Dusk of the year

This has been a busy but quiet and on the whole satisfactory year. After the trauma of last year, a  most welcome change. But I have lost one more of the grand old women in my family.

Notable things that have happened to me include the fact that my Facebook notice board has been in use for more than a year now, and the post on Rani Rashmoni has been – and this is a wonder to me – continuously on the most-read list for more than a year, too. Although I have been walking regularly for at least twenty years, this was a year when I walked literally every day, even in the most sweltering heat and pouring rain. Most seriously, my daughter has gone much farther away, but we have been in constant, cheery and productive contact all through, and we are enthusiastically looking forward to her building up a career of her own. Cheques drawn out in her name are being deposited in her account already, taking me back to 35 years ago! Also, my YouTube channel has been revived. Let us see what it does in the years to come… another interesting thing is that the second generation is attending my classes now. Age comes with good compensations!

I started the year with a travel post, and within a week it will be travel time again. But I haven’t taken the new car on a really long drive yet, and it’s already almost a year old. I wish I could give myself more breaks. Wage earners who get 15-20 days of leave and several public holidays on top of 52 Sundays a year don’t begin to get what being self-employed is like. I wish they were taxed much more heavily at least…

I am looking forward to several things next year, not least the looming general elections. What do you predict, and what would you like to see?

I wrote a post titled India: twenty years after in 2011 to mark two decades of our national liberalization program. It’s been seven years since then. I am asking those of my readers who have clear lived memories of at least 25 years – do you think India has definitely and considerably improved over that time period, and improved enough, and that her prospects over the next 25 years are bright? Are our young going to grow up in a country doing far better than their ancestors could have dreamed, or is a nightmare waiting for them? A question that is very important to me: shall we see more great men (boro manush, we say in Bengali) in the Gandhi and Tagore mould again in our lifetimes? I am so tired of pettiness, evanescent flashiness and inconsequentiality…

It has been a very mild winter so far. I am rather missing the biting cold – it comes and goes so quickly anyway. After several days of more or less bright sunshine, it has been cloudy since yesterday, and drizzling since the middle of last night. I hope it will make the dratted dust settle a bit, and when the clouds clear, the real winter will set in. High time it did!