End of year post

I came home after an almost flawless holiday only a couple of hours ago, and now Pupu and I are looking forward to eight hours of the dreamless, which is our favourite way of spending New Year's Eve. Have a very happy 2018, readers. The travel post will be up shortly.

Baba's birthday

The shadows grow long upon this year. It was one of the most painful years in recent memory for me, and yet, strange to say, now that it is drawing to a close, it seems to have passed at a breathless pace. As the poet said, ‘we wait, and the time is short but waiting is long’. Today my father would have been 79. He had expected to be around till 80, and so had I, but that was not to be. And at the end of this month, my daughter will have become a full adult, so the most important task of my life is definitely done. Not that she needed to be certified that way, because the way she has been brought up she became far more ‘adult’ in most ways several years ago than most people I know ten years her senior, but, you know, legally speaking she can well and truly be her own woman now. Let her find out how it feels, since I have been threatening for several years that from now till my dying day I will never tell her to do anything, only offer non-mandatory counsel if she seeks it. And she will have my goodwill and blessings to accompany her, and thousands of hours of rich memories. I pray that that would suffice. Meanwhile, I who have been without a guardian since teenage shall be looking forward to having her as a guardian in my old age.

Right now I am about to take off for my year-end vacation. Just waiting for my daughter’s exams to end. It has been a full year, so as always it will be a holiday well earned. Of late I have been slowly becoming more ‘technical’, having launched a Facebook page called Suvro Sir to be used as a notice board, so that if and when I want to escape at short notice, which I never could do for the last thirty years, I shall simply notify all pupils there and go. Now that even rickshawpullers have Facebook accounts, I thought it was time to make use of the facility. All pupils, and especially those who live far away, are being told to check the page before they set off for my house; after that, if they miss me, it won’t be my fault. I have kept myself bound to an iron routine for ages; now I shall be loosening up little by little.

The batch that has just left this year was a good one; I enjoyed having almost all of them in my class, and so, I think, did most of them. Many of them had been around for three continuous years, and they saw many troublesome things happening to me, including my own semi-incapacitation following the accident in 2015 and my father’s slow and painful passing. They adjusted beautifully; for that I shall remain grateful. I give them my love and blessings. Of course most of them will forget me soon enough; of the few that won’t, hardly anybody will visit, and of the very few who do that, most will be at a loss for words. Virtually nobody will sustain the connection over the long run even over the phone or email. So it has always been, so it will ever be. I have given up hoping for anything better. The few ex students who keep in touch meaningfully over the years are overwhelmingly male, and belonged to the batches prior to 2005. Something has changed with young people today, but so be it. It was good while it lasted, and they all paid me dutifully right till the last month; that’s all that finally matters. My enrolment lists for the next session are full and closed; I keep turning away people, telling them to ask me if there are vacancies after the regular admissions are over. So I guess I shall be in gravy for a few more years yet. A lot of people get frantic when they hear their wards might not have a chance. The kind of panic that they feel – or pretend to show – has always made me wonder: why? And if so many people are really so desperate to get their children in, why then do some (admittedly a small percentage, but still…) eventually drop out? Believe it or not, there are some who pay for admission and then don’t turn up, some who quit after the first day, and some even before the last month begins, when the majority are feeling bad that the class will soon be over! Some, I know, find the coming and going too taxing; some leave because my schedule clashes with ‘more important’ tuitions, but some, surely, do so only because they have started disliking me for one reason or the other – sometimes without attending a single class, or just a few. I wish I could find out why. Of course those seats are by and large filled up by others, but it keeps rankling that some found me so dislikeable. As I said, those who find me interesting are vastly more numerous, and their numbers have been rising inexorably over the years and decades, so this has never hurt my pocket, but I would have liked to know, even if from others, why some people quit. Anyway, it makes me feel good to think that there are numerous other youngsters who are dying to get in, having heard from older siblings what my classes are like, and also old boys and girls who are waiting to admit their children. Age has its compensations…

Sayan Bhattacharya of the 1991 batch came over from Thiruvananthapuram to stay and chat overnight after many, many years. He has had a difficult but colourful life, and I admire his never say die spirit. He and I share a love for writing – not a common thing in India! He has already written two books, both semi-fictionalized accounts of his own past and of his family, which I keep on my library shelf, and he is planning his third. I wish him luck, and hope someday to meet his family when I am travelling in Kerala. If you are interested, you can look up his books, Friendship Calling and A Case of Connections, on Amazon or Flipkart. More power to your elbow, Sayan.

We are having a very strange winter this time. It started becoming chilly in early November, yet today the sun is almost hot, and I am working in my shirtsleeves. I wonder what January will bring, but I do want to see a lot of snow where I am going, high in the Himalayas!  

Tales from bygone days, part two

I have always been fond of dogs (and they have by and large reciprocated the feeling – as I have often said, any dog which doesn’t like me has something wrong in its character!), and only the fear that I will become stuck at home round the clock, all year round, has prevented me from having several of my own. Maybe I will, someday, when I am at last surfeited with travelling for pleasure. But dogs have sometimes got me into trouble. In my early teenage days, I used to go to a coaching class to learn how to play the guitar. I rode across several streets on my bicycle, the guitar box slung from one hand – how empty and safe the streets were in those days, and how unworried my parents! – to my tutor’s house for an hour’s practice once or twice a week. He had a huge young female Alsatian called Lucky. Being childless, the couple adored and doted on her like a human child. Lucky and I fell in love with each other. Her favourite way of greeting me was to lie in ambush behind the potted plants, imagining I couldn’t see her, and the moment I pedalled into the little garden, she would fly out and pounce upon me with a loud ‘Woof!’ More often than not I would fall off with her on top of me: heaven knows why I didn’t break an arm or the guitar. More than one passer-by gasped, imagining I was about to be torn to bits, but she would only lick my face wet and then turn around and brush it off with her soft, bushy tail, before trotting into the drawing room behind me. Then she would fool around the room, distracting both my tutor and me with her antics, until he scolded her out.  While we settled down to play, she would wait outside until she thought we had forgotten about her, then with infinite patience she would slowly make her way back, slinking past the curtain, under the sofa, until she was just below my feet, her wet nose tickling the back of my ankle and making me laugh. Believe it or not, my tutor got so jealous by and by that he eventually made excuses for not being able to carry on with the classes and cut me off.

