Showing posts with label blidness. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blidness. Show all posts

The Teacher's Story, by Gita Mehta


Gita Mehta at the Wikipedia




Gita Mehta, The Teacher’s Story, by Elisa Sola

 

Gita Mehta, biography

 

Gita Mehta is an Indian writer and documentary filmmaker. She was born in Delhi in 1943 into a well-known Odia family. She’s alive, and she’s 79 years old.

Odia people are native to the Indian state of Odisha, which is located in Eastern of India, and they have their own language, Odia, which is one of the classical languages of India. India is an independent republic since 1950, and Odisha, formerly Orissa, became independent into the republic of India on April 1936.

Gita’s father, Biju Patnaik, was an Indian independence activist and a Chief Minister in post-independence Odisha, and her brother, Naveen Patnaik, is the Chief Minister of Odisha since 2000. In 2019 Gita Mehta was nominated for one of the highest civilian awards in the field of literature and education, the Padma Shri, but she declined, because the general elections were coming and she didn’t want to harm her brother.

She was educated in India and in the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom. In her professional career, she has produced and/or directed 14 television documentaries for UK, European and US networks. During the years 1970–1971 she was a television war correspondent for the US television network NBC.

She is the widow of Sonny Mehta, former head of the Alfred A. Knopf publishing house, whom she married in 1965. She has one son, Aditya Singh Mehta. Her books have been translated into 21 languages and been on the bestseller lists in Europe, the US and India. Her fiction and non-fiction writings focus exclusively on India - its culture and history - and on the Western perception of it. Her works reflect the insight gained through her journalistic and political background.

She has published 5 works: Karma Cola in 1979, a non-fiction book about India and its mysticism; Raj, her first novel, in 1989, which is and colourful historical story that follows the progression of a young woman born into Indian nobility under the British Raj. In this novel, she mixes history and fiction. The next work is A River Sutra, published in 1993, a collection of short stories, including our story, “The Teacher’s Story”. Her latest work was Snakes and Ladders: Glimpses of Modern India, in 2006, which is a collection of essays about India since Independence.

Mehta divides her time between New York City, London and New Delhi.

 

The Teacher’s Story

 

Gita Mehta is an Indian writer that she has written about Indian culture and society. In this short story, the author shows us how the life in India is. We know the paanwallah, the paan leaves, betel leaves, the samosa, the paisa, the Quawwali singers of Nizamuddin, the tanpura, the raga, the street hawkers, the goats and shepherds in the marble mausoleum of the Victoria Memorial…

The Teacher’s Story is one of the six stories that make up the novel A River Sutra. These stories are: “The Monk’s Story", “The Teacher’s Story”, “The Executive’s Story”, “The Courtesan’s Story”, “The Musician’s Story” and “The Minstrel’s Story”.  Every main character of the novel represents a particular community.

These six stories are presented by a nameless narrator who is in dialogue with his close friend Tariq Mia. In this novel, Gita Mehta uses not only one narrator, but sub-narrators. For instance, in the Monk’s Story the narrator is the nameless narrator, but in The Teacher’s Story the narrator is Tariq Mia, an old Muslim Mullah who is the best friend of that narrator. Therefore, the story is told from third person point of view and makes the narration omniscient. The technique of the novel is similar to the epic Mahabharata because these narrators aren’t involved in the novel as a character. However, they know omnisciently everything that happens, because they have been told or witnessed.

The kind of narration, very simple on the surface level, with flat characters, seeks to give moral lessons to the people, and it roots with the ancient Indian tradition of story-telling. In ancient times' story telling was a skill, and Gita Mehta wants to tell a traditional story with its moral message.

The main character of The Teacher’s Story is Master Mohan, a very sensitive person who sees broken his dream to become a famous singer when he was child because of his tuberculosis. Due to that, he became a teacher’s music like his father, who couldn’t see his dream come true. However, Master Mohan, despite not having fulfilled his dream and being blamed for it by his wife and children, is not a bitter man and continues to look for a way to live with his goal. On this path, he meets Imrat, a blind and poor boy with a great ability to sing: good voice and good hearing, and they both immediately make a bond.

Master Mohan teaches little Imrat to turn him into what he couldn’t be: a splendid singer, and they both form a family, the sweet family that they don’t have, because they both are orphans in some way (Master Mohan is rejected by his family and the boy is abandoned by his sister because she can’t raise him).

In the end, the boy achieves fame in the form of a record contract, but his voice is so pure that he is murdered out of envy, in an act of much cruelty that has a moral explanation: “such voice is not human. What will happen to music if this is the standard by which God judges us?”

If I had to compare this little story with a piece of music, I would do it with de Ravel Bolero, because it rises in tone to the final ecstasy: the pure voice of Imrat who can’t survive in this world of evil and is silenced with a sword.

QUESTIONS

Talk about the characters

-Master Mohan

-His wife

-His father

-His children

-Mohammed-sahib

-The paanwallah

-Imrat

-Imrat’s sister

What are the Quawwali singers of Nizamuddin?

Why did Mohan keep Imrat?

Can you tell us about the attacks from Mohan’s wife and children against Imrat?

What do you know about the taboo against eating pork? What other taboos you know that are strange for us?

What do you think about children’s cruelty? Is it something biological, or something that they learn from society, family, school?

Try to make a description of the Victoria Memorial Park in Calcutta.

What’s the Ochterlony’s Needle?

Who was Amir Rumi?

What kind of song did the boy sing? I mean, what was the topic of the songs?

Tell us adjectives for Imrat voice.

What is Tansen’s tamarind tree?

When did the miracle of an offer for a recording contract happen?

Don’t you think there is a contradiction singing for God and at the same time singing for a recording contract?

In your opinion, what happened to Imrat at the end? How do you know?

 

VOCABULARY

paanwallah, paan, betel, sahib, yoked, taunts, paisa, muffling, drilling, relishing, struts, tablas, sheikh, prodded, welling, pimp, puffed up, clumsiness, greed, drone, tanpura, raga, hawkers, samosa, pandering