Typing Lessons Exercises
Lesson-2
This summer the global academes has
celebrates, with much flourish, the 150th birth anniversary of Sigmund Freud,
one of the four eponymous individuals who have defined the dominant world image
in our times-the others being Darwin, Marx and Einstein. It is surprising
therefore that the huge mass of writings published on the occasion, by some of
the best known academics and Freud scholars, has turned out to be a tame
affair, perhaps aspects of Freud's worldview have become so much a part of our
life that his capacity to shock has now declined. perhaps the academics and the
universities so thoroughly dominate the intellectual domain in the west that
debates on the Freudian heritage have mostly centered on the gradual exit of psychoanalysis
from medical schools, its triumphant entry into literary theory and cultural
studies, and its new love affair with film studies and popular culture.
Certainly I have not sin many serious efforts this summer to grapple with the
larger global significance of psychoanalysis and its fate outside North and
West Europe.
Those who try to deploy Freud's
thought and method to map human subjectivities outside the west are likely to
have other reasons for finding the Summer's fare insipid. Looking back on the
last 50 years, perhaps the most significant new contribution of applied psychoanalysis
has been towards our under understanding of human violence. When Freud's Interpretation
of Dreads heralded the beginning of the age of Homo Psychological, it was the
theory of psychosexuality that provoked most controversy. In the post-World War
Era, the focus has shifted to violence. In the African and Asian colonies, this
change took place much earlier.
In India, despite the fond
belief of many, the theory of psychosexuality has never aroused the anxiety
that it did in fin-de-siècle Vienna or Edwardians England. Not even when
psychoanalysis first came to India in the 1910s, Puritanism was not unknown to
India, but its main bastion was the urban middle class. Even there, say, some
of the Tantric categories and may left-handed religious practices and thought.
Indian in diaspora, perennially
waiting to be shocked by the irreverence of psychoanalysis, will be very hurt
that, in India, the first generation of applied psychoanalysts did not consider
very many things sacred enough to be outside the purview of their discipline.
Their readers were not offended by their audacity either. In the 1930s as
published the first psychoanalytic essay on Tagore, already India's national
poet and deified as a timeless genius. No-body was embarrassed, not even Tagore
himself.
Lesson-3
Indeed, Carl Jung never found the same
degree of acceptance among Indian psychologists and psychiatrists as Freud did.
Jung had great admiration for Indian thought and there were convergences
between his thought and aspects of Indian philosophy. He also visited India and
was associated with the establishment of two university departments of psychology
in India. But serious intellectuals in India were not collecting testimonials
for their culture; they were searching for new baselines for social criticism
in a society were they and their children would have to live.
India is not an exception. In Africa,
outside the psychiatric clinic, the major impact of Freud has been on studies
of colonialism. The sensitivities of AimedCreasier, Franz Fanon, Octavio Maroni
and Albert Mammy all francophone African scholars and none of them an academic
were deeply tinged with psychoalytic thought. Even when they differed from each
other, as Fanon and Maroni did, they shared common categories and imageries, As
if psychoanalysis was their language of self-expression and conversation.
Why? After all, Freud has been
appropriated rather thoroughly, some would say-by the dominant global culture
of knowledge. Is there another Freud less digestible, less easy to fit in with
the regnant ideas if rationality, individuality and dissent? Is there in
psychoanalysis, beneath the pragmatism of its therapeutics, a persistent
negation of the global regime of truth and thus, an invitation to non-western
intellectuals who have lost their language of self-articulation?
Contrary to appearances, Freud was
not a fully assimilated Ashkenazi; he carried within him the traditions of an
East European Jew. He was a child of the Enlightenment all right, but a defiant
step-child. In a well-known remark on his cultural self, the unrepentant
atheist described himself as 'an author who is ignorant of the language of holy
writ, who is completely estranged from the religion of his fathers as well as
every other religion and who cannot take a share feels that he is in his essential
nature a Jew and who has no desire to alter that nature.' Freud always remained
bit of an outsider in the modern world.
Time, familiarity and changing social
mores have taken the bite out of many once-provocative ideas of Fraud. But what
has not dated in his intellectual vision, which grapples with contemporary
evil, without being contaminated by its language of hatred and without endorsing ideologies
of violence promising to undo the evil. Even in the west, perhaps the greatest
gift of psychoanalysis during the last 50 years has been its insights into the
dispassionate, bureaucratized, machine violence in which our times have specialized.
The 210 million who died in organized mass violence in the twentieth century
have best owed on Freud a new lease of life.
Lesson-4
Rapidly falling educational standards in
India have added to the sorrows of the nation. Passing even the highest
examinations even with a good second division is no guarantee that the
successful candidate knows anything of the subjects which he had offered. The
army of literate illiterates is alarmingly increasing from year to year. In the
past people talked of the educated unemployed. Now the problem is of the
'educated' unemployables. These young men hold the highest degrees and are yet
unable to read or write correctly, or even tolerably correctly, even ten
sentences. What a shocking state of affairs.
