The life of the spirit, part two

The little I have learnt about spiritualism in this lifetime is that you must begin by going through the steps listed below:

Accept that pain, loss, failure, sickness, disillusionment, frustration and death are inevitable – for everybody (The Buddha’s First Noble Truth was ‘Life is suffering’. Anyone who claims otherwise is a fool or a charlatan).

Accept that they cannot be ‘cured’, ‘solved’ or avoided by any sane worldly means. The wisest and kindest man can at best show you how to lessen that suffering.

Accept that the more you confuse ‘having fun’ or being ‘successful’ with joy or happiness (in the Sanskrit sense of ananda, bliss, which absolutely insists on a lot of resignation, acceptance, self-control, moderation in all things, tolerance of things you consider ‘bad’ and quietness of mind/spirit/soul), the more desperately you chase wealth/power/social status and fame in the hope that these things will save you from unhappiness, the more frantically you try to lengthen life and therefore fear death above all things, the more unhappy you will become.

Realize that you are much more a mind than a body, even if you do not understand (or refuse to accept) that you are something even higher and less explainable in material terms – a spirit or soul. You feel everything, even pleasure and pain, ultimately with your mind, not any part of your body (when the body-mind connection is turned off, as under anesthesia, you feel no pain even if your hand is amputated!). Being spiritual does not have to be learned from priests, monks and gurus – ask any great sportsman and s/he will tell you that the wonders they achieve is ultimately with their minds; they have only trained their bodies with endless hard work and patience and discipline to do what the mind tells the body to do. Being spiritual is an experience that can come from doing anything you do with love and respect and attention – whether it be cooking or surgery or gardening or mathematics or teaching; it is understanding that the mind appreciates beautiful music or lovely scenery, the gadgets you use to access them hardly matter, the money you have spent on your widescreen TV or home theatre or DSLR camera is a trivial and inconsequential thing, essentially money wasted. Newton did not have an electronic calculator, Michelangelo and Mozart did not have Meta or Gemini at their elbows to help them create immortal masterpieces; Wordsworth needed only an appreciative mind to exult in the beauty of the bank of daffodils.

The Great Masters of Living (E.F. Schumacher’s phrase) both in the east and west were always right – as one of our holy books pithily puts it, trying to achieve satisfaction by indulging your sense pleasures more and more is just as stupid and futile as trying to douse a fire by pouring ghee on it. Human greed knows no limits: give a single man the entire planet, and all he will say is ‘Only one planet?’ Check with Elon Musk. Of course poverty is bad, but cultivation of self-control and learning to be happy as soon as our most basic material needs are satisfied is absolutely essential for everyone to find a modicum of contentment with life and the planet to continue to be liveable for long (everyone needs and deserves a decent roof overhead, no one needs a palace; everyone needs to eat, no one needs to gorge at five star eateries; a bicycle may be a need as a luxury limousine is not; limitless uncontrolled growth in any part of the body is a cancer, and so is the chimera of perpetual economic growth). As soon as the basic needs are satisfied – and to do that one needs to exert one’s fullest efforts to curb the seven deadly sins inside his mind – one must, if one wants to survive with the least possible unhappiness, turn to satisfying more and more the cravings of the spirit, and even to do that, one must consciously and assiduously cultivate (to use Buddhist teaching again, though I have read the very same injunctions in every major religion) the virtues of karuna, maitri, upeksha and mudita: compassion, friendship, equanimity and joy in the joy of others.

Most people, even those who are not poor and sincerely looking for directions to a better life, will throw up their hands in despair already at this point: ‘It’s too much, too different from everything we have been taught, too hard, we just can’t do it!’ See what I meant in the last post about our basic philosophical orientation having gone seriously wrong since at least five hundred years ago? In the middle ages – at least in Europe, and Europe has been teaching the rest of the world everything for many centuries now – they tilted too far in the other direction: religion got a vice like grip on the human mind, and taught that everything about life on this earth was sick and bad and transient, so we should wallow in the muck while we live and wait for all our rewards in ‘heaven’. And then we decided to create ‘heaven on earth’ with war weapons, large industries, advertising, global trade and big government along with democratic and socialistic ideals steadily being turned into laws to make a better world. I shall insist once again at this point that much good has certainly been achieved by such means – I most definitely do not want to go back and live in the world of a thousand years ago in any country. But now we have reached a critical juncture; as a 20^th century philosopher put it, we have a choice only between the Buddha and the Bomb. If we in the mass cannot learn to become at least a little more spiritual, I frankly think we are doomed.

And yet I have hope, if only very slight. It arises when I see and hear about so many people searching and asking questions, even after having a lot of conventional fun and achieving a lot of worldly success, when I see attendance at meditation classes swelling, when I hear of the minimalist movement attracting more and more experimenters in many countries, when I learn about people backpacking and travelling around the world on shoestring budgets and greatly enjoying the experience, when I read about very big businessmen and politicians acknowledging in rare candid moments that things are going badly wrong in every sphere of life, when I see the technocratic approach spawning a hundred new problems as it solves ten old ones, when I meet reasonably happy people much more often among the relatively poor than in my own social class…

Turn inwards. I shall end this part of the continuing series by quoting some of my favourite lines from a very revered Hindu text, Adi Shankaracharya’s Mohmudgar:

Satsangatwe nissangatwam/ nissangatwe niromohatwam/ nirmohatwe nishchalatatwam/ nishchalatatwe jivan mukti.

From associating with good people you learn to be glad with solitude/ from solitude you learn to lose illusions/ from losing illusions you become still* inside/ from stillness comes true freedom.

*A footnote: In early (Hinayana) Buddhism, a spiritually enlightened person was called ‘Thera’, derived from the Sanskrit ‘sthira’, meaning still.

The life of the spirit

In a now already famous remark made not long before he died, Professor Stephen Hawking said he believed the rise of AI would spell the end of ‘civilization as we know it’.

Perhaps that might be indeed how we are doomed to go – in The Time Machine fashion, or in its more ‘updated’ versions, as in the Blade Runner and Matrix series of movies. Or perhaps some vast, benign, globe-girdling nonhuman super intelligence is going to preserve and protect us far into the very dim and distant future, the way many of Bradbury’s and Asimov’s best stories tell us things might turn out. Preserve and protect us ‘for our own good’, as farmers preserve and protect herds of sheep. ‘Civilization as we know it’ destroyed by our own hyper-creative cleverness. Mercifully (very selfishly speaking), I shall not be around to witness that ‘heaven’.

Otherwise… otherwise, from all I have understood about the human mind and human condition from my lifelong study of history, politics, war, economics, environmental science, psychology, literature and religion along with my own experience of ‘real’ life, I believe we can survive and thrive indefinitely, with or without much aid or dread from AI, by our own efforts, but we must change our concerns and priorities far more drastically than most present-day thinkers can imagine.

For too long – at least since the dawn of the European Renaissance – we have thought of changing and improving the outside world. And indeed, with the help of increasingly more powerful technology and organization, we have changed and even ‘improved’ things beyond the wildest dreams of even most kings in pre-Renaissance days. The common man enjoys far more freedoms and rights today and a far higher ‘standard of living’ than were available to all but kings and emperors (even kings and emperors didn’t have anesthesia or twitter) for all of history before the last two hundred years.  And yet, if we call that progress, we simply cannot deny the facts that it is the same idea of progress that has brought in its train imperialism and monstrous colonial exploitation, gigantic world wars, massive permanent unemployment and inequality and poverty amidst plenty, impending environmental catastrophe, and a global pandemic of ‘diseases of the rich’, from obesity to depression to maniacal road rage to perpetual distraction and endless thrill seeking, to mention a small handful of appalling, seemingly unavoidable troubles, or obstacles to human happiness as I prefer to think about them. I believe the root of this conundrum is that our basic philosophical orientation – in the mass, that is – became seriously wrong after the middle ages.

