This blog, Facebook and books

Looking back upon a post in April 2012, I just found that I was then eagerly waiting for the pageviews counter to cross the 100,000 mark. I had launched the blog in July 2006, and it took six years to reach that number – before which, I think, no one can call oneself a serious blogger. And now, already, within less than six more years, the number has jumped close to 550,000! At this rate, it will not be too long before I cross the million mark, if I stick around. How on earth did this happen? How did the readership grow so prodigiously within so short a span? What makes it doubly weird is that at the same time, the frequency of comments has dwindled: whereas in the early days some blogposts attracted twenty, thirty, even sixty comments, these days the number is at best below ten. So while my readers have swelled in number and/or frequency of visits, I must conclude that they have, for the most part, nothing to say about anything that I write. How is this conundrum to be explained?

One of the many reasons for the paucity of comments, I imagine, is that of late far more people are accessing the blog via mobile phone rather than via computer. The problem with this is that, firstly, internet access via phone is still very slow and erratic, and secondly, it is far more clumsy to use the facilities with such a small screen while you fiddle with your fingers: who knows but many people cannot even see the comments link, or have no idea how to use it! I don’t even know whether most of my readers have computers, but if they do, I would request them to use those in preference to their phones while reading my blog. One section of my readers tell me they follow my blog earnestly but can never think of anything to write as a comment. With them I can only despair. Even asking a question or supplying a nugget of relevant information can be a comment! There’s yet another category of older readers who say that after staring at the screen for ten to twelve hours at the workplace they don’t have the energy left … but if they can take time out to read my blog, why can’t they write comments at least now and then? That is something I have never been able to figure out.

I find it intriguing that some posts I wrote years ago suddenly come back into the most-read list. Rani Rashmoni has done so and stayed there for quite a while now; so did my reminiscence of my grandfather titled The end of an era for some time, and lately I can see my review of Sudha Murty’s book Wise and Otherwise has nudged its way in. How does that sort of thing happen, and why? I have no idea. But I shall once more strongly encourage my readers, especially newcomers, to click on the labels along the right hand column and visit old posts: many people get back to me after finding something interesting which I had myself almost forgotten, and that is always nice.

I like people with serious and abiding interests. Naturally, because I am one myself. I have been writing a diary since I was seven years old, and once the blogging facility came along I took to it like a duck to water, at the age of 43. I find it deeply therapeutic to write, and it tickles me that my readership is constantly increasing, even if I don’t hear from them as much as I’d like to (I also don’t think that any of my immediate neighbours even know of its existence! Make of that what you will). As you can see, I have stuck to it in a disciplined and regular way for twelve continuous years. Who knows what the years ahead might bring? One thing that has happened recently is that my Facebook page, titled ‘Suvro Sir’, which I launched purely as a notice board for current pupils (you can access it via Google by just typing ‘Suvro Sir Facebook’ without even having or logging into your own FB account, did you know that?) has very quickly caught on among parents, most of whom would probably never have read my blog, even if they knew what a blog is. So maybe I’ll publicize the blog a bit by linking it to my FB page. I don’t know if even that will persuade too many parents to do something as ‘boring’ as read a blog (as opposed to say shopping or gossip), but it would be good if a few at least did and talked around about it: it might go some way to dispel all the silly stories that have been circulating among the parent class in this town for decades, simply because they never made the effort to find out what sort of person I really am! Today’s parent class is in the late-thirties and early forties bracket; many of their generation were my pupils twenty five to thirty years ago. I hate to think they should remain as clueless about me as their parents were, even while sending their children to me in droves.