This tragedy is the result of the
neglect of language teaching in our schools and colleges. Today a very large
number of language teachers are themselves unable to read or write correctly
the language which they are supposed to teach. This is, indeed, intolerable.
What is the remedy? One suggestion
which deserves public as well as official attention is the opening of language
schools offering concentrated courses in such schools about eighty percent of
the teaching of English and of the mother tongue. Only about twenty percent of
the teaching and the school work should be connected with the other subjects of
the students' choice. If there are six periods of teaching every day, only
about eight or nine periods a week should be given exclusively to a through
grounding in English and in the mother tongue.
In these language schools there should
be no text books of language. Helpful and careful training should be given for
at least four periods a day, preferably a little more, in translation,
paragraph writing, essay writing, letter writing and correspondence, making of
summaries or précis, doing unseen passages, framing of sentences, correcting of
sentences and other exercises in composition. Training indication will be a
very important item and every student will have to be carefully trained to
write correctly to dictation. Let us never forget even for a moment that this
is an age of written administration. Our administration is already on the brink
of disaster because of inept and incompetent men who do not know how to do
writing work. We must tighten our standards in writing and reduce to the
minimum loose ends in writing work. Very large numbers of highly trained and
devoted language teachers will be needed to man and equip these language
schools.
Every student who either wishes to
take up service or to join university or degree classes should be kept at such
schools for one to years training before taking up a job or joining degree
classes. Type-writing and stenography, drafting, preparation of reports should
also be taught to most, if not to all, students in these language schools. Thus
and thus alone will the fall in educational standards be checked and all round
improvement effected in our education, as in future most, if not all, Indian
writers will have been trained in these language schools. Incidentallywhich today
is suffering from a lot of muddled writing. Language teaching is the keynote
not only to the teaching of language and literature, but to the teaching of all
subjects of arts and science. In these schools students should not only learn
to write correctly but also to speak correctly. Proper accent, correct
pronunciation, the culture of the voice for purposes of clear utterance and
enunciation should be taught. This done, we can man our services properly and
also send to the universities really promising material (from our language
schools) for undergoing the higher courses of learning.
Lesson-5
In India alone the money in banks would
run, on a rough and ready estimate, into more than several million cores. Let
us give our attention to the services rendered by the banks. Money is safer in
the banks than in unprotected houses. Banks create and encourage the habit of
saving and thoughtful spending among the people. Fixed deposits earn a rising
scale of interest according to the length of the period for which the money is
kept in the bank. A good bank balance means economic security. Bank are of
great benefit to governments and to national life. Bank help very greatly in
capital information. In addition to private deposits there is a vast sum of
money of firms companies, of great industrialists and of the government,
deposited in the banks.
How are the banks able to make money
and to pay their depositors? Suppose a certain house of business has ten lakhs
of rupees in a certain bank. Suddenly this house of business receives a
consignment of goods needing an immediate payment of fourteen lakhs of rupees.
These goods are almost sure to be sold out to comparatively small businessmen
within twenty days for seventeen lakhs of rupees. The bank will advance to the
house of business four lakhs of rupees in addition to the ten lakhs which the
house of business has to its credit in the bank. Within twenty days or so
rupees seventeen lakhs will be earned as the price of the goods bringing a
profit of three lakhs. Out of these, let us say, the bank will charge first of
all the four lakhs of its own money which it has advanced to the house of
business. And it may charge in addition, say, sixty to seventy thousand rupees
for the short-term loan of four lakhs to the house of business which will in
its turn earn a profit of two lakhs and thirty to forty thousand. That is how
the banks keep the wheels of business going with profits to themselves, to
their shareholders and depositors, and with huge profits to the houses of
business.
But banks need some sort of centralized
control. In our country this control is exercised by the Reserve Bank of India.
There is a growing demand in the country for greater public control of the
banks. Often the big and powerful shareholders of a bank use the bank use the
bank for making unfair gains. If this could be stopped or curtailad, the
government and the nation would stand to gain considerably. That is why the
government of India took over fourteen major banks under its control.
All government of public moony is
deposited in the banks and only a part of it remains in the government
treasury. The monthly salaries of public servants, of the police and the army,
and various other six-monthly or annual payments made by the government involve
hundreds of crones of rupees. Banks are the best repositories and channels for
this purpose. The State Bank of India with its hundreds of branches is seen to
be humming with life and subdued animation every working day of the week. But
on the first of every month which is the pay day, this life and animation are
at the peak. Banks have sometimes their branches in every country of the world.
High-class training in the banking is given by competent institutions. The
world Bank is the biggest banking organization in the world. All trade and
commerce are able to maintain their speed and efficiency through the numerous
banking establishments functioning all over the world.
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