Pondicherry

I had long felt it would be nice if I could take my parents on an all-expenses paid holiday trip, at least once, and it has worked out at last. I have just returned from a most satisfying holiday in Pondicherry.

We chose the location because my old folks had good memories of their last visit, when they stayed there for several months, seventeen years ago. It was also, I thought, a good choice because it could be a short trip, and wouldn’t put too much of a strain on them. Pupu went along happily, though this was our second trip to the seaside within a month.

So it was a (smooth and quick) afternoon flight to Chennai, and a three and half hour car trip along a very well-maintained and brightly lit highway to the Union Territory that still proudly retains its French connection, along with Chandannagar in our own West Bengal (shades of the same mid-18th century Governor Dupleix, too). The hotel we checked in was posh, as I had decided. Swimming in the rooftop pool was still too cold for our liking, but lazing on deckchairs at sundown and beyond was wonderful, though it did get rather too windy at times. The next three days were spent ambling around the town in a leisurely fashion, on foot and in autos, taking in the beach – early morning, forenoon and evening – a few local eateries (Italiza served up a very good ‘fully loaded’ pizza, Archana’s treated us to a very tasty and filling standard local thali; the dosa at the roadside Café Tifen was quite as delectable), the Ashram, Serenity Beach, Auroville, the Botanical Garden, the Museum, Bharathi Park, Paradise Island (to which we sailed on a motorized catamaran: the place reminded me strongly of Sagardweep) and suchlike. Shilpi dropped in, because she has been camping in Tirupati, so we had fun together for a day.

The promenade with its adjacent rows of well-cared for old buildings in the severe colonial style and French street names makes a very nice walk, though the boulder-bound beach is a bit of a disappontment. The famous Aurobindo Ashram left me unfazed – I am, alas, not religiously inclined in the usual Indian sense – and Auroville, I found, was basically a very big, well-appointed theme park (everytime I visit a nice park, I sigh that we have only Kumaramangalam Park in Durgapur, and nothing at all in blasted Bidhan Nagar, much vaunted as the haunt of affluent and educated people), where the boutique sells exorbitantly priced souvenirs. We joked among ourselves that since the place counts a Bengali sadhu as its USP, Bengali tourists should be welcomed with large discounts. At Auroville, we learnt from a roadside sign that rotikashaala was the Hindi word for boulangerie. Which reminds me, food in Pondicherry is decent but considerably more expensive than in these parts, God bless Bengal; liquor is much cheaper and widely available though they are overdoing the anti-smoking campaign, and the way the roads are swarming with two- and three wheelers whose drivers don’t seem to have heard about traffic rules, they’d save many more lives and lessen air pollution very much more if the administration paid attention in the right place.

As is usual virtually all over the south, the man in the street and his supposedly better educated brothers everywhere, even in fancy hotels, refuse either to speak Hindi or learn proper English (I am not just talking about the atrocious accent – one can quickly get used to wokey and right-ǝ and lunchi – but nine out of ten cannot, or will not, put five English words meaningfully together), so communication with locals was a frustrating non starter. You don’t speak Tamil, you don’t have to talk to us, seems to be the attitude, though we had a niggling suspicion that most of them would prove to be quite nice people if only we could talk to them. If this is what I’d have to let myself in for, Rajdeep, I am sorry but I am not coming to Japan.

The days rapidly grew hotter, so that on the trip back along the scenic East Coast Road, it was already blazing in the afternoon at Mamallapuram, where we stopped for lunch as well as a dekko of the famous rock cut temples and sculptures (by an interesting coincidence, I was reading John Keay's India Discovered, in which these monuments have been given considerable attention as possible artistic prototypes for all later temples in the south). The beach there, by the way, seemed more charming than the ones we had seen before, and apparently good for bathing in. We were back home in Kolkata just before eleven at night on the 22nd. For a long time to come I shall never hear a ship blowing its foghorn without thinking of the municipal buses of Pondi (their autos, on the other hand, use handblown air horns like our rickshaws), and I shall always remember wonderingly that roadside coffee shops were as rare to find there as Sardarjis in Amritsar.

The single smoking rooms – actually, little glass cages – at the airports are a nightmare; half a dozen men crammed together and poisoning one another with exhaled smoke. Why can’t they furnish those rooms with a large exhaust fan, for heaven’s sake, when they can centrally aircondition the whole of the rest of the place? Also, at every airport, food and drink is atrociously expensive. Does anyone know why? And one more thought that has struck me often: if our Metros, shopping malls and airports can be kept so clean, why can’t the major railway stations? I was a little sad to see that Chennai already has an airport to city Metro connection: in Kolkata ours is still under construction. With that and the East-West Metro corridor in operation – and if and when the authorities in their wisdom make a/c buses much more widely available – travelling around Kolkata, which is already much less troublesome than it was in the eighties, will become hugely easier. And of course they must cut down massively on private transport by taxing them heavily and forcing people to park only in designated (preferably multi-storied) parking lots for a hefty fee. Becoming civilized is not cheap and easy, but sure it can be done.

This was my second trip this year, and I am planning to make one more before the hot and busy season sets in at the end of March.

For photos, click here.

Demographic dividend, or monstrous liability?