One last thing for now.  I have been trying for donkey’s years to spread the reading habit and a taste for good books among my pupils, against very strong resistance from parents, who (in my milieu at least, but broadly speaking all over India) believe strongly that it is a disease to be guarded against. I have succeeded with a small number; with a much larger number I have failed. I feel chagrined to see that the new generation of parents, many of whom as I said belong to the generation I taught 25-30 years ago, have caught the aversion from the parents, and many kids growing up right in front of my eyes, despite my most earnest efforts, have already, in mid-teenage, decided that their parents are right, reading is a disease best avoided, unless you are reading the Chetan Bhagat sort of stuff. The irony is that all those parents send their children to me to learn English well, and if I have said this once I have said it a million times, that you cannot really learn a language well by just doing some grammatical exercises and cramming a few textbooks: trying to do that instead of reading widely and well is like trying to stay healthy by popping vitamin and mineral pills instead of eating lots of green vegetables and fruits daily. Few things make me gloomier about India’s future as a civilization. Most of all the fact that so many millions are going around claiming to be educated but know nothing outside their narrow spheres of professional specialization (if that!), and read nothing, not even newspapers or serious magazines, yet claim a facile competence to comment confidently on almost every subject under the sun – as I once wrote long ago, journalists these days solemnly quote beauty queens opining on the government’s economic policy. You can have too much democracy, and that itself might eventually prove to be democracy’s nemesis! 

A call to the other blog

Some of my more serious readers have complained that I have been neglecting my other blog. So I just posted a serious essay there which I could have put up here instead. It's called Indian values coming, beware! Please click here to read, and you can send your comments either there or here.

Google Doodle pathos

Of late, Google Doodles (the cartoon you see sometimes when you log into the Google India home page) has been ‘honouring’ notable Indians, especially women, on their birth anniversaries. I think it’s not a bad effort when I consider that the average netizen in India (definitely ‘educated’ in today’s utterly trivial sense, typically a B-grade engineer, journalist or sales manager) would probably never have heard about most such people otherwise, but it makes my lips curl with disdain when I reflect that Google does this cynically, with its eye on nothing but the bottom line: this is their way of currying favour with that (large-) section of the Indian populace whose custom they want to attract – nothing more and nothing less. So today they have drawn attention to Mahasweta Devi. Now she happens to be one of the few contemporary Indian women (well, all right, not exactly contemporary: she’d have been 92 today, and died in 2016) I happen to respect, and mine is not the kind of respect that is here today and gone tomorrow. Ask around in Durgapur about how many people besides me remember the once-legendary Father Gilson of St. Xavier’s and still talk about him eulogistically whenever the opportunity presents itself. But I wonder – will Google’s way of remembering make any real difference to anybody, and to M. Devi’s ideals and aims in particular? The ET story says the Doodle has ‘immortalized’ her. Do people like her need Google to be immortalized, or is it the Kim Kardashian and Donald Trump types who do? Yeah, yeah, I know the latter are vastly more numerous, so that proves what exactly?

Apology to recent comment writers

Several comments written by various readers, particularly on the previous post, including I think from Rajdeep, Saikat, Subhanjan, Sreetama, Tanmoy, Shalini, Siddhartha and a few others got accidentally deleted while I was editing this blog. My sincere apologies. This sort of thing rarely happens. Would you folks care to take the trouble to send over those comments once more, if it is not asking too much?

Kumaon trip, December 2017

(sunset at Munsiyari. Taken by Siddhartha Das, 2012, and posted on flickr, here)

The Kumaon hills, partly owing to their still undestroyed beauty, partly because of the honesty and simplicity of the locals, and partly owing to the Jim Corbett connection, have always been a favourite holiday destination of mine, ever since I went that way for the first time on a shoestring budget back in 1987. I have been to Nainital four times, including this one. Even Pupu has many clear memories of the last visit in May 2007.

