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? 

Two road trips

It rained twice, very heavily yesterday - at daybreak and again in the late afternoon, so even today it is deliciously cool, and I am relishing it to the full, knowing that the terrible summer is just around the corner. In fact, it had gotten unbearably hot at around this time last year already: the first of three successive heat waves that lasted till end-May. I wonder how soon things will take a turn for the worse, and how badly.

I have been planning to make a trip to the Dooars for ages: ironical that I have travelled so far and wide across India, but haven't visited two of the hottest sites in my own state, the Dooars and the Sunderbans. This time round I made all plans for a Dooars trip, end-February being my vacation time, but it had to be cancelled at the last moment. This has to be something more than a nasty coincidence. Anyway, I didn't waste the fortnight. In two successive weeks I made two three-day trips to nearby resorts - the first to Palash Bitan beside Murguma Dam, an hour's slow drive from the Ayodhya Hills in Purulia, the second to Gramer Bari, beside the elephant corridor through the sal forest just beyond Jhargram town in Medinipur. And both were lovely experiences, though I fell ill during the second trip, and narrowly avoided what could have been a truly bad accident on the road with very little damage. Both resorts were nestled prettily in the lap of nature, both were quiet for the most part (except for a few disgustingly noisy groups), both offered very cheery, informal, friendly service and good food, and nothing to do but 'stand and stare' to one's heart's content, night and day: just what I like. I keep looking for such places within reasonable driving distance - meaning four to six hours - and the more places I find, the happier I will be, because I intend to keep this up as long as I can keep going myself, and can afford it. In both places they said 'Do come again', and warned me to avoid the weekends and peak holiday seasons. On the second trip my mother accompanied me - she is approaching eighty and still enjoys these outings greatly, God bless her soul.

And now to brace up for yet another admission season. Something that seems to have been going on for ever - I wonder how I will feel the first year I stop doing it?

Tail end of winter

Unless there is something wrong with Google's counter, there have been more than thirty thousand page views since I mentioned 900,000 - and in only a month and a half. Incredible and heartening indeed. At this rate, I might cross that million mark much sooner than I had anticipated! Thank you to all my readers, but I keep wondering ever more with the passage of years: why do they communicate so little, or not at all?

It has been a mild but fairly long winter this time, thank heavens. I am still enjoying sitting out in the sunshine in the mornings and late afternoons - this being the slack season of the year. You can see some of my companions, animal and botanic, below :)

The dogs are free to come and go, but they have virtually made my house their home.

Two books

I just finished reading Rajat Ubhaykar's Truck de India, published in late 2019 - early into the present central government's second term (thank you, Aveek). It is a description of a young man's adventure, hitch-hiking with truck drivers across the length and breadth of India - well, Mumbai to Kashmir, a stretch through insurgent infested Nagaland, and again, Mumbai to Kanyakumari via Hyderabad. I got to learn a great deal, for which I am surprised, a little awed, and very thankful. Apart from the lovely, evocative descriptions of the road and the quick camaraderie that developed again and again between him and many of the drivers who kindly ferried him, for me, the two facts that stand out are: a) how hard these people work at great risk to life and limb to keep our vast country's economy going yet how much they are looked down upon by all and sundry in our society (even though they often earn more than a lot of naukriwallahs), as distinct from, say, soldiers, who are glorified for entirely political reasons, and b) how the 'system' grinds them under the heel relentlessly and mercilessly, by way of humiliation, harassment and bribe extraction (mostly through RTO officials and policemen, but also by all kinds of commission agents) all along the way, every time, all the time, and, despite our leaders' tall claims to the contrary, this 'brashtachaar' has been going on for ages and shows no likelihood of going away - though it seems that the introduction of the GST system countrywide and the increasing dominance of large corporate transporters who carry a lot of clout with the higher authorities has ameliorated their circumstances just a little lately. What stays with me is the common dream of so many truckers, that their English-medium educated, college graduate children will perhaps become high and mighty sarkari burra sahibs with assured, well-paying, secure and privileged jobs some day, the kind of demi-gods they have only regarded with fear and envy from an impossible social distance.

Two kinds of dark irony coloured my post-reading reflection. One - that after railing against the 'system', and the way our governments run, the writer himself has lately cleared the UPSC examination to be absorbed in the Indian Foreign Service. Should I wish him a great career, as the truckers think about it? Unless his knowledge of India fades and his conscience dies very soon, will he be able to live with himself? 

The second great irony that overlaps this one: I also just finished reading Alapan Bandyopadhyay's Amlar Mon, which I bought expecting it to be something of an autobiography, but it turned out to be a review of how some great bureaucrats (ICS and IAS officers), both British and Indian, both before and after independence, have served this nation to the best of their ability, despite all kinds of constraints and obstacles in their way. Alapan-da and I once rubbed shoulders briefly, back in 1986-87, as cub reporters for the ABP group (but that is another story), but he rose to the highest pinnacle of what might be called 'success' in his line of work, ending up as the senior most bureaucrat in the state (and currently 'Chief Advisor to the Government of West Bengal', a post specially created for him by the CM following his abrupt and untimely resignation from the Service), while the average IAS officer ends up in a half way house as a deputy secretary in some obscure department or something like that, as nondescript and forgettable as anyone higher than a clerk can be - and yet, all through the narrative a pathetic angst seeps through, an unbearably dark feeling of frustration, cynicism, helplessness and lack of agency ... to the extent that in one of his last essays he advises current aspirants to aim for the 'lower' services such as the police or tax- or audit departments rather than the IAS, once regarded as the 'heaven born' service. His son, I have since found out, has become a professor of history. And I, humble school teacher and later private tutor that I have remained, am proud and glad to say that I do not feel a tiny fraction of that kind of unhappiness with the career that I have pursued.

Having read both books, what advice should I give my current young ex-students now in college who come for career counselling?

Things that I still long for

Were someone to ask: what do you want out of life at your age and station in life? I would answer...

Firstly, that my daughter might have a long (but not too long, not as far as senility and decrepitude), healthy, safe and reasonably happy life, and pass on without shame and suffering.