Countless people have asked me if I believe in ghosts, have met true godmen, or have had a supernatural experience. I have always been mildly curious about such things, but fortunately or otherwise, never been edified. A few odd things have happened, though. The one that comes to mind right now happened during the school trip I organized – for the first time in St. Xavier’s Durgapur – to the Garhwal Himalayas, in December 1989. One crisp wintry afternoon, the whole troupe, around thirty odd I think, pupils and teachers included, had just finished lunch at the famous Dada-boudir hotel in Hardwar. The entire crowd had stomped out and were loitering about in the pleasant sun, leaving it to me to pay the bill, I being the treasurer for the team. I had just scanned the bill and put some sounf and sugar in my mouth prior to counting out the money, when a quiet bass voice spoke in my ear: ‘beta, khaana khila do’ (son, stand me lunch). I turned around to see a sanyasi on the threshold of middle age, tall, dark and sturdily built in saffron and with a shaven head, a jhola and blanket on his shoulder, stout cudgel and lota in hand, looking calmly at me. Now I must mention at this point that I have always been an agnostic at best and a scoffer at worst when it comes to ‘holy’ men: I never visit temples if I can help it, and have never gone to see a babaji or mataji. But there was something in those eyes… I grant you that it could have been a mere trick of hypnotism, but in broad daylight, and on a crowded roadway, with me distracted and busy as I was… it seemed those eyes told me that far from asking me for a favour, he was bestowing a huge favour on me. I nodded at the man behind the counter, indicating that he should add one more meal to the tab – evidently he was quite used to such things, so he didn’t bat an eyelid – and the sadhu walked in without so much as a backward glance, let alone a word of thanks. Yet he left behind a man feeling deeply grateful. I have done countless acts of charity before and after, to the tune of vastly larger sums, but I have never felt that way again, alas.

The same friend who had once played the surgeon on me took me on a most memorable trip across Bihar during my college days, in the course of which we visited Munger and Bhagalpur (I wrote an article in The Telegraph about a most interesting octogenarian wildlife enthusiast who was my namesake and whom I met in Bhagalpur during that trip. I remember the live python loose in his house, and the only parijat flower I have ever seen in my life carefully preserved in his collection). I stayed in his tumbledown house in his ancestral village for a few days. Many, many impressions of that trip are forever etched in my memory. Tasting wild honey freshly drawn from a hive – it goes down your throat like fiery liquor – finding out how hard it is to catch a chicken if it is allowed to run free around a large compound, listening to the Ganga lapping at her banks all through a moonless night as we lay on the ghat in a cannabis induced stupor. That was the only time I saw a baby leopard being dragged at the end of a leash by a forest guard, and the only time, too, that I was entertained with haanriya and homemade snacks (a mix of different kinds of lentils soaked in water and flavoured with salt and pepper) in the middle of the night by the womenfolk of a Santhal family in the courtyard of their own cottage while the men slept away blissfully. Someone among the men with me, a local, assured me that the women were in no danger: they were all armed with knives and knew how to use them, they could move like lightning, and any man who tried any hanky panky might not live to rue the day. I have always respected women like that, and it’s a pity I rarely meet the like in our cities. Strangely enough, though, one of the most memorable of those experiences was something that might come as an anti-climax after the things I have already mentioned.

We were staying in my friend’s country home in a small village close to the Bhimbandh Wildlife Sanctuary.  The same place where he had warned me the previous night to be careful while stepping into the makeshift toilet in the backyard, because apparently all sorts of snakes used it now and then as a comfortable refuge. Nothing untoward happened, of course, and the next afternoon I plunged into the pond alongside to take a refreshing dip. It was surrounded by taal (palm-) trees, I remember, and the water was muddy and opaque. Except for a dove or two whistling drowsily, the surroundings were quite silent. Well, so I took a deep breath and dived in, meaning to cross the little pond underwater. However, in the event I couldn’t, because I felt an immoveable barrier across my path, into which I gently bumped my head. It was big and hard and – hairy! I lifted my head above water, gasping, only to look into the slightly bemused eyes of a buffalo with enormous horns. He had been taking a dip too, and I had surprised him. We just looked at each other quietly for a few seconds; the buffalo did nothing, just kept staring at me without rancour, until I decided it was prudent to back off. I am dashed if I know why I am recalling this little incident so many years later and laughing over it…

There have been nearly three thousand page views since I put up my last post, but hardly any reactions! Whereas so many people have told me, by email, whatsapp, phone and face to face, that they enjoyed reading it. Why not here? As I have said, I write primarily for myself (and Pupu), but it would be nice to see comments from people whom I have managed to entertain, if nothing else.

Tales from bygone days

I have been going voraciously (all over again!) through the priceless works of James Herriot while simultaneously watching the once-famous TV-series All Creatures Great and Small on youtube – someday there will be a blogpost on these themes too – and wondering how he did it: how he remembered all those quirky little details from more than twenty five years ago and wove them together into such fascinating tales. I have thousands of little memories too, but they don’t hang together to make whole and meaningful stories! Which is why I feel so uncomfortable when Pupu goads me to start writing them down. In order to make me hunker down and get on with it, she even took the trouble to write out a short list of anecdotes she has herself heard and enjoyed over the years. So let me see if I can make something out of it…

Our department of  Economics at Jadavpur University has always harboured more than a fair share of nutcases. Some arrived that way, some went round the bend over the years. The reasons were many and various. For a few, at least, it was burning too much of the midnight oil that did it. One of my own classmates used to photocopy whole books as soon as any professor wrote out a list of recommendations, and assiduously stored the ever-growing pile in a special room, resolved to start reading them all together in the last few months of the undergraduate course (today’s pampered semester-oriented kids won’t be able to imagine this, but we had to read the entire course for the final examination at the end of the third year). We watched her with growing alarm, and then the inevitable happened: when the terrible finals were knocking at the door, we heard that she had attempted the impossible, suffered a nervous breakdown, and been forced to give the exams the go-by for that year. And I remember a senior, bearded and nice and wild-eyed, mild-mannered but evidently never all there – pity I have forgotten his name – who manfully struggled through the written part of the master’s finals, but lost it during the interview. We were loitering in the sun-drenched corridor, chatting about what was waiting for us, when one of the professors on the interview board rushed out, looking more harried than we had ever seen him before, and begged some of us to go in and rescue him (or maybe them from him). Apparently he had already been on a knife edge when the interview began, somehow answered one or two questions sensibly, but then blown a fuse: on hearing the third question he had gone into a sort of trance, and when the profs, imagining that he had either fallen asleep or was unable to answer, tried to prod him a bit, he had started rocking vigorously in his chair with a leery expression on his face, all the while chanting in a sing-song voice ‘jani kintu bolbo na, jani kintu bolbo na’ (I know, but I won’t tell you)! We had to coax him gently out and take him home. Heaven knows what eventually happened to him. How’s that for a little story?

I have heard Richard Castle yell after his teenage daughter going out for a late evening in the city with friends, ‘Don’t do anything that I would have done!’ I understand his feelings exactly, because over and over again I have done horrible things which make me shiver now when I remember them, and there is no doubt at all in my mind that I survived only because my guardian angel knew that I was destined to die another day. You have already read Fool in the sea on this blog, I suppose: here are three more that I can vividly recall.

