THIS is about a 24-year-old girl who wanted to do a master’s in England with all her heart.

Late in the summer of 2005 she boarded a bus from a town on the edge of Russia, clutching a first-class undergraduate degree, £110 in borrowings, and a handful of English words she had picked up at school. Three days later she arrived in Bournemouth.

Over the next year she got herself a waitressing job and saved pennies. She learnt English.

Last October she visited the Bournemouth University main campus for an open day. Staff there enthusiastically tried to sell her postgraduate enrolments, pointing out the wonderful opportunities BU offered.

She knew which MA she wanted, she told them. But she wouldn’t have the whole course fee — as she was foreign, it was double what a European Union student paid, £8,000 — by February. Could she pay half the fees then and the rest six months later?

Oh yes, she was told. BU was always glad to help.

This meant she had to raise nearly £3,000 in the next four months somehow, but she went home happy. She was going to the university finally.

She renegotiated a deal for her matchbox accommodation. Got herself a tougher but better-paying job. Budgeted brutally. Begged extra shifts and killed herself working in the holidays. Borrowed. She also managed to pass the IELTS.

In December she got an unconditional offer from the university. By mid-January she had the money. She got together her certificates and application and went to enroll — and was told she would need to pay the rest of her fees not six months into the course, but a month later.

Sorry, they said. And now that you mention you don’t have enough money, we are not sure we can offer you this seat. We need to think about it.

She spent four days agonising as they thought. Then she was called for a second interview.

She said she had been assured on two separate occasions — explicitly — that she could pay her second half of the fees after summer. She pointed out the first installment was a fortune to her — enough to buy a small house back home — and she could not afford to lose it, so she would definitely, definitely not run away.

I earn £620 a month, she said, and I live on £300, so I save £320. That and the extra money I earn during the summer holidays will add up. Please don’t withdraw the offer.

Can’t wait six months, they said. But maybe we can treat you as a special case. You pay the first £4,000 now, then make monthly payments towards the other half. You say you save £320? Excellent, if you sign an undertaking to pay that every month till October, and £1,400 in August — you said you would earn more in the holidays, didn’t you, and you might be able to borrow some money? — then we can let you enroll. We don’t normally do this for anyone, mind.

She signed on the dotted line.

That week she put in an application for an international student scholarship. By the time her course started, she got a response: she had been awarded £1,000 in fee-waiver.

That was a big relief. And now that her ‘debt’ was reduced, perhaps they would adjust her monthly payments proportionately? She wrote in with a request: £50 less — £270 per month instead of £320 — would make all the difference to her, she said, and the university would still get its money by October as agreed.

Sorry, they said. Now that your situation has improved, we would like you to finish paying early. The original installment had stretched us well beyond what’s acceptable, so we will stick to it.

Two months have passed, with two touch-and-go payments. In the meantime, her first piece of course work — in a language alien to her just two years ago — was graded a first class and presented to her peers as a model essay. She’s pleased, she said, but very tense when it rains and her shifts are cancelled (she works at a restaurant on the beach) and customers leave miserly tips. What if she doesn’t make enough to cover payment? They were about to send her away once because she didn’t have the full amount.

It’s more worrying now than ever before, she said. When I came here, I didn’t have anything to lose. Now I do.

Sometimes in this era of commercialised education, in this era when a university degree is a product sold over the counter to those willing to pay, we forget how difficult it can be for someone like this girl.

We forget there’s something shylockian about squeezing the last drop of blood out of someone.

Sad.

TWAT.

You will understand why I find this of particular interest when I say it is part of the academic lingo — at least over here in sunny Bournemouth.

TWAT stands for Three Week Assessment Turnaround (elsewhere it also stands for The War Against Terror, but that’s not surprising if you consider who’s behind it). Goodness knows what the powers-be were thinking when they came up with this particular construction and not, say, Assessment Turnaround in Three Weeks, or Three Week Turnaround for Assessments.

Considering many lecturers welcomed the idea very, um, warmly, I look forward to the next staff meeting when the issue is bound to come up. Imagine solemnly sitting among venerable colleagues discussing Important issues, and someone says with a straight face: “Look, this TWAT is not working.”

Oh Lordy.

I ask because my university is in the throes of a titular makeover that involves a variety of deans. Recently we sprinkled holy water on our head of school and told him in no uncertain terms that henceforth he shall be called the dean. We also supplied him with two deputies, by another of those blessed acts.

Now I am told we are about to acquire two more deans, of the associate kind, and I am kind of worried.