Secondly, that God might grant the same favour to me - about the passing, that is - given that He knows I have already suffered a little more than my fair share of pain in these last sixty years.

Thirdly, that I might live out the rest of my life relieved of the agonizing financial insecurity that has been my constant companion ever since I began to earn my own keep, a long, long time ago: especially seeing that those who know and love me most have been assuring me for years that it is just a psychological burden that I still carry with me when it is no longer needed.

Fourthly, that my writing might be read more widely. For the readers' benefit much more than mine.

Those four things, in strictly decreasing order of priority. And NOTHING else, thank you.

Notice - nothing about fame and power and glory and glamour. Grew bored and wary about such silly, ephemeral things a long time ago.

Gandhi

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was assassinated on this day in 1948.

He was much reviled and  criticised in his own time, but also, of course, revered all over India and the world as very few people have ever been. Then he was nearly forgotten, except for all sorts of tokenism, such as this day being declared Martyr's Day, he being nicknamed Father of the Nation, his face adorning all currency notes, and liquor sales being banned countrywide on his birthday. Lage Raho Munnabhai said it all. 

About forty years after the assassination, I reviewed Professor Amlan Dutta's book, The Gandhian Way, for The Telegraph of Calcutta. I remember writing 'lo, the tide of times has brought him back in fashion!'

Three and a half decades more have passed since that review. On the threshold of old age, I can see that today Gandhi is being remembered more to be abused and ridiculed than otherwise, and some people are trying to elevate his assassin to the status of a different kind of national hero.

I have thought about Gandhi all my life, and I shall write a longish essay here putting down some of the things I have thought. Keep coming back.

A few thought-starters...

Most of the people who revile Gandhi in the crudest terms these days have one thing in common: they have not read a single book by him or about him written by any literate, informed and civilized author. Their 'opinions', such as they are, are drawn straight from social media, supplied by others as stupid, ignorant and bigoted (or driven by vested interests) as they themselves are. My way of dealing with them: ignore, in toto. In many situations, silence is golden.

It is little known that this apostle of non-violence categorically said that if he were given a choice between a violent man and a coward, he would choose the first without second thought, because the violent man has potential for self-improvement, civilizationally speaking, but the coward does not. And on this, he and his bete noire Winston Churchill were completely agreed: courage is the mother of all virtues. As for his own courage, it is again little known that he was awarded a medal for extraordinary bravery when serving as an ambulance driver during the Boer War, while Hitler, that supreme preacher of 'macho' violence, ran away when the police fired upon a procession that he was leading before he came to power. And he faced down blood-crazed mobs unarmed and virtually alone in his last days.

He was already a very famous man respected and admired by many for his peaceful, and to a great extent successful, struggle for the rights of coloured people in South Africa, before he returned to India and plunged into her politics in 1915.

He was the kind of man that the rulers of the greatest empire in history deferred to whenever he declared that he would stop eating if some serious political demand of his were not met, so great was the public upheaval they feared in case he died. This in a country where the vast majority lived on the brink of starvation and famine almost all the time. I have wondered all my life how he did it: and that too in a world without the internet and twitter!

He was an ardent environmentalist long before Rachel Carson wrote her seminal book, and a votary of 'sustainable development' long before that became a fancy catchword. Now the wise and rich and fashionable are taking to bicycles again, drinking tea from designer earthen cups, wearing handloom fabrics, eating all kinds of 'organic' food and learning to renew, recycle and re-use.

He was a grassroots fighter for better public hygiene and dissolution of caste barriers who did much more than most armchair revolutionaries fighting for those same things ever did in their lives. Those who are curious should read about these things.

He tried very hard to find a via media between the two rampant and intensely hostile ideologies of his day, capitalism and communism, because he knew that neither could benefit the mass of mankind in the long run in any comprehensive way, both being fundamentally and inevitably destructive, driven as they were by greed, fear, jealousy and hate. That he did not succeed was not his failure, just as it was not Christ's - it simply means that mankind is not ready to realize their dreams.

He was a man who could draw and retain the deepest reverence of the most diverse of men, such as Sardar Patel and Rajagopalachari, Tagore and Subhas Bose. Englishmen like Elmhirst and Andrews worshipped him. Mountbatten said he felt like an errant schoolboy before an irate headmaster in his presence. Albert Einstein said of him that generations to come would scarce believe that such a one as he ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth; on hearing of his death Bernard Shaw remarked that the assassination proved that in this world it is still 'too dangerous to be too good'. Charlie Chaplin, who in his autobiography claimed that Gandhi had left him unmoved, was nevertheless deeply enough impressed to make a movie as scathing about industrial capitalism as Modern Times: if that is not Gandhian in spirit through and through, I don't know what is. Nehru in his first Independence Day speech referred to him as 'the greatest man of our generation', and at his death mourned, 'the light has gone out of our lives'. And - to my mind an indispensable part of the character of a truly great man - he had an exquisite sense of humour, often directed against himself. So he excused his lack of 'sufficient' clothing when he was meeting the King-Emperor in London with the quip, 'The King was wearing enough for both of us'; so he said, when someone praised him as a saint, 'If you knew how hard it is to be a saint, you would pity me, not envy me'; so he called his bullock cart his 'Ox-ford', and it was he who uttered what I regard as the single most devastating put-down in history - when asked what he thought about western civilization, he shot back 'That would be a good idea'!

He was a man who insisted lifelong that he was a devout Hindu, yet he did more than any other nationally-prominent Hindu to accommodate Muslims in peace and friendship; he was a devotee of Christ, and he was quite clear that in matters of faith, he would be guided by his own reason and conscience rather than any hoary creed. He sang the Ram Dhun modified in his own idiosyncratic way, and dreamt of re-establishing Ram Rajya. That was of course a pipe dream like any such other, and many of us could not live with many of his tenets, but look at what kind of Ram Rajya many people are hell-bent on establishing today, and compare with his ideas, and decide for yourself.

