Lost in the great blue yonder

Sputnik went up in 1957, Gagarin went out into space in 1961, Alexei Leonov made the first space walk shortly after. Then the alarmed and insulted Americans scrambled furiously into the race, and lo, by the end of that decade the first men had landed on the moon (or so they claim, and not everybody believes them!) By 1973, with Skylab, astronaut-scientists were ready to spend months at a time in a space station far above the earth. That was the era in which my generation grew up (I was ten in 1973, and a voracious reader already). The whole world was agog: space was hot, and next to the Beatles maybe (“we’re more famous than Jesus Christ!”), space science was the coolest thing.  

Sci-fi imaginations ran wild, predicting wonders that went vastly beyond anything that the most daring scientists were then willing to contemplate, and yet such incredible and all-round progress was being made by those same scientists all the time that it seemed all the fantasies would come true only too soon. We talked avidly of hibernating spacemen and proton/ion engines, super-intelligent computers in charge and teleportation and hyperspace jumps and wormholes in the space-time fabric, and world government and intergalactic empires and how ancient psychological, economic, political and religious problems would re-surface in new guises in vastly distant and alien environments light years away – as though such things were sure to come true, if not in our own lifetimes, then certainly within those of our grandchildren. Meanwhile SETI seemed to hold forth another glorious promise: discovering different forms of intelligent life scattterd all over the universe! Those who want to know what I am talking about need only to look up the books written by Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, Arthur Clarke and Frank Herbert, and the incomparable Star Trek series on TV…

That vision has largely faded, leaving only a dim afterglow. There have been no big-ticket space projects since Pioneer, Voyager, Viking and the Shuttle program. Despite searching for more than three decades, no serious hint of alien civilizations (a la War of the Worlds, Close Encounters, Star Wars, ET and Independence Day) has been found. Given the technological plateau we have reached, interstellar travel, it has now become apparent, remains a pipe dream for the near future at least. These days, it’s only boys from Bankura who talk of specializing in astrophysics and joining NASA (most of them end up writing software code in Bangalore, or fusty post-doc papers which nobody reads at places like TIFR at best). Now that the missile race (which, as those in the know have known for a long time, was the real purpose behind all the PR drivel) between two superpowers has subsided – and since China doesn’t seem to be interested – no government can whip up public enthusiasm to fund big new exploratory projects either; much better to focus on very earthbound problems, such as finding new sources of oil and water, and better methods of pollution control, and how to make keyhole surgery on the heart. Even fiction and fantasy seem to reflect the trend: if you think Matrix or Minority Report or Artificial Intelligence or Inception or the Harry Potter saga, nobody seems to be thnking seriously of leaving earth far behind – an occasional Avatar notwithstanding.

Shall we tell our grandchildren we were the last space crazy generation, then? Or were the sci-fi writers of the 1940 to 60s right all along: that such miracles were only likely to come about in a matter of hundreds, or even thousands of years, and we were getting all het up for nothing?

Actors don't just act!

We in India expect the government to do everything for us that we cannot do ourselves – from getting rid of garbage daily to caring for the army of the poor to building roads and keeping them safe from predators. I don’t blame common Indians entirely for it: they are simply living up to a long tradition of public powerlessness and whining, which has come down to us from the Mughals and the British mai-baap style of government through the long era of Nehruvian socialism…

But people ought to be more active about caring for one another without relying upon and blaming government too much. People are only as powerless as they think. Much of their inactivity also actually springs from apathy, indolence and plain callousness: few parents teach anything like public responsibility in this country (if I am not blind, why should I or my children bother to get involved with caring for the blind?) Which is one reason that there is so much avoidable suffering in this country, and most of us clever people repeatedly fall victim to our own cleverness at times of distress and helplessness, when we can hardly expect people (just like ourselves!) to come forward and lend a helping hand.

I was reading about how George Clooney and fellow Hollywood actors and producers have been busy raising very sizeable funds in the name of the Motion Picture and Television Fund Foundation in aid of indigent actors and assorted technicians in the trade: people who are not rich, and who are now ill or handicapped or on the verge of retirement with an uncertain future looming ahead. The Fund was set up in 1921 by none other than Charlie Chaplin (so my own newspaper informed me yesterday) – a man of genius who rose to great fame and fortune by his own efforts, but never forgot his very humble beginnings. People sticking together with less fortunate members of their communities is one of the nicest things we humans can do for one another: I always say one charitable man is worth ten philosophers and a hundred technicians.

Of course I am aware that it is not an exclusively American phenomenon. There are numerous individuals and organizations working for the common weal in India too: some locally focused, some nationwide in scope, some very well known, some obscure, looking after all kinds of underprivileged groups and interests, from rural women and children and the old, handicapped and ill to traditional craftsmen, artists and musicians, environmental concerns and vanishing wildlife, slum dwellers and disgruntled consumers, all sorts. And I am not saying for a moment that they don’t do invaluable work. My point is, I have heard so many people who work at such things lamenting that they are chronically short of both money and manpower.

Which is indeed a tragedy, seeing that there are not only literally millions of people around who can spare a few hundred, or even thousand rupees for good causes (the total would run into hundreds of crores!), but tens of millions whose real problem is that they have too little work to do – and so they are always partying or gossiping, dressing up or chatting on Facebook, shopping like drunks or lamenting that they don’t have money enough to shop as much as they’d like to, or falling victim to mental disease born of boredom, loneliness, and a very low sense of self-worth – depression and drug abuse and crime and domestic violence and behaving like hoodlums on the roads in the name of political activism. We never seem to have a dearth of such people in this country, but good, constructive work of any sort – NO NO! In fact, virtually all schools turn SUPW into a farce to be sniggered at, and in college, bodies like the NSS go abegging for volunteers. This, despite the fact that the few of my friends and ex-students who have actually worked for some social cause, usually with this or that NGO, have all averred that it was one of the most rewarding experiences in their lives.

I have long reconciled myself to the fact that as a teacher in this land and age, my power to bring about change for the better is pitifully limited. But I never lose sight of the saying that it is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness. If I can motivate fifty people in my entire lifetime into joining or otherwise helping some sort of social cause, I shall consider myself a successful man. And readers, I should very much like to know about the kind of such activities you might have been involved in, and the kind of experience you had. Even if they were not always very pleasant (as it wasn’t for my own daughter: see this post).

But the sun also rises

Since I ended the last post by saying I have always tried to be keenly sensible of whatever little goodness I have seen around me, let me recollect some nice and warm memories for my own satisfaction, and as a kind of public thanksgiving:

There have certainly been hundreds of parents who have not only spoken highly of me in their own circles, but insisted that their friends and relatives send their children to me in their turn: else I could not have been in gravy all these years, especially since I gave up my last job, and have never gone for advertising my services;

There have been old boys and girls who have cheered me up by giving me lovely cards and gifts (including their own paintings and touching thank-you letters) on my birthday, Teachers’ Day,  at the time of leaving and years afterwards;

There have been boys and girls who have carried around my photographs/messages in their wallets for years;

Ex-students and parents have turned up to say thanks years afterwards, for all sorts of successes which they felt they owed at least in part to me – from getting admission to some elite college to getting a good job;

There are people around who were decent enough to come over and offer to pay another month’s fee when the tuition was already over (in case they had made a mistake), and even offer to pay for the period when they were taught for free, because at that time the family had been going through financial difficulties;

There have been parents and students galore who have vocally acknowledged, to my face and behind my back, that I had contributed something to making them better, stronger, more self-confident people, more sure of their likes and dislikes, dreams and ambitions, more able to overcome what they could clearly perceive as their drawbacks after being under my influence for a while;

There have been many old boys who have expressed genuine delight about keeping in continuous touch with me, and about my dropping in to visit them now and then, and going travelling with them;

There are people around, now grown up and well-educated and doing responsible jobs, who have done me the high courtesy of saying they still regard me as a teacher on active duty;

There are current and ex-students who have furiously defended me when they have heard me being abused in public by foolish and coarse people both young and old;

When my daughter was born, eleven doctors came over to enquire after her well-being and her mother’s, to the vocal amazement of the nursing home staff;

When I was briefly hospitalized for surgery, scores of people of all ranks came over to see me within those two days and a half, though we had told nobody outside a tiny circle of friends…

I could go on for some time longer. What I have been trying to say is, the world is not entirely full of filth and baseness yet, and I never allow myself to forget that – not for long, that is.