During those college days, I often travelled from Kolkata to Durgapur by ‘local’ trains to save money, but whenever I felt like splurging, I took either the Black Diamond Express at dawn or the Howrah-Asansol (now Agniveena) Express in the evening. I have lost count of how many times I travelled on those trains, but a few trips I do remember. There was this one morning when I was coming home on the Black Diamond. It goes without saying that I had boarded a second class unreserved coach, and it was chock full of passengers, many of them with mountains of luggage, trunks and holdalls and all. A few minutes before the train would enter Durgapur station, I had jostled my way through the crowd towards the door opposite the platform: I had hardly any luggage, and I figured, young and lithe and silly as I was, that jumping off the train on to the tracks would help me get off much faster than fighting through so many people on to the platform. As luck would have it, I was leaning from the door, not even bothering to hold on to a rod or handle, when someone from behind, pushing his way ahead with an enormous tin trunk in tow, shoved me hard with it in the back of my knee. You know how the leg buckles involuntarily when you are hit like that? Well, the next moment I had crashed down on the adjacent railway line, and as a hue and cry went up on the platform opposite, there I was on my back, looking up dazedly at the sky, time seemed to have stopped, and the wheels, one after another in endless succession, were clattering past me, inches from my right hand. I got off with nothing worse than a few bruises and feeling like an idiot, but it isn’t the kind of memory that is easily erased.

There was a certain year – probably 1983, when I was twenty – when I suffered from carbuncles all over my body, from the bottom of a lower eyelid to a knee. Seven or nine in all, I forget. God, the way they hurt and bled, I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. Some of them were eventually cured by pills, a few were excised by doctors under local anesthesia, but one of them, the one on my left hip, I tackled myself alongwith a friend. I remember it had been giving me no end of trouble (I used to carry a cushion to college to sit on, and it frequently turned red by the time I came home – deucedly embarrassing, even if you discount the pain and the inconvenience) – and late one night, after we had been drinking heavily, we decided to get rid of it ourselves. Believe it or not, all we did was to numb the area with an icecube, put a pad of rubber between my teeth, and used nothing more than the scissors, scalpel and tweezers from a ‘biology box’, if you know the sort of thing, all perfunctorily dipped in boiling water and swabbed with Dettol. We scraped the whole ghastly thing out, while I screamed bloody murder at my friend the surgeon, then we lapped on a lot of Nebasulf powder on the gaping wound (not even stitches, because neither of us was confident enough with a needle and thread), put a rough bandage on it, drank some more and fell asleep. Next morning 90 per cent of the horrid pain was gone. I did take a Tetvac injection and a massive dose of antibiotics afterwards, but I don’t think any physician would recommend the process, unless you are on the battlefield, or have been bitten by a poisonous snake amidst some wilderness. And I most certainly wouldn’t like to do it again.

The same year – or perhaps it was the next – I made a holiday trip to Barajamda with an elderly friend. A young cousin of his lived there, working for Durgapur Steel Plant at the local iron and manganese mines. The tiny town is located on the Odisha-Jharkhand border, and can be reached either from Chakradharpur or Rourkela. It is (or at least was then-) surrounded by dense forests teeming with wildlife and tribal people, mainly Ho and Santhals. Look it up on google maps if you will; it is a stone’s throw from hamlets with interesting names like Bolani, Barbil, Gua, Kiriburu and Meghataburu; the Simlipal Wildlife Park is not too far away. One day the cousin, who was only a few years older than me, took me on a motorbike trip to the little town of Noamundi across the Saranda forest. The Tatas have been running an iron mine there since pre-independence days, and they have a nice club on a hilltop which DSP officers sometimes used as a watering hole. We enjoyed ourselves rather too long, so the shadows were lengthening when we set off for the return trip, and we were only halfway through the forest when it became pitch dark. And I mean that literally: townsfolk will never know what real darkness means. When my friend stopped for a few minutes and switched off the headlamp, I couldn’t see my hand before my face; and when he switched the light on again, we saw a long queue of tribals, both men and women, black as ebony, wicker baskets and axes slung on their shoulders, returning on foot from the day’s work in such uncanny silence that you had to rub your eyes to make sure you were not seeing things, their eyes glowing in the light like those of any wild animal’s. Eerie feeling, I can tell you.

So anyway, by the time we had reached the edge of the forest and could see some lights twinkling in the valley beyond, we had to stop, because I was desperate to relieve myself. My friend had barely turned off the engine when he heard a muffled noise very like a sneeze, and whispered, ‘What was that?’ but I was already heading towards a large boulder by the roadside. Then there was this truly heart-stopping moment when the boulder got up and started lumbering towards me, as tall as I was and three times as wide. Brother Bruin, probably drunk on mohwa or shivering with a malarial fever, had been dozing when our approach had rudely awakened him, and he didn’t like my intention one bit. He wanted to take a swipe at me, I guess, but I didn’t wait to find out. My friend only yelled ‘Suvro, bhalook, pala!’ (run, it’s a bear) kickstarted the bike and zoomed off, leaving me running desperately after him with nary a backward glance. Usain Bolt would have been hard put to catch me that day. The biker stopped only after he had gone almost a kilometre, and a truck was coming up the other way. You can imagine how I swore at him, but all he said was that in such circumstances it’s always every man for himself. I have never forgotten that lesson.

Just a few of the rather extreme things that have happened to me, but they might give you an idea why, like Harry at the end of Book Seven, I have had enough thrills to last a lifetime. 

Back to poetry

হায় রে রাজধানী পাষাণকায়া!

বিরাট মুঠিতলে  চাপিছে দৃঢ়বলে 

ব্যাকুল বালিকারে, নাহিকো মায়া। 

......

দেবে না ভালোবাসা, দেবে  না আলো। 

সদাই মনে হয় আঁধার ছায়াময় 

দিঘির সেই জল শীতল কালো,

তাহারি কোলে গিয়ে মরণ ভালো। 

I have been reading Tagore deeply again. The above is an extract from the poem titled Bodhu, The Bride, and tells of the existential angst of a very young, newly-married girl whom marriage has transported to a prison called the metropolis.

I was not a girl, and I was not married in childhood, and I grew up in a small town, neither a village nor a great city. Yet when I read the poem first at about the girl's age, it resonated with enormous power with something in my soul. Barring a few short snatches, and the first three years of bringing up my child, my mood has reverted again and again to the way this girl felt, maybe a hundred and fifty years ago.

Perhaps no one less than Tagore can understand. In his youth he wrote

 মরণ, তুঁহুঁ মম শ্যাম সমান, O Death, You are the beloved Lord,

 and yet, when he was on his deathbed, he dictated 

দিবসের শেষ সূর্য 

শেষ প্রশ্ন উচ্চারিল পশ্চিম সাগরতীরে,

কে তুমি -

পেল না উত্তর। 

As Emily Dickinson wrote, 'through a riddle, in the end, sagacity must go'.

and meanwhile, for the rest of us,

যদিও সন্ধ্যা আসিছে মন্দ মন্থরে,
সব সংগীত গেছে ইঙ্গিতে থামিয়া,
যদিও সঙ্গী নাহি অনন্ত অম্বরে,
যদিও ক্লান্তি আসিছে অঙ্গে নামিয়া,
মহা আশঙ্কা জপিছে মৌন মন্তরে,
দিক-দিগন্ত অবগুন্ঠনে ঢাকা
........