I must also hasten to point out that, though he was oft reviled as a prime representative of 'eastern orthodoxy', in his love of individualism and personal moral responsibility, in his insistence on the need of the aesthetic and spiritual in human life, in his passionate attachment to the need for democratic local self-government as opposed to centralized power and so on, he was inspired much more by western idealists, to wit philosopher/author/reformers like Tolstoy, Ruskin and Thoreau, as well as the American model of federal government, than most people know these days.

I was reading up on Dr. Bindheshwar Pathak, the founder of the Sulabh Shouchalaya movement who lived in the post-Gandhian era but was profoundly inspired by Gandhi, and died only last year. He is the kind of man, like Kailash Satyarthi, that we the educated elite of India hate to know about and would like to pretend didn't exist, because with their life's work they, like Gandhi, showed up our abiding shames to the world, such as that until very lately millions of 'inferior' people traditionally cleared human wastes for their superiors in this 'great' country, and tens of millions of children were bonded to, and ruined by, the practice of child labour so that we could live in cheap comfort as a matter of 'entitlement'. We never mention these people to our children as inspiring success stories, as distinct from cricketers, movie stars and billionaire businessmen.

I also wonder about how much we have changed, diminished as a thinking species since his time. It seems, judging by both the social media 'debates' and most of the commentaries on the regular mass media, that we cannot make layered, nuanced, balanced, well-informed judgments about 'great' people any more. To mention just one example, most people nowadays, even 'educated' ones, cannot understand how Gandhi and Tagore could have so deeply respected each other despite having so many, so very marked differences. We simply want every judgment to be a clear case of black and white, 'good' and 'bad', as if we are living in a fairy tale for children; we cannot begin to imagine that the greater the man, the more complicated, even contradictory he is likely to be, and our judgment of him must be calibrated, finessed accordingly. So it is entirely possible for me to be profoundly respectful and full of awe about Gandhi while at the same time sadly shaking my head at (what I think to be -) his many eccentricities, follies and mistakes. But abuse him, never, for at least three good reasons: the sun doesn't care if a billion candles abuse him; the man did and attempted to do enough good things to make for ten thousand 'successful' lives on the scale of ordinary human beings, and abuse merely shows me up as a vulgar and ignorant idiot.

So the last thought for now, unless there are comments which stimulate further thinking: I wonder how Gandhi would have dealt with India today?

The way the world is

There has been a cold spell all over south Bengal this last week, what with overcast sky all day and occasional drizzles; the newspaper reported recently that Durgapur had become just as cold as Darjeeling (5.4 degrees celsius minimum) - which is bad for Darjeeling, if nothing else. We are looking forward to the sun rising again, as it has, weakly, late this morning. We shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth, I suppose: before you know what the terrible and never-ending summer will begin anew.

Our government at the Centre has started claiming that it has lifted 250 million people out of poverty since it came to power, that is over the last ten years, using an index quite different from that which has been traditionally used to measure poverty. Some experts have hotly contested the claim, saying this index is a much more faulty measure. I don't know what is actually happening, and in any case I am too old and know too much about economics to lay much store by these claims and counter-claims: I think only about what I see with my own eyes around me. The photograph below, which I myself took a few days ago in my own neighbourhood - an upper middle class neighbourhood dotted here and there by slums - has been bothering me:

Judging by her looks and gait, she must be at least my own age, if not a little older. Which means she was a young girl when the people's government (jonogoner sorkar) of the CPI(M) came to power in West Bengal, and got 34 years at a stretch to deliver on their promise of ameliorating poverty. And she has been living under the populist dispensations of both the Trinamul and BJP governments for over a decade. Yet she has spent all her life in slums, and she still has to work manually to collect brushwood for a fire. She has obviously been poor all her life, and that is how she will die. I have no real idea how many tens or hundreds of millions of Indians still live like that, but I have always been surrounded by them, somehow scrounging a bare subsistence all their lives and knowing nothing better, only being sold dreams at election time, and being fobbed off with pathetic handouts between elections (read Lakshmir Bhandar and all the PM-prefixed doles) which do not even pretend to solve any long-festering, endemic problem. Meanwhile, sales of luxury condos, cars, high-end phones and jewellery are booming, while organisations like Oxfam are ringing alarm bells about how extreme and cruel inequality has become all over the world.

Sorry - besides the facts that torture in police custody has been made illegal in most countries and large scale famines do not occur any more, nothing else will convince me, no technologist, economist or politician, that we live in a nice world which has been growing steadily nicer for the great mass of human beings.

I wish some of my readers will wonder, or ask, why my sympathies have always been with them, the great mass of ordinary human beings - though culturally and intellectually I am a passionate and unrepentant elitist - rather than with all the 'success' stories that the media spin out with nauseating regularity day in, day out to keep us anesthetized or intoxicated.

Start of 2024

Ten days of yet another new year have passed by in the blink of an eye, and I hardly noticed. While it has been well said that the days are long but the years are short, sometimes the days flit by too. I have been languorously savouring the (very mild, very fleeting) winter days, doing precious little besides the daily routine work that earns me a living and reading, of course. 2024... and to think that there was a time, back in the 1980s, when I could not even mentally look ahead this far! Most people cannot, I suppose.

India - that is Bharat - has been changing. In a lot of ways that bemuse me, and certainly do not always please. The changes are confusing, because they are neither coherent nor unidirectional. Religiosity, for example - whatever people mean by that, and they mean many different things - is rising like a tidal wave, and apparently quite in harmony with rapid and remarkable developments in technology (as distinct from science; science is definitely stagnant in some areas, and in retreat in many other places). So are our ideas about poverty: how many are actually poor, how much they really suffer, how much welfare they 'deserve' and so on. And also what being 'educated' is coming to mean these days: something about which I have been thinking continually for at least forty five years. Some day I shall have to get down seriously to writing down all the changes that I have seen over my lifetime. Some day when I am truly a man of leisure, and have nothing to lose.

Many of my young friends - old boys and girls - are going through tough times, so I send them my earnest good wishes and blessings. A few are looking forward to happy events: I wish them the best, too. I wonder what unexpected things this year is going to bring, for me, us, the country and the world...