Combined with a deeply settling and widely spreading conviction (which philosophers have long named materialism) that this world of sensual phenomena and things is all there is, and that this one body, one life, is all we have (to be ‘enjoyed’ to the fullest as long as we have it), and increasing conceit that natural resources are infinite, only waiting passively to be exploited, and that ever advancing technology can fix every problem (even those of ageing and loneliness!), humankind became ever more obsessed with the single problem of amassing and consuming ‘wealth’ (again, understood in purely material terms). And as they wished, so it happened, especially since the Industrial Revolution got going – though already 200 years ago a poet was warning ‘ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, where wealth accumulates, and men decay.’ By the mid-20th  century, increasing the annual gross domestic product became the sole real religion, nay mania, of every significant country. On top of material engineering, the vast and ghastly experiments with socialism – the idea that society could be engineered like dead materials so cleverly that poverty and inequality (in Marxist philosophy the sole real problems we have ever faced: absolutely childish incomprehension of that infinitely complex thing called human psychology) could be forever abolished and instantly heaven would be recreated on earth – taught us, at least a few of us, that life was not so simple, and the cost of tampering too much with nature, both that outside and that inside us, was unaffordable. The alarm bells started ringing by the 1970s, with warnings like ‘The Limits to Growth’ and concepts like ‘spaceship earth’ and books like The Affluent Society and Greed is not enough, Globalization and its discontents,  Doughnut Economics and Capital in the 21st century coming to widespread attention, coupled with fear of sudden and total nuclear annihilation.

And yet, how did we respond? Worldwide, we maniacally accelerated the pursuit of economic growth, at the cost of every other major concern, having convinced ourselves that if things were indeed going very badly with the majority everywhere, the one and only panacea lay in even more rapid and relentless growth (hand in hand with cure-all technology). There is no serious search for alternatives, at least among the movers and shakers of the world, for better ways of shaping and facing the future, even now, with a quarter of the 21st century already behind us. Even though there are more fat people around us than hungry ones for the first time in history, more well-off people complaining of frustrated, aimless, boring, empty lives than have ever existed before, more evidence of rapid environmental damage with every passing year, more danger of catastrophic wars again, we cannot begin to think that there are very many things which are very wrong with ourselves that we desperately need to change, and urgently too. This is what I have observed over all my adult life, since the early 1980s.

Not that there aren’t people around who have been telling us what we need to do; they have always been around. By them, I mean the religious people, the people who keep telling us to give greater attention and a bigger role to the spiritual dimension of our lives. And I start immediately by clearing the decks – I deny legitimacy to every religious guru who is trying to aggrandize and enrich himself by peddling soothing or tantalizing mumbo jumbo, every doctrine which ultimately encourages stupidity and fanaticism and goads its followers to start behaving like some sort of Elect, divinely authorized to belittle, hurt and destroy followers of all other belief systems. To avoid much repetition while clarifying my ideas about a healthy spiritual life, I shall draw the reader’s attention to at least two old blogposts, My views on religion: a summary to begin with, and Socialism calling, part two. It would help if you read up those two essays before continuing with this one.

I have been feeling increasingly sick of watching my fellow human beings scrabbling just to ‘make a living’ lifelong, whether they are earning thousands or millions, hurting and cheating one another shamefully in the process, badly damaging and uglifying everything around them (forests turned into shopping malls, oceans turned into vast lifeless dumping grounds for waste), and yet lamenting all the time that they can find neither peace nor happiness. This is not an old man’s plaint: I started feeling like that in my teens, and even those blogposts mentioned above are many years old. A very thoughtful, observant and sensitive ex student in his early twenties recently remarked that while old men have always cribbed about present times, it is a novel phenomenon that many people even of his age are now feeling the same. Nice and clever people cannot find even folks of their own age to have meaningful conversations with, cannot trust that everyone will not let them down or betray them when they are tested. Things are going from bad to worse … that is not an illusion.

So, to turn into more ‘spiritual’, less harmful persons, what do we need to do? Most certainly not what a lot of people are doing right now – celebrating ever more puja-s with ever more gusto, relying more and more on once-supposedly obsolete and silly myths and superstitions and talismans, going more on pilgrimages like tourists, abusing and growing more violent against those of other faiths: all this comes from being actively ir-religious, from being driven by those same deep evil instincts, fear, greed, envy, hatred, malice, the lust for recognition (power and status, however trivial and transient) that drive us (almost everyone from billionaire and dictator to the man in the street), forever insecure and discontented, in the material sphere of life. To be spiritual is to be inwardly directed, and simultaneously to live in a way that is the least burdensome on people and nature all around us. Where the outside world is concerned, we need to become nicer to others – more gentle, more honest, more considerate, more charitable, more friendly as far as possible – that is something we need today far more than law and technology to make the outside world a better place to live in. John Lennon sang a very anti-religious song titled Imagine many years ago. Imagine how wonderful the world would be if most people behaved with one another as I have described above. And the really bad thing is that there are still lots of good but sad and lonely people around, of all ages, but they never get a fair chance to live a good life only because they are being constantly cheated, humiliated, shoved around and left behind by the bad lot. But I insist that even dealing better with the outside world first calls for changing ourselves inside.

Before going any further, a disclaimer. I do NOT consider myself a very spiritually evolved person (certainly not yet) as compared to the true Great Masters down the ages, from the Buddha to Sri Ramakrishna. And yet, I do believe that if most people realized at least the very little I have realized in this lifetime and put that realization into practice, they would certainly be less unhappy, and the world would certainly be a much better place to live in – if not heaven on earth. But to give a better shape to what I understand by a spiritual life, let me break this essay up at this point and beg the reader to wait for part two. It goes without saying that intelligent comments, even in the form of earnest questions, would make it easier for me to write it.

Life-changing movies

I have not written about movies for a long time. It is widely held that some books and movies are life-changing, though in these times, I doubt whether those who make such remarks about any movie or book even understand what that really means, or actually mean it - for more than a day or two - let alone remember their own remarks a couple of years down the line.

I am of course the sort of person who hates the habit of perpetually talking in empty hyperbole (an exclamation like that every sight, every event, every person, every ice cream is 'amazing' makes me want to puke), but some books and movies have been indeed life-changing, or at least deeply thought-provoking, in a very long term, even permanent sense. I shall briefly discuss only two such movies here. Strange to say, I watched both when I was halfway through adulthood, not in teenage, when minds are typically much more impressionable.

One was a subtitled version of the 1950 Japanese classic Rashomon directed by Kurosawa. It shows how incredibly difficult the job of a judge is (and terribly pertinent to all our lives, for aren't we compulsively judging people and being judged all the time, despite Christ's timeless admonition?) One crime has been committed, and there are several eye-witnesses, who, while deposing before the court, insist that all them are telling the unembellished, unvarnished truth (and there is no pressing reason to suppose that anybody is, not at least deliberately and wickedly), yet they tell such very sharply different stories that it is almost entirely impossible for the judge to make up his mind 'beyond all reasonable doubt', which modern jurisprudence insists upon, and pass a serious and definitive sentence: the tension and conflict is resolved in a rather bizarre way, which I shall urge you to find out for yourself.

The other, also a classic now, is the 1957 American work 12 angry men, directed by Sidney Lumet (re-made in colour, 1997: not quite so impressive). It can be, in the opinion of countless people, especially today, when most have never mentally matured beyond 12 and would rather watch mindless action flicks, a very 'boring' movie to watch: 12 jurymen sitting around a table and arguing out for hours a case where their unanimous verdict can send a young, alleged murderer to death row. It starts with 11 of them quickly voting in support of the execution, and almost ends when there is just one man holding out, and one man tenaciously, desperately teasing out the real reason for his almost maniacal recalcitrance - turns out he wants all delinquent kids to suffer and die because his own son cruelly 'betrayed' him and broke his heart. It is a triumph of the power of the will on the one hand, and a deeply disturbing and moving study of the tortuous, passionate, self-deluding, often utterly illogical ways in which human minds actually work. From witch trials to pogroms and genocidal attempts, much can be thoroughly and forever understood if you really absorb the movie into your bones.

What I have taken from these great works is the lesson that I should always be ready to admit - first and foremost to myself - that I may be wrong, I may have done wrong, and that I should therefore be deeply, permanently sorry, meaning that I shall NEVER repeat my mistakes and wrongs. But also an equally valuable lesson: that I need not heed any human's judgment of me too seriously - because much of the time they are venting their own prejudices, trying to rationalise their own failures and weaknesses, covering up their own guilt and shame and inadequacies, and fulminating against someone that is not really me. As the poet said, and those lines are becoming more and more pertinent in my life with every passing year '' 'tis God shall repay/ I am safer so".

The times they are a-changin'

The Trump is back on the throne. The best I can hope for the world is that his second term will be a damp squib, quickly forgotten; only by the time he's gone, the world will be a still more crude, truculent, vulgar place.

