Snippets From Pygmalion

Pygmalion is an all-time favorite book, and so is its author. I love Shaw's humour, and I happened to have some snippets and quotes from the book that I had written down when I read it.

Eliza, a cockney flower girl, goes to Prof. Higgins to learn phonetics. I became a fan of Shaw, his plays, and I absolutely love this one.I felt happy rediscovering that document, and hence I present to you my collection!

“The difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she’s treated.”

“The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls: in short, behaving as if you were in Heaven, where there are no thirdclass carriages, and one soul is as good as another.”

"Simply phonetics. The science of speech. That's my profession; also my hobby. Happy is the man who can make a living by his hobby! You can spot an Irishman or a Yorkshireman by his brogue. I can place any man within six miles. I can place him within two miles in London. Sometimes within two streets."

"What is life but a series of inspired follies? The difficulty is to find them to do. Never lose a chance: it doesn't come every day. I shall make a duchess of this draggletailed guttersnipe."

Here's a excerpt of a conversation that I had put up in my review:

WHISKERS : Maestro, Maestro (he embraces Higgins and kisses him on both cheeks). You remember me?
HIGGINS: No I don’t. Who the devil are you?
WHISKERS: I am your pupil: your first pupil, your best and greatest pupil. I am little Nepommuck, the marvellous boy. I have made your name famous throughout Europe. You teach me phonetic. You cannot forget ME.
HIGGINS: Why don’t you shave?
NEPOMMUCK: I have not your imposing appearance, your chin, your brow. Nobody notices me when I shave. Now I am famous: they call me Hairy Faced Dick.
HIGGINS: And what are you doing here among all the swells?
NEOPOMMUCK: I am interpreter. I speak 32 languages. I am indispensable at these international parties. You are great cockney specialist: you place a man anywhere in London the moment he opens his mouth. I place any man in Europe.
(a footman hurries down the grand staircase and comes to Nepommuck).
FOOTMAN: You are wanted upstairs. Her excellency cannot understand the Greek gentleman.
NEPOMMUCK: Thank you, yes, immediately.
(the footman goes and is lost in the crowd)
NEPOMMUCK: (to Higgins) This Greek diplomatist pretends he cannot speak nor understand English. He cannot deceive me. He is the son of a Clerkenwell watchmaker. He speaks English so villainously that he dare not utter a word of it without betraying his origin. I help him to pretend; but I make him pay through the nose. I make them all pay. Ha Ha! (he hurries upstairs).

Pygmalion is a book that talks about a wide range of things from language and art of phonetics to behaviour and how women ought to be treated, all in the style of classic Shaw humour. It is a brilliant play that is a must-read! 

Slow Shift: From Paperback to E-books

Credits: art by Mom

The physical presence of the book in our hand, the scent of the time-tested old copy wafting to our senses as we caress the worn out jacket with so many creases, which seems like the copy wants a crease for every fond reader who read it, the tinted print paper with words crafted in Garamond, an old-school appeal of the paperback and hard-bound: we all love it. 

Or, for some of them, a fresh, crisp copy- with no scribbles, no creases, no bent pages, the fresh scent of new print where the ink can still be smelt, a copy that's theirs and only theirs- is something to be loved, adored, and cherished. 

Nothing can replace it. Agreed. Yet, we have to slowly shift to the world where we buy more e-books than physical copies. Why? Here are three good reasons.

1. Save paper. The more you are willing to buy, the more they are willing to print. And, tens of thousands of people buy it, and they print tens of thousands of more copies. And, that's a whole lot of paper, there. The world is inching towards less and less resources every single day, and you can do your bit to reduce such wastage. When you think from this angle, even the most ardent fan of physical copies tend to pause and think for a moment. Do that: pause, and think a bit.

2. You never have to give away your books. You'll have them with you, and you don't have to think about a space for them. It's definitely more efficient in terms of how you can manage your books! No more do you have to worry and bother about your books not fitting within you air baggage allowance, voila!

3. Notes, Highlights, Quotes- the three best features of e-books. You can save all of them in a manner that you just need to do a key-word search to get them out in a jiffy. This can be really useful to those of us who write regularly. Vaguely remember a quote from The Little Prince on life? You'll have it ready. This is such a beautiful thing, and I really enjoy looking through these highlights and notes of the e-books I read. Amazon Kindle is great, and it neatly arranges the highlights and notes under a tab for each book. I also really like how Google Play Books creates a drive folder, and makes all the highlights and notes in a document, with each book having a different document. Such arrangement is a huge repository of wonderful, ready insights and key-points when you need them!

We are all human, and we all love to flaunt. If you sit in the class reading an Anthony Powell, it is sure to attract eyes and amp up your social image, while reading the same as an e-book won't really bring that much attention. We all love that attention, even if we aren't reading the book because of the attention. Even otherwise, we love to collect, display what we read, have a wall full of books, and all that- but times change, and the need of the world changes, and we must change, too. 

Buy from a sale of old-stock of books, but try avoiding a fresh copy. If your grand-dad has a great library, that's wonderful! Keep it. But, try to shift slowly into more e-books when you plan to buy something anyway. The supply will go down if the demand does, and that's definitely in your hands. If you still want a physical copy of something, get it, but don't make it a habit. 

I have started reading more through e-books now, and I have actually grown a liking to it. Take your time, shift slowly, but shift- because it definitely helps!

Bleak House

Image from Britannica

Title: Bleak House

Author: Charles Dickens

I had started reading Bleak House long before, but gave up when it was too heavy for me to handle. But, after a semester of classes on Law and Equity in my law school a year back, I picked it up again a few months back and read it through. And, I enjoyed every dig, every syllable that Dickens had to say about the Chancery and its court of Equity.

There was always a problem about law not delivering justice in time. Sayings such as ‘justice delayed is justice denied’ is popular and known to all of us. Dickens captures the essence of it throughout his book. 

“The good ships Law and Equity, those teak-built, copper-bottomed, iron-fastened, brazen-faced, and not by any means fast-sailing clippers are laid up in ordinary.”

“Over all the legal neighbourhood there hangs, like some great veil of rust or gigantic cobweb, the idleness and pensiveness of the long vacation.”

If the whole narrative of Bleak House has to be simply put, we just need one of the most preliminary paragraphs of the novel to get on point with the theme and the storyline. It is also one of the most pleasurable and enjoyable descriptions I have come across. 

“Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least, but it has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes without coming to a total disagreement as to all the premises. Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it. Scores of persons have deliriously found themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce without knowing how or why; whole families have inherited legendary hatreds with the suit.”

It is a common fact of basic knowledge to all those who have Equity as a subject that the first and the most important principle on which the whole concept of Equity is founded is that- “Equity will not suffer a wrong to be without a remedy.” Want to know the truth of Dickens’ times? Here’s an extract that’ll clearly give you the answer.

“This is the Court of Chancery, which has its decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire, which has its worn-out lunatic in every madhouse and its dead in every churchyard, which has its ruined suitor with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress borrowing and begging through the round of every man's acquaintance, which gives to monied might the means abundantly of wearying out the right, which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope, so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart, that there is not an honourable man among its practitioners who would not give—who does not often give—the warning, "Suffer any wrong that can be done you rather than come here!"”

Bleak House is an absolute pleasure to read. With Dickens, it is never just about the story, but the nuances of his narrative plays a very important role. Bleak house is a must read for all, and most definitely all law students. And, here’s a good suggestion from a fellow-reader: do some homework on equity before you get to Bleak House, I’m sure the fun will be doubled!