I came back to Durgapur, it turns out permanently, in 1987. Since then, the town has changed surprisingly little, either in its physical infrastructure or in the outlook of its denizens. Far more highrises and cars, some snazzy new hospitals and schools that give expensive service of dubious quality, many more liquor outlets, far more pujo-s round the year, much more noise, but little else to note. One thing that pleased me lately is how much the railway station has been improved, with clean platforms, coloured sleepers on the tracks, escalators, and even painted staircases! The people, on the other hand, have little else in life other than shopping and gossip and attending pujo-s and biyebaari-s; and they are still avidly interested in exam scores and whose son is going around with whose daughter; only watching TV has been largely replaced with watching social media. I would have been glad to say that I meet many better educated, rational, interesting, polite and good-hearted people nowadays, but that would be a laughable piece of fiction. When I go out, it fills me with wonder to think that most of those I see around me had not been born back in '87, and the young parents of those days are dead or dodderers now.

I have begun to read, for the third time, one of the truly great books I have encountered in this lifetime - The Scalpel, the sword, a biography of the Canadian surgeon/writer/poet/painter/social reformer Norman Bethune. Takes me back to the ideals of my youth, what a great doctor, a great teacher, a great communist should be like, ideals that, in my own very fumbling, faltering way, I have tried to hold fast all my working life. I recently lent this book to a very young ex student who, I had thought, had the makings of a good doctor in him, and he returned it unread. I like to say that few things shock me these days, but this one did. 

More mangled English

Well, just one more post on the last day of the year.

This is meant to vent my scorn, as a teacher and lover of the English language, on the way it is being mangled by a lot of new-fangled silliness and worse, what we call nyakami and dhong in Bengali. Not the first time I am writing in this vein, nor will this be the last. This post is meant only for those who share my love and respect.

These days it is not enough to talk about 'new' things any more - I suppose because novelties come a dime a dozen every day - so we must gush about 'newer' things: newer fashion wear, newer technology, newer political ideas. Likewise with 'lesser' (and the biggest culprits are journalists, who massacre the language out of both ignorance and careless hurry, probably knowing that it doesn't matter, since their readers are mostly as careless and distracted as they are): few people seem to know any more that less and lesser mean quite different things. 'My father earns less than me' is okay to say; so is, grammatically speaking, 'non-vertebrates are lesser creatures', meaning inferior; but 'I have lesser luggage than you' is meaningless. Nowadays, also, some people can only talk about 'older' people; simply calling us senior citizens 'old' supposedly 'hurts our feelings'. I don't know which morons think so, young or old, but I daresay most of our generation is too mature to be 'hurt' by such trivialities, thank you very much.

I have kept the very worst example for the last. In a recent interview, a journalist (yes, again) asked an elderly musician 'How young are you?' This beggars comment, so I shall leave it there, just hoping that none of my acquaintances ever use such English with me. I would be as offended as if someone referred to me as 'they' instead of he.

I am thankful to all those readers who have taken the page view count beyond 900,000, so that I can seriously look forward to crossing the million mark fairly soon. Some of them, I guess, have been with me for many years at a stretch: I shall be glad if they tell me so, even with one-line comments. Meanwhile, have a very happy New Year ahead, all.

Christmas week ruminations

Why have I not been writing? Several reasons, actually.

I am growing old, and slow.

I have been engrossed in reading a lot of very enjoyable books, the Maisie Dobbs series by Jacqueline Winspear among them (woman investigator cum psychologist in the early 1930s), besides having just finished the last of the Vish Puri books by Tarquin Hall, and In Search of Wales by H. V. Morton (famed for In Search of England, which is one of the loveliest books I have ever read - and that is saying something!)

I have been having fun, visiting my daughter's new digs in Kolkata. 

There are several dogs around to play with.

It feels unpleasant to sit in a cold room hammering away at the keyboard when I can sit out in the sun with coffee and watch the blue sky, the lush greenery all around, the cooing and chirping of so many birds and the flitting many-hued butterflies. And chatting with favourite old boys or going out walking with them in the late evenings after class.

I have already written so much that I sometimes feel scared that I might be repeating myself.

Readers have not obliged me by writing in to suggest ideas, things which I could write about with interest and knowledge.

In any case, in the Yuletide season, I wish peace on earth and joy to all men and women of goodwill. Who knows but this might be my last post of 2023.

Electoral augury

BJP comfortably voted into power in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chattisgarh, devastated in Mizoram, and Congress surprise victory (at least to me) in Telangana, trouncing both the BJP and the ruling BRS.

Lesson learnt - the BJP steamroller is not something the Congress can tackle single-handedly any more, except occasionally here and there under special circumstances, probably even less so at the national general elections next year, no matter what pipe dreams they might still be dreaming. 

I am not gloating. I have no reason to. I can neither forget that the Congress has been the root of all political evil in India since 1947 along with most of the good that has been achieved, nor that the BJP is doing a lot of things it shouldn't if it really has the long-term welfare of the country (meaning only the vast majority of ordinary people) in mind.

I speak only for democracy, and for democracy even to survive, a strong and coherent opposition that knows its own mind is absolutely essential. So, for the sake of democracy, I do hope that the Congress gets off its high horse and goes quickly into a real and meaningful electoral (as well as post-electoral) understanding with all the other major opposition parties, so that the BJP at least has to face a strong fight in the 2024 parliamentary elections, and is kept on its toes under the law and the Constitution after - as it seems very likely as of today - it is returned to power once more.

Remember: democracy has been said to be 'not the best, but the least bad of all systems of government known to man'. Destroying it leads inevitably to the reduction of vast numbers into unthinking, uncomplaining poverty, drudgery and servitude. The tragedy is that people start missing it most only when it is lost, and it invariably takes a lot of time, pain and loss to bring it back. 'Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it'. 

Finished with ICSE 2024

As I wrote at about this time last year, I don't  feel much like writing a goodbye post for every outgoing batch any more these days. They can easily look up the several such posts I have written in the past, like this one, which haven't aged. That is not to say I did not enjoy my time with the latest batch: many of them were a genuine pleasure to teach, and show some promise as I understand promise, so while I live and still have my wits about me, I shall be glad to see them again and again. Meanwhile, as I have said already on my Whatsapp group, they might want to keep in touch especially through this blog, which I have always called an extension of my classroom.