On being mean, and petty, and foolish

Despite being publicity-shy, I put up a sign in front of my house seven or eight years ago, with ‘Suvro-sir’ on it, and an arrow pointing to my house, and my phone number below.

I was forced into doing it because I had been hearing complaints from literally scores of people every year that nobody had given them my address and phone number (so that they could contact me to admit their children to my tuition); that even some of my neighbours, when asked about me – these are people who have known me for decades, mind you – blandly said they had never heard about me. The same with some people who had been colleagues in a school for fourteen years.

Of course, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out why people should behave like this. One group thinks ‘Why should I tell another person about a good tutor? Suppose his boy/girl ends up getting more marks in exams than mine?’ while another consists of those who think ‘That man is making too much money anyway, why should I help him along by sending a few more people to him?’

The same category consists of people who, while worshipping money above all other gods, habitually try to buy things on credit from their grocer and eventually don’t pay if they can help it; boast loudly about how they have saved a few miserable rupees by haggling like fisherwomen with rickshawwallahs and porters, think that the height of socializing is dolling themselves up for wedding receptions, never read a book in their lives once they have passed their last examinations, tell their kids to steal my notes if they can from some of their friends who attend my tuitions while blithely telling their neighbours they didn’t send the kids to me because they know what a bad man and poor teacher I am, spread the vilest gossip about their own ‘friends’ and relatives, eat at parties as though they are starving beggars, and come in cars wearing jewellery worth lakhs to admit their kids yet dare to ask me ‘aksho taka com hobe na Sir?’ (could I pay a hundred rupees less?). And when I occasionally get to hear about what they do to their husbands/wives/children/in-laws at home, oh Jesus!

These are also the very same people who tell one another that I provoke the kids against their parents. Guilty as accused, because one of my highest aims as a teacher is to make slightly better parents of the next generation, so that the world becomes a trifle less filthy. All I shall add as a correction is that I don't actually provoke them, I only ask them to observe, think and judge for themselves, not blindly swallowing everything that guardians say as necessarily good and true.

That is how petty, how mean, how foolish people can be (yes, foolish, too, because even after all these years they haven’t been able to make the slightest difference to my career, and they are too dumb even to figure that out and desist). I wouldn’t have minded, except for the fact that all these people regard themselves as educated, worldly-wise bhadralok, and hate me because I mock the whole tribe routinely in class, and say that they make me puke, and insist that the kids will have got no education worth the name if they grow up to be equally trivial and disgusting human beings.

A very great man said it’s a sin to lose faith in man. But the older I grow, the harder it becomes to keep the faith. The great misanthrope Jonathan Swift said about his friend Dr. Arbuthnot, who was apparently a very good man, that if he knew ten men like the doctor, he’d gladly burn all his books. I find myself increasingly inclining to the same opinion of my fellow human beings. Especially as I see that most of my kids, despite my best efforts, become clones of the worst kind of parents as they grow up.

I have been writing this with full responsibility. For the last fifteen years, I have been a parent myself, and one of the very few things that I am truly proud of is that my daughter is not growing up what they call nyaka-boka in my native language… that she already knows there is much to hate and despise about this country, and she needs to strive lifelong to keep herself from sinking in the same mire. I have also been trying to sensitize her to whatever little goodness we see around us, and to treasure it, because it is so rare. 

Debarshi's sequel to my old story

I wrote a sort of ‘story’ a very long time ago, and posted it here in 2007 (More on the lonely mind). Now young Debarshi, who is himself in his early twenties, a whole generation removed but still stirred by what I wrote, has penned his own ‘sequel’ to that story. I reproduce it below, just as he has written it.

More on the lonely mind (continued...)

“I carved the angel in the stone, till I set him free...” goes the famed line, doesn’t it? I am too drowsy to even think straight, let alone reason. One has to find a reason to think, or is it the other way around? Auroras of colour have started exploding like supernovae in my blurred field of vision, heightening my senses, putting me to sleep in this dark world of the senses, where all other fellow beings wake. My chemical romance has started, as I have begun to see my life through the kaleidoscopic vision of my inner eye. Someone has applied a red-hot poker to my very innards, and as I start twisting in pain, I catch myself in the mirror, with a contorted grin. I yelled out loud, demanding to know the identity of the apparition. “It is you, my dear. It is the likeness you have fashioned yourself into, and not the one you should have. Allow me to carve out the real you!” came back the answer. The glass shattered and the mirror cracked from side to side – of course it would, seeing as my hurled vase had found its target. Love built us, and pain shapes us, does it?

You rest your feet on the worn out, moth eaten pillow and stare at the ceiling, lost in thought. The endless stream of demands has finally died down, and you are left all alone with only your poor self for company. The thought gnawing at your mind now starts off as a furious tirade between two opposing factions, conceived in unity and separated by will – the head and the heart. “You must be yourself...”goes the debate. The frames per second rate of the movie playing itself out in your head are too fast to decipher. You let yourself go with the flow. Torn pages flying about, dusty walls, heavy metal, a lot of sound ensuing masking the innate fury, train journeys to nowhere, dying neon lights, dishevelled and shabby clothes, hours of boredom, and watching that ridiculously idiotic television set as if your life depended on it – images fly past, and you grow tired and weary of this world of distractions that is hell-bent on tugging at you with each passing minute.

Visions swimming past, reels changing tack continuously, all these provided me some meaning to this conundrum called Life. Now, they only seem to be the flashbacks of a fool. The chemist could help me out, you say? I laugh it off with a shrug of the shoulders, copying every move from a stereotypical alpha male you all like so much. The Eternal chemist does not even provide me euthanasia for all my prayers. I clutch the pillow tighter to my chest and try to doze off. Sleep will finally overtake me and send me off to a land where defeat and disappointment are accepted as natural precursors and successors to glory. In this madhouse, how does one even keep sane?

I have dreamt of corn-fields awash in the mellow moonlight, of picking up pink shells on the sun-kissed shores and listening to the sound of the old, old sea, of snow-capped peaks and valleys of lush foliage, of snowflakes and the emotions they imbibe in the eyes of all, of dark alleyways with a coffee-house at each turn, of lonely men in a pub sharing their stories as works of beauty which happened to someone else, of arched corridors and the delightful smell arising from old books with dog-eared pages, of stirring, soulful music which makes me free from myself, and of unending tales like the ones of Scheherazade. How can you sleep? You try to bury your head deeper into the pillow, and will yourself to give in to the lovely goddess of Sleep – how she entices you, with promises to play out all your sub-conscious fantasies! Pardon me, I am no Freudian, and so do not get your hopes up. All your defeats, the hypocrisy that masks our lives, the roles you keep on playing – drop the pretence, and be yourself in your own garden of memory, where sun-drenched acacias lend you shade, where the bluebells, germander speedwells, flash smiles at you, willing you to remember, remember your true self, so that you might not forget. Hey, you creep about in your own garden, stealing furtive glances at all others who wander into your memory! It is a dream, alright? How hard it is to be oneself!