Don’t get me wrong. I quite like the idea of deans. I am in excellent shape and can take a few more without breaking into a sweat; besides, there’s a nice academic twang to the title, wouldn’t you agree?

But as something of a semantic simpleton, I find the ‘associate’, ‘deputy’ prefixes confusing, especially when they fall under the same chain of command — as it is about to happen in my school, where the associate dean will report to the deputy dean.

I had always thought ‘associate’ had a near-equal status whereas the deputy was, well, only a deputy. So I looked up the words.

An associate, the dictionary tells me, is a person “united” with another in an act of “enterprise”, or “joined with another or others and having equal or nearly equal status”, or “having partial status or privileges”.

A deputy, on the other hand, is only an agent, a representative, “authorised to act as substitute for another”.

A dean by any name would smell as sweet of course, but there’s something about the surrogate issuing orders to the near-original that makes me want to passionately cry out, O, be some other name!

Actually, the student didn’t say quite that. But if I were to summarise the response I get when I talk about the apostrophe, that’s how I would put it.

In my three years of marking student work, nothing has given me more pain than the apostrophe: my teeth are all gnashed-out now, and I think I am in need of an urgent hair transplant. Good grief, how difficult is it to grasp it’s is a bit different from its? And your and you’re are not really the same?

I digress. It’s not such mundane usages I want to pick on today. What gets my goat more is how the poor ‘postrophe is used to ‘drop’ –- the purpose English printers adopted it for originally -– a certain s in a certain possessive. Let me take you to my classroom…

“Barry Richards’s beard, is that correct?” I say. “Or should it be Barry Richards’ beard?”

“Barry Richards’ beard,” they say confidently. “You don’t need the second s.”

“Actually,” I say, “you do need the second s.”

Which is when my students tell me I am rubbish. Sometimes, seeing me all crestfallen, the sensitive among them offer me an honourable exit.

“It’s up to you,” they say soothingly. “You can keep the s if you want, Chindu — it’s a matter of choice.”

Beg your pardon. It’s not a matter of choice.

THE rule is this. To indicate possession in a singular ending in s, you need an apostrophe and a second s. So it is Barry Richards’s beard and Bronwen Thomas’s beauty.

Think about it this way. If the beard belonged to Jim Pope, we wouldn’t write Jim Pope’ beard, would we? Nor would we think it entirely appropriate to put down Jim Pope’ beauty (not that Jim is lacking in beauty, mind). So I don’t think it is fair to deprive poor Barry and Bronwen their due just because they are richer by an s. Luckily, Lynne Truss agrees with me (Eats, Shoots & Leaves, 2005, page 55). So does the University of Ottawa, the Purdue University Online Writing Lab, and Fowler’s (Fowler’s used to recommend dropping the second s, though I could be mistaken there).

Perhaps it would help if we looked at how the ’s came to indicate possession. English printers first used the apostrophe some time in the 16th century. Its sole purpose then was to show omission of letters, and thus it stayed for a fair few decades, while Shakespeare energetically dreamt up apostrophic dialogue for Hamlet and other worthies.

Till then –- and here I quote The Dreaded Apostrophe — possession in English was shown by adding an es at the end of the word. Thus, if you wanted to write about the beard that belonged to Barry, you wrote Barryes beard.

Came the 17th century. The printers, bored silly with the es business, decided to drop the e. What do you do when you omit a letter? That’s correct, use an apostrophe. And thus came about the Barry’s beard we see today.

Things would have been simpler if they had stopped at that. But no, along the way, someone decided the possessive of plural words ending with an s needed modification. Take, for instance, the word parentses, which was now, apostrophically, parents’s. To write it with the second s, this someone decided, was a bit daft. So today we write parents’ house, not parents’s house.

Now I can’t for the life of me think why they didn’t do the same in the case of singular words as well. Perhaps they didn’t want to work the poor apostrophe too hard. Or they just liked to complicate things. But the fact is, they didn’t, and we are stuck with Thomas’s beauty and parents’ house –- and neither is a matter of choice.

Don’t think that’s it. There are exceptions to this rule as well (as if it wasn’t confusing enough). Jesus, for instance, doesn’t need an extra s. Nor does any name from the ancient world. And if a word ends with an iz sound, then again, no s after the ’postrophe. There’s more, but I will refer you to Truss’s (now this third s, I don’t like at all; doesn’t look nice typographically) excellent Eats, Shoots & Leaves.
 

LET me wind up with a final note. Is it 1920s? Or 1920’s? Most of us would go for the former. Some of us might also say the latter is incorrect -– and it is here I advice caution.