I have been saying for donkey's years that I have always tried to hold on to some very idealistic, very old-fashioned notions about what education and teaching mean. Part of it relates to what I hope from my students: that they will see fit to keep in touch for ages, because they feel a) they got something of deep and lasting value here, and b) they still enjoy and benefit from my company. Quite a large number do, between ages 17 and 50: Abhishek Das, ICSE 2003, happily attended one of the last classes this year. The number, I am sure, could have been much larger if most parents did not drill into their children's minds that a teacher (or rather, tutor/instructor) loses his value as soon as their wards have sailed through some particular examination - and it does not help that most tutors are indeed worth nothing more - and if the children were not kept so permanently infantilized that even in late teenage or early adulthood they cannot dream of keeping in touch with someone without their parents' active encouragement and support. What a world we have made!

And that brings me to my greatest hope: that some of my students, when they have grown up and become parents and teachers themselves, will remember, if only because of a few people like me, what true education should consist of, and how it should be imparted. These days education, from pre-school to B-school level, has become one giant money spinning gig which packages learning in homogenized, merely utilitarian, easily digestible nuggets, to be swallowed, thrown up in exam halls and quickly forgotten. Those who 'succeed', it has been well said, are no better than circus animals trained to jump through hoops, good at nothing except taking examinations. It can at best produce only obedient, docile, unthinking herds in the name of good citizens (it makes me shudder to recall Auden's poem, The Unknown Citizen, written generations ago), and technical people who can only blindly follow standard operating protocols, whether they become teachers or surgeons, pilots or engineers. Even as fancy schools advertise not knowledge and reason and emotional training but air conditioned classrooms and swimming pools and CCTV equipped buses, and scream about how they are encouraging innovation and creativity, what they are actually doing is indoctrinating millions in utterly trivial and forgettable rote-learning, usually at vast expense, ensuring that genuinely bright, brave, original and experimental-minded people, the kind of people who take civilization forward, will become vanishingly rare. They will all be labelled as brilliant, and turn out to be conformist drudges; even tomorrow's 'talents' will be pygmies compared to the giants of yesteryears. Let a few children grow up to claim boldly that they know better, because they have had the good fortune to know some real teachers. I am grateful to quite a few such teachers myself, if mostly through books.

My love and best wishes to all who want and deserve it.

Police in Blunderland

It has been recently pointed out by some mindful and regular readers that I haven't written in quite a bit - three weeks, which is a long time by my own long-established standards. Guilty as accused - though most bloggers, after they have posted four or five items, can't think of another thing to say to save their lives, while I have been hammering away relentlessly at the keyboard  for seventeen continuous years, and there are more than 700 posts up there now. Anyway, the reasons are a) I wanted that last post to be on the top for some time, so that it might get a lot of eyeballs (which might translate into some much-needed donations), b) I couldn't think of something really interesting to me to write about (I don't gush over Cricket World Cups), and c) the older I grow, the more self-conscious I become about the unbearable crime of repeating oneself, as old people are only too apt to do.

Old boy Abhishek Das kindly sent me a new book which I found such good reading that I finished it in three days, in between attending to many other things. Police in Blunderland, written by retired senior IPS officer Bibhuti Dash - who, among other things, served for a large part of his career with the West Bengal Police. Dash has a number of excellent academic credentials, writes polished and racy English with a lot of highly literate allusions thrown in which most engineers will never recognize, sports a dry brand of humour interlaced with a lot of decent human sensitivity, and all the makings of a good raconteur who 'tells it like it is', rarely pulling any punches. Who says all our politicians and civil servants are ignorant and stupid? There are a lot of things I hugely enjoyed, such as when he berates Shashi Tharoor for 'daring' to call himself a Hindu without having gone to Hindu (College), when he talks about a maid who was skilled at BJP (Bartan-Jhaaru-Pochha), and when he explains why it is better by far to be a senior policeman's wife than a senior policeman. There is cynical gloom when he candidly admits that the police is shot through with corruption big and petty, and it has always been like that since at least medieval times, explaining why it is so, partly because of the hard-to-resist temptations galore, partly because it is a hoary tradition, partly because those who don't do it are regarded as inconvenient fools, and partly because all the countless recommendations for reform made by courts and inquiry commissions have been gathering dust for decades (though it seems I heard someone somewhere claiming that over the last nine years bhrashtachaar has been eliminated in this country). There is also sadness covered up with quiet bravado as he chronicles his current battle with cancer and pays tributes in the last pages to all those who helped him become who he was, from a bright classmate who dropped out early to follow in his father's footsteps to become a manual scavenger to a schoolteacher who coached and motivated him effectively to reach heights which would once have been unimaginable.

Good reading, as I said: to a lot of Indians and foreign readers alike it would be an eye-opener about what it means to live intelligently and empathetically in today's India, with all its 'pageantry, magic, comicality and pain'. Read it - a book like this deserves to be widely read, like Sudha Murthy's Wise and Otherwise. You can also visit and encourage Mr. Dash at his blog, b-b-dash.blogspot.com My salute to you as a fellow-citizen and teacher, Mr. Dash, and thank you, Abhishek, for giving me such a nice gift.

P.S.: The last time I read a good book written by a policeman in India was Goyendapeeth Lalbazar, which deserves to be translated into English: see this.

Aashray for Animals

With reference to the baby dog that I wrote about in the last post, my heart aches to write that I am now quite unsure about whether I shall be able to save its life at long distance. Too many ifs and buts... whether they will feed him regularly as I have instructed, whether they will keep watch on that damaged leg, whether the poor baby can take it all. I ran around quite a bit to find out about medicines to give it, then was told that I am not allowed to send liquids by courier or post. I can only pray that those hotel people are going to feed it daily for a while, at least. I have little hope that they will take the trouble to find the medicines and administer them regularly ... if it dies, I shall forever hold myself at least partially responsible. Believe me, it's not a nice thought to think. Anybody have any ideas, or contacts at or near Bodh Gaya whom I can beg to help?

