Sorry to be late!

Yes, I have not written anything for a while, as some of my more regular and eager readers have started reminding me. Multiple reasons actually – I wanted the last post to be there at the top for some time, I am really  all tied up with the start of the new session, when the days start passing like a blur (and we are not growing younger!), I have been planning the near future with my daughter, I have been swimming and walking and watching movies with gusto, and enjoying the remarkably balmy summer we have been having so far for a welcome change (switching off the fan and pulling on a rug around daybreak, can you believe it?). Also, occasionally putting on the nosebag with an old boy whose daughter has now joined my classes. God is being kind to me, and I have observed, like so many others, that you write less when you are busy being happy!

Also, anyway, what do I want to write about? We are living in the times of Trump and Kim and Modi playing antics in the so-called real world which are as quaint and juvenile, and often cruder than, superheroes killing off one another on screen with the world going gaga over them. And we are living in a country where adults – the same country where ‘adults’ relentlessly keep telling the young how they should be respected for being wise and ‘experienced’ – have to be reminded with public advertisements, again and again, and with apparently very little effect, that listening to music, chatting or taking selfies while walking along railway tracks can get you killed: see here. I also happen to be the kind of man who was mulling over Socrates and Manu and Shakespeare and Russell before I was 16, and have to live among people who in their forties and fifties have the mental range and depth of tiny tots, though they have all acquired such great self-esteem that they take offence at the drop of a hat, even at people pointing out that they are needlessly giving offence with their anti-social behaviour. There comes a time when you just roll your eyes and cut the world dead – or focus on planning how to make more money by fleecing the hordes of intellectual and spiritual riffraff. Sell a still more snazzy smartphone/ set up a coaching centre that guarantees seats in the ‘best’ engineering colleges even if you can hardly spell/ advertize a fitness regime that can turn hippos into gazelles without any diet, exercise or pills… I used to say that overpopulation was at the root of all our troubles: at my age and station I can assert very strongly that far too many uncivilized people with too much time and money to spend and no regard for rules of any kind also makes for a nightmare of a country to live in. Especially since we have never had our own version of Emily Post: that has never been considered even by the 'bhadralok' to be a truly essential part of education.

I have been musing aloud more and more about how I mean to change the way I conduct my classes. The first given is that I cannot stop completely – I will be bored stiff soon, people won’t let me, and everything said and done, I have loved the money for too long ever to become entirely dependent on my daughter unless God renders me a cripple. The second is that I have to turn away so many simply because I can’t personally handle any more, and it’s too personalized a business to be turned into a franchise (which in this age of mass-marketed anonymity makes me very proud too).  Did you know that even thirty years ago some starry-eyed students were telling me they wished I were doing these classes on TV so that thousands or who knows, even millions, could attend them? Ten years down the line, I tried to make a beginning with the new technology, the internet – my website was called suvrodaonline – but it didn’t get off the ground, because the net was too novel, and the vast majority, especially in small town India, had no idea of using it for a purpose like education. Now that even rickshawpullers watch videos on youtube just about everywhere, and websites can be launched and run for a song, and so many organizations big and small are teaching all kinds of courses, I might try it once more, especially since very soon my daughter will be grown up enough to help me with everything. I shall probably go about very slowly, beginning with enrolling pupils online to get rid of the annual hassle of admissions; move on to putting some lectures on youtube, and then some notes and exercises: there might eventually come a time when a lot of parents will decide that it is a better bargain on the whole to access most of the stuff online for a fee. That way I might be able to have at least a few free days every week. And then I shall go on adding more course content, and spreading the net beyond this town… who knows what might happen by the time I am truly retired, and my daughter fully at the helm? Certainly, unlike most fathers, I am in a position to reassure her that if she can slip into my shoes, and perchance build something bigger out of it by and by, there would be few salaried jobs in this country that she would wish to have instead. Only God can decide otherwise.