While reading the storm of posts on Facebook and Twitter over the pros and cons of our PM’s demonetization drive, I was reflecting upon the kind of people who have grown up and become ‘educated’ in India over the last thirty-odd years, correlating with my own long experience of teaching a very large number of such people when they were in their teens over the same time period. Several thousand of my ex-pupils are in the 25 to 45 age bracket now. Here are some broad generalizations I can make about them, and hardly any of these are complimentary. Do read them with patience and see whether you agree on the whole, even if it makes a bitter pill to swallow. Of course I acknowledge exceptions, and know about many of them myself, but remember that by definition the exceptions don’t count for much: how a society behaves depends by and large on the common type.

1)   If they have good internet access and are comfortable with chatting/posting in English (even if that is very clumsy, stilted English interspersed with vernaculars), they belong to a very privileged minority. How many would they be? Twenty, thirty, fifty million at most?

2)    And yet they have an overblown sense of identity and entitlement. They believe they speak for all of India – many are affronted if it is suggested that they don’t even know much of India. They believe ‘national progress’ is coterminous with what they want.

3)   They ape Americans in everything except the good and important things. So – as I have pointed out once before – artificially tattered jeans, short skirts, ‘cool’ slang and chewing gum and rock music and fast cars/bikes and jingoistic chest thumping yes; hard work, cleanliness, love of greenery, charity, respect for the law, punctuality, keeping promises, courtesy to strangers, quietness in public and support for libraries, museums and research facilities, no no.

4)   They like to think and act as though they are informed, intelligent, independent beings, but – and they hate to hear this – they loathe learning and reasoned argument, they form opinions quickly then steadfastly ignore all evidence to the contrary, they are driven by emotion of a very violent, febrile, evanescent kind and the herd instinct in everything, whether it be choices relating to cinema or music, clothes, food, politics, subjects of formal study and career preferences, ‘status’-symbols and what have you. In addition, two other factors drive them powerfully: tradition (best observed when it comes to marriage – look at how powerful issues of caste and dowry and ‘correct dressing’ still are) and advertizing (right now they all want iPhones and compact SUVs because they all want iPhones and compact SUVs, or so they learn from the ads and the all-important peer groups, outside which they rarely venture).

5)    They are intensely patriotic – which means they hate Pakistan and revile any Indian who finds fault with Indians (numerous quotes from Vivekananda, Tagore, Gandhi and Ambedkar would make them froth at the mouth!) – and that seems to go very comfortably hand in hand with slavering over dreams of migrating to the US, or at least getting jobs with US multinationals, as well as being totally uninterested in knowing about their own land, its history and culture, its flora and fauna; with littering streets right and left, with being utterly callous about doing things that can improve the lot of one billion Indians who suffer from age-old neglect and exploitation. No matter whether they are male or female, whenever they talk about freedom, rights, equality and all that stuff, just observe how they treat their domestic help, waiters at restaurants and attendants at shopping malls, or how much they care about disturbing neighbours while enjoying themselves.

6)    They worship big money, no matter how it is made. So any startup zillionaire, even if he has made his pile selling discount coupons or gutkha over the Net, is much more a hero to them than a freedom fighter, a teacher, a social worker or a writer (indeed, it is this class which, having read virtually nothing outside textbooks and comic books, admires Chetan Bhagat, Ravinder Singh and E. L. James as ‘writers’). That admiration, however, is mixed up with a lot of envy and secret anger, so if you are rich (and famous), you quickly learn to keep such ‘admirers’ at arm’s length in your personal life.

7)    They are out and out opportunists, talking big wherever they feel completely safe and ‘in’, as when trolling anonymously on social media, and slavishly kowtowing to power everywhere else, knowing full well which side of the bread is buttered, and being truly passionate only about keeping their own skins safe. Best exemplified by the committed socialist at JNU who became a committed neoliberal overnight as soon as prospects arose of getting a scholarship from the department of Economics of the University of Chicago. So they have no problem with turning coat every other day and always saluting the rising sun. They are all devoted to Narendra Modi as long as he wields the levers of power: one big defeat of his at the hustings and they’ll say ‘Narendra who?’

8)    When it comes to religion, they are divided into two broad groups – either they blindly conform to lokaachaar, no questions allowed, or they equally blindly condemn all things spiritual as troublesome and useless nonsense, without making any attempt at studying and understanding any religion in depth. Makes for a weird and volatile mix.

9)  They are bone lazy and they compulsively over-eat (look at the obesity epidemic, and count the number of young Indian tourists as opposed to white skins who prefer to trek or cycle rather than hire cars). They are also materialistic in the crudest possible sense: look at the kind of movie that always makes a hit with them; look at how they go gaga over cricket rather than, say, hockey; look at how many books they buy as opposed to cellphones, jewellery, liquor, clothes and beauty care; look at the way, too, they are painting the walls of their houses these days!

10)  In a country where very little pathbreaking scientific research is ever done, they are all currently obsessed with technology – the word being restricted narrowly, of course, to consumer gadgets, virtually all of them developed in one tiny corner of the planet very far from India. Am I seriously wrong in comparing this with any other form of hard-drug addiction: that most tell-tale sign of empty and pointless lives?

This is the human material we are dealing with, whether we are small-town teachers or prime ministers. I handled their like as pupils twenty five to thirty years ago, I am handling them as parents now. Is it likely that any serious national progress can be hoped for, progress as understood by the finest minds our country has produced?

In To My Daughter I have touched upon this malaise in passing. Reading Pankaj Mishra’s new book Age of Anger brought these thoughts back to the fore. And it has occurred to me that making sense of the present chaos all around the world requires profound, sustained, intensive reading of the kind that the people I have described above – in India, especially, but to some extent everywhere – have lost both the desire and the capacity for doing.