Searching desperately for help online while still in Bodh Gaya, I learnt about Durgapur Aashray for animals, an NGO based in DSP township, Durgapur (19/20, Vivekananda Road, A-Zone). Their work, as described through Google and Facebook, seemed wonderful, but I wanted to see  the shelter for myself before taking a major decision. So I visited them  on Thursday the 26th. And by God, even at this age, I can say that it was a life-changing experience. My faith in humankind has been very powerfully renewed. Good people do exist, though they are sadly few and far between.

Mrs. Chaitali Roy and her family (along with a few dedicated young friends) have given themselves heart and soul to rescuing seriously injured and sick animals - mainly dogs - and giving them food, medical care and a loving home. I very quickly made friends with several of the furry inmates. The situation was as heart-rending as it was heartwarming, paradoxical though that may sound. There was one dog with its front legs permanently broken and stuck skywards, which crawls around on its belly; several are semi-paralysed, and several run around on only three legs, or the front two, their behinds supported on wheels in a frame. But all of them seemed full of life, and quite clearly not miserable or moribund. The organisation regularly arranges for all sorts of medical and surgical procedures too, such as curing dermatitis and acute malnutrition as well as sewing up wounds, restoring prolapsed uteruses and removing ghastly tumours which are potentially fatal if left untreated, besides running a programme of spaying and neutering young animals, so that they do not keep breeding indiscriminately, leading to accidents of all sorts to themselves and humans alike: a problem which has grown increasingly acute all over this country, ever since governments stopped regular culling and sterilizing drives.

They are running a full house, and new animals in pathetic condition keep turning up at their door all the time, besides the ones they continually pick up from the roadside. They often have to turn away animals in desperate need simply because they can no longer cope with more (and for that, as I read on the net, they are abused by people who would themselves, I am sure, never raise a finger to help in any substantial way). They very badly need more resources - space, volunteers, money, everything. 'What can I do to help?' I asked, after making an initial donation (note, I raised the question: Mrs. Roy never mentioned money before I did). She told me that some people do help now and then; but it is far from enough. Simply feeding that many animals daily and adequately costs nearly Rs. 60,000 a month, leaving aside everything else they do, and it was quite evident that they are not rich, idle people indulging a whim. 

So I am begging - that's right, begging - all my friends, acquaintances, students, their parents and every reader - to start a campaign at least to raise funds for this organization, even if we can't do anything else. I myself have vowed to give something every month. Do please first visit their Facebook page (Aashray for Animals), watch some of the videos, 'follow' them, then click a few buttons on your phone. You can send money to the following bank account

Account Name: Durgapur Aashray for Animals, Account number: 919010042770523 (Axis Bank), IFSC: UTIB0000213,

or you can send it via Google Pay/PayTM/Phone Pe at the number: 9609600920.

Please donate with a loving soul and an open hand. And please spread the word around in your own circles ... the more help that comes, the more lives will be saved, the more sufferers lifted out of misery.

Now here are a few photos I took there

Heartbreak at Bodh Gaya

I spent the four pujo days as I had hoped to, far from the madding crowd, 300 km away in Bodh Gaya.

I left on the morning of Saturday the 21st (saptami) and returned in the afternoon of Tuesday the 24th (Dashami). I had taken along ma and Koushik, who needed a much needed break of relaxation from his hectic work schedule.

I won't write much about the sights and sounds, because I have written in detail about the last trip (Buddha Vihar), in February 2017 (I went again in September that year - I love the place). The road is for the most part in excellent condition. We took in Rajgir and Nalanda too. Everyone agreed that the ambience of the Mahabodhi temple ('main mandir') in Bodh Gaya and the Venuvan park in Rajgir were the nicest highlights. 

The hotel was the same as the one I had stayed in on both the previous occasions, and yet I could recognize nothing about it, not the location, not the structure, not the rooms. Small miracle which was left unresolved. The staff was lazy and highly disorganized but polite and obliging, the food was good and the sleep restful, so I have little to complain about. The sun was hot, but everywhere it was pleasant in the shade, and the nights were very comfortable even without the air conditioner going.

Absolutely the most memorable thing that happened was the little stray puppy with a broken leg which had taken shelter in the hotel garage. I fell in love at first sight, cuddled him night and day, and parting from him broke my heart - I have been in tears again and again till the time of writing. I taught the staff to give it the right kind of food, begged them to put the leg in a splint, left some money for its care, and my only prayer to the Buddha these last few days has been that the poor mutt might survive, heal and prosper. If I had been a rich man with an adequate service staff, I swear I'd have brought that puppy with me and given it a permanent home. As it is, I am planning to do something more lasting and worthwhile for all such abandoned, sick and injured dogs around me, starting off with visiting the sole animal care shelter in my town that I have just heard about in order to find out how I can help. Maybe some of you can join in?

The First Noble Truth the Buddha taught: Life is suffering. Indeed. For me, and for all those I love. Become non-attached, He said, and yet no one ever strained every nerve harder lifelong to teach us all to be more loving, to serve, to heal, to save... did He ever succeed in becoming non-attached enough not to hurt so badly for every living thing?

Turning sixty

I turned sixty yesterday. If I had still been serving at that school, they would have officially thrown me out yesterday itself. All I can say is, 'Thank God I quit early.' And so, from today onwards, I am officially a Senior Citizen, and a voluntarily-self employed person hereafter.

There was a wonderful birthday celebration. The last time it had happened was exactly half a century ago (my mother, who arranged that last one, is still around), and this time round I had shyly expressed a mild desire for some sort of do on this day in my Whatsapp group of favourite old boys and girls. Several of them took it very seriously, and arranged a fun event that I shall remember with relish and gratitude till my dying day. There was even a round of cake cutting, and gifts (the most precious of which, it goes without saying, was that so many of them, Pupu included, had made time out of their busy schedules to come over, even from Kolkata, just to be here with me). There was an intercontinental video chat in which several others, who could not physically attend, enthusiastically joined in. There was happy cheering, eating and drinking, and almost all of them stayed the night, so we had the best kind of adda till the wee hours. Few people who are not rich and powerful celebrities (whose special occasions are attended essentially by chamchas looking for undeserved favours!) get such special treatment to warm the cockles of the heart. I am grateful to all of them, but above all to Providence. 'Somewhere in my youth or childhood, I must have done something good'....