Classes were over for the year on Thursday the 21st December. My mother and I took a bus to Kolkata on Friday afternoon, and Pupu was waiting for us at the Esplanade bus terminus. Mother went off for a trip to Pune, while Pupu and I had a very nice dinner at Shilpi’s place. Late next morning we flew to Lucknow. I missed the tongas this time round – they have almost vanished – and strolled around the city in autorickshaws, trying to recognize the locations shown in Badshahi Aangti, visiting among other things the new B.R. Ambedkar Park, a monument to Ms. Mayavati’s ego on an ancient Egyptian scale, a chikan factory, and the park along the Gomti at evenfall, having had lunch at the famous Dastarkwan galli in between. The next day was spent (re-) visiting the Residency redolent with history (Pupu had missed the museum the last time, when it had been closed for repairs), the Bara- and Chhota Imambara, the Rumi Darwaza, the Clock Tower and so on. The city, famed for its numerous parks big and small, is clean and well-administered on the whole, whether due to or in spite of Yogi Adityanath I wouldn’t know, but the half-kilometre radius zone of Chaarbaag, around the railway station, is in a state of hyper-congested bedlam: the sooner the authorities do something to clear it up the better for all concerned. The only advantage of checking into a hotel there was that at night we could walk into the station with all our luggage without the aid of a vehicle, a guide or a porter. A quick, modest dinner at the railway canteen, and we were off in the Kathgodam Express by 10 p.m.

The early morning fog was so dense that the train had to crawl for the last hundred odd km. It was eerie to look out through the window and be able to see virtually nothing outside even after dawn had broken. So we were an hour late in arriving, and I was glad to be served free tea by a Good Samaritan at Kichchha station just before Haldwani. A car was waiting for us. At Udupiwala Restaurant, just outside Kathgodam, where we stopped for breakfast, they served complimentary laddoos because it was Christmas Day. The Kathgodam-Nainital trip by road was, as always, a dream. We stopped for three hours at Nainital, strolling around and boating in the lake in the bright, crisp, balmy sunshine, drinking coffee which was delightful because of the cold, lunching at the lakeside and visiting the St. Francis’ Church before driving off for Almora, where we arrived at around 4 p.m. I was staying in Almora after a gap of thirty years, and the town had certainly improved. Perhaps the lovely panoramic view from the huge terrace of my Hotel Himsagar helped to colour my judgment. We took a long walk along the main road till almost outside the town to work up a keen appetite, dined at a very nice roadside restaurant called Bhumika run by a friendly middle-aged Kumaoni lady and two elderly assistants, and retired early, good long hours of sleep under heavy quilts being a very important requirement of all our holidays in the mountains. The ceiling glowing dimly in the dark with fluorescent stars and moons was a perk we hadn’t got elsewhere before.

Next morning we went on a six-hour round trip to Binsar Wildlife Sanctuary. There was a three km. trek on the menu, and the views of the woods as well as the distant snowclad mountains from the so-called Zero Point – a 350 km range, from Nanda Devi and Kailash at one end through Trishul, Panchchula, Annapurna and Dhaulagiri at the other – were, in a word, divine. And I am more thankful than I can say that Pupu has come to love the vast vistas, the pine-scented air and the silence quite as much as I do. We could have sat there all day, but hunger drew us away. We lunched at the Binsar Eco Resort on the way back, and returned to Almora well in time for another long walk, this time visiting the little Ramakrishna Ashram built by the Swamis Shivananda and Turiyananda at the behest of Vivekananda himself (though I would have expected something much bigger and grander), and the District Magistrate’s office, housed on a hilltop in the middle of the town in buildings erected by the Chand Raja-s in the early 1800s, and apparently never refurbished save the occasional coat of paint since. I joked with Pupu that those who worked there, and had to climb up and down so many breathless steps at least five days a week, would never have to worry about obesity and heart disease! As always, the street dogs, plump, furry and perky, could have given the best pedigreed city bred domestic pets a run for their money.