I was reading Jim Corbett's classic Man-eaters of Kumaon after ages. I must have read it cover to cover at least four times in my life before. This time round I felt a great difference: I found his writing is mellifluous and moving, his descriptions of nature and wildlife masterly, his love of the India he lived in deep and genuine, but I felt a rising nausea and disquiet about the endless bloodletting, killing animals even as trophies, sometimes, or simply because they got in the way looking for food. I am no one to criticize a giant like Corbett, but I would rather read only My India and Jungle Lore in future visits. Killing and hurting, especially for any reason other than sustaining or saving life, has always upset me violently, but this time round I just couldn't bear it any more. And this was from the best of men that Britain sent to us!

Also from next year, my old promise of gifting myself vanaprastha will begin to come true. I have decided that after a long, long, long innings, I am going to halve my workload from April next year, meaning that instead of seven day work weeks - how many of my ex students have tried and survived that for three months? - I might have two, even three days off. I have done my grihastha work to my own complete satisfaction; I don't need very much money any more, and I neither want to cope with nor enjoy shouldering that kind of monstrous work routine any longer. 

So I guess there will be a lot of big changes around here. I shall reflect on the likely things in a future post. Meanwhile, I shall have to re-imagine my life, keeping pleasantly engaged, doing things I still enjoy doing, maybe being of some real use to some good people still. If some of my readers truly care about me, please know that I shall be glad to have meaningful, doable suggestions.

Ooty and Mudumalai

Shubho Bijoya to all. This one is for those readers who have said again and again that they enjoy my little travelogues. 

Young Abhishek, of the St. Xavier's ICSE 2003 batch, is one of those old boys who have been asking me to visit for years. Having found just the right time which suited both of us, and eager as in every year to avoid Durga pujo, I flew down to Bangalore on Wednesday the 9th. Happily, we now have daily flights from the local airport. Touching down at 4 p.m., I arrived at his house (not far from Marathahalli) a little after 7 - Bangalore's biggest recent claim to fame being its endless traffic jams! His is located in a nice 'society', though, and being at the rear end of the building at some elevation, fairly insulated from the din. Very nice and comfy. My only sense of guilt arose from the fact that he had recently moved in, and had spent three very hectic days sprucing up for me.

Abhishek dragged me off - not unwillingly - to the HAL open air aeroplane museum late the next morning, where we feasted our eyes on a large number of air fairies from yesteryears, training craft, helicopters, fighters, bombers and all. Then we pushed off to the Bangalore Palace, which is a museum-cum-residence for the royal family. The place was beautifully preserved, along with a very large, manicured garden in full bloom, and the audio tour of the many exhibits was a treat, at least for the likes of me. So now I have seen both the famous palaces associated with the Wodeyars. There was a leisurely lunch break in between, so by the time we returned home dusk was settling in. 

The next day could have been harrowing, but Providence was apparently looking out for me, so it turned out to be very enjoyable on the whole. We set off from the city before daybreak to avoid the crowds, and the drive all the way to the edge of Udhagamandalam (everyone still calls it Ooty) was smooth and swift, with much of the way beyond Mysooru (Mysore) being foggy, rain-soaked and cool. The steep climb from Masinagudi, round numerous sharp bends, was thrilling, even for an old Himalaya hand. Ooty itself was picturesque, but the traffic was quite absolutely horrible, so poor Abhishek, who insisted on driving all the way, had a hard time of it (he is self-confessedly a bike man) - ten thousand tourists crowded into a place which can comfortably accommodate a thousand - and a man on foot could actually travel far faster anywhere in the town. Our little hotel was mercifully located outside the town, perched on a hill overlooking Ketti Valley, right alongside a tea garden, and it was all that I could ask for. After a short walk past the tea garden in the drizzle and a quick lunch, we went out sightseeing. We could have done without it. Just driving up to Dodabetta Peak (the highest in the Nilgiris, a little over 8,000 feet) took hours, and so did coming down; the viewpoints themselves were swarming with noisy, jostling merrymakers. We stopped at a tea factory cum museum on the way down, and it was lateish evening by the time we returned to our room. Thanks to the pleasant weather, we were less tired than bored. We took in the peace and quiet for hours on the balcony, chatting away merrily of everything under the sun (or moon!), turning in well past midnight. Not bad for 61, I told myself, up and about from 4 in the morning till 12:30 at night.

On Saturday morning, after a  leisurely breakfast of idli, vada and pongal (one can get very tired of this fare very quickly) we set off for Mudumalai forest along the 'other road'. Abhishek wanted to escape from Ooty well before the 'truly infernal' crowds from Bangalore started pouring in. The drive, despite the occasional jams caused by tourists who line up their cars along the roadside to ogle even at sunflower plots and little strips of pine forest, was a dream. After a lunch of biryani in pouring rain, we arrived at the Mudumalai Wildlife Park Reception Centre, which was a maelstrom of vehicles and people on foot - far more like a typical Indian mela than a forest sanctuary. People had queued up for safari tickets, in buses, for God's sake, not elephant back or even in jeeps! The screeching, squawking, yelling, cackling, quarrelling mob would have been far more suited to a lunatic asylum where all the inmates have suddenly been set free. I was so horrified that if we had not pre-booked rooms, I would have fled back to the city. What on earth are the forest authorities doing? Is this how a sanctuary should be run? Anyway, we were quickly registered and then drove off to the tiny Forest Rest House five kilometres away. There, bliss returned, in the form of absolute silence, deep greenery, a huge white cloud bank hugging a distant hill, herds of chital (swamp deer) and the occasional peacock strolling around the two little buildings, and a perch on a little watch tower right in front of our room. 'Enjoy yourself while there's light, but don't step out after dark', warned the elderly caretaker (who drives his own Maruti Swift!). 'elephants and bears come foraging after dark!' We watched a glorious sunset with fascination before retiring. Mudumalai, which straddles the Moyar River made famous by the hunter Kenneth Anderson, is the Tamil Nadu section of the same forest which passes into Karnataka under the name of Bandipur Tiger Reserve. The evening wore into night, and, chatting and snacking all the while,  we kept peering into the gloom again and again to catch a glimpse of any wild life that might have condescended to visit, knowing that there were tigers prowling in the vicinity, but no show. Nevertheless, it was a night to remember. We turned in early, slept like babes, and left after another late and very filling breakfast on Sunday morning.

The drive back to Bangalore was uneventful and as enjoyable as the outward journey. We skipped lunch, and I drove the entire length of the Mysore-Bangalore highway. Occasional spells of rain alternated with bright, even hot sunshine. We arrived at home shortly after four in the afternoon, an hour sooner than anticipated, because it was an early Sunday afternoon, Abhishek said, and we had opted to take the Ring Road. The rest of the evening was spent in happy and animated conversation with Abhishek's parents, who had made me feel so at home that it was hard to imagine I was visiting them for the very first time. I cannot thank them enough.

Monday, alas, ended on a rather discordant note. I set off at six in the morning to avoid the rush of traffic, and entered my house in Durgapur at six in the evening, thanks to a nine hour long delay at Bangalore airport - an unpleasant first in my flying life. But that glitch could not wipe away the pleasurable memories I had brought back with me. A teacher has to be very lucky to have old boys like Abhishek Das. May he have a long and fulfilling life, and may we be able to go travelling together again. And Shreya, many thanks to you too :)

I have been writing this post in little bits in the midst of classes and another birthday bash last night (this year has passed in the blink of an eye). I shall upload it now for those who have been waiting. For photos, click here.

P.S.: There are stupid, uncouth tourists who litter, stop, honk, and get out of their cars to take photos of elephants. If the foresters don't deal with them as they deserve to be, I hope the elephants will do their job for them. A few monkeys without tails trampled - the overcrowded world will not miss them.

Thoughts on life and peace of mind

I discovered this little gem of advice decades ago in an almirah in Father Gilson's library (I shall never call it by any other name), in the days when I was in charge. The words are not mine, and I don't know whose they are. Doesn't matter: it is the words which are valuable, not the source. They have helped me greatly to navigate through life. I post it here in the hope that they would be of similar use to a few others. Needless to say, comments and queries of a thoughtful nature would be welcome.

I am happy to see that the post titled The worship of the wealthy, written back in 2007, has come back into the most-read list after ages. Based on something written in 1915, it is more relevant than ever in 2024. 

A special thanks to Swarnavo Sinha for his recent comment on my last blogpost, because it has set me wondering, and I am waiting for some clarification.

I recently finished watching the entire  Young Sheldon series on Amazon Prime, and I can declare that I enjoyed it far more than The Big Bang Theory, which is, after all, not much more than slapstick for the most part.