I am serene and happy today. Feeling much, much more upbeat than I was ten years ago, when I turned fifty. (and you can go even further back into the past if you read Forty five and counting). Maybe for the time left to me, I can look forward to being less and less anxious about the future, having more and more time for loved ones, and watching their progress through life with ever more benign interest and helpful concern. Nothing would give me more pleasure anyway. But most of my life's work is done, and it was a fairly tough and challenging life, and I have dealt with it in a way that does not make me feel guilty or ashamed or inadequate. Now I am going to enjoy all the perquisites of old age, from getting a discount on my income tax bill to having to care less and less about household chores.

But, and I am reminding the Man Upstairs daily these days, I don't want to hang around for much longer than three score years and ten, and the three score is done already. 

One little girl, a current pupil, has wished me Happy Birthday along with the remark 'Not everyone can make sixty look like you do.' I am both grateful and very, very proud.  

What nonsense!

I just posted something on my fun blog after more than a year. It is a little comment on Sukumar Ray's immortal nonsense classic Abol Tabol. Do look it up.

Childhood fun

Now that I am going to become a 'senior citizen' in a few days' time, I am dreaming more and more of things that I used to do for fun in my childhood days.

There were two brands of toothpaste that we used, Binaca and Colgate. The Binaca-s used to come with tiny rubber models of all kinds of animals, saving up which as toys was a bonus. Alas, while Colgate carries on bravely, Binaca has gone out of business. What I remember best is using the thin cardboard boxes that enclosed the toothpaste tubes to build make-believe buses, cutting open little rectangular doors and windows along the sides with a razor blade, and nicking myself sometimes while I was at it.

On mornings when I woke up with a thunderstorm raging outside and there was no compulsion to set off for school, I used to pile up pillows and bolsters around me on the bed and pretend to be a captain sailing his little ship across a wild and billowy sea. Those who have read some poems in Stevenson's Child's Garden of Verses (A good Play, My bed is a boat) will be able, perhaps, to share the thrill and joy that I felt, and still imagine can sometimes feel when the clouds roar and the rain falls in torrents at daybreak.

During school vacations my grandpa frequently left me at evenfall at the gate of Children's Little Theatre (aka Aban Mahal) close to our house in Gol Park Kolkata after buying me a ticket, and I spent a couple of enchanted hours watching children little older than me enacting wonderful fables on stage. Two of my perennial favourites were Jijo and Rooplekha (I still sing one of the ditties from the former, tupi chai tupi, and I managed to fall head over heels in love with two successive heroines who performed in the latter!)

One image that keeps coming back is digging a tunnel through wet mud with a friend in our garden, and the triumphant joy we felt when our fingers met underground. Great explorers discovering new countries could hardly have felt prouder of themselves.

Trying out new shoes (only once a year, at Pujo time, and only those which were to be worn to school) was a tickle like few others. The first time they came out of the box, I always put them on and walked about on my bed. And reading Tintin comic books... I have read them in e-book format, and watched all the movies, including the Spielberg stuff, but I would still like to curl up with one of those illustrated books,if only I didn't have every line and picture in every book by heart.

In two of the houses I lived in during our sojourn in DSP township, I could clamber up the walls to the roof, and there I was 'monarch of all I survey'. I spent many a happy autumn night sleeping on one of those roofs when I was in my early teens, after having rigged up a lamp hung from the chimney, and feeling like a great engineer over the achievement. At no other time have I felt so happy and full of vim waking up at sunrise, throwing off the dew-sodden coverlet and slipping downstairs before my mother's angry voice could summon me. 

Making portable fire-fountains (tubri) with a team of friends on the occasion of Diwali was pure bliss, but I have written about that before, so I won't repeat myself.

On winter afternoons my mother sat together with her friends on the outer verandah of one of the houses in the neighbourhood, while we children indulged in horseplay around them - it was quite like one large, happy family - and the highlight of the occasion was when the young peanut vendor arrived, his tiny ponytail swinging from his shiny shaven head, with his trademark cry which sounded to me like 'aye badambhay chanachurey....'. He put down his long wicker stool and doled out his wares, warm shelled peanuts roasted in sand, accompanied by hot dhania chutney served on large sal leaves, and we ate together with our hands, squabbling and squealing with pointless laughter: few five-star dinners have ever tickled my palate half as well. Which brings to mind the many chorui-bhaati s we organised, traditional neighbourhood picnics the likes of which today's kids will never know.

Even at 15, while reading for my secondary level board examinations, I went off after lunch with an air-pillow tucked into my schoolbag along with a textbook or two and took a bus to the railway station. I lounged the whole afternoon on a wooden bench on the thinly crowded platform, studying only occasionally and paying much more attention to the trains coming and going (some still drawn by thundering, steam belching iron dragons in those days); waited for the chaiwallah to wake up from his siesta and serve thirsty people like me, then came home. My parents, leave alone scolding or even objecting, hardly even bothered to ask: they must have been very funny people, but this weird habit did no harm to my examination results. Today's parents will probably die of shock just to imagine their children doing something like that.

So, on the whole, it wasn't such a bad childhood after all, though nostalgia rarely makes me feel sad. Good times, well enjoyed, and happily left behind.

If, Reader, you liked reading this, you might do me the kindness of wishing me a happy sixtieth birthday. It is due in eight days' time :)

P.S.: According to Google, there have been a thousand visits to this blog within two days. A personal record! In comparison, the number of comments is measly. How unkind (or at least insensitive) most people are... especially since I am the sort of person to whom people have come whining and snivelling and asking for all sorts of help or at least a ear to lend to their tales of woe or a shoulder to weep upon for ages and ages, and I have never been short of time for them. Maybe it has been well said that your rewards are waiting in heaven, and you should have very low expectations of your fellow man...

