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.