upon him if he were to improve his English skills. At that time, English was literally a foreign language in those areas. So remote was the place.

Later when I had come back for a brief visit after a few years after my graduation, he met me and told me that he was studying in a college in Calicut. There was an essay competition in the college and the subject was Terrorism or something near to that. He wanted me to write an essay and help him out. I wrote one and gave it to him. I had stressed on the ambivalent stance of this phenomenon. In that, it can seen as a fight against suppressive regiments, and also as a terror attack on a peaceful social system. It was the perspective that defined the word. He later told me that he had used the points and statements from the article in his essay. He got the first prize in the college. A boy from a remote, no-English village.

I met this man much later when he had completed his PG in English and had joined as a lecturer in the same college (I think). I was quite distressed to see that even though he was a PG holder, his information on English Classics were quite a minimal. He seemed to stress that those things were no longer important.

Later he went to a North Indian university and received his doctorate in English. I was perturbed by the fact that a person whose knowledge in English classics was minimal could get a doctorate in English. Later I was to understand that getting a doctorate in India was as perfunctory as getting a college degree. A person joins the programme and more or less comes out with a doctorate, as assuredly as any other degree.

One day he told a relative of mine that I had not reached anywhere in life. I should say that I took it as an unnecessary negative comment, in that I had no intention of becoming a college lecturer and I had no competition with any college lecturers.

Later he was got a job in a UAE University. I met him at his university premises for I wanted to show the earlier draft of my book, March of the Evil Empires; English versus the feudal languages (at that time only around 32000 words) to some lecturers in his college who were British nationals. It was then that he mentioned his evaluation of the British crowd as having an innate inferiority complex. I have mentioned this earlier.

He was cordial to me, and he quite frankly told me that he had come out of his earlier level of not knowing English. As of now, English was nothing of a great thing for him. English was just an ordinary, sultry knowledge, with no specific grandeur to him.

I gave him the draft which I told him I wanted to give it to some British national lecturer or professor in the college. He assimilated the idea in his head and told me that he first wanted to evaluate the writing before doing that. I gave it to him. For a few days, I went on calling him to know what his evaluation was. For, I was living in UAE and my visa permit would get over fast. He went on telling me that he was reading it. I could sense a distress or irritation in his tone.

One day I called a particular college teacher who was a white US native. He allowed me to meet him. When I reached the college, I was directed to go to another part of the university, which was quite far to walk in the sun. I called the other man (from my native land). He arranged a university car to reach the other place. I gave the writing to the US citizen professor. However, within days that man left the college. So that reached nowhere. I remember his name as Ross.

One day I called CD. He simply seemed to go mad. He literally shouted at me, with these words, ‘What you have written is not Anglophilia, but Anglomania!’ I kept my cool and asked him about his promise to introduce me to one of his native-English colleagues. It was then that he made a very revealing remark: ‘Who do you think you are?’ I do not know which indicant word he really meant for You. The higher one or the lower one. The tone suggested a lower indicant pejorative one. However, the statement was in English.

I more or less left it at that. Around one year later, when I was in my home village (where neither my parents nor I do have much family traditional links), CD visited my house. He was very friendly. I showed him the redrafting that I was working on the book. It was then that he made another remark that was quite significant. He said, ‘These things about feudalism in Indian languages are something about which I am aware of. In fact, I have written about these things last year in our university English academic magazine’.

Plagiarism is something that I have had to deal with many times with regard to my ideas and writings. There was this man who I met in a very remote village, more remote than the one mentioned above. He was also an MA in English with bare information about English classics. I have mentioned him earlier.

Generally I do try to promote everyone by always pointing to their positive qualities and contributions. I refrain from saying, ‘You look weak’. I try to find out where a person has improved or has positive attributes. When I mention that I understand that that person mentally feels a positive input. It can improve his personality. However, when this is done to a person who has a competitive mood, he would use his improvement to torment me or others.

This second man who I should refer to as CF did a help to me. It was a help no doubt, and I mentioned it powerfully as a great help. However in terms of what I had been doing all my life, as a business man in many places, it was actually a miniscule help. Even though at that particular moment in life, I was in a tied up condition.

This CF had a particular propensity which I have seen in many persons with whom I do speak on intellectual terms. Whatever original ideas that I tell him on any particular day, he would come back to me on another day, and repeat the same to me as of his own discovery.