Diamond Harbour and Bakkhali

Last Thursday the 21st I drove to Kolkata with Swarnava and my mother in tow, dropped ma off at her brother's place, picked up Pupu and Pratyush and went on to Diamond Harbour, followed by a trip to Bakkhali the next day, back to DH on Saturday, then back via Kolkata, dropping off Pupu and Pratyush, picking up ma, and home to Durgapur on Sunday. 600-plus km in all. 

The highway to Kolkata is being massively reconstructed, with umpteen new flyovers coming up: it will be a very smooth and fast ride once more soon, but for now it was rather slow and difficult going; the passage through Kolkata was interminable as usual because of the dense crawling traffic, and we couldn't go too fast along Diamond Harbour Road either, it being narrow and choc a bloc - though in excellent condition - so the trip took at least an hour and a half longer than it could have. But it was well worth it. At DH the Tourist Lodge called Sagorika was a dream haven, as we had found it twice before, in 2011 and 2017, what with its beautiful panoramic view of the river, its swank rooms, the delectable food and the very friendly and obliging staff. The gusty wind, though warm and damp, and squalls of rain now and then were a bonus. The drive to Bakkhali was short and nice (now that they have built a bridge at Namkhana), and the Tourist Lodge (Balutot) was lovely. We lunched at a very homely streetside bangali eatery where the ambience, along with the owner-cum-waiter clad in a gamchha, his torso bare, reminded me strongly of Bibhutibhushan's Adorsho Hindu Hotel. The Lodge staff there, however, was very cold and uninviting, and we couldn't get rooms for another day, so it was back to Sagorika, where I got a suite which was, in one word, luxurious: all of us spent most of the day and half the night lounging in it. During the drive back to Durgapur, we were caught in very heavy rain for a bit, but spent that time lunching. No mishaps, except that I caught a bad cold. Firoz got a room to himself each night, and Swarnava was thrilled that he didn't have to put up with that awful snoring. Yes, it was a splurge, but these days I live for this sort of thing, and only wish I had the time and wherewithal to take along a much larger group of intimates, which would greatly multiply the fun.

Much of my fun came from quietly looking at, and listening to, the children's chatter. (I call them children, though they are in their twenties, and they spent a considerable amount of time attending to scholarly and professional work - but they grew up before my eyes, and I had a hand in the way they have grown up, so the pleasure is beyond words, mixed with wonder. Besides, they also relentlessly pulled one another's legs, guffawed over silly jokes and built a sand castle on the beach...). We sat on the sand in wet clothes watching the waves until the sun went down and the wind began to make our teeth chatter. I sang a succession of songs to myself, and communed with my Maker, giving up thanks for the myriad blessings I have been granted. For young Pratyush, it was the first overnight trip with us: I hope he will have lasting and fond memories. That, above all, is what I have tried to give to all whom I have loved.

Three-quarters of the year is over already! Now Durga pujo is coming. I hope I can run away somewhere outside Bengal - unless Pupu comes over to stay with me.

A few photos can be seen here. More on Google if you just type "Tourist Lodge" Diamond Harbour or Bakkhali.

Becoming 'creative' in school!

I was laughing and grimacing over the so-called New Education Policy recently with some of my more intelligent and well-informed old boys. There is nothing really 'new' about the policy: it is just a mish-mash of ill-coordinated, incoherent, rehashed ideas which have been suggested by numerous policy declarations before, and either never worked, or worked poorly, or proved to be self-defeating (such as the 'new' emphasis on vocational courses and replacing English with vernaculars as medium of teaching). What I have found truly laughable is the apparently new stress on encouragement of independent, critical, original thinking in the classroom. Let me lay out what I have learnt about the whole teaching-learning process over a lifetime in this context (our policy makers never consult dedicated, competent, well-grounded teachers when they throw out their brilliant brainwaves! so I have always wondered where they get their ideas from)...

Independent, original, critical thinking is not even relevant to many subjects which are taught at school. How can you be independent and original and creative when you are learning chemistry and history? Basically you have to memorize a lot of hard facts (such as dates and names) and techniques (such as balancing equations): there's never been any way around it. If you can't do that, and retain what you have memorized beyond examinations, you just don't know chemistry and history, period. And your mathematics teacher might occasionally challenge you by asking you to solve riders or work out a new way to prove a theorem, but try to be too creative and start writing three squared equals six, and you will flunk. 

Nowhere does school-level education offer greater scope of creativity than while learning a language (explain in your own words... write an original story ... what in your opinion was this character like as a human being?...), but what do we actually see happening in thousands of even so-called 'elite' schools? Let us face it: they stopped even trying to teach how to write long ago (that is why they now take 'creative writing' classes at college- and university level) - truth is, most schoolteachers themselves cannot write a decent essay impromptu to save their lives! -  and where literature is concerned, thousands of my readers will concur that their schoolteachers used to insist that while answering questions, it was imperative that they regurgitate lines crammed from their texts, word by word; nothing else was required of them, and 'don't you dare say the same thing in your own way'. All examinees should write identical answers in literature exactly as they would in chemistry. It is these creatures, these 'teachers', who will now be told to 'teach' their wards to be independent-minded, original, and creative in the way they think. Can anyone describe the situation better than with words like 'farce' or 'black comedy'?

One last thing. Which genius came up with the notion that everybody can be independent and original and creative? That we can 'produce' Newtons and Tagores and Beethovens by the million by schooling them? I should like to meet him alone in a dark alley some day...

Tech companies, CEOs and liberal arts

After my daughter got her BA in history, she decided to attend a one-year post graduate course in liberal studies, to which I gladly concurred, and we are both very happy about the experience she had.

This recent article in The Telegraph says why liberal studies are increasingly important in today's world, and you should read the whole thing closely. But I especially draw attention to the list provided by the authors of CEOs of giant modern high-technology companies who have degrees in the liberal arts (not engineering, mind you), including, prominently, history and English (see the third paragraph). I do NOT think, given everything I have written on matters educational before, that I need to add any comment of my own here. Do read.

I wish the parents who are still pushing their kids mindlessly into 'signs' studies so that they might somehow land low-level IT jobs could read and understand this article. There would be an instant revolution in India!