Watching the national parliamentary sessions, one becomes accustomed to hearing two words most often, usually in tones alternating between boredom and desperation – “shongkhepe bolun” (please make it brief). Even though they are usually drowned out by unstoppable tirades parties throw at each other, they outline a significant national problem – our inability to summarise.
Of course this shortcoming is hardly restricted to the parliament. Whilst describing symptoms to a doctor, recounting stories of films and books, gossip or in unending lectures, we simply cannot speak precisely and concisely. For a nation that prides itself on its practicality, we are strangely wasteful in this regard. So in the whodunit of national shortcomings, who was in the library with a wrench at the wrong time? And, what may have been the motive?
An easy target is our education. Foreign language teachers typically ask at the beginning of a class: “What did we do in the last lesson?” – a question that requires students to recount the activities of a previous session. Apart from jogging one’s memory, this simple exercise helps the student to succinctly summarise the contents of a two-hour class, picking out the most relevant events, choosing the right words and sentences to express them in.
One wonders if in local language courses in schools and colleges, there may be more focus on style than diction and whether that is in effect what prevents us from being able to put these skills to practical use outside the textbooks we summarise in class. Is there perhaps also an innate impracticality and purely hypothetical nature to the texts or the methods taught that makes the exercise more mechanical than truly enlightening?
In conversation, curious Bengalis possess a penchant for scooping out the tiniest details of a situation, as though without them, it would be near impossible to deduce the entirety of the picture. This manner of exchange appears to distinguish itself through its informal nature extrinsic to more formal structures of language use permitted in serious conversations. Local beauty parlours, petrol stations, mosques on Friday, tea stalls, and teachers’ lounges – all prove to be effective environments to observe this in action.
What did the man say when you ran his brand new car over with yours because you were having a bad day and how much money you paid him to fix his bumper in which garage where you met your friend who just got divorced and within a month sold off his house at what price and enrolled his daughter at the same school as your children where the tuition fees has gone through the roof!
The neglecting of years of training in summarising newspaper articles and Nazrul’s poems could thus also simply be a response to satiate this national appetite for details of other people’s lives. How can small talk about the goings on of a serial on Zee Bangla, a thing of everyday insignificance, demand the same dedicated and time consuming art of “putting it concisely” as a paragraph from Tagore for an essay? Is there a distinction then between summarising on paper and doing it verbally?
The most important thing to note is that when you summarise, in a sense you choose. You choose the points that you felt could portray the whole picture in the best possible way. In the act of summarising, inherently, you are held responsible through the enactment of a conscious decision. You become liable for deciding how and with which points. Is it this liability that we are trying to avoid?
There is a pithy expression in Bengali: “Dhori maachh na chhui paani,” reserved for the non-committal, eager to reap benefits without worrying about risks. We appear to exercise it unfailingly in our national lifestyle: Changing political sides at the next election, wanting bridges and flyovers but without having to pay taxes and tolls, writing “unbiased” editorials just short of thought provoking, swinging wildly between left, right, and centre, between TV channels, between Agora, Meenabazar, and Shopno.
This begs the question of whether or not there is a deeper, more disturbing intellectual problem behind the verbal diarrhoea plaguing our lives. Are we confusing being objective with being non-committal? And has our inability to commit extended to our inability to summarise?