As was my general pose to allow anyone who knows any little bit of English, to speak in English, I spoke to him in English. It was obvious that his English knowledge was of the lower quality kind, with bare vocabulary content.

I gave this man a copy of my draft writings on feudal languages. He was very enthusiastic about the ideas. One day he came and told me that he had been to the English department in Calicut University. He said that he had mentioned the whole idea to a particular doctorate holding personnel there. That man had told him that this was the most original idea that he had ever heard. He told him to do research on this theme. CF looked quite happy about the incident. I then casually asked how he had mentioned about me. He simply told me with no qualms, ‘I did not mention about you. There was no need to mention you. I simply mentioned the idea!’

Propensity for taking others ideas and using it as one’s own is not confined to India. I have felt it being done on my ideas on Codes of Reality in some other websites. However, there is no way that everything that I have contended can be plagiarised. For, my ideas on Codes of Reality are embedded in the language codes. That might make it unique.

A master plagiariser

However, a very famous national leader of India can be described a master plagiariser. For, he literally made it an art and got away with it. I mean none other than Nehru. He sat in a prison in India, where the British kept him, and wrote a lot of contents which later came out in the name of Glimpses of the World History. This book was a very great favourite of mine during my high school days. It literally gave me a very broad idea about world history. [I am not discussing the fantastic ambience of a British-run prison wherein the prisoners can sit and read and write. In India, it would not be termed a prison. Instead it would be called a fabulous holiday resort.]

However, it has to be admitted that it was plagiarism made into an art. What had been copied was the idea and much contents of HG Wells’ The Outline of History. This book is a much grand book. However, any content developer can make a better work of any book. I have seen it done when I was in Delhi, and came across the industry of content development. Nehru made use of many other books also, including Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Any book or group of books can be rewritten in a much better manner. But that is only plagiarism done with refinement. The question of why the publishers of HG Wells’ book did not go after Nehru for plagiarism can be explained as a repulsion to be seen taunting a ‘great’ leader of a ‘great’ people. For someone would definitely come up with the Racism Card.

In this incident, there is another noteworthy illustration embedded inside. It is with regard to the fact that a person undergoing the ‘terrible’ imprisonment in a British prison in India having the time and freedom to spend time in a fantastic library. And the liberty to write such a huge book. Well, one can only say that getting imprisoned in a British-run jail is far better than being free on the Indian roads.

There is a man by name Madani undergoing imprisonment in Indian jails for more than eleven years now. He is a political prisoner and none of the charges against him has been proved in court. Even though his crime is ostensibly terrorism, the actual crime he did could be that he addressed Malayalee Police officers without a Saar. It is definitely a much more terrible crime and usually anyone who does it to even a low level Sub Inspector, would get a very defining punishment within seconds.

I speak thus because I have had my own experience with addressing Kerala bureaucrats with a Ningal and not Saar. They try to make one’s life a hell.

Back to CF

Once when speaking about career possibilities, he mentioned that his wife was a general nurse working in the Middle East. He wanted to send his wife to the US and thus immigrate to the US using her citizenship there. However, there was a problem. He said, ‘She does not like the free sex prevalent in the USA. So she is not willing to go.’

Later, one day he came and told me that now, ‘I have discussed the issues. Now she has no problem with that. She is ready to go to the US’. This last part I added not out any spite, but to focus on the kind of people who now populate the United States of America, which was a nation founded by great thinkers of English nativity.

Another man, another experience

There was another man, a white man of US nationality, but of East European nativity. Name was Scott, I remember. He was an English lecturer in another UAE University. I met in him Abu Dubai very coincidently. I gave him the draft papers of my book. He was quite friendly. However, when I phoned him later after a few days from a very distant location, he seemed quite unfriendly. His first question was: What was an Indian doing such writings about English?

Well, here again there was this issue. When I delivered the draft in his home, I did see some Indian servants there, who moved around in a pose of great subservience. Naturally when they come back to India, they are rich. However, I who did not work in any such levels of subservience was naturally getting money in Indian currency back home. I was then in literal terms poorer than them. However, the East European descended man was frankly distressed by his identification of me with his servants. I cared not to speak to him again. However, my draft writings were with him, with which he was frankly impressed. The year was 1999. I remember him making one very revealing kind of statement. He who must have just arrived in the US a few years back, stated thus: ‘We booted the British!’

Well, these are the kind of people who possibly commented against my writings in the HuffingtonPost.