Millionaire in one sense at least!

I started writing this blog in mid-2006, after being prodded by one of my old boys to start writing a diary on the internet (I hadn't heard of weblogs - soon shortened to 'blogs' - before that). As with everything I undertake, I launched on this adventure very seriously determined to continue for a long time. It took years of patient, regular work before the page views counter reached the 100,000 mark, and then it began to accelerate. The last 100,000 has been crossed in barely eight months, and now I am a 'millionaire'. Not an achievement to be proud of, one part of my mind is saying, considering that in the age of Instagram Reels any pouting half-naked bimbo swinging her hips like a crazed monkey gets a million views within weeks, if not days. But, says the other part, is your blog something comparable to that? I take pride in believing that while such 'million-viewed' idiots are watched only by creatures of their own intellectual and aesthetic level, and are as promptly forgotten as they become 'famous', my blog, as I wrote many years ago, draws only people who like to think - deeply, in a sustained and intelligent way, about many really important things in life, who can read and enjoy reading, and who have come to feel that they gain something substantial and of lasting value to themselves by continuing to read what I write. That kind of readership is naturally very small in every land and age, but most especially in India today (I am assuming that the vast majority of my readers are Indians): and given that, a) sticking to the job for eighteen long years and b) reaching the million-page views landmark, taken together, is no mean achievement. Perhaps, at long last, I can start thinking of myself as a writer. And so I shall continue to write as long as I can, and still have non-trivial things to say.

Here in Durgapur, we got the first real taste of the monsoon this year over the last weekend. Thanks to a severe depression somewhere in the Bay, it has been raining almost continuously and middling-heavily since Friday the 13th night, and the sky is overcast even tonight, the air is squally and everything damp and rather smelly all around. If the weather app is to be believed (it shouldn't, judging by recent experience) it should clear up by tomorrow. May it rain some more before the pujo: we have had too little of it.

I had thought of writing about several things, but they escape me tonight. No matter, I'll get back as soon as they come back to me. 

P.S.: For latecomers among my ex students, if you want to write in with a good memory of your days with me as a few already have, click on the link I have pasted permanently on the right-hand sidebar (see web version on your phone), which will take you to the Google form.

Teachers' Day surliness

I kept my phone silent almost throughout yesterday. Otherwise I'd have been driven to distraction by the constant pinging (or whatever they are calling  it these days) - dozens of phone calls and hundreds of 'Happy Teachers' Day' messages - and could neither take classes nor attend to visitors as I do every normal day. I said a curt thank you to all those who posted in various Whatsapp groups of current and ex-students: to the countless individual messages, I did not respond at all, simply because it is beyond me. 

Well, no, not really - there is another reason. Such messages, coming from people who choose to remember you as a ritual on one single day in the year, and that too mostly driven by the herd instinct - 'I am sending a message because so many of my peers are doing it, and I am terrified of being left out' - frankly bore and irritate me. No offence to students - I feel the same about Fathers' Day, Friendship Day, Valentine's Day, Earth Day and all the thousands of other special 'days' around the year. If you have to remember any particular person or event only one day a year because custom and habit dictate it, well, it's worth nothing in my book. There is a tiny number of old boys and girls who remember and care and keep in touch all year round, year after year, and those are the only ones who matter to me. Sorry about the rest. Pause for half a second before you take offence: wouldn't you feel the same about people who get in touch with you dripping love and gratitude only on one particular day of the year? At least if you have been dealing with it for many decades at a stretch? Honestly?

This is the post with which this blog is probably going to cross the one million page views mark. I'll be watching...

Holiday at home

Just back from my daughter's den in Kolkata after a week's holiday - following three months of classes non-stop every day. Simply eating (very well indeed!), chatting, reading and sleeping to my heart's content. Didn't enjoy a stay like this quite as much ever since this one, back in July 2013! Swarnava was there, and gave me grand company: I am getting back an extended sense of true belonging after a very long time. God bless... I was hugely helped by the thought that my most beloved young folks have grown up enough, in every sense, for me to stop (OK, at least lessen) worrying about them.

I read so many books back to back (my daughter's library is growing like mushrooms in the rainy season, and what lovely and eclectic taste she has...). There was one about the (in)famous Pakur murder case of the early 1930s, written like a thriller by an American journalist; another a wonderfully erudite and gripping travel guide around London, a compendium of first-person memoirs about rural English life as it was in the 1920s to 50s, a lightly fictionalized reconstruction of the life of our last Vicereine, Lady Edwina Mountbatten, In Xanadu by William Dalrymple, which is, as literature, more absorbing than Marco Polo's Travels, which he repeated 700 years after the original trip, a speed-reread of Charlie Chaplin's autobiography after more than 30 years, Helgoland, by Carlo Rovelli, a lovely little exposition of quantum theory for the lay reader, and a few others which I can't recall off the top of my head. Pupu has made a large part of my fondest dreams come true.

Such fun conversation too, with all sorts of things to laugh and snort over, such as why, in this age of AI supposedly advancing at breakneck speed, our banks still do not factor some sort of fairly simple algorithm into their PR-systems which might help them stop wasting time calling up customers like me endlessly, offering credit cards and instant loans and suchlike which we have told them hundreds of times we are not interested in.

Whereas the last post has come up to the very top of the most-read list, I am sorry to note that very few new entries have been submitted on that Google form yet. So much for people who claim to have many, diverse, strong and fond memories!

I am toying with the idea of telling stories my way via podcasts like I have always told in class. How many of my readers think that would be a good idea, and would listen enthusiastically? If you do, will you please take two minutes to tell me so?

Independence Day, and a request ... serious readers, please don't ignore

I-Day passed unusually quietly in my immediate neighbourhood, in the sense that the usual blaring, deafening 'patriotic songs' and speeches over loudspeakers that shatter my early morning beauty sleep were missing. Who knows why? I have been flooded by 'Happy Independence Day' messages, which made me wonder: has it become like 'Happy Valentine's Day' or some such inanity? After all, wasn't it supposed to be a day for sober retrospection and introspection, remembering with gratitude and awe all the great women and men who suffered and died so that we might have this enormous privilege? And then we just take it for granted and trivialize it? This was the season of the Great Freedom sale, and ads telling us 'Shop karo azaadi se'. Maybe all countries gradually become like that, but if anyone tries to glorify it or even justify it instead of lamenting over the cultural degeneration it implies, sorry, I am not on the same page.

One very personal kind of good news: the Income Tax department has just discovered that I have now become a senior citizen, and very graciously granted me a sizeable tax refund. This is the first time the government, any government, has done me a personal favour since I read in Jadavpur University at a hugely subsidized price. Since they have even withdrawn the old folks' discount on railway tickets, I guess I must be satisfied with this pittance.

I am reading a book based on the life of a real woman doctor in 15th century China - Lady Tan's Circle of Women - and I am entranced not only to know how much doctors knew in those apparently Dark Ages, and how many lives they saved even in situations where modern doctors would immediately give them up as hopeless cases. And (combined with my great grandpa's book mentioned in the last post) it reconfirms my conviction that someone I knew who grew up into a 'medical entrepreneur' and tycoon, and burnt a remark on my mind that 'a doctor is only as good as the machines at his disposal' is not only an ass, but a greedy, callous, lazy ass, unwittingly insulting countless great stalwarts living and dead in a time-honoured calling. Pity he has become so diminished, but maybe it's just the zeitgeist? Oh, by the way, I would have loved to read some comments on my last post. Readers, cat got your tongue?

Finally, one old boy, Soham Mukhopadhyay, a physicist just finishing his PhD in Vienna, has taken it upon himself to collect good memories about me from old boys and girls who have some such and would like to share. About a dozen of the best people have already written in. I now put the link here, and would love to read more contributions. They will be balm to my soul in the dusk of my life. So please do write. And nobody has to confine a reminiscence to one hundred words!

The world of the doctor

I have just finished reading another of my great grandfather's books - Daktarer Duniya, The World of the Doctor. Here is a link: I hope every interested reader will download it and read it closely. It will amply repay him or her for their time. A million thanks to Swarnava for finding this book.

I have written about my ancestor, Dr. Pashupati Bhattacharyya, before. He was a man of many talents, such as doctors these days can hardly imagine. There is an extract from his book on Rabindranath here. Those who read this book mindfully should also look up two earlier posts, May the GP culture come back and Morality training for doctors? 