উর্ধ আকাশে তারাগুলি মেলি অঙ্গুলি
ইঙ্গিত করি তোমা পানে আছে চাহিয়া,
নিম্নে গভীর অধীর মরণ উচ্ছলি
শত তরঙ্গে তোমা পানে ওঠে ধাইয়া;
......
ওরে ভয় নাই, নাই স্নেহমোহবন্ধন;
ওরে আশা নাই, আশা শুধু মিছে ছলনা,
...
আছে শুধু পাখা, আছে মহা নভ-অঙ্গন
ঊষা-দিশাহারা নিবিড়-তিমির আঁকা -
ওরে বিহঙ্গ, ওরে বিহঙ্গ মোর,
এখনি, অন্ধ, বন্ধ করো না পাখা।    

Musing in early winter

Winter is in the air. The breeze is balmy, the sky is blue, the nights are getting long and chilly, it’s ever so much nicer to sleep.

Pupu asked, ‘Baba, why don’t you start writing stories again?’ Indeed, I have been wondering why the wellspring dried up more than a decade ago. As for stories from my own bygone days, I tell them impromptu without conscious effort, but when I sit down at the keyboard to write them down, they don’t come back to me. Maybe some of my readers will help to jog my memory?

Passing reflection: While driving around my town these days, it often strikes me that 90% of the creatures jaywalking or zooming around on bikes and posing a very nasty threat to public safety weren’t even born when I started teaching thirty years ago. Look at this article in my newspaper today (Ei Samay, November 05, 2017). Are you one of those who would shed a passing tear over the lost lives, or would you, like me, mutter ‘the more, the merrier’? My only concern, I am sure, is for all those luckless non-insane drivers and pedestrians on the roads whom these monsters endanger. When will the type be finally chased off the streets and highways, I wonder?

I looked up my twitter account after more than a year today. I never post anything on it, yet there are 126 ‘followers’ there. Heaven knows what they are ‘following’! And most of them haven’t ever got directly in touch with me for ages.

I am writing in my classroom, even as a lot of teenagers are quietly answering a test around me. How many years, how many batches have passed this way! Those who were bubbly kids are dull parents now; I thank my lucky stars that I can still hold the current crop’s interest much better than most people of my age can. It’s not just a romantic thing: they bring me my bread and butter. Some wise old advisors had expressed most solicitous concern about who would come to my tuitions if I quit my schoolmaster’s job. I am glad I have been able to lay their worries to rest.

It is not easy to keep many youngsters in a bunch interested, believe me – and that too with something as ‘boring and burdensome’ as studies, without being ‘cool and fun’ most of the time, day after day, year after year, for decades together, with a reputation for having a ferocious temper on a short fuse. Try it sometime. With me, the same parents who are so desperate to get their kids in here begin to grumble at some point about why those kids are so eager to come here even during vacations and school exams, and why they pay so much attention to things I say. One of the strongest reasons, I suspect, why those parents cut off all connections with me as soon as the ‘course is covered’. Most old teachers become brutes or bores, and it’s very hard not to. School- and college teachers survive only because their jobs are protected, whereas with private tutors, who are being ‘tested’ by every new batch, reputations soar, stagnate and then collapse within fairly short cycles: before my own eyes, many of them have sunk back into obscurity within twenty years or less. It is very hard and slow work to build up a reputation; keeping it is harder. These kids were born in late 2001 or early 2002. Those who were admitted to my classes then had already heard of me as a fairly ‘old’ and irascible teacher, then they discovered me. Now these kids are about to leave, and the children who are coming in next were born to the generation that passed through my classes in the early and mid-90s. It feels strange to think about how the kids of 2030 are going to regard me, if I am around and at it still. They’d be born of those who left my classes between 2000 and 2005!

A friend of mine, a doctor, keeps trying to build one successful hospital after another of which he can be the absolute boss. I was never so materially ambitious – I might even call myself too lazy for that sort of thing. I like my leisure too much, I strongly dislike being harried and worried, I prefer not to be beholden to a lot of people (as you invariably become if you want to make it even halfway big in business or politics), I have lived a large part of my life in the dreamy mode and greatly enjoyed it. But I have found to my own satisfaction that I am good with young people, so I might have done well for myself if I could set up a full-scale boarding school. Ah well, dreams, dreams...

I have been re-reading some of my old blogposts, and, in connection with everything that I have written about the kind of amoral capitalism that is currently rampant all over the world and the need for a new socio-political paradigm, as well as the sheer evil of growing economic inequality all over the world, I am smiling wryly to myself to see how an economist – Thomas Piketty – has suddenly become a bestseller with his Capital in the 21^st century, which has not only pinned down said inequality as an incontrovertible fact, but also condemned it as an unmitigated, and quite avoidable, evil. Of course, like everything else these days it is entirely likely to be forgotten soon as a passing sensation, but at least an issue very close to my heart has for a little while found a place in the sun. And there is no harm in hoping that the world might actually sit up and do something about it, with a little more consequence than the launch of iPhone 49.

One supreme lesson that life has taught me is that humans hardly if ever learn to strike a balance in anything. We forever only keep swinging from one insane extreme to another. I noted this first in writing when I was drafting My Master’s Word in late 1993, and the lesson has only been driven deeper by all I have seen in the last quarter century. So in reaction to the likes of Richard Dawkins come movements like the Taliban and ISIS, and I greatly fear that in reaction to the era of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos we shall have the era of Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot all over again. To use Conrad’s telling phrase, we only have a choice of nightmares. Perhaps the poet was right: always the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

I have been reading a lot of serious books lately. Shashi Tharoor’s recent work, An Era of Darkness, was truly impressive: you would have to be as obtuse as Niall Ferguson ever to claim again that the British Empire was at all good for India. It hurts, though, because I belong to that breed, maybe long outmoded, who really thought well of the British for a very long time, and still cannot stop admiring them for a lot of things they did worldwide. Maybe, Tharoor would say, it is so only because I was lucky to be born among the privileged classes, and so we never had to face the full horrid brunt of colonial exploitation. Another recent work, Churchill’s Secret War by Madhusree Mukherjee, has also likewise made me very ambivalent about a supposedly great man. I never went to the extreme of regarding Sir Winston Churchill as the ‘greatest Briton of all time’ (only an ass could say that, someone who had never heard of Shakespeare and Newton); I had always thought that with regard to his attitude towards Gandhi he was not only nasty but ignorant and petty-minded, but at least I always admired him deeply as a magnificent writer, a supreme master of English prose. But this book pretty convincingly demonstrates ( and I have read things like this before) that Churchill was almost personally responsible for killing off nearly three million poor and helpless people through the Great Bengal Famine of 1943, not because he couldn’t help it, but essentially because he liked the prospect, seeing that he thought of Indians (or rather, specifically Hindus, the majority of the population) as ‘a beastly people with a beastly religion’ who dared to challenge the authority of the one thing he loved and adored, the British Empire. Indeed, he lived long enough to admit that he had been wrong about them, but only in private, and the monstrous wrong was done and no amends were ever made about it (somebody, says Tharoor, has estimated that Britain owes India at least three trillion US dollars). I suppose by the time I die, I shall not have too many heroes left.