You jerk yourself awake, splash water onto your face, grimacing as the cold reality hits you. You are what you have done, and what you will do. Humans are funny: they label this simple stochastic process as a law. You catch sight of yourself in the mirror, and it reflects the state of your soul, instead of yourself. Chaos ensues in your heart, and yet you search for peace! You finally realize that another evening has passed you by – Time is a harsh mistress. Let go of all of your fears, your expectations and start living! – You say to yourself. What’s that shrill trill? It is the beastly mobile phone, with your newest distraction widget, a caller photo flasher application. How can one plaster such fake smiles on their faces? As you start talking nineteen to the dozen, your voice fades away, and your dreams trail away; they realize the futility of a lost battle. Why can you not live between the wondrous moments that ensue between the two wing beats of the fly of Paradise? Searching for permanent happiness in a transitory, surreal, vanishing world, you realize that maybe your heartstrings are out of tune. How does one listen to this tune, amidst the deluge of cacophony? You sleep over it, and you know, your pain will soon be over. Maybe that’s why we realize all our lives, and unravel the mysteries, when we sleep forever in peace. My spirit is away on a wing and a prayer, free from itself finally!

Cartoons say it all!

My wife says, only half-jokingly, that except for her, most married girls in the neighbourhood where she grew up are either divorced or otherwise separated from their husbands, and have returned to the parental hearth to raise their children. A lot of them have also sent their husbands and in-laws to police custody, if not also jail, for all kinds of alleged abuse – the law having tilted very strongly in their favour in recent times.

Some time ago, I read a very senior (woman-) police officer publicly grumbling that a lot of women are in their turn taking advantage of the law to abuse husbands and in-laws, or at least to have the whip hand permanently over the latter. I daresay I know some such women myself. Hence I wrote this post three years ago titled ‘A future for marriage?’ Now this front-page news item says today that the National Commission for Women (NCW) has itself observed that “80% of complaints filed under the seven-year old domestic violence act have been declared too trivial to address.” The Commission has said that most such complaints can be resolved adequately by counselling alone. It has simultaneously expressed fears that numerous much graver atrocities are still going unreported.

Alas, I am only too keenly aware of how both aspects of the situation are poignantly true in India: it’s such a complex country!

It is most certainly true that women are humiliated, abused, subjugated and restricted lifelong from doing all sorts of things they both want to do and can ably do in millions of households still, and not merely in the villages and urban slums. Indeed, I personally know a lot of girls and women who live the lives of dumb beasts in all strata of contemporary society – only, if they are lucky enough to be born rich or married rich, they live lives of highly ornamental beasts, and enjoy the privilege of lording it over their less fortunate sisters, the type who work for them as ill-paid domestic help. Girls are still being married off at 14 all around me, or sold off into prostitution, wives are being regularly beaten as entertainment and supported only to bear children and work as unpaid drudges, and even ‘educated’ women in middle-class families have had their fathers pay dowry through their noses in order to get ‘suitable’ husbands, and now live lives filled with gossip and TV and shopping and dressing up for parties and clucking over children’s exam scores, because that is all they are ‘allowed’ to do (in the town I live in, it’s still unusual to see a woman shopping except at the malls, I have seen men buying even underwear for their wives and daughters, and I have been told by countless mothers they can come to see me about their kids’ progress only when their husbands can find time to drive them to my house). And they quietly swallow all this indignity believing that going to complain against husbands and in-laws is something that ‘good’ women never do. Also, I  know what callous, uncouth, selfish boors many men can be as husbands and fathers, how intolerable they can make life for their women unless some sort of social/legal restraint is put upon them. So I have no hesitation in saying that a lot more women should go to the courts to seek redressal when all possibility of peaceful and private accommodation has failed.

But there is also the other side of the coin, and I can now speak freely, because no less an institution than the NCW has made things easier for the likes of me. A lot of women are using the law to ‘settle scores’ and ‘take revenge’, and that too over very petty and selfish issues (it is not merely apocryphal that a woman sent her husband briefly to jail on the accusation of violence at home simply because he had not bought her an expensive enough saree for the pujas, just to teach him a lesson!). It is one thing to say that a woman deserves equal rights with men, and quite another to say that, in a reversal of ancient tyranny, the woman must be allowed the last word in everything, no matter how irrational, foolish, selfish or high-handed her demands might be. And there is reason to fear that that is exactly what a significant number of women are now doing, and these women, it seems, mostly come from educated and affluent backgrounds. It does not speak highly of either women’s innate nature or of the kind of education they have received, at home and outside.

The most rabid feminist will concede that throughout the ages there have always been viragos; likewise there have always been timid and peaceable souls among men who have quietly borne with all kinds of impositions from their womenfolk. But if this now becomes a major social phenomenon, there is a chance that there will be a backlash against women in the not too distant future. Already among my old boys I see a marked unwillingness to tie the knot: a lot of them have reached their mid-30s depending on one-night stands and casual or live-in girlfriends, even when they are not turning to same-sex relationships as a ‘better’ option. A time may come when millions of old parents will be desperately looking for grooms for their ageing daughters whom nobody wants to marry. It’s all very well for young girls, in the full flush of their folly, to say that they don’t care, they can do very well without getting married, thank you very much. Most of them will feel very differently once they are into middle age, with neither parents nor children to look after them, and men looking at them only to say ‘Yuck!’ and turn away hurriedly. I have an unmarried aunt in her late-sixties, living on a pension and all alone. The whole family feels only pity and fear for her – and that includes herself, mind you.

Now it's Facebook

An old boy sent me a very sardonic little Bangla essay mocking the ongoing Facebook mania, and my daughter has written her own blogpost around it. Do take a look...

Anybody remember orkut today? I wrote a post titled 'orkut, anyone?' years ago. The reader might visit that too, and then look up this link once again.

Unwilling women

Now that my daughter can be treated as an almost full-grown woman (unlike lots of women in their 30s and 40s I know!), we have begun to have those long and deep conversations that I had been looking forward to for so many years. Only recently, for example, we were wondering together why, although I have quite a few female members of all ages here, she and my old friend Shilpi in the US seem to be the only two who read regularly and comment frequently (much of my daughter’s commentary I hear at home, obviously). Most others, it seems, never have anything to say, although I write on a very wide variety of subjects – of course, that doesn’t include fashion and cooking and gossip about celebs, but still. Several have communicated very eagerly but briefly, and then vanished out of sight without a word of explanation. Not that some males don’t also behave like that, but the proportion of females is vastly greater. What is it about me that turns them off? Some girls and women have told me privately that it’s unfair on my part to base judgments on the few women I know: my riposte is that, if they are honest, they will admit they are themselves always doing the same thing (because it is the natural thing to do: everybody has to make decisions in the real world primarily on the basis of personal experience), and besides, I have known far more girls and women personally and often pretty closely over long periods of time  than most people either male or female. The average male or female does not get to know more than fifty women well in a  whole lifetime…

In any case, I’d like to hear my readers’ opinions – including and especially women’s opinions, if you please – on this question. Why do so few females feel the urge to comment on my blogposts, even (if I may assume) that many of them actually read these? And if women don’t as a rule read my blog, why so?

Just don’t say it’s because I routinely discourage critical comments, because I don’t, as anyone who has been an attentive reader for a while ought to be aware of. I admit criticism, from males and females alike, often even if it is obvious that it is irrelevant, uninformed or somewhat foolish, just so long as the writer is not blatantly and unnecessarily offensive. There must be a more serious reason than that: maybe several. And I’d really like to know. On the very last post, for example, I had been expecting a lot of comments from women, seeing that I have heard so many complaints about the current crop of teachers from women who are mothers of schoolgoing children now. Not one has come in yet. If my readers don’t feel, like me, that this is very odd indeed, I should also like to know why.

And a reminder – for the umpteenth time – to the interested reader not to confine herself to the home page but click on the links to old posts, where she will find a lot more interesting stuff. Such as this one, and this. Just to show I can give attention, respect and praise to women where it is due: apposite, I think, in the context of the current post! Goes without saying I’d love to have more comments on those two earlier posts, too.