One reason that the medical profession has gone to the dogs today is that they themselves are less and less deep and well-rounded human beings any more, much more like technician robots working according to fixed algorithms and protocols, drained by the very nature of their education and the 'demands' of the corporate hospital surroundings in which they work of any real ability to think and feel, leave alone empathize, and naturally unable to deal with patients like living, sentient, thoughtful creatures but only as machines to 'fix' or throw away. Not all doctors I see, not yet, but they are getting there.

Dr. Bhattacharyya was not only a physician but a litterateur (a singer appreciated by Tagore, no less, among other things, too). I am proud that he probably wrote about things that happened even before A. J. Cronin penned Adventures of a Black Bag, tales of a doctor's life in 1930s rural England, which I have admired for ages. I am also wonderstruck to rediscover how very contemporary many of his experiences and observations are, though he trained as a doctor during the early days of the First World War.

One last thing before anybody writes a comment: I am bemused to see that his faith in God actually deepened as his scientific studies and medical experience progressed all through a long life.

I wonder whether such doctors will make a comeback. I would very much like to die in my own bed, at home, in the charge of such a one.

Approaching a million page views...

The Google counter says that the number of page views on this blog has crossed 990,000. Now I am beginning to get a little excited :)

As I often say - and am generally ignored - I'd love to know the names of people who have been regular readers for many years at a stretch. A special bond has been created with them, so I hate to think that they prefer to remain anonymous.

Also, right now I am rather bereft of ideas to write about, and scared of repeating myself - which won't be surprising, given that I am growing old, and have been writing continuously for eighteen years. Not many people can do that, but it is also possible to over-extend oneself. So I would love to have suggestions and requests. 

I have just been editing a recommended booklist that I wrote out two decades ago for the benefit of my pupils, and it struck me that most people - even if they call themselves readers - prefer to limit themselves to the 'latest crazes'. Books are not like cars and mobile phones, they can much better be likened to good wine, which matures with age; and no great book ever becomes out of date: keep that in mind.

I have decided against writing anything about the third Modi government at the Centre. Either I'll say too much or nothing meaningful, and in any case, too many people have talked about it already. Let it keep for personal interactions.

I should especially like to thank Ramit Das for commenting several times on my recent blogposts. It always feels good when old boys get back after ages. I shall be very happy to respond to emails or Whatsapp messages, Ramit. The phone number is 9932849202: it's no secret.

On the other hand, I have been missing folks like Saikat Chakraborty and Nishant Kamath. This is a reminder to both of them!

I shall get back here soon, I hope - or as soon as inspiration strikes. Ciao.

A woman for men!

Thanks to my daughter, I have discovered Ms. Nandini Bhattacharya on the internet - a woman in today's world, today's India, who, without denying that many women are still harassed, oppressed and exploited, speaks up stridently (and factually) for men! I didn't dream of finding someone like that in my lifetime. Here is one of her interviews. As she herself often says, lots of so-called feminists hate her, but she gets a lot of support from people too, and not only from men. More power to her elbow. I shall not comment here, but I wish more and more people would not only take note of her, listen to her, be persuaded by her but help her cause. If some men fought long and hard for women's well-deserved and long-denied rights (to wit Rammohun Roy and Vidyasagar), maybe it was high time that some women started defending (decent) men, especially since some men have been undeservingly getting a lot of bad press and worse for too long now. 

P.S.: Those of my readers who don't understand Bengali well, please do still try to listen to her with attention.

The time I was a movie actor

More than a decade ago I played a bit part in a short movie (based on a short story by Premendra Mitra) directed by one of my old boys. It went on to win a prize at some sort of competition. You can look it up on YouTube, here. It has just been rediscovered by my current class 10 batch :)

The director told me 'Sir, you don't have to act, just behave as you always do in your classroom'. One point of pride is that I was the only actor who needed a single take, though I had had no professional experience before that.

Given more expert editing, the whole thing would have looked better, I'm sure, but I encouraged the team because they were so young, so excited and dedicated to the project.

Watch, enjoy and comment.

Kota Factory

While some of my readers are waiting to read about my perceptions concerning the recently concluded general elections, let me regale them with an article I recently read in my newspaper, written by a professor of English and creative writing at Ashoka University. It laments worriedly about the massive and pervasive ignorance (not to say stupidity, too) that is highly visible among our so-called talented youth today, if by talented we mean those coached by Kota Factory style cram shops to score marks in the 99th percentile in entrance examinations like the CAT and UPSC. Read the article yourself: I shall not repeat the points  made by the author, nor the pathetic examples.

I can confirm from my own lifelong teaching experience that he is entirely right about the facts. I shall only add that a) this ignorance is not confined only to matters historical ('whether Darwin was BC or AD'), and that this ignorance has been growing apace over the last four decades, so that even to an 'average' student from the early 1980s the 'bright' ones today seem like idiots, and c) pride in ignorance and a 'so what? all my friends are like that or worse' attitude has been growing as fast as the ignorance itself.

Only a few things to add, or demur with. The author has mentioned the deep and abiding preoccupation of large parts of our middle class with education. I should say that became a myth a long time ago: what he means is a preoccupation with marks and jobs, salaries and material things they can buy. Respect for the truly educated (vidwan sarvatra pujyate) has all but vanished: most people I know cannot even tell the difference between being educated and having a lot of degrees (a Tagore compared with Abdul Kalam, anyone?) Also, there is an obsession with knowledge of material and technical things (hence the sciences, engineering and medicine), which leaves out virtually every other sphere of the vast world of knowledge untouched. And finally, there is no retention, even with universally 'favourite and respected' subjects like physics and mathematics and biology - it is all to be crammed to pass examinations and forgotten instantly, as I have verified with thousands of my students and ex students. So it is hard indeed to find a 'knowledgeable' man these days who retains most of what he learnt in school, let alone greater things thereafter. I know: I hear about 'teachers' of physics with MSc or MTech degrees who can teach high school kids light and electromagnetism but not sound or general properties of matter, I have encountered an MSc with a first class in biochemistry who was scared to teach a 17-year old biology because 'she had forgotten so much', and so many schoolteachers who are clueless or talk rubbish without Google at their elbows. If they have to Google everything (which their students can do quite as well by themselves) what exactly are they getting paid for?

As for intelligence, critical thinking and creativity (see the last paragraph of the article), these days it makes me laugh when I don't feel like crying. It takes a lot of creativity and intelligence even to make or appreciate a sophisticated joke, and I long ago lost count of 'highly educated' people who can do neither. Oh, they say, but Einstein said 'imagination is more important than knowledge'! Yes, and that was Einstein. Do NOT cite such examples when you yourself have the brains of a defective ten-year old. Besides, there can be no genuine creativity or critical thinking in a vacuum, as the author of that article has rightly pointed out. 'If I have seen a little farther than most others,' said Newton, 'it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants' (meaning learnt from the great minds of ancient Greece). True, many remarkable discoveries and inventions have been made by sheer serendipity, but that is not to be confused with creativity or original intelligence. As any accomplished writer, poet, musician or inventor will tell you, true and valuable creative ideas come mostly to highly trained and knowledgeable (not merely informed-) minds. And Kota Factory style 'education' destroys whatever creativity and originality a child may be born with. As I said before, it is only churning out dwarf robots by the million, good for nothing except (perhaps somewhat glorified-) back office or sales jobs.

P.S.: For the sake of new readers, and those who like to look up old posts, here is a post titled What does it mean to be intelligent that I wrote back in 2011.

Going down the drain

Last week, I travelled all the way to Kolkata and back by train to spend a few days with my daughter. This was after a very long time ... I have been shuttling between Durgapur and Delhi since 2018, and for several years before that, ever since the Volvo bus service started, I had given trains a miss. This time it was re-living an experience that was a round-the-year affair forty years ago, but much has changed since then. I journeyed all the way in air conditioned comfort, which would have been a pipe dream in my youth. The Howrah-Esplanade section of the Metro having become operational (albeit only on a very small scale, with just two rakes running, which is causing an enormous passenger load), I went home from the station in less than an hour, despite all the escalator rides and walking between concourses, for just thirty rupees! It was also pleasant to see that some things haven't changed: both the Coalfield Express and the Agniveena Express follow the same time schedule as they did in 1980, and they serve the same jhaal muri as they did so long ago.