If I am not mistaken, not too long ago, ’s was used to indicate the plural of numbers (and also acronyms, for instance, CD’s, thus). Blame it on the printers again. Possibly this was because the typefaces they worked with weren’t as ‘clean’ as the ones we have now, plus the headlines those days were mostly in capital letters — which was where the apostrophe came in, to stop letters from jumbling together.

Those days are over, luckily. Today, though ’s is used to indicate the plural of lowercase letters (for instance, p’s and q’s not ps and qs), to see it used with numbers or acronyms is unconventional. Unconventional, I say, but still in vogue, especially on the other side of the ocean — the venerable New York Times, for instance, still continues with 1920’s.

Perhaps, in this particular case, it is a matter of choice.

P’rh’ps.

Suddenly the corridors are not empty, the forecourt is not deserted, the library is populated, the cafeterias are open, and my colleagues are back from Spain (and China). There’s talk, activity, excitement. Everywhere.

The main reason for my partiality, though, is the freshers. They simply wash across the campus, their faces open and eager (alas, it’s only a matter of weeks before that innocence sets into the grim expression of the hardened student). I love watching them, in a rather nostalgic way. The period allows me to mingle with students incognito — a task made easy by my youthful looks and innocent face, I would like to believe — with the explicit purpose of eavesdropping. On one occasion I sat down with them and waited for the lecturer — myself. It was great fun, quite insightful. I strongly recommend it to all staff.
CHRISTCHURCH House. First floor.

1st girl: “…and I really don’t know why they said that.”

2nd girl: “They want to keep you quiet, that’s why.”

3rd girl: “But you haven’t even gone to a lecture!”

2nd girl: “I tell you, they want to keep her quiet.”

1st girl: “But–”

2nd girl: “Honey, this is Bournemouth University!”

Much intrigued. Anyone know what that was all about?
IN Waterstone’s, on campus. Girl waving copy of Public Relations Theory: “This one, y’think? She said this one’s good!”

2nd girl: “So take it.”

3rd girl: “They can say what they like, but they ain’t getting me to buy books.”

2nd girl: “Me neither.”
WATERSTONE’S again.

Girl 1: “…and the first thing I will do after I clear my overdraft is get myself a jumper. Not books. A jumper.”

GYM. Noon.

Baggy-Trousered, Tousle-Haired Fresher 1, heading straight for the chest-press machine: “This is the best one. I luvv it!”

B-T T-H F 2: “Yeah?”

B-T T-H F 1: “Yeah! This works your chest. You gotta get some chest, mate — chicks go for chest.”

SEMINAR room. Break-time.

Girl: “…like, one of the guys can’t cook? At all? And he actually came to ask me how to boil an egg? All he can do is pasta and ketchup and he has had it every single day!?”
EAVESDROPPED by my good friend Lakshmi. Third floor, Weymouth House.

Boy: “…nobody has talked to me like that before! She talked to me like an adult! It’s great, I love her!”

Rachel Dungar, take a bow.

CHRISTCHURCH House again. First floor.

Girl 1: “I love my housemates! They are so lovely, we get along so well!”

Girl 2: “One of my housemates is quitting because she says our place isn’t clean.”

Girl 1: “Then she should come to our place. It is a mess! And my housemates are lovely. The guys do the washing up! One day we sat around talking till 7 am and the guys did the washing up!”
GYM. Ground-floor.

Big guy to small guy, peering in at open door: “Let’s see what they’ve got here… Uh-huh, it is the aerobics room!”

Small guy: “Uh, the girlie room. Naff.”

The subject was always the same. Childishly simple, the kind you would expect to write an essay on in school: your hobby. Difference was, you needed to produce a feature article, a piece of creative non-fiction, informative and interesting, capable of carrying the reader through to the last word.

Result? Some very pleasant surprises (also some quite, um, unconventional use of punctuation and grammar, but more on that in another post), to prove, yet again, that there’s nothing called a boring topic. It’s how you tackle it that makes it boring — or not.

Naturally, how you begin is crucial. So here’s a sample of beginnings I found interesting…

Helen Smale’s hobby is not reading, nor dancing, nor singing. It’s mentoring school kids. She begins thus:

I have just helped someone change his life. How? I went back to school.

Crisp. Dramatic. Now I want to know why, and how. She’s got me all right.

Mike Goodeve wrote about driving tests — to be precise, how he routinely fails driving tests. That’s not really what you would call a hobby, but, hey, he got away with it. This is his reworked lead:

I have a hobby, a rather unusual one: I fail driving tests routinely.   