If these be teachers...

I keep hearing from the parents of toddlers, youngsters my daughter’s age and many ex-students far older, finishing their master’s courses, even in very ‘prestigious’ places, how bad the new crop of teachers has become: all those in their late 20s and 30s, that is to say. And I recall that I used to say to so many pupils who attended my classes fifteen-twenty years ago: ‘What on earth is going to happen to this country when irresponsible and lazy dullards like you become teachers?’ That nightmare has now come true.

And no wonder. For a very long time three very nasty things have been happening. a) public examination standards fell through the floor, b) only the dregs generally took up teaching: those who had always been backbenchers in their own student lives, and lacked the energy and intelligence needed even to become BPO hacks or sales agents, and c) the best students routinely shied away from teaching – as they are still doing as a rule, despite the payscales having been revised quite sharply upwards – because teaching is supposedly hard, unglamorous, thankless work and ‘lacks status’ (apparently a glorified mechanic-turned-file-pusher, aka engineer at a steelworks or an MBBS on a government salary in a rural health centre or even an IT worker drawing Rs. 25K a month has more ‘status’, God help us!). As a result, all our teaching positions are being filled up by nitwits with bloated and brittle egos (I have heard despairing parents say, ‘aar kichhu toh pelo na, tai teacher-y tei dhukiye dilam…’). I know directly how little English and History and Economics the English and History and Economics teachers know – they are helpless without their notebooks, many skip classes regularly or spend whole classes in idle chatter or make the pupils merely read out from textbooks, mark homework and testpapers in the most hurried and shoddy way imaginable, most of them would fail miserably if they were forced to take an impromptu test themselves – and I hear the same thing about those who teach math or biology or physics from my students who are themselves good at those subjects. This, despite the fact that they have loads of degrees: one can easily guess how those degrees were obtained, how easy and meaningless it has become. On top of that they are by and large lazy and totally uncommitted – teaching to them is little more serious an occupation than selling paan and cigarettes (one of these creatures actually told me that it’s just ‘time-pass’ until he gets a ‘real’ job), and bribery plus sycophancy are all you apparently need both to get and hold on to teaching jobs. They naturally suffer from a huge sense of inferiority in class, so it comes as no surprise that all they can do is bully and shout down the more intelligent and curious of students, threaten them with all kinds of dire consequences if they don’t blindly toe the line, reward only shameless flatterers and witless crammers, take no responsibility for their pupils’ progress, and spend all their spare time thinking up excuses why they are not to be blamed for the whole system going to the dogs. Amartya Sen has been warning us for a long time about the pathetic state of our government schools in rural backwaters – if he did a survey of the most ‘elite’ schools and colleges in our metros, I don’t think he would survive the shock. Why do you think everywhere we private tutors are making hay?

I hear from quite a few ex-students that they are now teachers of one sort or the other – some at schools, some at colleges, some at BPO training centres and hotel management institutes – and all I can say inwardly is ‘My God, that idiot too?’ (I am reminded of a girl I called ‘daab’ in class, because even among very silly people she stood out prominently, and a few years down the line I heard she had become a teacher in one of the well-known plus-two level schools in this town. I leave you to draw your own conclusions…). Incidentally, the very few among them who are both learned and sincere repeatedly aver that before they started teaching they had no idea how much effort, serious concentration, dedication and constant self-correction it entails, how awfully challenging a vocation it is, how little time and energy it leaves you for anything else. So imagine the kind of teacher who is by choice a party animal or mall-hopper!  No wonder the one idea that scares their pants off is that their careers should be made to depend on student-evaluation alone. And yet I have maintained since my own days as a class representative in college that the only people competent to pass judgment on teachers are the students who actually learn or suffer at their hands…

I was chatting with a truly brilliant old boy the other day, someone on the verge of passing out from university, and he was telling me about a classmate who thinks Shah Rukh Khan is a ‘great actor’, Gandhi was a disgusting fool, and anyone who asks her why is stupid and rude: she just happens to think that way, she has a ‘right’ to her opinions, and of course it’s very old fashioned to say that one ought to base one’s opinions on knowledge and reason. It occurred to me that this girl was not only going to be a parent in just a few years’ time, but, armed with a good degree from a first-class university, quite possibly a teacher or even a college lecturer too. My God. I wouldn’t be surprised if, in imitation of the Naxalite era, students started hurling bombs at teachers once again: this time not driven by ideological hatred, but simply because they have had their fill of uncouth illiterates masquerading as teachers.

Thoughts for the new year

For quite a few years now I’ve been noticing that after a prolonged vacation (which means anything more than a week) I begin to itch quietly to go back home and get back into the regular round of daily tuitions by which I have been earning my bread for ages. I think it really has gotten into my blood now. It’s true that I often get tired and frustrated and temporarily bored with the routine, and sometimes very angry or unhappy indeed with my pupils for being dull, inattentive, forgetful, lazy and what have you, and sometimes even curse fate for having tied me to this grind lifelong, but who knows, Providence might really know better what is good for us than we ourselves do. We’ve noticed again and again too that when I am slightly ill, nothing makes me bounce back to full potential as a session in the classroom: no pill or pep talk from my family works half as well!

In any case, one cannot, after three decades, help becoming a creature of habit. When I used to tell some parents some time back that I was looking forward to retirement, and that I’d give it another ten or fifteen years at the most, some of them smiled and said, ‘You’d never be able to stop completely. People won’t let you. Besides, everyone needs some work to live by, even if it is no longer essential to make a living.’ Who knows but these people were prescient! Looking at many people who are very old and have been living utterly idle lives for decades and slowly growing ever more senile, I can only shudder. I don’t know how they have coped with being totally unoccupied and useless for so long, but I know this much for sure – just one year of it would drive me up the wall. I must keep working, just to stay sane and enjoy living as long as I am around: much better to die in harness relatively young (in one’s sixties, I mean) than to hang on to be a doddering old fool in his late eighties.

I also used to say I’ll work but I’ll change my vocation and try to do something I like much more, but these days even that makes me wonder. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks. What else am I good at, what else would I rather do? Write, yes, if I do find a large and eager enough audience – which is unlikely – or teach, perhaps younger people, needier people, if that brings greater satisfaction, a greater sense of giving back. But these days I can’t think of much else that I’d rather do, besides raising grandchildren, that is.

Life has been good to me, on the whole. It comes home to me with greater force with every passing year, watching people my age, younger and older so hassled and so frustrated all the time – even if they hold high office and earn large incomes and can boast of great honours. To have such a combination of decent earning and good health and peaceful family and leisure and freedom is not given to many of us, especially in this day and age. I am writing this down because I want to come back to it again and again when I am feeling blue: I do have much to be thankful for, things could have been much, much worse, and few other lifestyles could have given me so much overall satisfaction, even if I had been earning ten times more, and seen myself mentioned regularly in the papers. It is from an infinitely deep well of wisdom that the Lord’s prayer says ‘Thy will be done’ rather than mine – how little we know until we are very old what we really want, what would really make us happy. I started teaching almost by accident when I was barely out of boyhood, and I have taught so long and so many people and so many different things, and though I’d have gladly done a lot of things differently if circumstances had permitted me (trying to make teaching more interesting both for me and my pupils) I cannot now imagine that I could have ever wanted to do anything else. And to think that I had once fantasized about becoming a neurosurgeon, or a pilot, or a business tycoon or even a statesman…

It’s been a truly bemusing transition, from a very young teacher to an ageing one. Kids may come and kids may go, but I go on forever! At least, what I mean is that my ex-students grow old, but those I constantly deal with are perpetually fresh and lively 14 to 18 – while so many of my ex-es have become dowdy, frustrated, dull and common enough to embarrass me. My one grouch is that when I refer to myself (as I often do these days) in class as the boring old man, many of the kids, both boys and girls, loudly protest that I am neither so old nor boring, which is, I admit, a mild salve to the ego, but they do precious little beyond that, either the girls or the boys, to prove that they really are interested in me as a human being as they used to do twenty years ago (as distinct from a note-churner whom they pay a fee just to pass examinations). One could imagine, in this era of cheap telephones and email, that some few would try to build relationships privately, even if they were too shy to take the plunge in the classroom. It’s hardly very sensible to think that I’d seduce every girl who tried that, and turn every boy into a terrorist or a drug addict – as some silly mothers in my town used to fear once upon a time!

