The
IMD predicted a scant monsoon this year, so it has been raining heavily all
through June, and incessantly over the last few days. And I love it as much as
ever, surrounded as I am by space, quiet and greenery. Things are far worse in
the metros, I know, but it is good to hear that Calcuttans are now much better
off than those in Mumbai, from what I get to hear from my family and ex
students. Anyway, as I have always maintained, I shall never live in an
anthill, unless I earn five lakhs a month post taxes at least, and can work
from home. If I have to move about
for a living, it had better be fifteen lakhs, and preferably a police car with
a red beacon and hooter following me about. When I think of good living, I
don’t think smartphones: I was not born a gwala’s son.
Physiotherapy
is stopping just short of torture, did you know that? It comforts and it hurts,
and slowly the latter’s proportion increases until they stop just before you
think you are going to yell. I’ve been given crutches now, by the way. It hurts still, so I am interspersing it with the walker. I
have defied doctor’s orders to go upstairs, and to visit the bank once already.
But anything like normal will be another three months at least. I should have
broken a bone 35 years ago: kids grow so fast! … this boy Hasan is
good. I have promised to fetch him a lot of custom. He charges just one hundred
rupees for a one-on-one session, can you believe it? It makes me see red when I
think of so many people his age or thereabouts, whose ‘work’ does not have a
hundredth of the social value, earning ten times that much. Many tens of
millions should thank God that someone like me would never become a socialist
dictator.
Surveillance
and parenting and Big Brother. I posted a cartoon on the other blog, now read
this article. Thank God again I quit that school before smoking on campus was
banned, and the day they make it mandatory to install CCTV cameras in my
classroom I am going to call it a day. All workplaces are becoming what prisons
and lunatic asylums used to be only fifty years ago: that’s progress for you.
Bengali readers, have you watched Ichchhe
yet? Recognized somebody you know?
My
daughter’s college life starts next week. With her, it’s almost become a
time-honoured tradition to read history in our family. I couldn’t (or so I
thought in my youth) afford it, so it feels good to think I have at least played
a part in enthusing a few others in the days when they were growing up. Sad
that I couldn’t pass it on to any of my thousands of bright kids, so many of
whom have discovered in their mid-twenties or even later that history is a far
more interesting subject than engineering!
I
have passed yet another milestone in my life: a very pretty young thing
actually asked to be petted in class (ador
koro)! Soon I’ll give them permission to call me dadu. As for sitting under a tree in the rain at Humayun’s tomb, I
guess Krishna wants I reserve that for Pupu alone in this lifetime. I have got
much without asking; I shall not insult myself any more by asking those who
cannot even understand what they were being given.
How
much Indians care about things that matter (such as saving life and limb from
road accidents) as opposed to say cricket and skirt lengths and ‘rights’ for homosexuals
has always been an issue close to my heart (along with peeing by the roadside),
as countless ex students can aver. That Indian roads have become the most
dangerous in the world is, for obvious reasons, no longer just a statistic for
me, if it ever was. I would give a very great deal to see laws enacted and
enforced that would make our roads safer for our children. Mine was a typical
hit and run case, with the biker driving at high speed along the wrong side of a
national highway running alongside a very busy marketplace. And he got away
without a scratch, without a beating, without a fine. Just one of thousands of
such incidents happening every day in this wretched country. I insist, it will
never happen in any truly civilized country, and that is an infinitely
more important index of development than autorickshaw drivers using
smartphones. Alas, what hope is there in a country where university educated
folks in their thirties and forties are imbecile enough not to know what
matters and what doesn’t? This I know – if their fathers, brothers and husbands
became roadkill or were maimed for life, they’d weep for a week or two and then
‘move on’. With such an ‘educated and enlightened’ populace, what wonder that
the government doesn’t care? Last year, after Gopinath Munde’s tragic death,
the Modi sarkar had promised to bring in a tough amended road law – that seems
to have died a quiet death, as this report says. Our aam janta is at one with the auto lobbies in wishing more and ever
more vehicles with wild and reckless drivers on the roads: a few lakh lives
lost and a million or so temporarily or permanently crippled is too small a
price to bother about. And if we are intellectuals or hacks, we must spare time to think about terrorists – after
all, they kill hundreds a year, don’t
they?
