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?

Essays, heat and rain, selfishness

He is never late for class. He sits like a Buddha with a long nose (I’d like to touch that nose!). He drinks endless cups of tea. He brings boring lessons alive. He sniffs too often. He marks homework meticulously. Sometimes he calls out answers so fast that I have trouble keeping up. He is very frightening when he flies into a rage, but he cools down quickly. He can stay calm even in the midst of family crises. He takes out the garbage himself. Time flies in his class, we have so much fun. I had heard lots of nasty rumours about him, but the real man is very different. I am going to miss these classes…

That was the general tenor of the essays that the current batch of pupils in class 10 wrote about Suvro Sir. Some cheerfully read them out in class, some had to be coaxed, some submitted the essays for me to read because they were too shy to read them aloud, and many of them, of course, didn’t bother – I daresay the majority of them dislike me, or couldn’t care less, belonging to the type who only come to collect notes or because their parents have forced them in. It pleases me, rather, to see that so many kids did take the trouble and wrote so many nice and curious things – sometimes they give me tips which help me to improve – and also to see that nothing seems to change: their mothers and fathers were hearing the same rumours and writing the same sort of comments thirty years ago, and, if I live that long and carry on, their children will probably be doing the same. Mobile phones have not made any significant difference here, at least!  

So thank you to those who wrote all the nice things: my blessings and good wishes. May you have gained something from me that will be of lasting value. As for the rest, go your own way, but try not to be mean and malicious afterwards out of sheer ignorance, stupidity and spite, as you have seen so many elders doing. Remember, it only says things about you, not about me. Remember, also, that something does not become either right or good or defensible just because mummy or daddy does it, whether it is talking on the phone while driving or spreading gossip born of idleness and envy. That is one of the very very wicked things that Indian parents manage to drive successfully into the heads of their children – they must be ‘thankful’ that two people brought them into this world, and thankfulness translates into covering up for those two all their lives!

There was a terrific thunderstorm on Friday evening, followed by torrential rain – the heaviest this year so far. I don’t know whether this is the first sign of the monsoon or whether this was some sort of ‘depression’ as the Met office likes to call them these days (the weather seems even more frequently ‘depressed’ nowadays than people are!), but from the very next morning it has been blazing again, besides being incredibly muggy – the downpour could have been a dream, were it not that the wet earth still bears testimony. This is the time of the year when only the airconditioners keep me going (and gift me with a bad cold that refuses to go away). Yet on a very hot June afternoon 34 years ago I bathed in the cold water of a deep well and fell fast asleep in the shade of a giant peepul tree in a village somewhere deep inside Bihar, waking up only when I was hungry again, and the sun was setting in crimson glory. Have I changed, or has the weather?

Talking of change, look at the picture below.

 I have been seeing this advertisement frequently in the newspapers lately. (Another one, put out by some coaching class, I think, promises to develop the ‘killer instinct’ in children so that they have a better chance of being ‘successful’ in life). Most people have always been blindly, stupidly selfish, of course, and never found out the joy of sharing and caring, but has petty, vicious materialistic selfishness ever been preached to children as a good thing on a vast scale this way before? Just what kind of adults are these kids going to grow up into? Oh, I know, I have talked to a lot of people in their thirties and forties, and the commonest and most asinine thing they say is ‘Sir, you take things so seriously… amra moja korchhilam Sir, we were just having fun.’ I think of the ‘fun’ that the young adults of 2035 are going to have, those who will become teachers and policemen and politicians and parents then, and I remember the fun they had at Auschwitz.