How little we as parents and teachers know what makes a good life when we so pedantically and enthusiastically lecture the children in our charge how they should order their lives to achieve ‘success’! I hope my daughter (and maybe her children) may learn from this, rather than other so-called teachers and friends’ parents, that we elders know too little and sermonize too much – most probably to cover up our own shameful shortcomings and failures! – and that beyond a certain age they are really on their own, and they must follow their hearts, and then accept and gradually grow used to and even start loving what life has given them… if there is any happiness to be found in this world, that’s the only way you can find it.

Amid the eastern Himalayas

Well, here’s the little travelogue I promised – though I know by now that very few readers are really interested.

As I said earlier, for my daughter it was her first flight (my first was in class two, and she’s in class nine now), so naturally she was full of eager anticipation. So was I. Mercifully it was an Airbus A320 and not one of those cramped and noisy little Boeing 737s of yore. Strangely enough – and I could be mistaken, my memories being twenty years old – even this aeroplane seemed rather small. It was clean and well-served, but these days on these low-cost airlines the seating is quite cramped, and the stewardesses have been reduced to salesgirls. Not that they have much to sell except a few grossly overpriced snacks and juices. Anyway, the flight was so short that it was over almost as soon as it had started. It was a cloudy day, so though we got a fine view of the snow-capped Himalayan peaks before landing at Guwahati, we missed the lovely sight of the Brahmaputra that I remembered from the last time. The road to Shillong is little more than a hundred kilometres, and the scenery is picturesque, though not as formidably grand as in the western Himalayas. But it is horribly congested, and though the widening project is visibly underway (making the trip very dusty), it took us all of six hours to reach Shillong, when it should have taken little more than three. Our hotel was, as always, decent though not fancy, but with all mod cons. That first night was pretty chilly. The next day we made a sightseeing tour of the town. Ninety per cent of the population seems to be cramped into a circle of half-km radius around the Police Bazar Chowk, and it’s basically a very crowded, noisy and flashy marketplace: all very brightly lit up on the occasion of Christmas. The whole city was in holiday mood. Most traders here are Marwaris, most tourists Bengalis, and the locals, the majority being of the Khasi tribe, seem to care little for work and a great deal for drink and revelry. The Elephant Falls and Shillong / Laitkor Peak offered some lovely views. It was good to see that these places are well-tended and guarded, and they help to earn the municipality a pretty penny. The Beadon and Bishop Falls were off-limits, because we were warned against rowdies who haunt those far-flung locations. Lady Hydari Park, the mini-zoo  and the Cathedral of Mary help of Christians all decked up for the season were particularly enjoyable.

On the 26^th we drove to Cherrapunjee (locally called Sohra) and back. Lovely drive, with some more picturesque waterfalls (though, of course, if you want to see them in their full fury you must come during the monsoons), and the long stretches of heather and gorse on the low undulating hills quite justified the sobriquet of Scotland of the East. We gave the Mawsmai caves a miss, since we don’t like cramped, closed spaces and they were too crowded with tourists anyway, but the adjoining Sacred Woods were a treat, for the sheer tranquillity if nothing else. Along the way we stopped off at several viewpoints, including one from where you could look down at the plains of Bangladesh, and imagine the great ocean of dark rainclouds rolling in from the sea during June to August, which go to make this the rainiest place on earth.

The 27th was spent lazing, sun-bathing and boating at Ward’s Lake. While my wife went shopping, my daughter and I walked for two hours around the town, since both of us enjoy walking, and have begun to agree that you cannot really see a place if you stay inside a car all the time. It was quite an exercise, since we walked fast, and didn’t spare ourselves the steepest roads. It gave us quite a few photo-ops and a keen appetite, among other things. A large part of the town is under military occupation, it being the headquarters of both the 101 Area Command of the Army and the Eastern Air Command, under a Lieutenant General and an Air Marshal respectively, no less. Besides, there are cantonments of the Indo Tibetan Border Police, the CRPF and the NCC. It’s obvious that India is taking the troubles on its borders seriously, and no wonder, because both China and Bangladesh are only a few minutes by air. But the heavy military presence is largely responsible, I am sure, for keeping the town so clean and green. One awful thing about this place is that the food is prohibitively expensive, especially anything in the line of fruits and vegetables, since everything has to be carried by truck from the plains, so I was told that the locals survive largely on meat, which is relatively cheap, especially pork.

Shillong is special for me because there used to be strong family connections. My mother’s grandfather was a self-made tycoon, and he built a large part of this town, as well as the only highway (still locally called the Gauhati-Shillong Road) and Assam’s first bus transport service and departmental store. The family fortune faded rapidly after his death in 1947, but one of his daughters ran a primary school in her sprawling house where I visited almost forty years ago. Then the huge uprising of the natives began and went through the 1980s, so that most Bengalis had to sell out to the locals and depart. Now all history seems to have been wiped out. The house (N.K. Bhattacharjee and Co.) on Jail Road has been mentioned in Leela Mazumdar’s book Aar Konokhane, but the locals are mostly young and entirely uninterested in the past, and most old buildings have been razed and replaced, so that I could find no traces of what I was looking for. It was almost as bad as looking for Corbett’s house in Nainital…

We returned on the 28^th. The drive back was just as slow as the first time round. The plus point was that we had a long panoramic view of Umiam Lake, aka Barapani. The temperature rose rapidly as we came down, so that freezing inside the car was speedily replaced by cooking. En route we stopped off at the famed Kamakshya temple, though I hung back, not being half as religious-minded as my wife, preferring to enjoy the view from the balcony of a house right next to the temple complex. Then back to Lokapriya Gopinath Bordoloi airport, which, unlike Dumdum/Netaji, offers a smoking room – and yet, they took away my lighter before I could reach it, because here, unlike in Kolkata, the rules stipulate that lighters even in the hold pose a security risk. Bureaucracy is equally cussed everywhere. The view of the lights of the city just before landing was the last bonus. We arrived at my in-laws’ place tired but happy. The next day it was my daughter’s birthday. Yesterday was spent visiting and adding a few more little touches to the new flat: for me it has become a biannual exercise! And this morning we took a Volvo home…

For photos, click on this link.

Four hours of the old year left. I wish all my readers a very Happy New Year.

A little filler: wait for the longer post!

I am in a cyber-cafe right now in Kolkata, one with a (predictably-) slow net connection, so I shall keep this post short: just a sort of filler to satisfy those of my readers who might have started wondering where I had suddenly vanished. I left Durgapur in the morning of Thursday the 22nd for my end-of-the-year holiday, and we, our family, made a brief but enjoyable visit to Shillong, Meghalaya, from where we returned only last  night.

We are lazing and soaking in the winter sun (though it's disappointingly less cold than it was a week ago), and taking delight in the fact that it's my daughter's birthday. She's all of fifteen today, and in three years' time she will be an adult, and five feet ten and very solemn and fluent in three languages, and it still seems she was born yesterday. Life is a continuously unfolding miracle...

