Poetic condemnation

A well-known poet in Kerala (I thought the tribe had become extinct in India!) has 'begged' the government to exclude his poems from school textbooks, because he hates to see them mutilated and insulted by dumb teachers and dumber students alike. Alongwith he has said some harsh home truths about what education has become in India over the last thirty years. The same sort of thing that I have been saying for donkey's years. Do read the news item.

Meanwhile, the same paper carried on its front page a full-page advertisement from one of those hugely successful cram shops which promise, for an outlandish fee, to make your idiot son an Einstein (read cybercoolie in Bangalore). That is exactly what both the poet and I condemn. But that, alas, is all that 99 per cent of Indian parents want out of education. You want shit, you get shit.

P.S., April 05: 1) Devi Kar, Director of Modern High School Kolkata, whose writing I have quoted before, has written this article about the growing and obnoxious 'commodification' of education. I hope the parents of today's kids in school, who would be the generation that I coached and harangued 25 to 30 years ago, would take note, and look at themselves in the mirror, and wonder how they have become this gullible, this stupid, this harmful for their children. I conclude, as Mrs. Kar does, that I realize how out of sync I am with the times. I also keep advising my own daughter that if ever she comes into this profession in any capacity, she must be very well aware of the current reality, both if she wants to change it a little for the better and if she just wants to profit from it.

2) The same newspaper today informs me that certain doctors in Kolkata hospitals are being paid two to three crore rupees a year by way of salary. Now I know very clearly why medical costs have gone through the roof. Once upon a time medicine was supposed to be a crucial service, and doctors, while they had as much right as the next man to a decent living, were expected not to be greedy like any other trader. And let not anybody give me crap about how much they had to study and how hard they have to work to make money. Lots of others, from rural schoolteachers to soldiers and senior bureaucrats, research scholars and people who do very unpleasant and risky manual labour all their lives have to do with much less, simply because they have not been able to con the public and corner the market as well have doctors have. It is all, as we socialists have always said, about who manipulates the levers of the political economy (the same goes for education, too. In a dispensation where all schools hired only competent teachers, paid them decent salaries and forced them to do their duty properly, private tutors and cram shops would not have made hay as they are doing now - myself included).

Last free Sunday

Sunday evening. The last free Sunday I shall have for another long season. The admission storm begins next weekend. This year I am as amused as anxious, for I have sensed a panic among hundreds of people phoning and visiting over the last few months, and one ex student, whose own daughter is going to join up, told me the other day that the rumour is that a vast number have enrolled, and most of them are not going to get a chance, so they are sweating blood and losing sleep, while I am a little scared of being mobbed, and at the same time I cannot help laughing at the irony of the fact that my services are so much in demand now that I am less and less interested in carrying on making a more than adequate living. I needed money much more thirty years ago: where were all these people then? What very special service have I given the public lately that the demand (I am sure the right word is craze – I keep telling people ‘do not regard tuition as a shortcut to marks without merit and effort’, and insist that I don’t primarily teach for marks, and remind them that lots of kids get good marks without attending my tuition, but obviously all in vain) has surged like this? These people will do anything to get their kids in, from telling sob stories to flattering me shamelessly and embarrassingly – the only two things they haven’t done yet is offering extra money and threatening physical violence! Yet I know that most of these people will badmouth me foully if their kids can’t get in or are dismissed for some reason at a later date, forget me the moment the tuition is over and often explicitly order the kids never to see me again, and if and when my reputation begins to flag and the numbers dwindle, nobody will care two hoots whether I can survive and look after my family or not. I get more and more why real celebrities privately so despise the same fan mob they profess to adore and thank, and why they are so insecure despite making vast fortunes… think of Sachin Tendulkar today, all of you who are more than thirty, and compare with where he was even ten years ago.

