Just overheard a mercantile marine instructor disenchanted with teaching.
Those boys even learn the solutions of mathematical problems by heart, and textual ones down to a comma at the exact place as given by their instructors. Our institution charged 4000 dollars for a course. That's expensive by local standards. Before there was hardly anyone to volunteer as instructors because the compensation was so low, and they had to forcibly assign us by turns.
Now the students are not respectful. They must have been thinking that they have bought us because of the high fees. In fact they are going for a certificate without which they can't get a mercantile job. They don't really care if they learn their trade or not. For now people are much concerned with bad effects for example, to the environment. If your ship spills some toxic substance in US waters you'll be in hell. Now we have to learn a lot of things we were never aware of in the past.
Well I tried teaching them to look for knowledge on the Web, but they aren't interested. I tried changing the wording of problems in exams, so as to test their knowledge. Then they report it to the higher authorities complaining that I gave problems that had not been taught in the class. Now I'm going back to the sea.
When I was having some talk about new technologies in data analysis with a few young academics and not so young friends, it came up to mention Mr. Maung Hmine the doyen of Myanmar poetry.
We must pay great tribute to the master(s) for being so successful in obliterating things of beauty that could have been effortlessly handed down generation to generation, just with our oral tradition and zero cost. But, were they insensitive to the notion of love for one's legacy? Or, were they been callously selective?
No one in that small group has ever heard of this Bagyi Hmine's expression of solidarity with the students:
O ye students
Thou hast learnt hta-sin-do
O'er and o'er, loud and clear.
Hath bestowed
Thy undaunted fervor.
Take me, thy saya
On the crest of thy list, fellas!
I was doubly surprised because in that group was a recent retiree from public service who is a FB fan, a prolific speaker on agrarian issues, and son of a well known patriotic writer.
I imagine that rote learning and oral tradition would involve the same basic mental process of our brains. But the role of learning by rote in our education system and the memorizing of tri-pitakas (the three sets of Buddhist canons) or parts of them for recital or chanting in our religious life are vastly different and so also are their significances.
Another dimension of oral tradition has to do with our cultural life. Learning and relishing a few stanzas from your favorite poet is an individual experience. "A thing of beauty is a joy forever: Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness ...". You may sing or recite and missed a note or missed a word, but it doesn't matter. You could have a recording on your smart phone or a file on the tablet. But that's different.
But I've seen and heard a sa-pyaw-saya or sa-haw-saya reciting some epics or classic story on an upper part of the covered steps to the Shwe-set-taw pagoda. He wasn't old or young and looked sturdy and healthy. A small audience was on the steps too. I am not sure if he had a long hair and wore a top knot. But he was wearing a turban loosely and his body swaying a little from side to side rhythmically as he recited. He had a tinge of accent of these parts of central Myanmar. That was around 1965 and I was with a one-year internship arrangement based in the neighboring district of Magway.
My return visit to Shwe-set-taw was in May 2005.
It was just the time the festival season for Shwe-set-taw had been closed after the Thagyan or water festival. On the pagoda platform I saw just two vendors. It was a familiar sight. One was selling books, calendars, and posters of the pagoda, and the other was a display of herbal medicine and curious objects that are supposed to bring you good luck. These kinds of vendors and these kinds of things they sell must have been here, unchanged, for a long time. The only flight of steps by which you approach the pagoda platform at the top of the hill and exit from it was empty. It was off season, but I doubt that any younger breed of sar-haw-sayas would have worked on these steps any more. Now that even the most unlikely places in Myanmar have been invaded by Korean, Bollywood and Hollywood movies and Chinese non-stop actions, I very much suspect that this rare form of folk-art has died out.
Not long ago I've heard that a group of young people has been going around and telling stories. They have been doing this perhaps to rejuvenate our oral tradition, or soothing the little minds of the children of today, or just trying to pay back to society and redeem what they had lost in their own childhoods. Good work my young friends!
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