This trip was special in more ways than one. We went to the hills after a gap of three years. It was the first time my daughter flew (for me, it was the first flight in twenty years!). Shillong was pretty, but crowded, and hardly colder than Durgapur at its coldest. I shall write about it in detail in the next blogpost, and provide a link to some photographs: just give me a little time, folks. Meanwhile, season's greetings to all, and many thanks to all those who emailed and sms-ed their good wishes- too numerous to reply individually to. May I be pardoned for being so lazy.

Booklover lost among philistines

It amazes me to find among my pupils some (albeit a tiny number) who still want to read. And it makes me sigh to know that the more our schools are ‘progressing in keeping with the times’, the less opportunity these children have of reading – not just fiction but all kinds of non-fiction works, including stuff  that they need to reference for the ‘project work’ they are assigned from time to time, whether it is something about dinosaurs or the great depression or faraway stars or environmental movements or world wars. Most end up regurgitating copies of work done earlier by seniors, or material that their parents can beg, borrow or buy, or downloading stuff they have found on the net, or actually getting the project work done lock stock and barrel by professionals for a fee. And they grow up, even the bright ones among them, without having read a tiny fraction of what I’d consider absolutely necessary for someone who wants to function usefully and valuably in today’s world as an educated person.

An old boy who has recently gone over to a major university in Canada wrote back that one of his first strong impressions was that a lot of people read ‘big, fat books’ everywhere – in parks, on trains, at home. And others from some other countries aver that libraries are plentiful, well-stocked, and well-patronized. All I can do is sigh. I guess I was born in the wrong country. I would call any Indian city, including mine, civilized only when it accommodates haunts for bibliophiles like this (many thanks to Anindya Banerjee for sending me the link). I tried to buck the trend in a very small way for many years : as a schoolteacher, and even as a private person. Then I had to give up charge of the school library shortly before I resigned, and after suffering the agony of having too many books stolen and dismembered, and hearing too much parental abuse about how I was ‘misguiding and distracting’ their children I couldn’t take it any more, so I stopped lending out my own books routinely to my pupils, too. The generation of kids growing up in front of my eyes now, my daughter’s generation, has read virtually nothing beyond textbooks and comics ( a lot haven’t even read Tintin and Asterix!), so no matter what I ask them to talk or write about, be it parachutes or pumas, deserts or dreams, they evince an ignorance, or even worse, unconcern, that makes my heart ache. And I never cease wondering how such utterly ignorant folks can go on to get and hold down jobs that I once supposed required a great deal of knowledge!

So today, when I encourage young people to read, I have adopted a different tack. I don’t tell them merely that it would help them to become good doctors and engineers and business managers, because I now know that’s a lie: I rather tell them it will make them fuller, happier, more mature people, better able to cope with the challenges of life, having more real entertainment at their command than those who depend on parties and shopping and festivals, less likely to be swept off their feet by the siren song of advertizing, and proud of themselves for knowing a lot more about the world and about mankind than their peers do.

Imagine an eighteen year old who has grown up without having read (and remembered-) not only the world’s finest fairy tales but the Mahabharata and Shakespeare and Tagore and Russell, and not even Dickens and Conan Doyle and Wilde and Shaw and Wells and Kipling and Wodehouse and Hemingway and Asimov and Gerald Durrell and Herriot and Corbett and Jack London and Alistair Maclean and Nevil Shute and Chekhov and Pushkin and Tolstoy and Balzac and Hugo, nor even the great modern classics like Gone with the wind, All Quiet on the Western Front, Anne Frank’s Diary, To kill a Mockingbird, Grapes of Wrath, The Good Earth, How Green was my Valley, Exodus and The Agony and the Ecstasy… who has hardly even encountered any contemporary writer of greater substance than Chetan Bhagat! It takes my breath away, it makes me feel like a lone man on the Planet of the Apes. 

AMRI blaze: who really cares?

At latest count, about ninety people, most of them helpless patients, died in the accidental fire that broke out yesterday at one of Kolkata’s premier (and most expensive –) hospitals. Most of them choked to death. See this report.

Virtually every adult in this country knows, of course, that our closed public spaces are high-risk fire hazards as a rule. Occasional disasters merely remind us of this grotesque fact, such as the fire on the Doon Express a few days ago, the blaze at Stephen’s Court, also in Kolkata some time ago, the news of a large number of schoolchildren who were roasted alive somewhere in south India before that, and a similar incident at a Delhi cinema a few years before that. We live with that knowledge, preferring not to think about it, since we all feel that very ordinary people like us cannot do a thing by ourselves to change things for the better, and praying is better than worrying that it may happen to us or ours, since worry only leads to bad dreams and ulcers.

The fact of the matter, though, is that it isn’t only ordinary people (who are most likely to be the victims) who don’t care: those in power don’t, either. Most places like schools, offices, bazaars, cinemas and hospitals either do not have clearances showing that they are prepared to handle such emergencies with minimum loss of life and limb, or even if their papers are in order, the ground reality is that they are entirely unprepared, both in terms of equipment and trained personnel. It’s like not only do you shut your eyes when you look at disaster hurtling towards your car, but your driver does too! So the security guards not only do not swing into action at once but dally in raising the alarm, the police arrive late, the firemen, despite their courage and best of intentions, are handicapped by woefully inadequate equipment too, and they all have to rely on the spontaneous and desperate assistance given by the men from the nearby slum – who, ironically, are personae non grata to the authorities in the normal course of things! They do their best, of course, but that best, being clumsy and chaotic, cannot prevent a horrific casualty toll. After a brief outburst of lamentation and indignation – maybe a roadblock for a few hours, a few buses burnt, a few low level functionaries beaten up, some compensation announced and some condolences offered – the public forgets, the media turn their attention to newer sensations, the police cases are covered up, the culprits (to wit the moneybags who run these profit-churning institutions and cannot bother to ‘waste money’ on safety precautions) let off with  minor reprimands and fines, and no strict, large-scale, exhaustive measures are adopted to ensure that such horrors will never be repeated.

That some people, layman or high official, claim to be shocked when such mishaps occur is what makes me want to puke.  Why do they pretend, grown-up and educated people, that they don’t know how uncaring and inept we are, most of us, at taking responsibility for others, even when that happens to be our job? The other day I had asked some pupils to write a short essay on the kind of fire-control measures they had at school, and they had little idea – no fault of theirs! – and when I told them about some of the rules (fire escapes, extinguishers and sandbags on every floor, at least a few full-body asbestos suits for emergency rescue, sick room with nurses skilled in first aid, police and fire brigade hotlines, regular evacuation drills and teachers trained compulsorily to handle such crises…) they laughed cynically, as well they might, knowing whatever they already do: ‘Sir, is there one school in this country which is fully prepared in that sense?’ And as for this particular hospital, let me narrate just one incident in which I was personally involved. About 11 years ago I had gone there to get a CAT scan done (there was a pain in the neck and the doctor suspected spondylitis). I asked about costs at the reception, and the figure they quoted sounded exorbitant to me, so I was visibly hesitating when the man asked ‘How much money do you have in your pocket (apni koto taka enechhen)? It sounded such a bizarre question that I felt I was talking to a carrion-eating vulture, not a human being. I turned around without a word  and went off to get the scan done elsewhere. This is the attitude of the personnel who deal with you first at that hospital. Is it any wonder that they would be ghoulishly unconcerned about patient safety? Tellingly, while a couple of nurses lost their lives trying to save sick children, a lot of staffers, including securitymen, allegedly ran for safety at the first hint of serious danger.

One Bengali newspaper (Shongbad Protidin, p. 4) has published a very sympathetic article today about the proprietor of the hospital, one S.K. Todi, saying what a nice man he is, and how hard he has worked to give the city a great hospital, how unfair it is of fate to deal him such a big blow in his declining years, and how this ‘utterly unexpected’ disaster has left him a broken man. CM Mamata Banerjee has promptly cancelled the licence of the hospital, and vowed to give the ‘harshest punishment’ to the guilty. It remains to be seen whether she would like to start with Mr. Todi. If he is not an arch criminal making money hand over fist with utter disregard for human life, can’t we at least agree that he is too big a fool (if he really thinks the disaster was ‘utterly unexpected’) to be trusted with running anything more serious than a street-corner paan shop?