We live in such an incredibly stupid country. A country where ‘educated’ people are so painfully lacking in manners and consideration for others, a country which is so violent and so bigoted despite pretensions to ahimsa and broadmindedness and the loftiest of ideals, a country so interested in trivia like fashion, a country so steeped in superstition. Despite all this talk about how it is compulsory to read science and go in for professions like engineering, people are still actually driven by the likes of babajis and movie stars and netas whom we have begun to adore. So as long as a man has not somehow made a mark as someone special, we can only nitpick and find fault with him – we hate few things more than to hear someone whom we consider ‘just like us’ to be praised for anything at all – but let once a man convince some people that he has something special (the power to work miracles, whether as a tutor or healer or politico) and we start falling over ourselves to get a sprinkling of his blessings. And now, I guess, I have become something like that, a brand name, a babaji, someone who can get kids marks in the all-important exams regardless of their brains and whether they have worked for it or not. The rest of what I try to teach be damned – indeed, I have heard often and again that many parents, the same parents who seem to be ready to kill for admission, warn their children not to heed all the ‘rubbish’ I say ‘outside the syllabus’. So now I am getting old and tired, and warning people that very soon I am going to reduce the numbers and become much more choosy about whom I take in and whom I allow to continue, but apparently that is serving only to fuel the panic, the craze to get in! Those of my senior old boys who know the details and wish me well keep telling me to make hay while the sun still shines – jack up your fees drastically, Sir, and for the few more years that you keep working, laugh all the way to the bank. I still have some morals left, alas, and don’t yet feel that particular need, but who knows, I might take their advice before it’s time for the last hurrah.

And the kind of things that people say is beyond belief. They ring up at daybreak or close to midnight to say they want to enroll their kids. They ring up to say they have heard I am a well-known teacher, then ask what I teach, and cannot figure out why I lose my temper. Some come five years in advance to ask when they should enroll the kid (one couple did a few minutes ago), and scores come at the last moment, long after the lists have been closed, to say ‘they didn’t know, but would I please make a special concession for them?’ and they nag and nag and nag, as if not knowing gives them a special privilege somehow (and completely ignoring the fact that I get angry after I have told them umpteen times very politely why some people cannot be taken in out of turn, and that they didn’t know – which I flatly disbelieve, of course: after thirty years, only those cannot know me who didn’t want to know – doesn’t make a difference). Some tell the most fantastic stories about why their kids must get in – the most common being that they couldn’t come on time because somebody or the other in the family was on the deathbed or something like that, though how that kind of condition can last in any family for months on end is something I’ve never been able to figure out. And these days a lot of old boys and girls are coming back to enroll their kids, and act as though they are hurt or offended that I can’t remember them, but have they looked at themselves in the mirror lately and compared with what they looked like twenty five years ago, and can they remember thousands of people who have never met them for twenty years or more?

Meanwhile I keep longing for what I probably will never get: interested old boys (and just maybe a few non-girlie girls) coming back. Within the last three days, in quick succession, one has done so, and another has expressed the desire to do so. Usually they get back with a lot of uncertainty and trepidation about what they might expect: most go away pleasantly surprised. There are cranks among them too: some, after joyfully re-establishing the connection, cut it off again, permanently, without a word of explanation. As I have said before and not once, my faith in and love for humankind has reached a nadir. In my worst distress and helplessness I have been hugely helped by complete strangers; those who should remember me with the greatest affection and gratitude have by and large cut me dead, or cheated me most horridly. I can no longer look at people except as either sources of income or worth avoiding like a disease. And yet I used to be so different. I had so wanted and tried to create that most hyped and overused word these days long before it came into fashion, a network of like-minded, decent, mutually caring and helpful people who have a lot of good conversation. Not fated for me, apparently. Ah, well.

Mukutmanipur revisited

I was at a loose end, what with Ma gone to Kolkata and Pupu off to Mumbai. I was also rapidly running out of free Sundays, and didn’t want to stay at home. The new car needed running, and the weather was still tolerable to fine, with a chill in the air in the early morning before the sun rose. So I made a quick trip to Mukutmanipur on Sunday the 11th. Indranil Panigrahi of the ICSE ’98 batch, one of those old boys who have always kept in touch, happened to drop in on Saturday, so I took him along.