But I didn't start writing this post to talk about train rides. What irritated me no end was the (bad-) manners of some co-passengers, specifically the way they let their little brats misbehave all through, despite the visible and barely concealed discomfiture of many others. These children, well beyond infancy, judging by their volubility, played noisy video games or raucous music on mobile phones, grabbed toys from other, less ill-behaved kids, got up on seats with shoes on and danced on them, literally picked things up from passing snack-vendors' trays, and nagged and screamed for every little thing they wanted right now, from a cold drink to a seat by the window. Their parents (in their thirties) and even in one case grandparents, did nothing beyond cooing and wheedling and occasionally tut-tutting at them, or at best urging them to pipe down in a way which made it obvious that they expected to be ignored, which of course they were. One father (I am ashamed to use this word, being a father myself) loudly told his child not to take a toy from another, offering to buy her an identical toy at once. While what these brats needed was to be immediate cuffed and ordered to apologize in such a way that they would learn a very valuable lesson in civility for the rest of their lives, they were instead being clearly encouraged to grow up to be (well-heeled) chhotolok, rowdies and guttersnipes. And mind you, all these people were clearly part of that section of our society which fiercely insists that they are educated bhodrolok. I, for one, have seen far more bhodro people among our much poorer fellow citizens, who have not enjoyed the dubious advantage of an English-medium education. I wonder how many of my readers can see themselves as in a mirror while they read this, and shamefully admit, at least to themselves, that they have been either brought up like this or have become parents like this. And I was also wondering why some people still pretend to be shocked to hear that a drunken minor driving his father's Porsche without a licence recently killed two bike riders in Pune, and brazenly told the police  that his father knew all about what he was doing! How many innocents will have to pay dearly before our public rises up in a countrywide revolt against the growing cancer of a belief that money can buy up everything, even justice and civilization? Do read the previous post again.

This is the section of our society, too, which most passionately believes that we are very rapidly 'progressing' as a society and nation. God help Bharat that is India, as she fills up with such scum. And if God is really watching, may He quickly bring down the dictates of our time-tested Chanakya-niti upon the worst of us.

Worry... but don't worry too much!

I was deeply interested in, and enthusiastic about, science and technology in my high school and college days. I have observed that the older I grow, the more tired and bored I become about them. 

Oh, there are older people than me who are constantly 'excited' about the constant march of technology - Tim Cook and Bill Gates prominently among them - but that is very easy to understand: they expect, with very good reason, to  benefit greatly, materially from it in the short and medium run. I would probably have pretended to have been the same in their place (and privately admitted that I hated it, as Michael Jackson is alleged to have hated pop music!) Millions of others pretend to do the same, simply because they believe they have no other way to make a living. In the context of my present ruminations, they don't count. What I think about the constant 'progress' of technology I have written in passing in numerous posts, most notably in Technology in a demented age. Read it, slowly and thoughtfully.

It irks and upsets me no end when I read teenagers, asked to describe the world they imagine twenty years from now, writing almost exclusively about how much more spectacular progress technology will have made by then. Then I forgive, telling myself 'They have no idea of anything better, anything greater, anything more desirable. Neither do their parents and teachers, so why blame them?'

I, on the other hand, dream more and more of a world where people would be nicer, kinder, more considerate towards one another, and at the same time (one cannot happen without the other) less materialistic, less grasping, less selfish, less full of insecurity and fear and jealousy and greed and fascination with novelty for novelty's sake. There is no other way to make a better world - of that I am now convinced beyond persuasion. Without that, ever growing wealth and ever advancing technology is bound to make an ever ghastlier, less liveable world. God knows I have known and heard and even met a lot of clever men ... it is for good men that, like old Diogenes, I have been looking for all my life. I am lucky indeed that I have actually met a few.We too easily forget.

In connection with the last three comments on my last post... Subhanjan was saying wistfully how nice it would have been if all my writing could be digitally preserved for wide circulation. I smiled to myself. Most of it is digitally preserved anyway, on this blog, isn't it? And it has already seen nearly a million page views while I am still alive! As for wide dissemination, I don't really care. It's not how many people read, but how much they understand, and appreciate, and remember, and apply in their own lives. Besides, who says you need digital technology for wide dissemination? There was a carpenter's son two thousand years ago who spoke to a mere handful of mostly illiterate peasants and shepherds about making a better world. One or two remembered, and wrote some of his words down. Few other men have had a deeper, wider, greater impact on humankind, and few, once touched, have been able to forget. That's 'influencer' for you.

Tanmoy was feeling sad about pompous, overbearing know-it-alls. Remember, Tanmoy, it has been well said that silence is golden, not chatter. 'Avoid loud and aggressive persons, they are vexatious to the spirit'. And all our wise men down the ages have insisted on 'satsang' - the company of decent folks - as second best only to nihsang ... learning to be quietly, contentedly alone with oneself. 

As for the young man who asked about the future of language in the age of artificial intelligence, I shall reserve comment, beyond pointing out that artificial intelligence is a gross misnomer: there is no 'intelligence' about a computer program that merely bulldozes at eye-watering speed through millions of pages written by human beings, picks up a few phrases here, a few lines there, a memorable paragraph or two, and patches them together into something apparently new and meaningful but actually no better than a very sophisticated version of mindless cut and paste. I don't know about language, but that is anything but literature. No AI will ever write a decent book, because - and every real reader knows this - a book can be born only from deeply felt human experience, and/or deeply visualized human imagination, which only other humans can truly appreciate. 

Neither Google nor travel makes you wise or civilized

I am glad that my 2011 post on Bibhutibhushan's little novel Debjaan has come into the most-read list once more. It deserves multiple readings, if I say so myself. 

It rained very heavily twice this week already, so the weather is blessedly cool right now. As I noticed someone commenting on his Whatsapp status yesterday, it is tragi-comic that people forget about the threat of global warming the moment it rains.

I mentioned global warming and its effects in passing with a bit of scepticism  in my last post. Someone else I know a little berated me for not knowing much about the subject. I'd like to mention just a few things in this context:

1) Most 'educated' people these days obviously cannot recognize any kind of humour except the grossest sort, accessible to middle-school goers: I was writing in a joking mood, meaning tongue in cheek;

2) I had clearly mentioned that I was only talking about how the weather has (or has not) changed in and around Durgapur, where I have spent most of my life, not talking about the whole planet;

3) My critic, who boasted of having travelled far and wide and therefore knowing much better how real the issue of global warming is compared to old stuck-in-the-mud me, and claims to have read all my posts, clearly has no idea not only that I have written again and again about the growing menace of environmental pollution and degradation here on this blog, and indeed I first wrote about it (in connection with the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth 1972 report) in a national newspaper forty plus years ago - several years before this person was even born; also, this person has no idea that people who stay physically stuck in one place all their lives often know far more about the world than those who hop around it all the time ... witness the examples of Bibhutibhushan himself, Premendra Mitra, Tintin's creator Herge and Satyajit Ray's brilliant creation Sidhu Jyatha;

4) I shall go on record with three assertions which I have come to believe over forty years of learning and reflecting about the way this world is going. Firstly, while environmental damage threatening human life itself is a very real and dangerous thing indeed, global warming is only one dimension of it, and it is backed by a lot of poor science and hyped propaganda ... but of course to know that you have to spend thousands of hours reading, understanding, thinking and remembering, besides knowing what genuine science is all about, and 'who has the time for that?' Secondly, too many people screaming themselves hoarse over this issue are either ignorant of their own position or what we call bokodharmik in Bangla - I haven't see too many crusaders giving up on their cars and air conditioners or taking trains or ships instead of flights just to save the environment. Thirdly, I don't even much blame those people - except for their stupidity and rudeness, of course - the world we have made, and grown to be entirely dependent upon, is so complex and essentially pivoted on a few basic things (like near-total reliance on fossil fuels, still, and a hyper-consumerist lifestyle, aspirational if not real) that unless we become determined en masse to change not only our most basic technology very quickly (I don't know whether that is even possible) but our very way of living, all that talk about fighting to save the environment is sure to remain pure time-wasting nonsense - picking up plastic litter by the roadside just to have it all dumped somewhere else! Fight the real fight to have all production of single use, quick-disposal plastic stuff permanently banned - and fight that out on the streets, not as internet warriors.

Anyway, those who are reading the post on Debjaan should know I am not exactly ignorant nor facetious and superficial. So when you write comments, better be sure you know what you are talking about, and whom you are talking to. Otherwise, not commenting is the safest option, really. Also, as I repeat ad nauseam, among civilized people, courtesy as well as gentleness and moderation of discourse is absolutely essential. To me, at least. My life, my blog, my rules. And if I cannot, in my station of life, live by my own rules - within the bounds of the law - whose rules should I live by?