In the newspaper two days ago, I read this article about a young dance teacher somewhere in my own town lamenting that these days kids don’t seriously want to learn anything, and in this they are wholly supported by their parents, whose only ‘ambition’ is to make their children ‘famous’ overnight, if only by getting up to ‘perform’ (the word now reminds me of circus animals only) on the stage at the neighbourhood pujo. To think that Shakespeare wrote about young people chasing the ‘bubble reputation’ so long ago! What would he have said about us?

Yes, I know I have been rambling. So I had better sign off here before you get really exasperated. On the other hand, if you liked reading till this point, let me know, will you?

My daughter and Brigadier Gerard

Storytelling has been a strong tradition over generations in our family, and I have carried it forward both as a teacher and a father. Now I have always been a man of many interests, so naturally my stories have covered a very wide swathe of life, but history has always figured rather largely, not only because it lends itself so well to storytelling (imagine doing it with chemistry!) but because it helps so much to know the ways of mankind, and yes, because I have always loved it dearly.

That perhaps goes some way to explain why my daughter developed an early and abiding interest in history and, unlike most middle-class Indian kids, not encumbered with desperate parental obsession with medical or engineering careers, she chose to read it in college. As she tells me, in her final year, she might not go on to become a professional historian, but she has definitely enjoyed reading her course. I have hugely enjoyed myself discussing her course material with her too: that has been a bonus; not too many parents can relish such a pastime. I have often egged her on to write about things she has read and thought about. Very recently, she wrote a term paper about the connection between formal history and literature, focusing on one particular classic work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. She loved writing it, got the highest marks in class for it, and I managed to persuade her to put it up on her blog, if only so that she can look back on it decades later and smile. Here it is.

I am glad indeed that I could not only persuade my own daughter at least that education is meant for enlightenment and enjoyment, not merely a means to a job, but could afford to let her take her time to realize it. She is going on 21, and I know she will not regret it, and neither will I. At the same time, I still do not worry about her finding a good career for herself. From all I have seen of life, with the blessing of Providence, any intelligent person who is willing to work hard for a long stretch can find a reasonably decent career. When most parents worry about how their kids can be ‘established’ in life (a very popular word in Indian English) unless they restrict themselves to chasing just one or two well-worn professions, their real worry is how their kids can ‘afford’ to be different from the herd. It is a sickness by which far too many young lives have been blighted: both as a father and a teacher I hope that my daughter’s generation will not fall prey to it as parents in their turn…   

Obituary

The newspaper that my father put on its feet in Sikkim published this obituary on 17th September.

The full first page can be seen at the Sikkim Express website. Look up the Sept. 17 issue in the archives (search box in the top right hand corner). 

To My Daughter redux

I first announced that To My Daughter was in print back in March 2014.

It's been more than three years since then. And surprise, surprise... the book has been selling slowly but steadily, which is far more than I had expected, seeing it is self-declaredly not an entertainer, and demands close and intelligent attention of any reader. The publishers had made a deal that I shall start earning royalties only after a certain number of copies had been sold, and this month they have remitted the first payment to my bank account. A very small amount, but it is the symbolic significance that counts. If you write a book, and it keeps selling, you will get paid for it as long as you live, and your offspring will continue to be paid long after you are gone. Besides, in a country like ours, it is rare for any author to get paid for writing, unless he writes textbooks or penny dreadfuls. I am being paid for nearly a decade and a half for my Oxford Tagore translations, and now here is this addition. I guess my daughter can take a bit of pride: not many of her friends can claim that their dads earn book royalties!

To all those who have not only bought the book but read it, here is a reminder request: please write reviews on any of the websites which advertise my book (see the previous post, linked above), or on goodreads. It will help to spread the word around, and that is the best kind of advertisement. This was not a commercial enterprise, so I am spending no money on publicity; the only publicity it will get is by word of mouth. And thank you all in advance. 

To those who haven't read the book yet, a gentle nudge: unless your attention span is no bigger than what it takes to read a tweet, try it. It will not be a waste of time and money. I have already been thanked by quite a number of people for writing the book.

In passing, I note that a 2011 post I wrote, titled A most frightening prospect, about Anna Hazare's anti-corruption campaign, which had then become all the rage countrywide and is now quite forgotten, has reached the most-read list today. Do take a look, and go through all the comments on it too. Doesn't it sound very quaint today? What does it teach you about the public character, and about sudden wild enthusiasms? To all my current and ex-students, this is what I mean by saying that I am always teaching, and this blog is an extension of my classroom. Whether you learn anything of value or not is, of course, entirely up to you...

Remembering baba

Ashok Chatterjee. My father who is no more. What shall I write about him? I have been thinking all the time about it over the last twelve days, yet when I sit down to write it seems to me that I either have to write a whole book or it will be nothing at all that makes much sense. Maybe the dam will burst someday. Right now, I can only sigh that we did not get the time of life together. I hope my daughter would be able to say we did, she and I, when I am gone.

Meanwhile, a photograph of his when he was barely 36. Imagine, eighteen years younger than I am now! And one of me below, as I look now. Remembering my father.

He's gone.

It's 1:10 a.m. I have just returned from the cremation ground after setting my father's ashes adrift in the river.

He left us a little before six this evening. My mother saw him minutes before he stopped breathing. I broke up my class halfway and went off to say goodbye.

It was a long, difficult, complicated, and unnecessarily painful life. For both of us, for our sins. But he was at last quietly content after coming back to live with me.

I shall pray that after life's fitful fever he sleeps well.

Baba, farewell. We shall, I hope, meet again. In happier times and climes.

Lord, it hurts

I can see that a lot of people have been keeping an eye on this blog for an update, so thanks are due to them. I haven’t been writing for some time. It’s become tough enough to carry on maintaining a semblance of the ‘normal’ working life as it is.

‘There are,’ Professor Dumbledore said to Tom Riddle, echoing countless real-life sages of yore, ‘things far worse than death.’ I can see it happening to my father. It is not death itself that is horrid, but the dying – if the dying is so incredibly slow and painful and pathetic, for the person concerned as much as those around him who must tend and wait and beg for release.

For the last several years he has been much less than a whole man, and it’s been more than a year now that he has been bedridden off and on. But since mid-April he’s been a complete invalid, and that is going on five months now. Even with two nurses working alternately round the clock, it was becoming so awful a burden for my infinitely-suffering mother that both she and I, brooding aloud, have lamented that there is no law allowing for euthanasia yet: that such a law, at least benefiting the very old and terminally ill, should become one indispensable hallmark of any society that dares to call itself civilized. The least I can say for myself is that I would not want to hang on like this for my daughter to serve with sick and bone-weary despair, putting her entire life on hold. That is not love, that is socially-imposed torture of the cruelest sort upon the living.