Setting off at eight next morning, which meant waking up at 6:30, a truly ungodly hour for us in that kind of cold, we made a nearly eight-hour drive to Munsiyari, stopping at a riverside restaurant at Tejam for lunch on the way. Most of the road is in good to excellent condition, thank God: in the hills even more than in the plains, it makes all the difference in the world. At Munsiyari, we checked into a hotel called Milam Inn. The bellboy-cum-waiter simply pulled aside the curtain of the picture window in our room, turned around to raise a questioning eyebrow, and smiled contentedly to see our jaws drop. I am not given to superlatives, but the sight that met our eyes, the full Panchchula range bathed in brilliant sunshine, so close that it seemed you could reach out and touch them, took our breath away. I have seen many a Himalayan vista, but I can assure you that you won’t get a closer, grander view of the Himadri range unless you trek to a base camp at the foot of one of the great peaks. There was nothing to be done but stay rooted to one spot in the garden, shivering but deliriously happy, for more than an hour as the sun gradually set behind us, drenching the lofty peaks in front of us in a multitude of glorious colours, slowly changing from blazing gold to a softer hue, then purple, then crimson, and eventually fading away until they were only a faint outline in the moonlight more imagined than actually seen, and we were chilled to the bone as we headed back to our room for a very welcome cup of coffee and heavier stuff. Later at night someone lit a double line of controlled fire in the hills for our entertainment: the glow against the black backdrop of night was mesmerizing. That was the only night we used a heater before going to bed.

Next morning, the tap water was hot enough for us to brave a bath. Then we went out for a short but tough trek up a hill to visit a talao called Maheswari Kund. Afterwards our driver Vimal-ji took us down to the little town where we visited the Nanda Devi temple, a fine spot for a picnic on a hilltop, then a little tribal museum housing Kumaoni relics and lore before lunch. Walking around in search of the bazaar we had left behind, we managed to lose our way, and had to phone for the car to come and pick us up. The rest of the evening was spent reading out a story from Man Eaters of Kumaon to Pupu and watching a movie on the laptop. Early dinner (they feed you good stuff everywhere in those parts) and early to bed thereafter.

Friday the 29th was Pupu’s birthday. I had kept the best hotel for the last. We drove four hours down to Chaukori, where we checked into a place called Ojaswi Resort – and it is one of the best places I have ever stayed in. Fine view again, lovely walkabout in the tea garden before lunch on the sun-warmed terrace, where I dozed off for a while afterwards until the sun went behind the trees and the wind began to bite, whereupon we rolled up in our quilts for a late-afternoon snooze: for me, the very height of luxury. Another movie in the evening. I never watch TV when I am travelling and Pupu has her laptop with her. This time I watched four lighthearted movies in succession: Elf, Shrek, Zootopia and Ant Man. Talk about regression to childhood! Or detox, if you prefer Pupu’s vocabulary, and I can’t say I disagree.

On Saturday we checked out at 9 and drove down to Bhowali, where we stopped to pick up bottles of rhododendron (buransh) juice at a roadside shop, then lunch on the way, and at 4 p.m. Vimal dropped us off at Lalkuan railway station before bidding us goodbye. The once a week Lalkuan-Howrah Express left with us at 7:20 p.m., and next evening, the 31st, we arrived at Durgapur a little after 8:30, only four hours late (this is something that Indian Railways calls a ‘superfast’ train, meaning its average running speed is about 50 kmph – and I hear someone is dreaming of a ‘bullet’ train somewhere in this country. Good luck to him). Dinner at Kohinoor right in front of our house with rumaali roti and Chicken Patiala, and it was time for bed on the last night of the year.

My only real grouch this time round was that there were far too many Bengalis around (at Munsiyari and on the return train, they were almost all Bengalis). It shames me to say this, being a Bengali myself, and because Bengalis are the most enthusiastic tourists in India, but when will they learn that there is (or should be) something called public manners? – Four very important aspects of which are that you shouldn’t scream at one another in the name of chatting at all hours nor let your children do it, you shouldn’t discuss the most private and personal things, such as your bowel movements, for all and sundry to hear even if they desperately don’t want to, you shouldn’t order about hotel staff as though they are slaves, and you shouldn’t bargain at shops so strenuously and shamelessly that the locals have to work hard not to show how much they have begun to despise you. I appeal to all my readers who truly love to travel: don’t you think India would be a much nicer place to travel around if we all learnt to behave ourselves a little better? 

[Our photos can be seen here]