Remember, finally, that Google can at best give you information and guideposts to knowledge, and that too only if you at all know how to search. And it certainly cannot make you wise and civilized. They don't even profess to try!

Summer and old boys

Last year, March was already hot. These days summer is coming early, and the monsoons are setting in late - it rains heavily only from end July. Also, winters are much milder than before. Other than that, I haven't noticed much change in the weather over the last fifty years, no matter how much people all around keep muttering about 'disastrous forms of climate change'. Well, not yet, anyway. It has been blazing since about the second week of April, and now we are heading towards May: every day the celsius climbs to 42-44, and the IMD says this will continue through the next month, but, despite all the talk about heat waves, I can't say I see a very real difference. I mean, when has summer not been horrible hereabouts? We just have to curse and bear it and wait for the rains, as always before. And yes, a lot of people are going to get sunstroke, a few will even die. Not news. As we grow older and more ease-loving, these things irk us more, that's all. I used to wander around town without a care in this kind of heat on a bicycle till I was in my mid-twenties, and I can see the hardier of my little boys still merrily kicking around a football in the nearby park of an afternoon as though they couldn't bother less about the heat. Their numbers have greatly decreased and the number of cotton wool-wrapped, air conditioner-cuddled ninnies has greatly increased - there's the pity. I worry about the health of all those who come to attend classes at three in the afternoon more than they do themselves, though over the last decade they have luxuriated here in cool comfort, whereas I sweltered in the heat along with my hordes of boys and girls for more than twenty five years before that. What surprises me, really, is that the kaalbaishakhi has been playing truant in recent years, and sometimes I hear that there was no snow in north Sikkim and Gulmarg in January, but it  was heavily compensated in mid-March! Also, that sometimes Bankura is becoming hotter than Jaisalmer.

What worries me much more is the fear of power outages growing ever more frequent, and even more than that, the possibility of water famine, of the sort that many parts of the country are already facing - Bangalore, to name the latest city to suffer. And I can't see that remedial measures are being taken along a wide front well within time, long before real disaster strikes. Conservation and reduction of waste must become the name of the game, countrywide, mandated by very strict laws and active governmental involvement, because the 'people' will never do it on their own: they are too ignorant, or too stupid, or too shortsighted, and far more interested in relentlessly increasing consumption levels. People who install more than three air conditioners in a house occupied by just one family must pay a specially heavy tax, for instance; a steeply progressive water tax geared to volume of usage must become mandatory, instead of being filled up to make space for more residential buildings, lakes must be dug and maintained on a very large scale again, and waste water must be recycled everywhere ... that's just four of the twenty essential steps that I can list off the cuff. Imagining the kind of trouble we are going to face if such measures are not undertaken urgently makes me shudder and pity all who are more than twenty years younger than me. And of course, I sigh sadly and fearfully to think that every crisis of this sort could have been greatly ameliorated if not entirely avoided if we hadn't allowed the population to explode over the last 75 years... (see the older post, The population bomb).

Sudipta Sengupta, St. Xavier's Durgapur ICSE 1991 batch, who has been living in Houston, Texas for over 25 years, visited me last evening. It was a good meet-up, and, as with so many others, I was both flattered and delighted to see that he retains so many and such good memories. 'Suvroda taught us to think and to challenge.' Not a bad heartwarmer for an ageing teacher. If you are reading this, Sudipta, thank you, and come again whenever you can, keep in touch, and don't forget to send over those photos of days gone by. Good luck to your son.

[P.S.: there's a new post on the other blog after a long time. Do look. And I am gratified to see that several old and beloved posts, such as Forty five and counting, Growing up in Durgapur, and especially The end of an era, have come back into the most-read list again. Good to see that many readers are taking the trouble to explore old posts. As I keep saying, the best contents are not limited to the home page!]

Edging towards retirement

My new classes have got off to a good start. Once again.

This year, after ages, I have shut off one batch. That's a beginning. As I have been meaning (and threatening) to do over the last few years, I intend gradually to reduce more batches, until by 65 (God willing) I am working only five days a week. After more than forty years non-stop at it, I shall have earned it, surely? Millions of people never work more than five days a week in all their lives, and some of them tell me they are bone weary after earning their living for only five years!

The threat is now beginning to work in earnest. Only minutes ago the mother of a current pupil rang up to say that I absolutely MUST carry on at least until her younger child is through. I have heard this hundreds of times before. So I laughed, trying to mask my irritation. There will be children and children forever ... how long must I continue? how long can I? Who thinks about me? Don't I have a right to retire, like everybody else? And besides, the harsh truth is that within a few years the same people will forget  that I even existed. That is the rule of the world. They will find a substitute, for better or for worse. Who remembers the legendary Father Gilson today, except for a few oddballs like me? Given how 'busy' and distracted people are these days, very few of even my favourite ex students are likely to recall me ten years after I am gone the way my generation and older ones used to recall their old favourite teachers long gone.

Maybe I shall make a rule for the last few years ... that only  kids from families which have sent at least one student earlier to me will be taken in (there are families which have sent me six or seven!), and maybe a few others strictly by lottery while there are still a few vacancies? I should like to see how that works.

I would have liked, in my older years, to have kept in touch with a lot of interested people via the internet, especially through this blog, and maybe through platforms like YouTube. That, I have decided with a sigh, is not to be. It may also be that some old boys and girls, including my daughter, would find me work to do that I can go on doing from home, at my workstation. I have been used to 'work from home' since long, long before that idea came into vogue (it was the norm for aeons before the Industrial Revolution came along, but who cares about history?)

Otherwise, being the kind of private person that I am - many people do not know this - I should prefer to keep my own company and counsel for the most part. That would be vanaprastha enough for me. Only those people should keep visiting who know deep at heart that I am always glad to see them. 

In continuation of something that I wrote in a recent post, our times will probably be remembered as a period when for most people, nothing really happened. What I meant was, I see that events all around us leave so little mark on our memories and psyches that it really seems nothing matters for more than a day or two, maybe a month or two, any more. Even apparently deep, private griefs are forgotten with astonishing, not to say shameful speed. That is the price we are paying for hankering after sensation and spectacle and novelty every waking hour of the day. The more 'exciting' things happen, the more ephemeral they become. 'Humankind cannot bear very much reality', said the poet.

A Rhino's Horn

I read this lovely little book titled A Rhino's Horn, by Farhan Shaikh, a few days ago. A heartwarming story about a little rhinoceros who suffers from great anxiety, self-doubt and humiliation because he lacks the tell-tale sign of machismo - a horn. However, thanks partly to his mother's quiet but unwavering support and greatly through his experience of protecting and caring for a wounded baby deer, he finds confidence, strength of a different sort, and a sense of fulfilment which helps him to forget, or do happily without, what he lacks. 

Living in a world that is dark and depressing for the most part, I found it delightful and redemptive to know that there are young people around, still, who value such things as gentleness, kindness and goodness enough to write about them - and write very well, too.

The text is beautifully illustrated by Asuma Noor.

I cannot pay a richer tribute than to say that the text and illustrations together brought back to mind classics like The Little Prince and Bambi, as well as movies like How to train your dragon.

Amazon says that the book is fit for readers in the 8 to 14 age group. Of course it is, but I found it good reading too, and that, as those who know me will agree, is saying something. If more schoolteachers read such books and learnt to appreciate what they are saying, there would be much less badness in our classrooms.

I am prouder than I can say that my daughter Urbi worked as the editor on this project.

Page views, books and horrible weather

More than 50,000 page views in just three months. Either the Google counter has lost its mind, or something extraordinary is happening.

The old post No women please, I am an MCP, has recently come up to the top of the most-read list. I hope the readers have the intelligence and the sensibility to realize that it was written somewhat tongue in cheek, and would do me the favour of reading the numerous comments that came in. How I miss the deluge of comments that older posts used to fetch. But of course, this is the era of Instagram reels and semi-literate PhD holders and five-second attention spans, so I guess I can hardly expect comments beyond emojis, which I do not accommodate. So be it. I shall continue to write primarily for my own satisfaction. However, a few comments on my recent blogposts from old boys did make me wish that we could have a tete-a-tete. It's been such a long time for most of them.

The horrible summer has descended rather abruptly on us. Late last night, though, we had a very sudden thunderstorm accompanied by torrential rain that lasted slightly more than half an hour, and I am looking forward to more such, as predicted by the Met Office. But they are also threatening us with an imminent heat wave, and the Celsius has already touched 38 today. 