Five days ago he began to choke, with fluid accumulating in the straining and failing lungs. We moved him into the ICU of a nearby hospital, where  they have been pumping out the fluid while keeping him under an oxygen mask and feeding him through intravenous drips. He is comatose most of the time, can hardly articulate his words when he is awake, and though there are short lucid intervals, what he says doesn’t make any sense at all most of the time. By some miracle he is not in any significant pain – probably thanks to the same brain tumour which has immobilized him – but what a ghastly way to hang on! What marvellous progress science has made, indeed, to be able to drag on a vegetative and deeply undignified existence for a few more days or weeks! Last night he was transferred to a general bed, but still in exactly the same condition, and all that the experts can tell us to do is to brace up and wait… as if that is not exactly what we have been doing for more days than we have kept count of.

I would not wish this upon my worst enemy, and this is my father I am talking about.

And all the time, day in and day out, I have to keep acting in the classroom and the neighbourhood as if it’s more or less just business as usual. Because I have to earn my daily bread, and I don’t do a salaried job or live on a pension or inheritance.

Dear God, have mercy.

P.S., September 11: He was back in the ICU yesterday after exactly one day in the general ward. 

Old posts

I have been noticing on the visits counter with mildly amused surprise that an old post on Rani Rashmoni has been of late suddenly and steadily climbing towards the top. How can this be explained? It was hardly a ‘hot’ post, given whatever almost every Indian below forty considers to be hot. Could it have some connection with the fact that a biopic on the said lady currently showing on TV (Star Jalsa, I think) has become very popular?

On the other hand, have you noticed what I wrote in the last lines of the post titled Farewell to Tagore, and what has transpired by way of comments since I put it up?  Wouldn’t you say I was entirely justified in concluding the way I did – that with every passing year I have ever more reason to be convinced that given the sort of people the vast majority of my fellow countrymen are now, the time is not far when we shall have nothing called a heritage left nor miss it: that not only will the likes of Tagore have vanished from our minds but sites such as the Konark Sun Temple and the Ajanta caves will have been taken over by shopping malls, spas and private engineering/management colleges?

If some old posts can keep coming back up on the most-visited list (Growing up in Durgapur is one, I wish I had resigned sooner is another), why not The Worship of the Wealthy? I often laugh with my daughter about how history keeps repeating itself – especially the worst parts of it! – and that essay, written by Chesterton a whole century ago, sounds as though it was written yesterday, it describes today's world so aptly, and with such devastatingly disparaging wit. Wit and sarcasm are the last weapons of the quiet and civilized man, until they too are forced to fall silent under the jackboots of tyranny. And in our country, at least, the tyranny of the majority – the greedy, ignorant, philistine majority (many of whom can speak in pidgin English, drive expensive cars and have been to Umrica, so I absolutely refuse to identify them with one religious community or just the ‘lower classes’) will ultimately decide everything. At least until some kind of real disaster strikes, such as being conquered by China!

Through the glass, darkly

As some readers will have noticed, I let August 15 – the seventy first Independence Day, really, not the 70th – pass quietly by. That may come as a surprise, especially to long-time readers with long memories. I have waxed eloquent on the crying need for a little more patriotism among Indians, not once but again and again, publicly here. See, for instance, what I wrote in Free India is 65 today five years ago, and follow up the links provided therein to even earlier posts. So why was I silent this time round?

One obvious reason is that I am growing old and tired. But, as you might have suspected, there are other reasons too, reasons for deep and helpless disquiet.

Given the fairly strong resurgence of patriotic urges highly visible over the last decade, I should have been a happy man. Why am I not?

I remember that the greatest men that have ever lived, including Buddha and Gandhi, Einstein and Tagore, have condemned patriotism of a certain kind as an infantile (and very dangerous-) disease of the mind.

I remember what Japan and Germany did to the rest of the world a little more than half a century ago when they grew ultra-patriotic, and what in turn happened to them.

I remember being taught by the greatest of teachers that true patriotism does not hate other nations and try to hurt them or cry them down, it means recognizing the faults of one’s own nation and trying all one can to remove them.

I see much dark cruel stupidity of the past being revived in the name of loving and respecting ‘our culture’, I see a conscious effort to put a very large, diverse and complex nation into a very narrow cultural straitjacket (I won’t insult what is nominally my religion by identifying it with what is being passed off in its name), and I can see only mischief, violence, destruction and retrogression on the horizon, not progress.

I see a tragic and deeply humiliating mental contradiction which most of my countrymen apparently do not see – that of jingoistic boasting of all our ‘achievements’ and simultaneously a) reluctance to learn more about our own country and b) slavering over favours from stronger, richer, more advanced and self-confident nations, everything from jobs to honours to mention in their newspapers: an affliction that is very highly visible even among the most supposedly ‘educated’ and well-off Indians, so why blame the subalterns?

No one would have been happier and prouder than me if I could see a glorious future for India. No one is sadder that I cannot. And the ominous warning of a great sage rings in my ears – ‘Men who forget their history are condemned to repeat it.’ 

Samriddha

Samriddha Ghosh, going on 17, who was my pupil till the end of last year, came to see me two days ago. That in itself is an event these days, because, firstly, girl ex-students have traditionally forgotten me as soon as their classes ended, regardless of shrill protestations to the contrary, and secondly because in the last few years I have been making my dislike of them as a tribe apparent, primarily because they never have anything to say. So it is only the rare kind of girl who dares, and takes the trouble.

Samriddha made me happy. She told me she had started working part time already. Because, she said, she wants to acquire work experience and a modicum of financial independence. And as if that is not wonderful enough in the society I live in, she has started working as a teacher – a private tutor – something which I started doing exactly at her age, am still continuing, and love to boast of before people who have been by and large living off their parents until nearly thirty.

Indians, Bengalis in particular, hate work. They do it only if they have to, and as little as possible, as carelessly and shoddily as possible (that explains a very great deal about why things are in such a sorry state in this country – from the condition of roads to the tardiness in government offices to the woeful state of our public hospitals). Work, especially any kind of work that makes you either think or sweat (or, horror of horrors, both) is anathema; it is only for the chhotolok, the plebeians, who don’t ‘deserve’ any better. Here journalism very often means passing off press releases as news (I have seen this with my own eyes), and engineering means signing files or typing on computers, both preferably done in airconditioned offices. Here parents pray that their grown up kids will not have to work hard (and lament if they do), and, if they can afford it (even to the extent of getting into debt), keep their children from getting jobs as long as they can. Although things, I hear, are changing – very slowly – in the metros, everywhere else parents are shocked, hurt and offended if a teenager, and a female to boot, says s/he wants to work: it will cause the parents to lose face in society (since they cannot adequately provide for their ward), and the teenager to lose precious time which she can better devote to ‘studies’ (which has long ago been reduced to mean merely cramming textbooks and forgetting almost everything as soon as this or that examination has been ‘cracked’). Strangely enough, zooming about on bikes, watching TV or playing video games for hours daily, attending every puja and wedding in town, visiting the shopping mall several times a month, gossiping or simply spending half the day in bed, in the bathroom or at the dining table never ‘wastes time’.

And teaching, of all things? Isn’t  it hard, boring, frustrating and just plain frightening (in no other profession are you so completely open to immediate criticism and ridicule for your ignorance and shortcomings – especially if you are not protected by the kind of disciplinary threats that a school environment provides)? Isn’t that one of the main reasons why even parents with college and university degrees don’t want to sit down with their children’s homework – the boredom, the taxation of the brain, the terror of being found out for the oafs they are?