This is a link to some people who do care. Think: could you do something to help
them? For your own sake and for your loved ones?
1 comment:
Your sense of good cheer, swords, daggers, glints, an insouciance and your enduring concern for what makes for civilizations mark this post, Suvro da. I hope this means you’re doing better. I’m saving my comment for your previous post.
Thank you for your update. I had no idea that physiotherapy meant stopping before torture. I knew you’d have a course of it. I had the very strong feeling that you would climb the stairs. I can’t say anything about your visit to the bank or about defying the doctor’s orders. You sound cheery - I’ll go with that. Given the way I used to walk on roads before I read about your accident – I should have broken a leg – not you. Whether 35 years ago or now. They charge Rs150 for even a hair-cut at the cheaper places and they pretend they’re doing me a favour. I’ll wish the boy Hasan well.
I’ve been watching the rains coming down. A part of me was saying to myself with a huge smile: I’d not been mistaken about what you’d consider to be an okay amount for living in this city (I didn’t however consider the police car with the beacon and the hooter). Let me just say that the rest of me was not exactly smiling.
The third bit about surveillance, teaching and parents got me writing on the side. I haven’t watched the film but I had to read what was there on the net. It’s the sicko mother of course.
Regarding surveillance: segments of the horror from those old sci-fi novels seems to be coming true. 1984, A Brave New World, Anthem, and gadgets controlling humans. What makes me wonder in a somewhat bemused way is whether all the stuff that grand writers have written about on the mind, consciousness, imagination…the advancement of the same or about shared feelings are all nothing but fantasy or sci-fi or figments of one’s imagination.
I’ll say ‘Yay’ for Pupu studying History and to you certainly for enthusing her. I’d been wishing she would, what with her interest about a T.V. program on Nefertiti and later her elaborate reasons for wanting a Time Machine at 12. I was reminded of the flood of arguments/discussions from a few years ago with her and you. It made me grin. I hope she writes about her first impressions of college life soon. The bit that you write about yourself in relation to studying History maybe directly explains one of your stories in a way actually!
Whoa for the very pretty young thing telling you ‘ador koro’. I don’t know about the young uns calling you dadu though. Isn’t that too early? I can’t say anything about the rains, Humayun’s tomb and sitting under a tree. Apart from Pupu, I guess, that’s for those who know about what you’ve told them. I’d fling my arms in the air with your despair and given the way you care and keep trying to get the rest to see; maybe that’s me.
I had almost the same thought last Monday. I was yelling inside in a rare fit: we won’t keep our roads safe for a human being or keep our communal properties clean; people carry filthy habits but talk about gender rights, gender orientation, the right to engage in PDA and smartphone revolutions!’
Your accident wouldn’t have happened in a civilized country. I knew that when I was reading the third paragraph of Pupu’s post on your accident. No moron would ever dare to drive on the wrong side of a road, leave alone a highway. A hit-and-run would carry penalties of the sort that the general run of mollycoddled Indians cannot imagine: they’ll write some pseudo-intellectual trash on a film like ‘The Machinist’. I let out a bitter gah about people thinking that auto rickshaw drivers having smartphones can be some index of development. Those women will cry for more than a week though. They’ll display the tears/vulnerability whenever they seek attention, affection, warmth, a shoulder or love.
I’ll still hope there remains some amount of sanity that lives on and thrives between the intellectual hacks and the smartphone/short-skirts gushing creatures. Regarding the link ArriveSafe: I’m sorry I didn’t get any brainwaves about how I could help them. Maybe your other readers might have ideas.
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