Currently reading more Maisie Dobbs, nearly finished The Travels of Ibn Batuta, and going through My Hanuman Chalisa by Devdutt Pattnaik. Also a remarkable book called The Henna Artist by Alka Joshi, recommended by Pupu. I might write a review of this last shortly.

An ex student visited me after a gap of ten years this evening, and we had a long and very nice chat. I was delighted that he agreed entirely with me that if most ex students do not communicate, they either don't want to or are afraid to (whatever the reasons for that may be) - nothing else. Being busy is the most pathetic of excuses. He is 26 and I am 60: it feels good to agree.

Yet another coaching session begins this week. Some of my fond readers might do me the kindness of wishing me luck in my 61st year!

Voters in prams?

I read something preposterous (and I am not in the habit of using such strong words casually) in my newspaper yesterday - some 'scholar' has suggested that the voting age should be reduced to six, and some journalist has found it worthwhile to write about it. Now mine is, I know, just a voice crying in the wilderness, but let it go on record that I was one of the vast, silent majority (I am sure) who were appalled by the idea. 

But before I explain why, let me remind every one of my present and would-be readers that I have never shared the currently prevalent parental attitude that children are babies, and ought to be babied, for as long as possible - at least till they are in the mid-twenties. I should also like to re-assert that I have always believed children can grow up and become mature much sooner than most of today's parents think, if only they are allowed to take responsibility early on, and learn from their (often painful-) mistakes, and that I know children in earlier times grew up much faster - some of the greatest men and women of yesteryears were far stronger, cleverer, wiser and bolder adults at 16 or 18 and fending for themselves, even ruling and teaching nations, before they were 18 - Adi Shankaracharya, Akbar the Great, Abigail Adams, Michael Faraday, Charles Dickens, Lincoln, Rani Lakshmibai, Vidyasagar, to name a very tiny few,  and there is also the quote from Sigmund Freud which is a fixture at the bottom of my blogpost; but I also believe that people can remain irresponsible imbeciles well into middle age if they are brought up badly, and the world around me has filled up with such people. When folks in their thirties and forties still behave like silly and spoilt children these days (I have written again and again about this), give children as young as six the right to vote?! Why not commit mass suicide right away?

Let me first talk about the children I have dealt with all my life - the 14 to 18 age group in middle and upper middle class, small-town India. If anything, the mollycoddling, and consequent infantilization, has consistently worsened over my working lifetime. Combine that with 'education' reduced to mere cramming for examinations, with an obsessive focus on the sciences and mathematics to the near-total neglect of and contempt for social studies (civics, history, economics, geography, sociology, psychology, literature and scripture), has brought up two successive generations of mind-numbed robots, fit only for low end technical and service jobs and a totally selfish, narrowly focused materialistic and asocial, spiritually directionless lifestyle, 'guided' first by parents as clueless as themselves and for the rest of their lives by superstition, advertisements and 'what others are doing', whether it is a question of whom to marry or buying a car. The children I have been handling over the last twenty years and more often cannot shut my gate when they enter, have to be told to flush after using the washroom, have never touched a book or a newspaper because all that is 'outside the syllabus', score pathetically on impromptu quizzes, cannot write even a halfway decent 350-word essay on any subject, casually use foul language and do not know of any brand of humour more sophisticated than the toilet kind ... I could go on forever. They are glued to their mobile phones, playing inane games or scrolling through idiotic social media posts when they are not yelling at cricketers on TV or gorging at feasts of one kind or the other. Their attention span can be measured in seconds, and their knowledge of the past rarely goes back to more than a decade, so everything from the world wars to the Mahabharata is prehistory, even Pele and Michael Jackson and Harry Potter are now old and 'uncool' (a college goer recently asked why they were making a fuss over a little bald old man wrapped in a bed sheet. The reference was to Gandhi). 

Of course every now and then I encounter a child far superior to the rest, in terms of intelligence, empathy, GK, power of coherent thinking and expression ... a tiny few even impress me. But these are truly exceptions (as the great men and women I listed above were), and a democracy does not work on the strength of rare exceptions, remember. It is the average wisdom of the voting masses, such as it is, that directs the destiny of the country. And as a very general rule, the younger they are, the stupider and less concerned they are about matters political - that has been my experience as a teacher all through. Unless they are given that sort of education right from very early childhood which makes for good citizens rather than (at best) efficient doctors and engineers. Which means not only will our curricula have to be revised almost beyond recognition but we have to bring up an entire new generation of children (along with their parents!) who are socially well-informed and strongly civic minded. And even then, bring the voting age down to six?! The author of the article says whether we bring it down to 6 or 13 is a mere detail. Obviously he has never actually handled children, especially in the mass, so he has no idea that an enormous change comes over a person between 6 and 13, and then again between 13 and 21, as every sane adult will agree (are there many such left any more, by the way? I wonder... especially since I read only this morning about someone who has done a PhD on the Sociological Impact of the Eyes of Amitabh Bachchan. I kid you not: Srijit Mukherjee has said this in a newspaper interview), and then again between 21 and 35, during which time most ordinary people at last realize what life is all about, and what kinds of limitations we must all live with, and what working for a living and taking responsibility for others means. 

While we were discussing this article, one old boy reminded me that when they were attending my classes, they once had a debate about what should be the lowest age for calling anybody an adult, and they finally agreed by vote that the minimum, under present conditions, should be 25. This they decided when they were themselves only 15, but (and I take considerable pride in claiming some credit for this) becoming increasingly aware of their shortcomings as social beings. Whereas this journalist says that denying primary or middle school children the vote is yet another 'patriarchal ploy' to maintain the status quo. Well, imagine six year-olds voting. By what criteria are they likely to choose their leaders? ... who has promised to abolish homework, or who has offered a lifelong free supply of lollipops?

And these infants, claims the scholar and the fawning journalist, are apparently far more informed and concerned about issues like climate change and human rights and the future of civilization than their older fellow citizens, so if they are allowed to vote, radical improvements will come about in the way we are governed and the way we live. Witness, they say, the apparently enormous change for the better brought about by Greta Thunberg. Well, I am sure the very young (meaning all those currently between 10 and 18) have either never heard of her or entirely forgotten her long ago: to today's children, ten years is a lifetime. And in any case, has Greta Thunberg effected the slightest change in the ways of the world? Honestly? Where Gandhi couldn't, after a long lifetime of titanic effort involving the participation of tens of millions of people (in the flesh, suffering, not as internet warriors relaxed on sofas in air conditioned bedrooms with Coke and popcorn at their elbows)? Are we burning less fossil fuels and throwing off less plastic and wasting less water than on the day when she started skipping school in order to 'change the world'? As Jesus could have told her - because he was not an infant - it isn't all that easy. 

God help us.

What was my lifetime like?

I was musing lately about how historians will look back upon these last forty years - the biggest part of my adult, working life - and comment on it. Interested readers should hark back to a post titled 'What really mattered?' written back in 1989 and uploaded here in 2015.

Throughout many of the previous centuries, they used to painstakingly put together hard-to-find data (in the form of artefacts hidden among ruins, difficult to read partial manuscripts and diaries, rock inscriptions and suchlike) to tentatively piece together a reasonably believable picture of some bygone age, and many of those pictures are still hazy and uncertain, as well as overladen with myths and legends, such as whether King Arthur and Sri Krishna really existed, and what the Indus Valley seals say, and whether Hitler was a closet Jew. Those looking back at our times, say, a hundred years or more hereafter, will be faced with quite the reverse problem - there is such a gigantic Niagara of data available that they will be very hard put to decide what to keep, what to take seriously, and what to ignore. The internet - via a trillion bits and pieces of data being daily uploaded by several billion individuals, in the form of official communications and love letters, twitter posts and Instagram Reels, blogposts and photographs and videos, is very likely to overwhelm them. And eventually they might decide it was a very uneventful time, when nothing much that mattered happened, in terms of the progress or regression of civilization. There were no world wars or massive famines, no visits to even the nearest star, no birth of a world-sweeping new religion, no gigantic discoveries or inventions, no major paradigm shift in the arts or political ideas, no great and sweeping social reforms (in comparison to the abolition of slavery or women getting the vote and the right to property, I mean) ... and did Michael Jackson and Madonna and Taylor Swift and Beyonce and Rihanna and Shakira (or Messi and Ronaldo and Neymar) make the slightest difference, seriously? Personally, I think I lived through one of the dullest periods in history. Or am I looking at the world in a very odd way? Would some of my readers like to start a debate?