One last word for the young and not-so-young who worship the wealthy like gods: these are the CEO types who drive about in BMWs, stay in seven-star hotels and go holidaying in the Riviera. Do you begin to see why I habitually wrinkle my nose when I hear of them?

Bbuddah hoga terra baap!

Just watched Amitabh Bachchan’s Bbuddah hoga terra baap.

As one reviewer has put it: “Corny, a little desperate and contrived, but Bbuddah Hoga knows that and doesn’t care… Bachchan playacts here, but with chutzpah and humour and still has the power to make you smile and weep… for fans, it is one big, happy bear cuddle with the man with whom they’ve had their longest love affair.” And by God, it stirs nostalgia with spades.

The director says at the end that it is an unabashed and feisty tribute to the icon so many of us have grown up with (and like whom so many of us are growing old now), and many of us, even very solemn and learned and successful ones among us, have secretly longed to emulate, at least in some ways, at least at some stage of our lives.

What a career it has been, through so many ups and downs, so many disasters, so many write-offs, so many comebacks, so many avatars! Just glancing down a list of all the memorable movies and roles takes one’s breath away. Since the days of Saat Hindusthani and Anand we had Zanzeer, and Namak Haram and Chupke Chupke and Deewar, through all-time landmarks like Sholay, and then Amar Akbar Antony, Muquaddar ka Sikandar, Kaala Patthar, Adaalat, Trishul, Don, Silsila and Shakti, by which time he was probably the most famous Indian alive, through the disaster years that began with the near-fatal accident on the sets of Coolie, disease and family trouble and political mess and financial crisis, and then, when virtually everyone had given up on him as a burnt-out has-been, barring occasional blips like Agneepath and Suryavansham, there came the renaissance that started with Mohabbatein and has not run out of steam yet, and he has already given us as varied fare as Bunty aur Babli, Cheeni Kum, Black, Viruddh, Baghban, Paa, Sarkar, Bhootnath, Nishabd, Dev, Khaki, Rann and The Last Lear.  Along the way he made a huge success of KBC on TV, and has managed to impress all kinds of industry greats including Francois Truffaut and Satyajit Ray, for that unique trademark baritone if nothing else, and has even set his own benchmark as a playback singer (who can say s/he has been unaffected by Mere pas awo mere doston ek kissa suno or Main or meri tanhai or Rang barse…? you should try out this latest number too, if you haven't heard it already).

And he has never really been handsome and smart, either, except insofar as he defined those ideas to fit himself and persuade hundreds of millions of cinegoers, including those who were always a little worried about whether he could even act at all! What can you say about a man like that? What kind of staying power does it call for, what kind of talent and grit? All I could think of after watching Bbuddah was, be as solemn or corny or heartrending or way out as you like, Mr. Bachchan, only live and act some more years, and “do not go gentle into that good night… rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

What does it mean to be intelligent?

An old boy recently wrote me a one-line email: ‘Sir, what does it mean to be intelligent?’ The best of my old boys are like that: they suddenly pop up with questions, not only because they are really keen to have an answer, but probably because they know I like people who make me think.

This is what I wrote back: “Ha! You could look up H.J. Eysenck’s books (such as Check your own IQ) for starters, I suppose. Then consider that many experts opine that there are different kinds of intelligence: someone who is great at chess could be hopeless in business, a physicist a dud in politics. Personally, I judge my pupils’ intelligence by how many times they have to be told the same things, how long they remember things they are told, how quickly they pick up hints and see connections between different things, how creative their imaginations are, how curious they are to know things ‘not in their syllabus’... things like that. As you well know, I don't call many people intelligent, and I see remarkably few really intelligent people among those who routinely ace their examinations.” I could have added that an intelligent pupil usually has a lot of questions to ask, and likes to argue every point – so intelligence can flourish only with encouragement from liberal minded, enthusiastic and intelligent teachers (parents importantly among them), especially in the early years!

I deliberately kept that reply short, but I do have a few things to add. First, that intelligence is a very interesting thing – most of civilization we owe to it. What is even more noteworthy about it is that all through history, hardly 10 per cent, or perhaps even less, of the human population could have ever been called intelligent by any yardstick (and I don’t care how ‘elitist’ this sounds – the same applies to other things, like for instance ‘beautiful’. These are facts: if you don’t like the way they are, quarrel with the Maker, don’t call your fellow men names out of frustration and spite!). Also, don’t ascribe worldly success to intelligence: statistically speaking, luck (including which parents you were born to), daring, diligence and ruthlessness, combined sometimes with some native skill which has found a lucrative market, like playing cricket in contemporary India, together play a far bigger role in your success than any intelligence you may possess – indeed, an excess of intelligence might be a serious liability in all sorts of worldly careers which require getting along with the herd and not noticing or bothering overmuch about all that is wrong and weird and stupid around you.

Intelligence sometimes makes you conceited, and helps to make enemies, so it is a good thing to temper it with modesty and quietness. However, whether or not an intelligent person is stuck up, it makes others jealous and spiteful, so it behoves the intelligent person to be careful unless s/he wants to be nailed to the cross, and reconcile to the fact that s/he will be lonely all through life, unless s/he is exceptionally lucky to have a few admiring friends. We hate clever people much more than any other type.

A lifetime of reading, observing and teaching at all levels has convinced me that academic merit has very little to do with intelligence, whether you are looking at the kindergarten level or at post-doc scholars. Learning, yes, sometimes, but not intelligence. Also, children are usually much smarter than adults are, and in that sense that chestnut which says ‘I was born intelligent, but education ruined me’ hits the nail absolutely on the head, especially given the kind of ‘education’ that has been drummed into people’s heads over the last two generations in this country and some others I could name. Which, of course, does not mean that any pinhead teenager who goes around with that legend on her t-shirt has a right to imagine that she should be identified as intelligent, mind you.

Some people of superlative intelligence are very narrowly focused, but I give highest marks to those who have a very wide diversity of interests and talents – the Leonardo and Tagore and Asimov types.

Emotional intelligence is not the same as being able to do complex math quickly in  the head: it means being able to imaginatively understand and sympathize with other people’s plight and points of view, and even think up solutions for their problems (which are not usually of a ‘convergent’ nature, meaning the sort they ask you to tackle in most tests for entrance to engineering or business school) even if you have not personally shared in their experiences. In this sense, many an old-fashioned grandma is far more intelligent than her grandson who has just graduated from a top-flight technical college. Technical/mechanical intelligence – the sort that makes successful inventors, scrabble players and entrepreneurs – I believe, is not only far more common than that of the emotional type, but is getting  dangerously  too common in a world which maniacally undervalues the other type both in academia and in the job market. You cannot expect decent people, leave alone saints, to flourish in a world where plumbers (or software writers, or mannequins) are far more highly rewarded, and not just in terms of money. For instance, so many people whom I once knew cannot understand why I should forget them or become cool and aloof when they try to renew contact after a hiatus of many years… that’s the sort of lack of intelligence I am talking about, and all these people are more or less educated, even bright if you go by their examination scores.

In close connection with emotional intelligence comes the question of wit. And I must insist on this: although wit can be taken too far, a keen appreciation of humour is one very important sign of the kind of intelligence I value most – perhaps because it is so rare around me. Intelligent people, unless they are depressive, laugh a lot, make people laugh, don’t take themselves too seriously, and limit their aggression to verbal barbs (never, of course, stooping to abuse, which is anything but witty).