I don’t know how long I will be able to carry on with it. But at the moment, I am giving it all I have got….

Point is, you can pull off darn near anything as a hobby (I remember a piece in Esquire magazine in which the writer decided to bargain for everything he bought, including hotdogs, then wrote this absolutely riveting piece on his haggling experience), provided you peg it up.

Leonie Wilson did something similar:

I have this hobby I love to talk about. In fact, I’ve made talking about it a hobby in itself. This is why I jumped at the opportunity when a stranger contacted me and asked me to talk to her about my experience last summer.

Enough suspense in there to get us reading. More about how she keeps us hooked, and what her hobby is, in the next post. Now for another interesting beginning, clever pegging, from Sophie Pascal, who didn’t think she had a hobby –- till she looked the word up…

This made me wonder what a hobby is. So I looked it up. The Oxford Dictionary describes a hobby as ‘a leisure time activity pursued for pleasure’.   

In that case maybe I have a hobby. It’s not your average sporting hobby, but a highly developed fondness for cats. In my leisure time I enjoy cats and collect cat-related objects for pleasure … this must technically mean my immense love for cats is a hobby.

And now for another, from Katrin Kerber. Katrin’s hobby is video games, quite conventional compared to the ones we have discussed till now. She gets us with a saucy summary sentence:

In the last couple of days I slept with at least four guys, married a girl, stopped a restaurant from going bankrupt, helped a musician get into the charts, and became vice-president of a big company.

Gemma Gilbert works along the same lines. Here’s how she teases us in (lightly edited):

We’ve all done it, many of us more than once. Some of us do it in the bedroom. Some in front of mirrors. Some like to do it in clubs, with their mates watching.

Curious to know what she’s been up to? I was.

What makes these work? They grab my attention, one way or other, through surprise, shock, sheer sauce. You can also get me with information, description, action, conversation… anything really. Fact is, I am available. Up to you, how you hook me.

Short answer: because there’s no escape.

There’s no escape from it the same way there’s no escape from the web. Ten years ago, we didn’t believe the web would tie us all together the way it has done. Today can we imagine life without email (hell, even my technology-challenged father in the heart of rural India threatens me with emails now), without online shopping, without Google?

Not. And that’s how it will be — is — with blogs.

For us blogizens, the blogless are the have-nots, the unprivileged, the underclass. Mere muggles, boring and non-magical. The unenlightened.

But enlightenment isn’t hard to come by. Not with easy-to-read sites on blogging like this around. Before I pass you on to such, let me tell you why I blog.

Because it’s fun. It allows me to engage, experiment in writing, an activity I enjoy. It allows me to practice my craft.

Because it lets me be my own writer, my own editor, my own publisher. I get to decide. I get a voice, and it is all my own.

Because I am in the business of communication and this is communication, up close and personal, one-to-one, one-to-many. It’s a channel open 24/7, easy to use, economical, fast, far-reaching. Open to everyone, me, you, anyone with Internet access, to communicate darned anything — from what it is like when your convoy is attacked in Iraq and how to help communication in big businesses to celebrity gossip from the streets of New York and what it is to have tumour cut out from your brain.

Because I am in the business of education, and blogs can be effective learning and teaching tools. They provide for collaboration, for sharing information not just with students — and students certainly will find them helpful — but with other faculty across the world. Check out these scholars who blog.

Because it puts me in touch with people, contacts, sources. People I would never have met otherwise. It can be the ultimate networking tool, used intelligently.

Because it is a wonderful news source. Not once, not twice, but many, many, many times have I come across information on blogs I would otherwise have missed. Latest instance, this story on why the old media should embrace the new, which I came across on my favourite half-Estonian’s media blog. Fact is, there’s so much happening around us that we possible can’t keep track of everything on our own. Blogs like this, which are nothing but specialised newsletters, do that for us.

Because… oh, never mind. That’s enough reasons. And guess what? My hunch is that every reason I mentioned above applies to you too, especially if you are interested in media, in communication. If you are still sceptical of this online uprising, here’s some stats:

There are at least 10 million blogs already out there. Every day, at a conservative estimate, some 35,000 blogs are created, and the blogosphere doubles itself every five months. You can’t outrun such a phenomenon.

There really is no escape, you see.

PS: Am I talking rubbish? Would love to hear your views. Also, if there’s any particular aspect of blogging you’d like me to blog on, drop me a comment, willya?