Odd jobs...

I have been trying to remember some of the very many things I have done ever since I started, in a very small way, to fend for myself in mid-teenage. It’s because I worry these days that I might be beginning to forget, so it would be a good idea to write them down, if only for the sake of my grandchildren.

I have been tutoring school- and college kids all through,

I helped a teacher of mine to prepare her notes for a B.Ed. degree when I was myself in high school,

In college, I once helped a judge to pass his Master of Law examination (which he had been failing repeatedly and so couldn’t get promoted to first-class magistrate) by summarizing an entire thousand-page book on jurisprudence into one sheaf of foolscap handwritten paper in simple Bengali,

I wrote articles, reviews, news and stories for numerous magazines in both English and Bengali, and a few daily papers,

I designed a greeting card for a major public sector firm once, and a publicity brochure for a diamond merchant,

I translated a famous author’s novel from Bengali to English at very short notice so that he could read it out before a panel of fellow authors at the American Center in Calcutta,

I have edited, at various levels of detail, many people’s PhD theses on very diverse topics,

I have traded in encyclopedias on commission,

I have been paid by hundreds of people for counselling them and/or their children,

I have ghost-written speeches for a lot of bigshots,

I have hosted quiz contests,

I have conducted ‘grooming’ classes for college graduates about to appear for job interviews,

I have contributed ‘lessons’ to textbooks,

…

Some of that work has gone unpaid, or paid what I would call beggarly rates now. And despite making money in so many different ways, I have still jealousy guarded some time and leisure for fun, as well as for work of a purely charitable nature.

Now, if I am growing lazy and unwilling to work unless I am paid the kind of money that I want, I wouldn’t like people to hold that against me.

I wrote this just as an explanation for why I seem to be so unhelpful these days to a lot of people who come to ask me to do them all kinds of favours and go away disappointed (only last week I shooed away two profs from a local engineering college who had come to importune me to host a quiz show for them. As always, the only thing they refused to mention was payment). I think I have earned the right to have grown allergic to work that brings me neither love nor money! Salaried people will never understand the sentiment, whereas I trust that any businessman or self-employed person would go to the other extreme and call me a fool for having allowed myself to be exploited for so long. When I think of the countless ingrates for whom I did work for which I could have charged hefty sums but didn’t and who have long forgotten me, I keep telling myself I shall never let my daughter be suckered like that if I can help it.

If you are reading this, Tanmoy, that might be one way in which I have changed over the years...