OUT OF SYLLABUS

For a period of time I was posted as a trainer at the Sardar Vallabh Bhai Patel National Police Academy, Hyderabad, the premier national institution, training the fresh inductees to the Indian Police Service. The duration of Academy training is one year during which the trainee officers are exposed to various outdoor skills and initiated in a wide range of indoor subjects. As in any other training institution, a syllabus is defined along which the instruction in indoor subjects is imparted. Considering the period of training, a vast range of indoor subjects and the limited allocation of time to each subject, a lot of topics that are a part of syllabus remain un-covered. So at the end of my  allocated hours, a young officer in one of the batches came up to me and enquired if I had completed the syllabus and then went even further wanting to know what if a question in his final examination came from ‘out of syllabus’!

According to the Oxford Dictionary, syllabus is an outline of a subject that is included in a course of study. The word syllabus derives from Latin sittybas "parchment label, table of contents", which first occurred in a 15th-century print of Cicero's letters to Atticus.  The syllabus ensures that there is a minimal confusion on policies, expectations of material to be learned, behavior in the training sessions and effort on learner's behalf to be put into the training, and providing a roadmap of course organization and direction.

We all have a fixed way of thinking, willing, or feeling, acquired through previous repetition of a mental experience.  As behaviors are repeated in a consistent context, there is an incremental increase in the link between the context and the action. Habit is the most powerful force in the cosmos Therefore, the young officer’s response to a classroom situation was conditioned by his past experience, to look at the syllabus, or to the end of the course exams or to anything out of syllabus. So when I told him that given the time constraint, I won’t be able to run through the entire syllabus and that I wouldn’t vouch for any questions coming out of the syllabus as well, the young officer froze as if a major disaster was imminent. When a pattern of behavior, not a regular or routine one or in sync with a predetermined mindset is seen or displayed, the reaction could be from ridiculous to shocking to unbelievable.

DDLJ was released on October 19, 1995. 1000 weeks and about two decades later, the film is still fresh in our collective memory. Raj and Simran became cult characters and so did their iconic romance. But have you ever wondered what DDLJ would be without few things that helped to accentuate the love story? Could DDLJ get what it did without few of the most memorable set pieces?

A joyous wedding song so energetically performed by Sharukh Khan and Mandira Bedi, where even Farida Jalal breaks into dance, is suddenly interrupted by the appearance of an un-approving and dominating Amrish Puri. A deathly hush descends upon the festivities. The viewers were ready for explosive fire-works to follow. But what a turnaround when Babuji himself breaks in to a song and dance... Ai meri zohra jabeen…! Again in the climax while audience would have expected the train to steam past with the strict father Amrish Puri with his glaring eyes emitting fire. Still firmly holding Kajol’s hand, the heart of a stone cold father melts, and he let go Simran to join Raj on the moving train delivering his popular lines, ‘ja Simran ja, Ji le apni zindagi’ (Go Simran. Live your life.).  

This takes me to ‘The Guide” the famous novel of RK Narayan, (which was so beautifully made in to a block-buster film starring Dev Anand and Waheeda Rahaman). Marco doesn't approve of Rosie's passion for dancing. Rosie, encouraged by Raju guide, decides to follow her dreams breaking away from the stifling domesticity. While Marco devotes himself to the discovery of the cave, Raju takes Rosie out when she wants to see a male cobra:

‘She stretched her arm slightly and swayed it in imitation of the movement; she swayed her whole body to the rhythm-for just a second, but that was sufficient to tell me what she was, the greatest dancer of the century.’

Raju learns about Rosie's background as a daughter of a prostitute and how Rosie has achieved respectability as the wife of Marco. She had to give up her passion for dancing since it was unacceptable and was clearly out of syllabus for Marco. 

‘I took Rosie all over the place, showed her the town hall tower-showed her ‘Sarayu’ and we sat on the sands and munched a large packet of salted nuts. She behaved like a baby- excited, thrilled, appreciative of everything. I took her through the Suburban Stores and told her to buy anything she liked. This was probably the first time that she was seeing the world. She was in ecstasies.’

It is perhaps at this stage of the narrative that director Vijay Anand conceived of a song for Rosie’s celebrating her ecstasy at breaching narrow confines of the syllabus: Aaj phir jeene ki tamanna hai/Aaj phir marne ka irada hai.  Does one start living or dying only after transcending the limits of a life syllabus prescribed or imposed externally?

Bade Bhaisahab is one of the most loved stories of Munshi Prem Chand. It is a light-hearted tale overflowing with humour and laced with the traditional axiom that a man is qualified to command respect, sermonize and pontificate just because he is older to you; again a stereotype of an expected behavior of an elder brother for the young sibling.  Of the two brothers, the elder one amongst them is a serious person. He is so committed to studying hard that he does not approve the playfulness of his younger brother. He is all the time worried that the younger one is not studying enough to do well and sermonizing to him constantly. But what happens when something out of the ordinary occurs? And Prem Chand captures this moment so beautifully:

Bhai Sahab embraced me and said: ‘I wouldn’t have stopped you from flying kites. I, too long to fly them. But I’m helpless. If I were myself to tread the wrong path, how would I stop you? Duty weighs upon my head’.

By chance just at that very moment a kite came floating over our heads. The end of its string was dangling just above us. A group of boys was chasing it. Bhai Sahab is tall. He jumped and caught hold of the loose end of the kite-string. Then he flew off towards the hostel. I ran behind him…. ‘ 

Ending of the story explodes the inflated balloon of the elder brother’s pretensions and assumptions. In fact Bhai Sahab’s sprint with the kite might also signify his own liberation from the ghosts that haunt him and thus emerging ‘out of syllabus’!  

Life in all its hues and shades must have a degree of regularity. But changing the expected to something unexpected could be so free spirited, so out of syllabus yet so endearing.