So Samriddha has my blessings. She deserves them as very few females I know do. If she enjoys her work, sticks to it, and makes a name and a good living for herself in the years to come, I shall be pleased indeed. 

Farewell to Tagore?

I read in the newspaper today (see this and this) that a proposal has been submitted to the NCERT by the Shikhsha Sanskriti Utthyan Nyas, headed by the redoubtable Dinanath Batra of Wendy Doniger fame, that works of Rabindranath Tagore be excised from all school textbooks.

There has been a predictable hue and cry not only from political parties which sit in the opposition in Parliament but also from renowned scholars and savants, such as Shankha Ghosh and Pabitra Sarkar (alas, I shall have to look much more closely over the next few days or weeks to find out if any non-Bengali of note has cared to lodge a protest – Derek O’Brien doesn’t count). Tagore is our national treasure, far above politics, they have said, and such mischievous, petty-minded efforts point to a careful and countrywide effort to close minds and drag us back into a darker age.

Maybe the ruling party will decide that Tagore is too holy a cow to be touched, so nothing will come out of this, for now: after all, they haven’t replaced Gandhi on our currency notes yet. But my take on the issue, even as a Tagore devotee, is rather different from the expected wholehearted support from the saffron brigade or the howls of outrage from the so-called liberal, progressive intelligentsia. Mine is the reaction of a very tired and cynical mind, a mind moulded by teaching language and literature at high school level for half a lifetime. I don’t think it matters any more, one way or the other. Put in Chetan Bhagat and Amish Tripathi and Ravinder Singh in Tagore’s place for all the difference it is likely to make. If my readers disagree with me, please let me know why; then maybe I shall explain or change my position. If there are no responses to this post, or very few, I shall take that as a vindication of my view. 

My God!

Do you notice something truly extraordinary about this photograph taken in my classroom? I did when I walked in. I was so amazed I did a double take, then didn't lose any time to click the scene.

Not one but several 15-year olds were reading big fat books - story books, and that too, believe it or not, not stuff like Chetan Bhagat but the likes of Khaled Hosseini and other authors of a similar level. They were reading books like that on their own, of their own choice, as they waited for the class to begin.

If anyone knows Durgapur and its 'educated' populace, adults wholly included, they would know it is almost as rare a scene as seeing a whole cohort of Olympic gold medallists or Nobel Prize winners walking down one of our streets.

I was charmed, thrilled, delighted. And if I can believe that I have contributed even in a very small way to the making of their tastes, I shall consider myself blessed. It is at rare moments such as this that I can still hope that India has a future, civilisationally speaking. God grant these children long and happy, fruitful lives, and may they keep reading till their dying day.

Mid-monsoon note

Yes, I know it’s been some time since I last wrote, and that is so only partly because I wanted the last post to be on top for a while. Fact is, I have been distracted. I took a break, spent some happy time with my daughter, read some books (the latest Muzaffar Jang mystery thriller, Crimson City, by the way, failed to satisfy – too many loose ends left loose – while Kings of Albion by Julian Rathbone was fun, 15th century Europe seen through Indian eyes, and found wanting in a great many ways; Pankaj Mishra’s The End of Suffering is an interesting and thought-provoking assessment of the Buddha’s relevance in today’s world), and enjoyed watching the Blandings TV series… Lord Emsworth, bless Plum Wodehouse, can bring a dash of good cheer even amidst the worst gloom.  And been attending to chores like filing income tax returns and replacing worn out plumbing. Besides maintaining the daily work routine, of course. More than that I cannot do, with the shadow of death looming over the house.

It’s the height of the monsoon we are going through right now. It rained all night yesterday, and very heavily again this morning [this is being posted two days after writing]. It is still drizzling as I write, and the met. Office says this might continue for a day or two. It’s so dark that I can’t read indoors without switching on the light, and the drains (does anybody have any idea why half-educated Bengalis always refer to them as ‘high’- drains? Is it a confusion with hydrant – a word nobody seems to know? Given that ‘mamlet’ was in such wide circulation till only a few decades ago – a mishmash of marmalade and omelette – I wouldn’t be surprised). I have always loved the rains, of course, but I found out the worst things about them during my Kolkata days and never got over it (now my daughter is doing it, and it’s a very good thing that she does not hate the city as I do, nor has to live in it during its worst days as I did, nor in the worst parts of it, where waterlogging is a recurrent nightmare). I was glad to have come back, and thank my lucky stars that I work from home especially during this part of the year, and that I have so little muck and slush around me and so much of greenery. One of my dearest sensations, ever since I was so high, has been listening to rain as I fall asleep at night, or half waking up in the wee hours to hear the rain pattering outside as I drift off to sleep again. God has been kind.

It just occurred to me that the pujo is only two months away. Christ. How I wish I could run away to someplace quiet and secluded and free of Bengalis during that wretched week – such as to a guest house in a tea garden – and come back only when I can settle into my routine again! If God had granted me a few more wishes, I’d have had rich favourite ex students who had such places to invite me to, rather than modest-income IT workers living in cubbyholes in Bangalore and Gurgaon. Not the latter’s fault, of course, just my bad luck that I couldn’t inspire young people to grow up into fat cats.

I have been writing little travel reviews for tripadvisor for more than a year now (see this), and they tell me that I have got a sizeable number of readers already, including some who write in to say thanks and ask questions about places I have visited. Funny how these things happen. I started off just to oblige some hoteliers whom I had liked. It would be nice if a time comes when they start offering me various concessions at hotels and resorts simply because I have been writing for them. There was an old boy who once told me about his plans to launch just such a travel website and pay me for writing about my sojourns here and there, though nothing came out of it.

I have just begun reading John Keay’s The Great Arc, the fabulous story of how early 19th century British military geographers measured and mapped India (a vast and arduous scientific exploit that puts many of the so-called wonderful achievements of scientists in the last fifty years to shame, though largely forgotten today), and Suketu Mehta’s book about the horror that is Mumbai, Maximum City, on my daughter’s recommendation, though I am not sure whether I can stick it till the last page.

I shall take my leave of you for now, dear reader. Until the next time, which may be when a sudden inspiration strikes me, or when someone has said or asked something which I find interesting enough to reply to. 

Five hundred thousand pageviews

Eleven years.

It’s been quite a journey.

And I have reached this milestone without ever posting smut, or gossiping about cricket and shopping, or advertising snake oil, or stoking pointless quarrels which sound like the most important thing on earth for two weeks and then sink without a trace. Takes some doing, I can tell you, especially in an age when even someone who arranges for cabs via the internet briefly becomes a superstar. An age when like old Diogenes you have to search with a lantern even under a blazing sun to find one sensible man.