Mukutmanipur, which became a picnic spot ever since CM Dr. Bidhan Ray had a several-kilometer-long earthen dam put across the Kangshabati river close to where it meets the Kumari, is only 100 km away, but for some reason I visit rarely. The last time I went was in 2004, during the rains, and stayed at the Peerless Resort. I am glad to report that the roads have improved vastly since then, and our current CM has done a great deal to give the place a face-lift, so it was a very nice trip. Leaving home at about 6:45 a.m., we were there at the WBFDC (‘Sonajhuri’) resort in three hours. Unfortunately cottages had to be booked online, and there was a poor internet connection on the spot, so we missed out on that, but we were allowed to look around, and the staff was surprisingly friendly and accommodating, considering that they were government employees. The hilltop viewpoint gives a lovely panoramic view. We drove off to the Sutan forest, which is the first real forest I have seen in southern Bengal – never having gone to the Sunderbans – where we saw the ruins of a police outpost which had been blown up by the Maoists when they used to rule the roost in these parts, and then to Jhilimili, which is 35 km. from Mukutmanipur, and which you can safely give a miss. Back to Mukutmanipur, where we lunched at Sonajhuri, checked into a little hotel at the foot of said resort, and went to sleep in air-conditioned comfort. By the time we awoke the sun was setting, and it wasn’t hot anymore, so we went for a long boat ride on the reservoir. The whole surroundings were ablaze with palash flowers, and gradually it grew dark, and the lights of many colours, which were there in profusion, began to glow and twinkle, until amidst the silence of the river, with only the water lapping around us, it became magical.

The riverfront reminded me strongly of the seaside promenade at Digha and the Motijheel Park at Murshidabad: Didi’s signature is only too apparent. I have never seen a more tastefully designed Sulabh Shauchalaya anywhere in India. We sat in the little park for a long time, watching the multi-coloured fountain and listening to rabindrasangeet, then drove off towards the other bank, which is dark and eerie save for the Peerless Resort, and another hotel, Aparajita, where we stopped for a quick chilled beer. Then back to the hotel, where we eased back for a bit, and finished the day with dinner at Sonajhuri again, because we had liked the food. A quiet night’s sleep, and we woke up at dawn with a multitude of birds whistling, singing, warbling and chirping all around us in the woods. We went for a long walk along the dam. The breeze was strong and cool, and the sun, mercifully, went behind a large dark cloud again and again. Indranil remarked that though it was a Sunday, when the place should have been crawling with noisy tourists, we had the whole place nearly to ourselves, the Madhyamik exams. starting the next day having kept most people away. Stopping once more at the park to photograph the flowers growing in rich abundance, we drove off, stopping near Bankura for a quick breakfast of poori-ghoogni and hot nikhunti, and we were back at home by 11:30, so I had time to see Indranil off, do a bit of tidying up, a bath, lunch and half-hour snooze before taking two classes as on every Monday.

My old Indica was always faithful and true, but the new Dzire is definitely one notch above. Thanks, Maruti.

Indranil, I do hope you enjoyed yourself enough to want to bring over your wife next time around. And remember to ask your dad to arrange that trip to the Sunderbans at a time of mutual convenience.

I guess my travels are now truly over till at least end-May, but as I said, I shall be looking forward keenly to suggestions about little trips like this one, which can be done in one or two days at the most.

When I was a child, our family did only a few trips together, but I remember enjoying them. Immediately after finishing the ICSE exams, I went on a long tour of Himachal Pradesh with the family of a friend, and liked it so much that I vowed to travel all my life, to everywhere that sounded interesting. I am glad that God has given me time, money, health and continued interest to keep at it for nearly four decades now. And as I have said before, I’d like to take old boys along: that is a special pleasure. Of late I have got to know that several of them have stayed on or returned to settle here in Durgapur, and most of them are doing financially okay or better. I hope to build up a network with them – I never give up hoping! Kaushik, Anupam, Tuhin, Abhik, Shakya, Prashant, Sayan Roy (and the likes of him who live not too far away)… are you listening? Tell others you know about this, too, if you can.

For photos, click here.