Intelligence (and talent) can flourish only in a milieu where they are actively identified and patronized. It is no wonder that certain brief periods in the history of many countries have been emblazoned with the apparently ‘sudden’ appearance of a great many men and women of the highest intelligence. India today would rank pretty low in terms of how she values the kind of people who make good writers, lawmakers, teachers, judges and saints. Next to being a highly intelligent man, it is best to be a man who respects and values intelligence, especially if you are in a position of some power, whether as a school headmaster or a tycoon or a cabinet minister. Best for the country, I mean.

Paradoxically, exceptionally intelligent men are often far more sympathetic to the slow and foolish than people of quite average intelligence are: read Maugham’s short story Salvatore, and Tagore’s Balai.

Finally, I must bear witness to the impression that the more this country drowns in solemn and self-important mediocrity, the less it wants to see intelligent people flourish.

Here is also a link to something that some of my readers might find interesting for further reading.

Have I done justice to your question now, Amit, in case you are reading? Any other question on the subject that I can try to answer, readers?

Debjaan

I have always held that Bibhuti Bhushan Bandyopadhyay would have won the Nobel Prize for literature if he had had the good fortune to be born English or French or Spanish or even Russian: it was his misfortune that he was born a Bengali. Outside a very tiny circle of readers, his fame rests overwhelmingly on only one book, the Apu Trilogy beginning with Pather Panchali, immortalized in cinema by Satyajit Ray. He deserved much better. Aranyak, The Tale of the Forest, is certainly – to my knowledge, at least – one of a kind as a novel, and I hold it as one of the hundred greatest books I have ever read. His adventure saga for children of all ages, Chander Pahaar, The Mountain of the Moon, is likewise a gem of the finest cut: it still takes my breath away to think that any author could write so knowledgeably and evocatively about faraway places he had only read (and dreamt-) about. In Bengali, only Premendra Mitra’s Surjyo Kaandle Shona in the same genre can be placed on the same pedestal, and no Bengali writer, even with the internet at his disposal, has come close to equaling the feat in the last 20 years. So also Adorsho Hindu Hotel, which I encouraged my daughter to write about on her blog some time ago, and Ichhamati, and Ashani Sanket.

Now I have just finished reading and digesting Debjaan, another little novel of his, and I am filled with a sublime wonder. I had read it when I was a boy, but then, somehow, it didn’t make a very great impression: evidently I had to grow up a great deal before I could appreciate its true worth!

It is an adventure story spanning many worlds and many lifetimes. In one sense, it is cast in the mould of Lord of the Rings and Asimov’s Foundation series; at least, those who have read and loved those books would relish it most. What makes it unique is that it is unabashedly spiritual in tone and message, not merely carrying religious overtones like Lewis’ Narnia saga. Drawing from many Indian theological traditions, including the bhakti of the vaishnav and the advaita of the gnyana yogi (and blending them magnificently with many of the findings and speculations of 20th century science, such as distant galaxies beyond human vision and  supernovae and baby stars being born out of interstellar gas, and the possibility of intelligent life – though perhaps of a sort very different from the terrestrial – flourishing on many other planets, and that ‘reality’ could exist in many dimensions beyond those perceived by the human senses), it describes the soul’s journey through many worlds, many heavens, seeing the human drama unfolding with supra-human eyes, being reborn again and again, wading through all kinds of sin and depravity and yet struggling forever towards the light, pulled ever upwards by the all-conquering power of love, meeting incomprehensibly higher beings (gods/angels if you like), some of whom were human once – and all along trying, with ever greater understanding and still falling hopelessly short, to realize the Ultimate, the Absolute, both the alpha and the omega, from whom all things physical and mental arise and into whom they go back again, whom some call God, knowing whom is the only way to gain true freedom and joy and glory.

The Upanishad has been quoted here: adityavaranam purushang mahantam/ vedahametang tamaso parastat/ twameva viditwati mrityumeti/ nanya pantha vidyathe ayanayah (it is only by directly knowing the effulgent Being who stands beyond the darkness and the void that you can overcome Death: there is no other way). But I was also reminded of the medieval brajabuli poet Vidyapati writing in praise of the Supreme Lord of All: kata chaturanana mari mari jawata, na tuwa adi avasana/ tohe janami punah tohe samawata, saagar lahari samana (so many Creator Brahmas have been born from You who is without beginning and end, and died again, like waves on an infinite ocean…), and I remembered Emily Dickinson writing This world is not conclusion, a Species stands beyond/ Invisible as music, but positive, as sound/ ...To guess it puzzles scholars, to gain it men have borne/ Contempt of generations, and crucifixion, shown/ Faith slips, and laughs, and rallies/ Blushes, if any see/ Plucks at a twig of evidence, and asks a vane the way…

The book, I felt, and my daughter independently concurred, fills one with an ineffable sense of peace and confidence and cheerfulness. Once I allow the full possibility of the vastness of reality to pervade my mind, much ennui fades, much that I take seriously becomes trivial, and much terror begins to look silly. I wonder whether Professor Dumbledore had read the Gita, but he got it absolutely right at least twice: ‘Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?’ and ‘To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.’ Ekam satya, the truth is one, though maybe vipra bahudha vidanti, the wise sometimes call it by different names.

Idealistic horrors

Ideals? Yes, it is important to have some ideals, especially in a world which is rapidly becoming gross, totally obsessed with the here and now, convinced that just about everything goes, and mindlessly materialistic, nowhere better illustrated than by the way caring for skin, hair, teeth and nails has become a multi-billion dollar industry, promising to keep you eternally young and appealing, utterly at odds with the ineluctable fact that no matter how much we try and spend, we are all going to grow old and fusty, and then die and be forgotten all too soon, all of us except the blessed few who leave valuable things behind, and not even they for very long… It is important to love living things rather than gadgets, it is important to dream (and not just about making money!), it is important to hold on to certain non-negotiable values simply because one is convinced that they are good in themselves, it is important to believe that there’s more to life than bestial, sensual existence, even if that is a five-star existence… that’s the sort of thing I mean. And so (see my post titled 'Skepticism and cynicism') I celebrate when I see young people who do have some ideals, and I take my hat off to elderly people who still retain a few.

I am, however, congenitally the kind of person who is wary of wild enthusiasms of any sort, especially idealistic ones. It is possible to be too idealistic. One can simply be bone-lazy all one’s life and pass it off as an effect of idealism – I have personally known far too many people of the sort. They do no good to themselves and remain burdens on their families and friends lifelong, myriad forever-just-about-to-become-great artists and philosophers among them. The type is not unique to any particular age or race, but I am ashamed that there’s a preponderance of such folks among my own people, the Bengalis. Then there are people who are truly idealistic, loving, caring, deeply spiritual, but such a one too can be a cross for others to bear. The great medieval Marathi saint Tukaram wrote a song in a moment of total candour that while he spent all his time praising the Lord, the cow ate up the vegetables from his stall, while his wife wept and cursed him for not feeding his own children. In today’s world the type has grown pretty uncommon, but not extinct.

What led me to write this essay, however,  was this article about how the very great romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was not, in real personal life, halfway as wonderful a man as he comes across through his poetry. One shudders to think of the dichotomy, really, and thanks heaven that he never got a chance to ‘remould the world nearer to heart’s desire’, in Omar Khayyam’s words. It is this type who, when they do get a chance to wield power over men’s bodies and minds, become Robespierres and Lenins: and millions rue the day they stopped writing poetry and started making and executing laws. No wonder Shelley’s long-suffering wife fiercely wanted her son to become just a normal, ordinary man!

As my dear old boy Abhirup says, quoting a line from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, I only seem to have a ‘choice of nightmares’. What would I rather have: a world with more Shelleys in it, or one filled with dumb and crass teenagers (of all ages… see my post titled 'Juvenilia') living it up at the pubs and shopping malls as if there need be no tomorrow?

[P.S.: The results of the poll have been fixtured at the bottom of the right hand sidebar]