This is a time to congratulate and thank  my regular and long-time readers, too. There are occasional and one-time visitors aplenty, I know, but there must be at least a few hundred of the other sort.  It is them I keep in mind whenever I write a new post. Every now and then I am pleasantly surprised to hear from someone or the other who, without my knowing, has been following my blog for a long time, and gladly admits to having been influenced by the way I think. They invariably bring to mind those who pretended to be, sometimes very plausibly for a while, and have fallen by the wayside ages ago…

Indeed, over a very long working life spent observing people, I have come to decide that the vast majority of them are merely vulgar (khelo in Bangla sounds somehow more apposite to describe the type) and a not inconsiderable minority is stupid and often downright nasty. I am toying with a project now – one by one I shall describe how scores of individuals, pupils and parents, have dealt with me over the years and decades, and what exactly about their behaviour have led me to the above conclusion: me, who started out on life determined to love his fellow human beings. I have been dealing in generalities for a long time, now I am going to deal with specifics, and though I shall name no names, those indicted and people close to them will be left in no doubt that it is them I mean. By God, that will be a catharsis.

Writing a blog is akin to writing a diary. But my daughter recently pointed out one fundamental difference that has come about lately – earlier people wrote diaries in secret and got angry if others managed to pry (I am not talking about poets and suchlike, who perhaps wrote to gain posthumous notoriety); these days people write diaries (or miniature diaries, as in twitter) and get angry if others don’t read them. It was a salutary warning to me.  I would be dishonest if I claimed that I didn’t want readers – why would I be writing publicly, then? – but it would do me a world of good to remember that a genuine diarist writes primarily for himself. If he gets some earnest readers, fine, but that should not be the primary aim, for that way lies prostitution of the mind. Ever so slowly, lured by the possibility of quicksilver fame, one begins to stop being oneself and pander to the (mentally-) unwashed masses. To care overmuch about what others may think is the surest way to triviality.

So, for the next 500,000 pageviews, this blog is going to become more consciously and unrepentantly personal. Writing – and I am not talking of tweeting and journalism here, those pathetic refuges of failed authors and wannabe page three celebrities – in this day and age is the most elitist of hobbies. And you write to keep your mind alive. If you don’t, you will be shopping and pubbing and gossiping instead… what a horrible way to spend your youth! What an utterly ghastly way of spending your old age!!

P.S., July 03: I have updated the medical bulletin. Scroll down if you will. 

Hospitals and banks: the way things work

With all the hullabaloo in the media over remedies for the shoddy treatment and overbilling that have become the hallmark of private hospitals in our state, several very pertinent points are being systematically overlooked, or deliberately ignored.  First I want to put on record that I have been personally a beneficiary (besides having had the good fortune to talk to some people who have been the same) of the state run public hospital system, and I am grateful.  They serve you at rock bottom prices, with a lot of facilities absolutely free, and incredible as it sounds, there are still doctors and nurses and ward boys who give sterling service, despite all the pressure they work under, and all the amenities that are in short supply or non-existent. If the government were sincere about improving the health sector, they should greatly boost the system a) by encouraging in every possible way those who do so much good work while sternly punishing the other kind, regardless of party politics, b) by spending much more on health care, and monitoring the spending to cut down on waste, inefficiency and plain theft, c) by training far more doctors and nurses for next to free provided they are willing to give an undertaking to serve in the public sector for most of their working lives, d) by significantly raising prices, at least for non-BPL patients, so that a large part of the costs can be recovered – people don’t value things enough when they get things for free. The prices could still be kept much lower than what private hospitals typically charge, yet the burden on the public exchequer would decrease considerably. It would also help greatly if the entire non-BPL population were ordered by law to take out medical insurance. I wonder why that hasn’t been done yet, when everybody who buys a car or bike also has to buy insurance before he can even take the vehicle out of the showroom. Talk of the stupid governing the stupid, the blind leading the blind…

Not only the best doctors but also often the best equipment are in our public hospitals. The real problem is that the system is unspeakably overloaded, so most people who are not desperately poor want to bypass it for one that works faster – and that is the felt need which the private/corporate sector took advantage of to spread like mushrooms in wet weather. And now that they have been found wanting in a double sense, a lot of indignant voices have been raised, a lot of demands are being made to rein them in, to make them accountable by fiat, to force them to render better service at ‘reasonable’ prices. Sensing strong electoral payoffs, the government has responded by suggesting various remedial means, including fixing upper limits on prices for various tests and treatments. Predictably, doctors and hospitals have reacted with dire warnings, the gist of which is that setting such caps might strongly discourage them from offering their patients the ‘latest and best’ procedures. Some doctors have gone so far as to threaten moving out of the state. Everybody is trying to justify skyrocketing costs by arguing how wonderful and useful the latest gadgets, drugs and treatments are (which claim is often actually little more than empty publicity), and how expensive it is to invent/develop them  and recoup costs. The devil, of course, lies in the details. On the one hand, doctors have confided in me that ‘costs’ go so high because the directors of the pharma companies and equipment manufacturing companies ‘need’ to live seven-star lifestyles; or else it is the hospitals which are greedy, and pad expenses shamelessly. Both true, of course, but what is too rarely mentioned is how greedy a certain section of doctors have become: they measure success, nay, their very sense of self-worth, by how big and fancy the car and penthouse and luxury vacation they can buy, and how often, the Hippocratic Oath be damned. I have benefitted greatly all my life by following my own maxim, namely to find out what sort of person the doctor is, not just what fancy degrees he has, before I go to him if I can help it. And now that parents are paying ‘donations’ of upto a crore to admit their children in private medical colleges, children whose first prirority in life will be to recoup the expense and reap a handsome profit, God help the next generation of patients.  Or maybe beating up doctors and burning hospitals will become so much a mundane fact of daily life that no one will raise an eyebrow in the days to come, and that is how a certain barbaric balance will be struck between public service and private greed…

[P.S.: My newspaper on June 17 carried this article. It's a pent-up sigh about what doctors used to be like, and a few still are, though they are a fast dying breed in this 'advancing world']

On the other hand, there are the Augean stables of the public sector banks to be cleaned up, and they are making a sorry mess of it. At one time they were grossly overmanned; now they are so terribly shortstaffed that everything moves at a snail’s pace, despite the advent of computers and the internet (sometimes, it seems to me, because of them!). There is an infinity of niggling rules for them to keep their money safe (so, as I found out yesterday morning, it takes ages merely to close down an old, idle account, which I have done elsewhere in a jiffy, without even presenting myself in person); alas, it seems, that such rules exist only to harass the ordinary small customer, while tycoons run away with vast loans they never intend to repay, so that bad debts, now going under the fancy name of Non Performing Assets, have grown into a mountain big enough to threaten the stability of the whole economy. Their websites shrilly advertise how they are dying to serve us, while when we do visit them, we have to deal with the laziest, surliest, most unhelpful and/or incompetent people in creation. The only reason I have not yet moved all my accounts to private banks is the old, perhaps silly but very widespread fear that they, unlike the PSUs, can simply down shutters one fine morning and run away with your lifetime savings. But I have been closing accounts in public sector banks right and left, and maybe the day is not far when I will take the plunge. Unless a genuine revolution comes about, as I hope it would, and soon. For starters, why can’t banks run round the clock, seven days a week, if the railways and power plants and police stations and hospitals can?